Mitsuba is a mess, and his relationship with Kou just high light it.
(Head up: I’ll call the human ‘Sousuke’ and the supernatural ‘Mitsuba’)
Mitsuba wants friends, and he seems to have focused on Kou to get that, which in hindsight, is a very strange decision. Kou was not his smoothest interaction in Hell of Mirrors, he wasn’t even Mitsuba’s first interaction outside Tsukasa: Nene was.
Nene had no expectations of how he ‘should be’ based on Sousuke, and she had a lot of time to bond with him.
They bantered and tried to help each other from danger even when scared, and Mitsuba did feel a connection: He ran to her rescue before even Hanako and Kou when the ceiling fell, and he treated her as the priority, only saying his farewells and looking at her fondly when he kicked everyone off his boundary.
It seems like they are already friends, or at least, on friendly terms, so why does Mitsuba focus on Kou after Hell of Mirrors? What changed?
He got obsessed with the idea of identity.
Wanting an identity has been a big part of his character since his introduction.
Mitsuba’s existence is depressing: He thought he was a ghost, a human that died, and forgot his life. He tried to remember who he was but he couldn’t, so he felt isolated, and empty, and this feeling got worst when Hell of Mirrors didn’t show him anything. No reflection, no fear, nothing.
He displayed some fraction of a desire here: “Who am I?” “I want memories.”
It’s a wish that stuck with him before even the basic ‘wish’ to get out, which was what lead Nene to him and kick started the arc in the first place.
Mitsuba said “who cares” when Nene talks about seeing him before (seeing Sousuke) but he does care. A lot. It is not a passing wish, it genuinely bothers him.
Unfortunately, this wish to ‘remember’ is crushed before it can even became a proper goal.
He is told he is an artificial ghost, he never had a life or a heart for No.3′s mirrors to read: He’s an empty monster, created for the hell of it.
Mitsuba is not an idiot, he can see Kou is using him to pretend Sousuke is still around and Tsukasa is using him for his entertainment.
The lack of love sticks to him, it hurts, but what seems to have affected him the most is his lack of previous life. The idea that he was never human and have no life to remember.
That he doesn’t have anything.
And he can’t accept that.
Unlike Sousuke, Mitsuba’s main goal isn’t to make friends: It’s to have an identity, to be somebody.
When he masters his school mystery powers he doesn’t seem to spare Nene, Tsukasa, or even Kou, much thought, but he gets obsessed with Sousuke: He watches his life from the moment he steps into the school, to his graduation, and his destruction.
The mirrors finally show him something, and even if there is this disconnect between himself and Sousuke, it’s still something.
We are told his wish is “to be human”, and that is a big part of it, he wants to have a life, to be visible and tangible, but he wouldn’t have tried to be Sousuke if his goal was simply to have a human body and experience being alive.
Mitsuba is contradictory: He wants to have his own identity, be worthy as himself, but he doesn’t like himself, he feels like an empty frankenstain monster built on the shadows of Sousuke, and being a human with no memories, no connection, no goals outside ‘living as a human’, is still empty. Barely an existence.
So he tries to be Sousuke, he gets lots of friends that call him Sousuke, which is the surname of a family he doesn’t have, and tries to have the relationship he had with Kou. He steals Sousuke’s backstory and Sousuke’s dream, and tweak it to convince himself he is living his own dream.
He keeps following the previous No.3 rumor, even if by accident or force: First by stealing No.3′s seat number “to not disappear”, and after by stealing Sousuke’s dream “to have something”
But there is still a distance between him and Sousuke that shows replacing him was never his intention: Mitsuba doesn’t guard the photography book Kou gave him in Hell of Mirrors, he doesn’t try using a camera at all in picture perfect, he doesn’t like being mistaken for Sousuke.
He just likes to feel like somebody that can realistically be loved.
Even if deep down he is convinced it’s not true.
He only snaps out of his Sousuke obsession and goes back to pay attention to Kou as an individual, not as a major link to an identity he feels empty without, in chapter 48, after he opens up and Kou pays full attention to his wishes as Mitsuba, not Sousuke, for the first time.
He begins to care about Kou on a personal level: He stops watching Sousuke and starts watching Kou.
Considering how much free time Mitsuba have, I assume he watched more of Kou’s life through the window: The way he saved Hanako in the Young Exorcist arc, his big talk when he learned about Nene’s life spam, and so on. But even if he didn’t, since I have no proof he did, Mitsuba still witnessed how he did not fight back while in danger with Sousuke, and everything in picture perfect.
He knows Kou has a martyr complex.
Kou wants ‘perfect’ solutions and feels very distressed when he can’t have them. He’ll put himself in danger to give ‘anyone’ a happy ending, this, paired with Mitsuba’s view of himself, makes this conclusion perfectly reasonable:
So even though he doesn’t feel comfortable calling Kou a friend, Kou still makes him feel like he matters. Like he is worth grieving.
He likes when Kou listens to him and notices things about him, because it makes him feel like his existence is loved, which Mitsuba has convinced himself it does not, and never will.
An act as simple as remembering he has a fondness for penguins made him melt.
