Not many fans participated in the anniversary poll so I can't really take it as an accurate measurement of the characters's popularity. xion, albeit controversial, is popular enough in japan for her theme to get a music box, not even riku or sora got one. If I'm being honest about it, xion is more popular than both namine and kairi combined and the majority of fans prefer her over them. as for kairi, she is the main heroine so even if she does get hate and criticism, she is still loved by many. these two have dedicated fans and therefor seen profitable by the marketing team (and nomura) whereas namine has a very small fanbase compared to them and thus easy to ignore. however, it's not like their mistreatment of namine goes unnoticed, a japanese artist complained about it on twitter. people know she is mistreated and as ironic as it is nomura himself is aware of it if that one scene in kh3 is anything to go by.
Isn't that because her theme is one of the better ones or one of the breakouts? I think that's the case. Anyway, I'm not sure how you're measuring popularity. Those votes show that the gap isn't big, even if the sample was small. Xion had everything handed to her on a silver platter in 358/2 Days. Hijacked the game off of Roxas, got in a trio with two of the most popular male characters, her theme is the only one to get an obnoxious, fancy French name, got the Tragic™ treatment, was in Organization XIII as the "14th" but not really, is a Sora yet looks like Kairi so she can go in any of those groups, etc. But even that wasn't enough to beat Aqua's outrageous favor. And that's the thing. Both Xion and Kairi are divisive and controversial to an extent. For different reasons. You don't see Aqua and Naminè get
this kind of vitriol, it's either you love them, like them, or are neutral. Kairi and Xion you have to be at either end of the polar spectrum for the most part.
As I've mentioned previously, how are you going to give a character relevance if you are to consistently cast her on the side away from everyone with no "team" to belong to. Naminè is left out of trio art, Twilight Town art, Keyblade wielder art, no merch, not in the Guardians of Light, etc., because Nomura has disconnected her from
everything and did absolute shit to fix it. No matter what, that's going to affect things. I remember people going bonkers when Naminè appeared in the trailer for Re: Mind and I had thought to myself "where the hell in what rock did y'all come from?". There's interest, she's simply not used.
Ah yes nomura's newfound love for repliku lol. I still don't get why he brought back the one TRULY dead character in kh, only for him to kill repliku again in the same game. although, I do get the feeling he brought him back more for riku than namine. repliku is sorta of a mirror for riku and he reminds him of his old self or whatever. even repliku farewell scene parallels riku's in kh1.
I don't care for Riku Replica and never did, so I don't mind either way. I just don't like the mind screwed victim implications and what it did to Naminè's character, being utilized as some trophy for his "sacrifice" and nothing else when she has her own shit to close that doesn't involve him.
I can't wait for MoM to come out and debunk rikunami for good. It has been a year since the ultimania came out with nomura debunking rikunami, yet people are still trying to push it. they keep bringing up the misconceptions of them working working together in days as a definitive proof of rikunami when they only had one scene in days, one that implied riku wasn't around in the first 200 days due to his lack of knowledge of the roxas/xion's issue, and afterwards he spent more time with xion than namine. he had more dialogue with xion than namine, his ""supposed love interest"".if nomura was truly going for rikunami, then he could have added more scenes of them together when he did the days movie. evidently, namine isn't even on riku's list of priorities as he is seen showing more concern and care for aqua than he ever did for namine, his supposed love interest, and he had to be reminded of her existence by his soon-to-be-dead replica. namine and riku don't have any semblance of relationship/bond, let alone one that can be perceived as romantic.
SEE GUYS! We brought it back to shipping.
Anyway, I just found Nomura failing to keep the concept about Riku Replica's connection with her funny. He inadvertently eclipsed Repliku with that dumb crap he pulled with petals and Riku arriving on a ship as if that isn't the most shoujo trope in existence. And somehow he thought people would be like "totally about Riku Replica". The guy has no sense.
Those who keep pushing certain ships are those that want to uphold their own narrative and keep their confirmation bias. They're not gonna relent. So let them be. Time will shut up who ever it needs to.
Heck, who knows, maybe Nomura could actually
be competent one day and truly deliver and care about his female characters in some unfathomable miracle of the 5D universe. For now though, he's on the bottom of the totem pole.