Cursed Hands

Spoilers on Rewrite's Lucia Route/Relevant Portion of Common Route
In Key's Rewrite, the character Lucia Konohana wears white gloves that have led others to believe that she is a clean freak. Gloves as a symbol often are used to show the outside world being kept there in the outside. As a result, one must wonder about the kinds of characters who wear gloves. One popular example that comes to mind is Elsa who is prominently shown with her blue gloves. (Rewrite seems to play around with notions of body image through the inclusion of characters like Shizuru who wears an eyepatch and Lucia who wears gloves.)

Kotarou suspects that Konohana is a clean freak or has terribly disfigured hands but the truth is less clean and simple than that. This enigmatic aura combined with Lucia's cold attitude creates distance between herself and others; in some ways this act seems intentional. But what if, like Shizuru's eyepatch, Lucia wears gloves for other reasons?

I'm going to draw attention away from Lucia - hey, what gives, Zeldaru!? - and onto me. One of my main weaknesses, at least in my viewpoint, is my hands, both of which I hate. Now, hating a part of yourself is harsh and you shouldn't do that, especially because that's self-defeating - that's immoral under Kantian ethics...and under morality schemes as well. I have a problem where I chew on my skin even though I probably should have stopped such a bad endeavor already. But my problem extends deeper. Due to my condition, I have poor muscle tone, which has a large variety of problems. I am very clumsy at walking, a difficulty that translates analogously to my hands. I spill things or drop things in improbable ways and frequently, as if I am just super clumsy. That itself doesn't sound too bad. But I get criticized often for my handwriting - perceived as horrible, apparently - which is caused by my condition. I also have to erase often to rewrite something that  turned out wrong, which is a total pain when you're an engineering student. I can do an assignment in 12 pages while someone else could probably do it in 6 pages or less. Because of my hands I struggle with things such as sports (ultimate frisbee, anything with throwing) but also with pipetting and even just holding my hands steady. My hands are also just ugly. All of these factors combined make it very difficult for me to do many activities, even something simple like swinging the Wii remote to make a slash in Okami. My hands cause me frustration.

Though Lucia's hands are rather pretty, as commented on by Kotarou and Kotori, she wears white gloves everyday and carries around many spares. As I'm sure you guessed, I was dillydallying to stop the uninitiated from reading spoilers. Then why does she wear the gloves AND at the same time seem so isolated? Her bare hands destroy all she touches - she hasn't to my knowledge had an encounter with a human but rather with flowers. In this manner she is akin to Elsa before she can control her powers (i.e. early on when she strikes Anna with her ice powers) or Rogue from the X-Men who saps the life of any human she touches. Both Lucia and Elsa don gloves in a manner to shield the world from them, instead of the usual role of a glove which is opposite. When Kotori, Kotarou, and Chihaya attempt to give Lucia flowers as a way to make up for Chihaya's harsh words, Lucia inadvertently destroys the flowers, prompting her to both get really angry and lachrymose. Lucia's situation is in many ways similar to mine though: both of us seem to have this repulsion to our hands due to their ability to completely throw situations awry. As a result, Lucia is cast away unconsciously due to her hands (though indirectly). Hands are amazingly complex as can be testified by the gigantic volumes dedicated to hand surgery and biomechanics but that makes feeling your hands are ineffective and unbeautiful even worse. So yes, Lucia's story does hit rather deep for me because she also knows the frustration of cursed hands.