Throughout the anime, the art of smiling truly without pretense is highlighted. When Sayu came to live with Yoshida at first, she smiled in order to cover up her true emotions and feelings. She smiled to simply make the other person comfortable and it was a front she put up to hide her true self and feelings away. Simply put, she didn’t want to be even remotely vulnerable around people. However, Yoshida saw through that and called her out on it. In fact, he was able to bring out her genuine smile as the anime progressed. Though Sayu’s past was unimaginably harsh, she still retains the ability to smile in the moments that she had with Yoshida and Asami and that shows how strongly feminine she is as a character.

As the anime progresses, Sayu was able to realize where she was going wrong. She was able to realize how her thinking was wrong, how the way she looked at her problems was wrong, and how she was going about everything with a defeatist attitude of running away without stopping. All these realizations and possible epiphanies that are important to one’s life cannot be achieved without extreme personal reflection. Sayu was able to stay at Yoshida’s house till she got on her feet and she took it seriously. She didn’t simply choose to live comfortably at Yoshida’s house forever. She made sure to do her chores around the house to give herself purpose and she chose to start working at the convenience shop to start supporting herself. The person that Sayu has evolved into is a completely different person than what she started as.

This is what sets her apart from the other female characters in HigeHiro. Airi Gotou is unable to truly face her feelings head-on after she realizes that Sayu was living with Yoshida. She was incapable of pursuing her love for various reasons but, mostly, she chose to stay back and watch instead of taking action for herself. Yuzuha Mishima did the complete opposite and chose to take way too much action instead of sorting out her own feelings first. However, Sayu took a long, hard look at herself before she even chose to acknowledge her feelings for Yoshida, setting her character development apart from various other anime characters of this genre.