i have vague memories of being kind of offput by masumi. this seems to be a pretty common occurrence for pretty obvious reasons. but the more i saw of him and the more glimpses i got into his life, the more i just felt REALLY BAD FOR HIM. i'm pretty sure the first a3 rant i went on was about masumi and why he seems to be the way he is.
i've said this before like countless times but masumi is the way he is due to being a sixteen year old with a complicated relationship with his parents, with them often being busy with work and seeming to prioritize how he makes them look rather than his own happiness. on top of that, his "fan club" tends to view him as almost a trophy boyfriend, pursuing him because of his looks and perceived attitude rather than because of who he is as a person. his understanding of love - in whatever form that may take - is skewed, and when he meets izumi and she expresses interest in him as a potential actor, he kind of latches onto her as being his soulmate or whatever and draws from the experiences of his fan club to express it (which is to say, by being extremely jealous and overly demonstrative). i make a note of his age here because i think a lot of people kinda???? forget that????? when talking about him????? and as a result they tend to act like he's a malicious adult rather than a neglected teenager who doesn't really know how to deal with his own feelings. (hell, honestly, half the time him tying his actions to izumi comes across as a way of avoiding admitting that he cares about the other actors, especially spring troupe. see also: sakuya's mankai encore backstage and basically any time he keeps tsuzuru functional during script crunch time)
but honestly, he's been growing a lot, ever since we first met him. it's never explicitly stated that he started helping sakuya with the romijuli fight choreography because he saw elements of his own loneliness within sakuya's story, but that's always been how i interpreted it. magician's pure love entirely centers on masumi trying to figure out love and what it means to everyone else, and the whole play is conceived because he becomes scared of how he'd handle izumi falling for another person - most notably, he becomes scared that he'll quit acting over it, which i find really telling - and asks tsuzuru to write a play with unrequited romance so he can learn how to handle it. in the epilogue to last year's white day event he even works with the rest of mankai to make white day special for izumi because he knows she'd prefer that. he still has some form of affection for her, of course, but it's become healthier and more manageable.
he's grown on me so much, dude. he very well may be third in my rankings at this point. i think he's really underappreciated.
(as far as headcanons go, i think any interpretation of his feelings regarding izumi - whether it is a legitimate crush or just him misinterpreting other kinds of love for romantic - is valid. will admit to being fond of him being some flavor of arospec though.)
