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Hazama Masayoshi and the Void of Empathy

I've been feeling like doing some Samurai Flamenco meta for a while, so that's what I'm going to do. Starting with random talk about character development (under a cut because this shit is long).

It's in some of his first lines. He's unhappy with the fact that as other boys grow up they seem to no longer focus on superheroes. It's not because he doesn't personally like their taste in sports, music, or women (...although), but because he can't understand their interest. Every single one of his interests comes back to superheroes. He's athletic because he's training to be a hero. When he sings to himself to calm down, it's the Red Axe theme. The only women he significantly interacts with outside of his manager are superheroes. Work is something he does because—well, okay, because it's expected and he has to do something—but it's also a way to keep himself afloat while working on his real goal of becoming a superhero. At this stage of life, his passion for justice probably ranks at Phoenix Wright/10, but unlike the former character, his sense of empathy is pretty pathetic. Thank god, because this narrative needs places to go though, right?

The starting point of his character development (indeed, the point that separates him from his be-tentacled AU self) is that he meets a guy named Goto Hidenori while out trying to be a hero. Goto freaks out at the naked dude hiding in a dark alley as any reasonable person would, but after burning his clothes into an ash pile, Goto at least has the decency to lend him a garbage bag and leaf print shirt so Masayoshi can rock it like a sadsack Hawaiian-themed frat party taking place in the wrong country for frat parties. The thing is, for all that Goto has many, many problems of his own that have led him, too, to be friendless and isolated, empathy is profoundly not one of them.

[Goto-san, there's something I haven't been telling you]

Masayoshi bothers with Goto for a few reasons.

a) he knows his superhero identity, which validates the idea that Masayoshi actually has a superhero identity, just like in his shows, yay! b) he's a cop. Curry udon, yeah, but still, that's pretty heroic and also authoritative. Masayoshi responds to authority. c) Goto's a partial convert. Masayoshi's got him sort of on board with his ideas about heroism, but Goto still needs convincing, which more time together might cure d) the kid is just lonely, not that he's fully capable of processing that e) because Goto has showed empathy towards him, if in some very small ways, and he's responding to it

So episode one marks the beginning of Masayoshi's evolution as a hero, and as a human being. They’re both always happening, but it’s worth saying that they aren’t inherently the same thing.

Samurai Flamenco chooses its foils well. Masayoshi is good at justice, but bad at empathy. Goto is highly sympathetic towards other people, a trait which itself contextualizes his belief in justice to give a rather different perspective to Masayoshi’s. Goto understands why people are apathetic about smokers in non-smoking areas; Goto understands the kinds of things that motivate people towards crime (and knows it firsthand by the end of the series). His belief in justice and the nature of people in relation to it accords with his understanding of human foibles.

Perhaps the even greater foil to Masayoshi, however, is Maya Mari. Mari is a narcissist who is...okay at justice, and attuned to empathy in a way that Masayoshi is initially not, even as her narcissism leads to her frequently re-contextualizing other's problems within her orbit. She gets that the people around her have feelings, she even has some room for consideration (especially towards Moe, Mizuki, and Goto), but she differs from Masayoshi and Goto in that when these feelings are incongruous with her needs or beliefs, she tries to change the narrative to assert her place at the centre (see episode 16, where she recognizes Moe’s motivations perfectly well and clearly does, on some level, appreciate her genuineness—she gets it—but still egoistically spins it into her own problems, as though effect were the same as intent. “You made me look bad.”) Her character arc is all the more fascinating for this, but that’s for a different discussion.

Armed with these two foils who serve as kind of yardstick for Masayoshi’s development as a person, let’s skip ahead (so I'm not writing at you for four hours) and look at the major steps of his evolution towards actually finding insight into what other people think and feel:

1. In perhaps one of the most brilliant if brief subversions the show has to offer, Masayoshi discovers his parents were murdered when he was a child, and has no fucks to give.

Okay, that's flippant—he has no emotion to spare for them because he didn't know them, he's still shit at empathy, and this knowledge isn't dredging up complicated unresolved feelings about parental longing or the usual bullshit. The kid was happy being raised by gramps and he supplanted things like father/mother figures with superheroes anyway.