And while I am sure he would be happy if anyone did something so nice to him, he is extremely affected by Kou in specific. He values what Kou does much more than anyone else, his actions stick with Mitsuba to the point of madness since their first meeting.
In Hell of Mirrors, Kou should have been perceived as a lunatic: He is a stranger that’s way too touchy and speak nonsense about personal things Mitsuba wasn’t a part of, but even though he doesn’t even know Kou’s name, he is speechless by Kou.
The memory that stuck with Mitsuba in Hell of Mirrors wasn’t this weird stranger grabbing his face and demanding he remember something that he never experienced, it was Kou’s watery smile, the clear love, and relief he felt when seeing what he had believed to be Sousuke.
I’m sure Mitsuba had no idea how to react to having someone cry of joy to see him, but the way Mitsuba’s survival instinct stopped working when Teru tries to kill him is unbelievable: Mitsuba is so focused on how Teru remind him of Kou, on how seeing someone that looks like Kou with such cold and cruel eyes doesn’t compute, that this ‘wrongness’ take all his attention, leaving him uncapable of processing the deadly sword on his face.
He sees Nene, Sakura, and Natsuhiko, distressed on many occasions, and while he does get sad for Nene and can empathize with them all, when Kou is the one troubled he pays full attention, he goes out of his way to help and freak out when Kou gets too sad. He goes as far as to put a pause on his wish to die to make Kou stop.
His joy also affects him more than anyone. When Kou is happy Mitsuba is always star struck.
He forgot every Nene smile but played Kou’s watery smile on repeat after Hell of Mirrors. He constantly frames Kou as if he is bright like stars or larger than life.
Even when he completely disagrees with what Kou says, Mitsuba still pays full attention. Is like he can’t look away when Kou is paying attention to him.
Because of it, instead of being dismissive or unimpressed, he gets very shaken and frustrated when Kou promises things he doesn’t believe in.
Kou have a lot of power over Mitsuba, which Mitsuba doesn’t nescesarily appreciates.
He wants to get closer but he also want a break from Kou.
Mitsuba isn’t very good at handling strong emotions, but he also has the bad habit of dismissing casual feelings or forgetting them.
He may be a very sweet supernatural, more emotional and empathetic than most, but in the end, he is still a supernatural: He does not get attached to people easily, and have an odd sense of priority.
He doesn’t have a high standard of how ‘caring or nice or alive’ someone need to be for them to be worthy of being his friend, he just want someone, anyone, to hold on to.
And yet he unconciously doesn’t allow himself that.
We can’t justify his sudden lack of interest in Nene, who was the closest thing to a certified ‘friend’ he got in Hell of Mirrors as him putting a mental block on her after learning of her lifespan: He just has no desire to be closer to her, be it because she wasn’t awake when he was told he is a frankenstain and therefore doesn’t see Mitsuba as the monster he sees himself, so he feels a disconnect, or because of something else, but regardless, he has convinced himself that she isn’t someone that he can care about, or isn’t someone that will care about him.
The same goes for the broadcasting club.
It is understandable why he doesn’t consider Tsukasa a friend, since despite how useful and competent Tsukasa is (he kidnaped no.4 as a present for Mitsuba, keeps him alive, gives him no.3 power and so on), he is hurtful and scary. But Natsuhiko and Sakura have shown to worry about him and go out of their way to make him happy.
They welcomed him with open arms, and they may not be perfect, but they do try to listen to him, they do care.
Natsuhiko was genuinely distressed when Mitsuba was in danger. He may be very goofy, but he tries to help enough that even Mitsuba acknowladge.
But Mitsuba does not consider Natsuhiko a friend, an annoying sibling, or anything.
No matter how desperate he should be to connect with others so he doesn’t feel empty he just… don’t.
He can’t put a label to the people he surrounds himself by, not on his own. He doesn’t cling to any bond he might have created, so he still feels alone, and with no reasong to stay in the near shore.
He gave up on his current connections.
He gave up on being human and making new connections.
He would have gived up on the idea of friends as well, if it wasn’t for Kou.
Kou have a lot of power over him, and Mitsuba want to be Kou’s friend very badly but he was basically told point blank Kou doesn’t feel comfortable calling him in specific a friend.
He does get his hopes up after Kou jumps off the roof for him in picture perfect, but throughout all of the manga, Kou never called him a friend, he only ever called Sousuke a friend.
So once Mitsuba’s body started be unable to hold itself together, and he had to eat supernaturals to stay around, any kind of hope grew too troubling, not worth the pain and self hate of merely existing, so Mitsuba gave up on being his friend. He decided he just doesn’t care anymore. About anything
The moment he sees Kou all happy to see him and worried about his health, he can’t look him in the eye. He either doesn’t have the courage to hurt his feelings (cause he knows Kou’s sadness makes him super uncomfortable), or his determination to die wavers.
He hold on to him, and instead of giving up on this connection too, his ‘last wish’ is to spend time with Kou.
He still clearly want to be Kou’s friend, or more than friends, he just didn’t want to think about it.
The penguin destruction wouldn’t have distressed him so much otherwise. The idea of going to a festival with Kou wouldn’t be useful if Mitsuba didn’t get excited and looked forward to hanging out with Kou.
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