Oh man, where to start...
I'd like to put together a big huge list of all the reasons I love Ayu, but honestly, the list of reasons why I SHOULDN'T like her are longer. Her big-eyed duck face pictures, those atrocious creepy contacts, her tendency to stick with wavy blond hair when straight dark hair looks so much better, her squeaky voice and/or overdone vibrato, her graphic designers usually being incompetent, her tours being lipsynced and showy and dancey when I prefer the times when she's just up there singing and moving naturally.
In so many ways, Ayu is the embodiment of everything I usually HATE in a pop star.
Sure, I love aspects of ayu's image and style, but I haven't loved an ayu "look" since about 2001, tbh. I can't put that as one of the reasons I like her. Her princessy style just isn't accessible enough to me anymore. I love the princess dresses but I miss when she did things like the foxtail and camo and leopard print and tiny little pins, because they were quirky and distinctive and easy for us regular ol' people to copy. That stuff REALLY reeled me in back in the day. Far more than the sparkly deco and designer handbags EVER could have. I worry that Ayu is very very out of touch with her fanbase these days.
But... she's AYU. She's special, she's different. She's a person, no matter how much makeup she puts on. She moves like herself no matter how choreographed she is. She picks all her own clothes even when she doesn't design them herself. She tours on a sprained ankle, sings with a deaf ear, and dances with a broken hand. She pulled herself up by her bootstraps and somehow did this without compromising & kissing butt. She sets herself apart from everyone else EVEN WHEN SHE'S NOT TRYING. Her imprint is left on EVERYTHING she does.
And then there's the lyrics. Sure, sometimes she writes in cliches, and from 2005 to 2009, her songs pretty much all had the same message and same ideas. But then she came back, and I fell in love with her all over again. Ayu has so many songs I relate to. I cry when I listen to songs like "A Song for XX", "TO BE", "Naturally", "Don't look back", "reminds me", and "Letter" because they're MY songs. I feel like Ayu gets me when I hear songs like those. I don't know Japanese well enough to understand every lyric to every song but when I find one I do understand, I learn it and I own it and eventually I know it like the back of my hand. Because they may as well be pages out of the book of my life.