[Harakiri Sunshine is basically his dad]

It is a quandary for him however, and he reaches out to Goto about it. He knows he should care because it is the perfect hero backstory and heroes always care (there is, in fact, the distinct possibility that because Masayoshi feels he cannot fill this particular heroic mold, he subconsciously asks the universe to create Guillotine Gorilla et. al. because that! That kind of heroism, he can do!). Goto, in his usual show of empathy and understanding, calls him a freak.

In a nice way. Or a "don't sweat it and keep being you, because you're doing me us some good" kind of way. Freak.

Masayoshi takes it on faith, because even if he is aware that his subjective experience is uncommon (and fears it’s wrong), all he really needs is Goto understanding him to be reassured. He’s learned to like having someone who “gets him.” He doesn’t get Goto, yet, however. In spite of the vast interpersonal skills progress Masayoshi has made up to this point (he now has 1 friend, 1 mentor, 1 person somewhere between the two, 3 idol girls who occupy an ambivalent position on his heroism scale, and an improving relationship with his manager) he's still not that good at understanding other people's struggles, which takes us to the next step… 2. The more Masayoshi fights King Torture and minions, the less he cares about anything else. It doesn't help that the Flamenco Girls have more or less ditched him because the fight against evil was becoming passé, but it also owes a lot to his ideals about being the masked hero figure who takes on all the bad guys himself. There's not a lot of room for everyone else's roles in that vision. It's easy to see where From Beyond Masayoshi comes from. As Goto's text messages note, the look in his eyes is scary. He starts acting like Mari. What ultimately breaks Masayoshi out of his ego trip? Three things.

a) Goto says "fuck you, I'm out." (Okay, okay, he says, "you and our mutual narcissist don't understand how much everyone else is struggling with this shit, I'm out"). b) Harazuka, whom Masayoshi has pigeonholed as sidekick scientist/mentor-ish/basically the least heroic figure on the general side of justice that Masayoshi knows, shows up for the battle against King Torture's minions and is like "I got this!" Suddenly Masayoshi is seeing other people who aren't curry rice or udon also taking on heroic roles because they too believe that they are struggling against evil. c) King Torture gives his own egocentric narrative about how he too knew he was something special, had a great destiny as a supervillain, how sacrifices were made in the name of his beliefs, and that everything will be assimilating with him and it’ll lead to better things etc. Masayoshi realizes just how awful it would be to have to go it alone, and that, in fact, he never really had been.

[Meanwhile Goto stops the rocket]

And so, achievement unlocked, Masayoshi throws the speech back in his face and notes the everyday heroism and everyday suffering of other human beings, and when all is said and done Masayoshi takes the helmet off, because the masked vigilante is hard for people to connect with, and Masayoshi is kind of liking the feeling of finding connection on things beyond abstract principles like justice and morality. Perhaps connection based on something more like "shared humanity." (That’s perfectly concrete.)

Besides, King Torture was fucking ugly, and Masayoshi needs his pretty face to make an income, so that's also motivating (on the other hand, he could have had a CHAINSAW for an ARM). 3. But we're not done yet (I know, I know), because Masayoshi is still working on this "understanding other people" thing, and he has to kind of revise the "hero" thing, because he's already been two kinds of hero but he's a completionist and he's gotta be 'em all. So as he enters the third phase of hero evolution (learning how to be a leader) he also enters another phase of emotional growth (oh fuck, leadership). He completely fumbles trying to get the Flamengers to feel like a REAL TEAM, because he's still not very good at connecting with people. So he turns to the one person he knows he does have a strong connection with and asks him to join the team instead. Goto says no. Bummer. Once again the emotional growth and the evolution of the hero work in a kind of tandem. He gets better at directing the people he works with and begins to see them as human beings rather than allies of justice. It's not smooth going though. Unready to challenge the authority of the Prime Minister, he starts counting up his five people to save. He has too many. In some ways, however, he has much fewer than he would have had at the start of the series. He's not like Flamen Blue (who, to be fair, is just as capable of empathy as he is self-pity), who only has five people in his contact list. Who would Masayoshi save at the beginning of SamFlam? Nobody, because absolutely everyone is equal. Equally victims of an injustice, equally deserving of a hero's protection. By episode 13? #1 comes pretty easily, and #2 and #3 shortly thereafter. What's most telling, however, is that #4, an umbrella who he's never met, doesn't take much effort either. Masayoshi's not just thinking about the people he's come to care about and understand, he's also showing that he understands the feelings of others. Goto has a girlfriend (which is class C "distracting and dangerous" on his former list), but Masayoshi genuinely gets that Goto cares about her, and that's enough for Masayoshi to care too. He then visits Goto, who turns out to be sheltering Mari after her breakdown. Once again, Goto's empathy level is probably beyond what it needs to be (I'd give her the name of my therapist and then the boot, personally), and Masayoshi picks up on it, and adds three more people to his list. It's that point at which he returns to what his former conclusion would have been: "everyone is equal and heroes can't choose who lives and dies."

