A popular question within the anime community that’s often asked is, “do you prefer the manga or anime?” Now, usually, one’s preference for one or the other doesn’t necessarily affect their perception of the characters or story that strongly. After all, many anime adaptations are direct reflections of the manga chapters. Whatever happens in the third episode of the anime is the same thing that happens in the third chapter of the manga. At least, that’s how one would expect it to go.

This rule doesn’t really apply to most anime. For instance, the second half of Akira Toriyama’s manga DragonBall has 325 chapters correlating with the anime adaptation that is DragonBall Z, which in turn only has 291 episodes. That’s a huge difference, and it’s mostly because the show was given 30 minutes of run-time per episode, allowing more material to be introduced in a single episode than a single chapter in the manga. The same happened to Naruto: Shippuden, which has 700 manga chapters but 500 episodes in the anime. Being able to condense the material into a 30-minute animation is fairly easy when each chapter is much shorter than a single episode. However, this does come with some issues when it comes to adapting the manga into a show for Western audiences. Some plot points and dialogue get taken out, mistranslations become an obstacle, and some characters get completely changed for the sake of making the show more interesting for Western audiences.

If you need an example, look no further than Inuyasha, an anime released in the United States in 2002 on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim. Created by Rumiko Takahashi in 1996, Inuyasha—the manga—has 558 chapters that were condensed into 56 volumes that were released from 1997 to 2009.

Both the show and the manga feature 15-year-old Kagome Higurashi, who lives in modern-day Tokyo and is sent back in time to Feudal Japan through a magical well in her family’s shrine. There, she meets the half-demon Inuyasha, son of the Great Dog Demon, and the two go on a quest to seek out the Sacred Jewel shards before the story’s villain—Naraku—can gather them all. Kagome is also the reincarnation of another character in the show, Kikyo: a teenage priestess who died defending the Sacred Jewel from Inuyasha and was Inuyasha’s old lover. Due to their relation, Kagome inherits her ability to sense the Sacred Jewel’s presence, allowing their group to easily track down the shards. They also look very much alike, making it rather awkward when Kagome and Inuyasha’s romance starts to blossom.

However, that is where the similarities end between the manga and the show. After introducing these three characters, the two forums diverge in their characterizations. In the show, Kikyo—who is brought back to life and has the desire to not only have her revenge against Inuyasha, but to also die in peace and actually stay dead this time—is more villainized than she is in the manga. In the show, she’s portrayed as always chasing after Inuyasha, attempting to lure him into a false sense of security so she could finally kill him by using his love for her against him. However, in the manga, it’s quite the opposite: Inuyasha is the one who won’t let her go, constantly attempting to push himself back into Kikyo’s life while also pursuing Kagome at the same time. In one scene in particular is this apparent.

In Episode 47 of the show—and in Volume 18 of the manga—Kikyo escapes Naraku’s grasp and is chased by a demon before she runs into Inuyasha in the forest by the Bone Eater’s Well in her village. Inuyasha saves her and the two of them run and hide away just long enough for Kikyo to recover from the incident. In the show, Kikyo is much more hostile towards Inuyasha when he asks her what she was doing running from the demon. He claims it’s because she wanted to find him to save her, but she yells at him to stop being a fool and that she merely was attempting to escape. Running into him was only a coincidence. Inuyasha then attempts to bring up their past, and how she pinned him to a tree with her arrow for fifty years. Kikyo gets upset by this, and, after some exposition about Naraku’s nature, Inuyasha attempts to pour out his feelings for her only for Kikyo to pull a knife on him.

However, in the manga, this interaction is completely different. Kikyo, laying in Inuyasha’s arms, explains that she hadn’t even realized that she was running to the same place where she and Inuyasha met, almost as if her instincts were telling her to go there. Also, rather than Inuyasha getting nostalgic about their past, Kikyo is the one to bring it up. The exposition about Naraku still happens, but rather than Kikyo pulling out a knife on Inuyasha the two dive into an argument: Kikyo wants to take on Naraku by herself, but Inuyasha—still in love with her—refuses and insists he should kill Naraku.

This staggering difference is rather important to Kikyo’s characterization. Firstly, the anime adaptation paints Kikyo as an evil seductress who takes advantage of a love-struck Inuyasha, making the pairing between him and Kagome much more likeable in comparison. It’s a classic “The Evil Bitch versus The Good Girl” trope that makes the audience want to root for Kagome instead of Kikyo as well as view Inuyasha as an idiot who can’t see how clearly evil Kikyo is. The manga, on the other hand, paints the situation as it truly exists: three teenagers in a life-and-death situation who have a complicated relationship with one another. Kikyo and Inuyasha still obviously care about each other, and the two were manipulated into turning on one another, but Inuyasha is in love with both Kikyo and Kagome. Kagome—as the outsider looking in—then has to make the decision: should she continue to pursue Inuyasha or leave him and Kikyo be? She technically doesn’t belong in this era, so going back home and letting history take its course would be the right thing to do. However, her feelings for Inuyasha are still strong and make her hesitant in leaving.

Rather than take the obvious route and keep this dynamic when making the anime, the producers of Inuyasha chose to completely change Kikyo’s character as well as her relationship with Kagome and Inuyasha to make the show more dramatic. Kikyo went from an innocent victim of Naraku’s scheming who still cared about her first love to a cold-hearted jerk who only got in the way of the “one true pairing” of the show. It then becomes plainly obvious why people who’ve only ever watched the anime dislike Kikyo compared to those who’ve read the manga.

So while one’s preference for either reading or watching a show doesn’t always have an impact on how they view the story, it’s also important to note that there are exceptions to this, and that looking at the full picture should be people’s go-to when analyzing characters from an anime. After all, you never know when you’re gonna have another Kikyo situation on your hands.