Thread:SiaCatGirl/@comment-24690456-20180104005557/@comment-24048903-20180104020852

Darling, try all you might, but it's never been clarified whether Kaede is his official crush or just a really special friend. Shuichi got easily attached to her and she did trigger a lot for his arc, true, but his feelings for her remain unknown, both to the group and Shuichi himself, in a sense that when Maki asks him if he had feelings for Kaede, he says he thinks he did but he's not sure if he really did, or even what Maki and he meant by feelings. He never specified if those feelings referred to love. After all, it could just be his easy attachment to her coming off as having feelings for her. This ship has potential to become canon, but it's not irrefutably canon.

And please don't get me started on her free time events. They consisted almost entirely of ship tease for the sake of ship tease, they felt like absolute garbage to me. And we don't even learn anything about her other than giving a concert to a king or why she's so optimistic all the time, something the main game already does a good job of conveying. It's like they stripped her entirely of what gave her character depth in chapter 1 and only left the pointless ship tease that adds nothing to either character.