And then things get worse, except better. His crutch, Kaname, drops out of the picture, and suddenly decisions like "do I let these poor people know the country is about to be invaded?" fall into his hands. After a clumsy reveal that moves up the invasion date and a bitch-slap from the PM, he pulls himself together (because fuck that guy) and releases a PSA about how sharing is caring and that all that hero work has led to him seeing more instances of people working together through hard times rather than struggling alone. He more or less tells the nation to think of each other's problems as much as their own. And then he tells Flamen Black it's good that he got his grandpa to safety. Four for you, Glen Coco. 4. Everybody hates him, nobody loves him, he might as well steal bread. Masayoshi on the run has reached the superhero trope stage where he may finally espouse that most obnoxious of beliefs: "I must leave my loved ones in order to protect them." A hobo tells him that's bullshit, which is the best kind of reality check, I always say. More seriously, Masayoshi is acutely aware that there are now people who trust in him and care about him, even though everything else in his life seems to be turning against him. He can't reach out because he doesn't want them to be hurt and he hasn't yet gotten to the point of awareness where caring-->for other people leads to other people caring-->for you (open circuit shit). Fortunately, there's always a hobro you saved back in episode seven to sort these things out. The hobo shows kindness to him, Masayoshi clearly shows concern over the crap that happened to him, and the hobo mentions his own falling out with empathy. It works in part because it illustrates the usual entanglement of "the good" with "the ability to sympathize." Things went badly, and the hobo stopped caring about others and himself. Samurai Flamenco shows him there's still justice and good intentions in the world (which as has been said before, early show Masayoshi was aces at, even though he failed "the ability to sympathize" exam hard), and the hobo started to care both about doing good AND about the people around him as fellow humans who also struggle, and so by episode 16 is able to sympathize with Masayoshi's problems and get his ass over to Goto's place because of that open circuit thing I mentioned before. I could pontificate on the romantic montage but I think you get the point by now: Goto is central to Masayoshi's growing ability to care for other people, and understand he is cared for in return. 5. A good number to finish off the evolution stages at, we arrive in the final arc. Masayoshi gets to be confronted by the rather awful fact that Goto, despite rating Troi/10 on the empathy scale, is not exactly sane. In fact, he's been suffering a whole lot for upwards of 7+ years, and Masayoshi somehow failed to notice that for the entire year he's known him (it was, in fairness, a pretty intense year). Masayoshi's also forced to deal with a little shit whose empathy meter and obsession meter are more or less in line with his own at the beginning of the series. But Haiji didn't grow up idealizing justice. He spent the past year laughing and slapping the floor at Samurai Flamenco.

In perhaps one of the most telling single lines in the evolution of Masayoshi as a character, he threatens to kill Haiji if he harms Goto. This from the guy who was concerned about the loss of life caused by King Torture minions committing suicide. It's just a heat of the moment comment, but it hammers home the change pretty starkly. Masayoshi has someone he might, when it comes down to it, prioritize (courtesy of his emotions) over plain old justice.

