>>528803441
You're misinterpreting my point and confusing being in a difficult situation with working hard to achieve something. What I'm questioning is the narrative weight of how he handles those challenges. From a character development perspective, choosing to erase your identity and become Izuru Kamukura is not a story of perseverance, it's a story of despair and rejection of identity. That's fine, excellent. The problem is that Hajime, at the end of the day, never achieved anything on his own. He needed the protagonist from the previous game to rescue him, he needed Chiaki to give him the courage to do something on his own, and then he used Izuru's powers to save the day. Do you see where I'm going with this? Compared to the difficulties his talented peers had to go through, Hajime's suffering was too mundane and didn't justify what he did to gain talent.
>how did Chiaki work harder than him, in particular?
The problem is that Chiaki's arc in the anime was about developing as a person rather than relying on her talent. She could have easily stopped going to class and devoted herself to her video games, but she wanted to have real connections with her classmates to the point of sacrificing herself to save them. While Hajime saw that Chiaki had her life figured out with her talent, Chiaki saw that Hajime had the freedom to be his own person and that his life was not tied to his talent. Don't be a hypocrite. If you're going to argue about all the effort Hajime might have been putting in off-screen, you shouldn't downplay the effort others were putting in off-screen. Are we talking about what was shown or about our head canons?
Wew that was a long reply.