One thing I like is that the only people who really truly see Shinichi in Conan, the only people he drops his guard around enough to act like himself, are like: 1. Hattori, best friend, one of the first people to discover his secret, the human equivalent of a puppy dog. And 2. the Detective Boys, the literal young children he spends time with mostly against his own will.
And it's so funny because he TRIES to keep his guard up, he TRIES to act like a regular, boring child, but Shinichi/Conan has one fatal flaw that prevents him from pulling it off: he's too much of a perfectionist, he's too much of a completionist. Once a mystery has his attention he has to solve it, he has to get to the bottom of it, he has to solve riddles, he'll spend the entire day and night thinking about it because he NEEDS to know.
Hattori knows that because Hattori Gets It, he's right there with him, and he understands that the obsessiveness is what makes Shinichi a good detective.
But the Detective Boys do Not get it, they just know that sometimes their weird buddy gets strangely intense and normally it's because murder is involved but sometimes it's about a stupid map to treasure that he finds stupid until he finds out he doesn't get it and begins to obsess over it until he does get it. And sometimes their weird buddy starts laughing maniacally and they're all a bit concerned, but hey, maybe that's just how weird friend expresses himself? Sometimes weird buddy seems to pretend to be stupid, like he just spent fifteen minutes explaining something only to turn around and act like he's three. And this bothers them because, like, what? What's the purpose? And how is anyone convinced???
I love the Detective Boys plots, they are all Conan thinking that it's stupid only to then get way too into it. And just imagine how Inspecter Megure feels! This child yesterday explained the hows and whys of a gruesome murder, only to then be like "how does a clock work?" Like, bro must be SO confused. He and the Detective Boys are over there like, "I know Conan isn't stupid. You know Conan isn't stupid. Conan knows Conan isn't stupid. And yet, somehow, Conan just said the stupidest thing I've ever heard in my life. And now he's back to not being stupid, what was the poINT-"
All this to say, I like that Conan's friends know about Conan's interests and obsessions and accept those interests and obsessions as part of him, and even try to give him things to interest him and get him to spend time with them. Which is just something we never really see with Shinichi because Shinichi's only real friend seemed in the beginning to be Ran, and Ran in the first episode seemed caught off guard by the fact that Shinichi spent nearly an entire trip to an amusement park talking about Sherlock Holmes.
