Why Gintoki is an amazing character...

I know No one asked for this but I thought to post this here anyway. I hope No one minds. There's no spoiler for the final movie but there are spoilers for Gintama° so proceed with caution.

In the beginning, he's introduced as a fourth-wall-breaking comedic character who clearly holds some kind of samurai values very dear to him. He does Odd Jobs, but not only is he willing to do any kind of job he's given, but he also goes beyond treating it as a job request when it comes to helping people. Within the first 30 episodes, you start to meet other characters and you get to see his interactions with them, and it reveals a lot about his character. One day he'll resort to using dumb tricks to win a duel that he challenged himself for the sake of some girl he just met, then the next day he'll break a guy's sword because he doesn't want to fight seriously, not that he wouldn't win both fights if he actually tried.

He'll be a lazy bloke and be behind on rent but he'll turn around and fight against anyone who puts his landlady in danger. He's strong, but he is just such a lazy ass. Why not just be strong all the damn time? The answer is so simple. It's because he doesn't want to be.

He reads Jump comics because he wants to see others be the hero. He's tired of being the war hero himself, leading armies in his mid-to-late-teens, laying waste to Amanto troops, and protecting his comrades. So what if he's earned himself a legendary title? He doesn't want it. Forget ambition. He just wants to drown himself in sweets and have a simple life. He's essentially just a dude in his late 20's who's messed up with PTSD after the war and who's got no more strength to do anymore in life than just scrape by and survive.

But then, after that, we start to see a lot more serious arcs. Gintoki is put in a situation where time and time again he has to use his strength to help those around him. And every single time, he initially turns away from the fight after getting his ass handed to him. I mean, after being stuck in a war and having it end in such a way that really broke him forever (RIP Shouyou), how could he even bother to fight seriously anymore? Yet every time, after getting beat up, he gets back up, pushes his friends away to protect them, then goes right back into the fight recklessly. It's as though he has no care for his own life and that the only reason he'd fight seriously is for the sake of others. And it's true. He wouldn't mind dying if it meant protecting someone else. This is confirmed again in the Shinigami arc, where it's revealed he had offered his head to save some others from being persecuted. This is so beautifully tied in with his usual lazy demeanor that it makes him real. Instead of the usual main character who goes "I'll always fight my hardest", Gintoki wants to avoid fighting seriously until others' lives depend on it, because come on, who in the world would actually have the strength to go 100% all the time? He's only human.

On top of that, throughout the series, as we see Gintoki go through the major arcs and we see him fight, we can see his growth as a person. Sure, he may be in his late 20's, but he's avoided living a serious life after the war for so long that he's really just a teenager at heart. And that's what he wanted to be, considering he had spent his adolescence fighting a war that he knew he wouldn't win. His heart is pretty much dead after killing Shouyou and watching his two best friends go separate ways in life.

But we can see him slowly begin to come back to life as he meets new people, makes new friends, helps new people, and sees the differences that he makes in others' lives. At the end of the Shinigami Arc, he even wonders aloud, "with this, I wonder if I've become a better person." And as more about his past is revealed, it becomes so painfully obvious just how far he's come as a character. We can literally see and feel his past experiences and how much he's changed, how his heart has gone through so much unnecessary suffering but how he's grown so much as a person that he can now overcome the things he's been through. He grows in such a way that it makes us feel like we're growing with him.

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is, Gintoki is a believable main character. He's not written so out-of-this-world that it makes him a god. He is still strong, of course, but he also faces the same challenges and troubles that people face in real life every day. And on top of that, because Gintama is a comedy, in the end, Gintoki faces his everyday happenings in some of the dumbest, funniest ways possible, because that's what real people would do.

Gintoki is not just an amazing character. He's so well-written he's an amazing person.