He then picks a major fight with Goto, because for once Goto isn't responding to Masayoshi's troubles with the empathy and understanding that Masayoshi has come to expect as default with him. So he makes an asshole comment about the girlfriend, and DV makes a second appearance.

[And your little tako charm too] But! Masayoshi apologizes immediately, whether it does him any good or not. Give the kid another sticker. Fortunately nobody is actually dead yet, so Masayoshi has one person left to turn to for advice after this all comes raining down on him. It's shit advice. What the fuck is love? Masayoshi doesn't do love, he does heroism (and friendship-kind-of-thingys, but mostly heroism). He's never seen love at work, except for maybe what his grandpa felt for him, and parents felt for him, and his fans feel for him, and Ishihara feels for him, and Haiji feels for him, and Goto feels for his girlfriend (what?). Basically, thank god Ishihara is there to 'splain a thing...except Masayoshi still doesn't get it, regardless of how obvious the development of his ability to experience love has been to the audience over the course of the series. Time to talk about the evolution of the hero again. The brilliance of SamFlam's ending is predicated on the development of both the hero persona and the person Masayoshi is. Masayoshi has evolved through several heroic models and has lost not one iota of the passion for goodness and justice he had at the beginning. But justice can't help Haiji, and Masayoshi can't love him either—he still doesn't know what it is. It is precisely because Masayoshi cannot really understand Haiji anymore than Haiji understands him, that the awkward naked struggle, however hilarious and disconcerting for the viewers, yields no actual result. So Haiji, as a villain, falls right out of the picture, serving only as the audience stand in, as the unlikely (but thematically spot on) events unfold.

[Don't tell me you didn't look like this] On one level, the unhinged and armed Goto is the fittingly the final villain, because as Red Axe informed us in episode 3, the hardest thing is to convince a friend they are wrong.

[Other things Red Axe was right about.] It would follow that this is where the next evolution of the hero must appear. It's not. The evolution of the hero thread was put on hold five minutes ago, when Masayoshi took off his underwear because Samurai Flamenco couldn't help Haiji and he thought maybe, just maybe Hazama Masayoshi might. Neither were bound to work, and the evolution of the hero is immaterial now. Goto picks up the gun, and here's where 22 episodes of character development finally come together in a really bizarre and magnificent way. The Masayoshi of episode 1 in front of Goto aiming a gun at a middle-schooler would be concerned about the threat Goto is posing to another person. He would be concerned, in the abstract, about the morality of Goto's actions, and the negative impact of Goto taking such an action as a person doing wrong when he ought to do right by both himself and others. Those concerns are still buzzing around in the back of Masayoshi's head at the end of the series, but that's not what he cares about. He cares about Goto's suffering and wants to heal it; he cares about Goto's future and he expects to be a part of it; he cares about the actions that shape who Goto is because Goto has shaped who Masayoshi is. "I get it, this is love." Even as he fumbles his own dramatic revelation, he follows up with affirmation that he has, in fact, gotten it.

Yes, in the form of crying out baka over twenty times, but you're watching Samurai Flamenco. You don't cry and call your best friend stupid 30 times because you lack empathy (...actually, normally that's exactly what that behaviour is rooted in...), you do it because you love them and you want them to stop hurting themselves. "Let's get married." You're not really alone. Let me show you that I care about your problems and your happiness, like you've cared about mine.

It's basically the most heroic thing he could do.

[This is my final form]

The show leaves us there. Whatever ill-advised contradictory interviews people give in the aftermath of critical and commercial failure (what?), it’s pretty easy to say that character development is one of the biggest thematic end-goals in Samurai Flamenco, even when it didn’t have to be (after all, some hero shows are driven more by concept, action , or message). Moreover, Samurai Flamenco doesn’t go for the clean cut, even as it hands out a sense of satisfaction. We see Goto working towards change, but it is work. We see Mari in need of change, but hard pressed to go about it. It keeps things human. People like ‘human’, probably even more than people like ‘good’. The satisfaction, then, is probably because we see transformation of someone who was great at being good but severely lacking in human empathy. We see Masayoshi change, Flamenger Period.

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