Talk:Izumi Akazawa/@comment-25281705-20140928125109/@comment-397235-20140929011047

See, I don't like the manga version of Izumi because I never got the impression she was really trying to do anything about the Calamity. The only times she really does anything related to Countermeasures is when she decides to blame it all on Mei at dinner, and when she tries to kill her later on. Other than that, she seems content to sit in her room, bemoan her failure to protect Yukari, and generally be a bitch to everyone else (mostly toward Mei, but she's not especially nice to Kouichi either and she even goes so far as to make Naoya cry at one point).

In the anime, of course, circumstances are a little different. Izumi's brother has already been dead for a year by the end of 1998, and she doesn't lose her best friend until they get to the Inn, so she's not got those two gaping holes in her psyche. On top of that, she actively attempts to find a way to deal with the Curse: she talks things over with her friends before deciding they need to ignore Kouichi, she goes with the boys to the beach in order to get answers from Matsunaga, and even when things start to go to hell in a hurry she still tries to keep it together. Granted, Izumi's fatal flaw in the anime is she's nowhere near decisive enough when she needs to be: she doesn't explain to Kouichi what's going on when she had several opportunities to do so and once she does learn how to end the Calamity she still doesn't immediately do anything about it (I've always figured that, on some level, is why Takako took matters into her own hands: basically she got impatient. Nearly being killed will do that to you).

As for Takako, if you notice, she's not trying to kill Izumi, she's pushing her out of the way so she can get at Mei. Takako doesn't try to kill anyone other than Mei at any point: that's the difference between being psychotic and being a psychopath. In her mind killing Mei, and only Mei, will end the Curse. The laughing is a visible scene of her insanity. Contrast that with Tomohiko, who merrily kills his way across the Inn (he murdered two people that we know of but it's possible he's the reason why several other students simply vanish) and doesn't express any emotions whatsoever.

And of course, a lot of this comes back to Kouichi and Mei at no point attempting to explain things to anyone outside their group of friends. That right there is why a lot of the deaths at the Inn occurred, and Mei brought a lot of that down on herself because of her absolute patent refusal to stand up for herself.