Oh my goodness, thank you so much! Yeah, it was so hard to see him dealing with things so poorly. I think a large part of it is that I see Yeongha as more of a symbol to him than a person--he started as That Guy Who Dissed Sai Whom I Must Defeat, turned into That Guy To Whom I Lost And Thus Failed To Defend Sai's Honour, and the fact that Hikaru can't communicate with him or even follow him in media reports and interviews and things due to the language barrier builds him up more and more as a caricature rather than a real person in his eyes. The Yeongha we the manga reader knows is a canny, selfish jerk, but he does what he does in the pursuit of go, which we can understand. I think Yeongha and Hikaru would have an interesting relationship (I mean generally, not romantically or sexually, though of course it's always interesting to explore all sorts of things) if they got to actually sit down and talk to each other; Hikaru has a poisoned first impression of Yeongha, but I think Yeongha's sincere passion and pursuit of the kami no itte (to put it in Sai's terms, though I don't know if Yeongha would articulate his desire to play his best game in quite such a way) is something Hikaru would identify with.

Oh lord, poor Akira. I was trying really hard not to make him too saintly; I think he's incredibly hurt by everything that's happening and how he sees Hikaru as wandering down the garden path, but he's doing his best to understand because this is so obviously important to Hikaru. Akira is actually the person I feel the worst for, since he is trying so freaking hard to be there for Hikaru and to support him and his goals, and receives nothing for his efforts except the ability to watch Hikaru slide further and further into this horrible self-destructive morass.