Dark Gathering has a character that saves the main character a little too often. Should she just be the main character instead?
The main character of Dark Gathering is Keitarou Gentouga, followed by his friend Eiko Houzuki and her little cousin Yayoi Houzuki, who is just in third grade. All the characters are cursed in some manner or can see ghosts, and Yayoi specifically also has the power of trapping ghosts and making them fight each other. Question is, should Yayoi have been the main character?
Keitarou is not a bad protagonist, but the problem with him being the main character is that Yayoi constantly has to save him.
She is supposed to be incredibly smart, with 160 points in IQ, and that helps her a lot, but aside from that she is just very brave and very quick to come up with ways of trapping ghosts. She is also the one with the goal that the characters work toward, that is, finding the ghost that took away her mother.
Keitarou, on the other hand, has only the goal of rehabilitating after having spent too much time as a shut-in, which Eiko helps him with. It is a good goal, but this goal has nothing to do with the events of the series. In fact, one can argue that the group's goal of finding more ghosts is counter to the goal of rehabilitating Keitarou seeing how he became shut-in after a supernatural encounter. Eiko and Yayoi have to convince Keitarou to go ghost-hunting with them, even though eventually he admits to liking fear. Overall, Keitarou as a protagonist does not really work out for this story.
Yayoi does need Keitarou, it seems, since he tends to attract spirits, and she needs those spirits to find the one that took her mother and take revenge on it. But otherwise, she seems a little too overpowered, with her IQ and different toys containing spirits that she pits against each other.
That said, there is a benefit to using Keitarou as a protagonist. He seems to know little to nothing about spirits, just like the audience does, and he is the one who experiences most of the horror, which also makes him similar to the audience. If we consider that Keitarou is our point-of-view character, the decision to make him the protagonist makes sense. He also needs to survive every time, which is why it makes sense to give him an infallible savior.
"The point of a horror story is to put you in the headspace of someone who feels powerless. That's why DG's protagonist is Keitaro, not Yayoi," u/8andahalfby11 summed up.
In the end, the decision to make Keitarou the main character is understandable, but making a 3rd-grader so overpowered remains a curious creative choice.
Source: Reddit