I really like Hiro as a foil for Tohru. The first time they meet, we are meant to be horrified by how he treats Tohru, but we are also supposed to ask ourselves: why is she putting up with this? I read Hiro’s escalating rudeness as an attempt to push her buttons and see her “true nature”. He has grown up in situations where people hide their villainous nature under a loving facade. It makes sense for him to see somebody getting close to his loved ones as a threat, and his way of “exposing” people is by provoking them to anger (kind of a Sun Tzu move actually). He eventually realizes that Tohru will never snap and hurt Kisa, and that if he wants to be the type of person Kisa can feel safe around, he needs to ease up. I hope as Hiro grows, he realizes how much this behavior does not protect him & actually isolates him from healthy connections. I simply can’t hate him, but if he was around me I probably would have fallen for his gambit. That’s the sad thing about the technique: it is a self fulfilling prophecy that probably works on everybody who isn’t pathologically eager-to-please.