I shot this video 200 years ago when Willow was a guest at Otakon 2008, and I forgot I still had this stored on my camera's memory card. So I thought I'd go ahead and share the last few minutes of the video where she answers a question regarding Kikyou.

I apologise ahead of time for the quality of the video. I had to really shrink it down in size in order to get it to upload properly without getting aborted. I'll try and upload a higher quality version later.




My take on Kikyou's character is that she was largely misunderstood by fans up until the airing of the Spring Special (Meguriau mae no Sadame no Koiuta) where they actually began to understand her a bit more. She especially became more favourable after the airing of her final episode on Kanketsu-hen, which pretty much brought everyone to tears, including her more serious haters.

As for the character herself, I did like that Kikyou was an unconventional heroine in that she will do whatever means necessary to accomplish a task, which is not a characteristic that is frequently seen with more traditional heroines like Kagome, who always want to do the right thing and save everyone at the same time. I also like that Kikyou acknowledges that there's risk to anything she takes on and is pretty realistic about it. She's definitely the type to prefer to sacrifice one life and save millions in the long run, rather than spend an entire battle saving one person at the cost of hundreds of innocent lives. This in my opinion gave more complexity to her character and she felt more real as a result.

Kikyou also gets criticised alot for being selfish, especially for asking Inuyasha to become human so she could be rid of the jewel once and for all and have a normal life. Others have even argued that she didn't really accept him as he was and hence the proposal. However, I do think her selfishness is quite understandable in this case, especially since she spent a whole chunk of her life protecting other people's happiness without expecting any reward in return. I think it's only natural that she would want to experience love just like everyone else, and be able to just be herself for once. She is a miko, but she isn't without human emotion.

As for the whole "she doesn't accept him as he is" part, I honestly didn't feel this was a problem for her. If anything, Inuyasha's isolation from his status as a human-daemon hybrid was something that she related to very easily, because she too felt different from everyone else. Should Inuyasha have been a full blooded daemon, there's no doubt he would have met with the pointing end of Kikyou's hama no ya attack, or even if he was fully human, she probably would have never met him as he would have had a normal life then.

By proposing that he become human, she was really attempting to kill two birds with one stone: 1) she was hoping to relieve Inuyasha of his isolation by giving him a place in the human world, and 2) she was hoping to end her own isolation by ridding herself of the one thing that was keeping her in that position: the shikon no tama. Should things have gone as planned without intervention from Naraku, I think they would have lived happily ever after. That was my interpretation of that anyway, lol.

Anyone else want to answer Willow's question of "what's your take on Kikyou?" :)