With the recent on-stream apology for a lack of Mafu7, I've been seeing some of the discourse on Kanade's focus events cropping back up.
The fact that this discourse even exists shows that a significant number of people here don't understand what a focus event is supposed to be.
Simply put, a Focus event is a unit-specific story event in which one character's journey and growth is front and center.
The exact reason the event happens within the story can be due to many different reasons, but the result is that the focus character is the one we're taking the perspective of and following through the event's story.
A common critique I've seen of Kanade's focus events is "they always focus on Mafuyu", which following the previous definition, simply is not true. For starters Mafuyu is hardly present during Kanade's first and fourth focus events.
From here, we will need to define 2 more terms. The first is Catalyst. This refers to something that allows for change, without itself being changed. The second is Inciting Incident. This refers to an event that kicks off a chain of other events.
With that in mind, let us look through Kanade's other focus events to see what's going on within them.
Kana2 is mostly a flashback event, showing the events that led to Mafuyu and Kanade joining together to create N25. This is one of few focus events in which none of the characters grow from the events of the story, instead it gives us a good yardstick to measure the growth of Kanade and Mafuyu from. I also find it rather telling that people label this a Mafuyu focus, but don't call Mizu3 an Ena event.
Kana3 takes place during a story arc in which Mafuyu's situation affects the rest of N25, so I'm surprised to hear that Kanade is the only one who's event within this arc gets called a Mafuyu focus, especially since this is arguably one of the more kanade-heavy events. Sure the event is caused by Mafuyu's situation, but it's strictly about how Kanade acts under pressure. Agreeing to meet a complete stranger under a complete imbalance of power, and managing to not buckle under that pressure.
In Kana5, Mafuyu's storyline acts as a catalyst for the event to happen, with Kanade laboring over a song to an unhealthy degree. I honestly fail to see how anyone could see this event as anything but being about Kanade's tendency to overwork herself.
Kana6 follows a similar beat in which Mafuyu's storyline catalyses the event, but it's still firmly about Kanade. Mafuyu herself only even appears in the penultimate chapter of the story
Furthermore, in criticizing Kanade's events for being "about Mafuyu" a lot of hypocrisy shows.
As already mentioned, Mizuki's flashback event discussing how she and Ena got involved in n25 doesn't get called an "Ena Event", and neither Ena3 or Mizu4 get criticized for "being about Mafuyu" when she's more heavily involved in the events of those stories than she is in Kana5 and Kana6 combined.
But then there's other hypocrisies like how Ena5 doesn't get called a Mizuki event
This attitude so many people here have towards the event stories is disrespectful to Kanade, disrespectful to Mafuyu, and disrespectful to the teams of people writing these stories
