>>57612910In the early 2000s, during the original Japanese magazine run of RS, reader polls (not picrel) were initially meh about Ruby as the latest protagonist since he was a useless selfish bitch. But then he got character development and started showing interest in Sapphire. And suddenly everybody's completely obsessed and Ruby and Sapphire rise near the top of character polls and now RS is still stupidly popular in Japan. Shipping man.
Ruby's a confusing character, so I think for a lot of manga readers the only thing keeping him in the camp of "le good guys" or even just being likeable/tolerated is unironically just the way he treats Sapphire. Whether he's been good to her or not lately etc, not even just romantically but in general. Especially after RS when his relationships with his family and Pokemon get
dropped I mean resolved, but his relationship to Sapphire is still vague and in flux (at least before ORAS). The story itself plays on this a lot, Kusaka loves making Ruby look way worse than he actually is out of context, so that the retards not paying attention (most readers, see /vp/) will go "omg Ruby's such an abusive boyfriend xD"
But in reality there's a difference between being an "abusive" boyfriend or just being a flawed one, Ruby's meant to be the latter
