Why Kageyama Reiji (Ray Dark) is one of the best characters & villains
Just a quick summary of his life, traumas and faults.
While some people might agree with the title of this post, I think there still are many ie fans who consider Kageyama Reiji to be a naturally evil man without scruples and morals who acts evil just for the sake of it. This is a very simplistic view which completely flattens the complexities of this character. It is true that IE is an anime with a young target audience, but there are also many dark details and sensitive issues that are worth focusing and reflecting on even and especially as teenagers or adults.
As regards Kageyama Reiji's childhood, I think we all know that Reiji has only negative memories of it. Reiji was of kindergarten age when he saw his beloved father, the great soccer player Kageyama Tougo, go from being a celebrity acclaimed by everyone to being the disappointment of an entire nation, which lead him to break down and abandon his family. Reiji saw his family shattered within a very short period of time, as his mother died around this time, thus leaving her son completely alone.
All of Reiji’s memories are inextricably linked to the moment when he witnessed his father being not only humiliated on the football pitch, but also insulted and basically “verbally abused” by hundreds of “fans”, who were immediately ready to trade their “soccer idol” for another more talented one. (The scene where Reiji is among those “soccer fans” who were throwing stuff at Tougo is kinda heartbreaking)
From this moment on, a rapid decline of Kageyama family’s life into death and loneliness began (or simply continued). As i wrote earlier, Reiji gets abandoned by his parents, and it’s precisely this aspect that I’d like to focus on...
When Reiji gets arrested for the last, final time, Onigawara Gengorou (Gregory Smith), the man who spends the whole series investigating on Kageyama’s past, says that it’s impossible that Reiji was the man behind all the potentially criminal actions that have been taking place in the last 40 years (since the day the Inazuma Eleven’s bus got hijacked). If we take into account other explanations given by Onigawara himself, we understand that his doubts are well-founded, because at the time of the incident I just mentioned, Reiji was around ten or twelve years old.
We all already know the identity of the man behind all of Reiji’s actions: Garshield (Zoolan). He was the one that approached Reiji when this latter was a merely traumatized, wounded, lonely child, instilling in him the desire for revenge, fuelling it by promising him all sort of stuff.
Of course, nothing and no one can justify the crimes to which Reiji actually contributed (thus getting his own hands dirty since he was a child while his puppet master - Garshield - was watching everything from afar and enjoying the money he got from his shady deeds).
Now, I don’t know whether Reiji saw Garshield as a sort of “father figure” who would help him heal from all the pain through revenge, maybe he did see him that way at first, but regardless of this he indeed spent the most crucial years of his life with Garshield as his only adult figure of reference. Could he ever have become a functional adult?
When Reiji realizes he can no longer submit to Garshield’s orders, this latter calls him a mere pawns in his hands and, while referring to the incident that will took Reiji’s life away, he states that death is what you have to expect when you bite the had that fed you. I don’t know about other dubs, but in the Italian one Reiji often emphasises to Kidou the importance of knowing how to move the pawns as effectively as possible. Mistakes couldn’t be allowed. Spending an entire life to the dependencies of the only adult figure who raised you - a tyrannical figure with no morals - unfortunately led Reiji to repeat the same dysfunctional patterns, attitudes, behaviours he learnt from Garshield. All of this took effort, so much effort, because after all, as he said to Fidio (Paolo), he used to long for the light, but he ended up hating it because he no longer had the chance to lay his eyes on it, so he had no choice but to rely on the darkness in order to survive.
It is now necessary to talk about Reiji’s “greatest Creature”, for it was the encounter with Kidou that first shakes the walls around his heart; it was Kidou’s rebellion that instilled in him doubts, insecurities, fear… and that awakened the trauma of failure, humiliation, loss, abandonment. Reiji’s relationship with Kidou becomes obviously dysfunctional at some point, Reiji literally freaks out when Kidou decides to move away from him (thus breaking some sort of generational trauma cycle). Being abandoned again by someone he cared about was not part of his plans and it is something that tears him apart so deeply that he is willing to do anything (even to attempt to create a perfect copy of him through Demonio Strada / Giulio Acuto) to make Kidou come back to him.
Another crucial moment in Kageyama’s “redemption arc” is the match between Orpheus and Inazuma Japan, which makes the above mentioned walls falter once and for all. And here some of the credit goes to Fidio. Why him? Why not Kidou? It actually makes sense that someone with a “similar” past as Reiji but who isn’t emotionally attached to him was able to grasp the reasons of his actions better than someone (Kidou) who, whether you like it or not, will forever be affectively attached to him.
And well, the rest is history. Reiji is forced to face with his darkest trauma while watching Fidio play soccer the way his father, Kageyama Tougo, used to play. He immediately loses his temper, yells at Fidio to stop playing like the man who destroyed his whole existence and made him hate soccer… and then breaks down. “What do you know about it?” he angrily asks Fidio “What do you know about the darkness I had to carry inside of me? You know nothing about it!” And it was true. No one could have ever imagined what he went through… Still, there was one last chance of salvation. The veil was torn, the mask fell, and tears started streaming down his face. He was finally ready to forgive his father, to look at the blue sky again for the first time in a long time, to embrace the light, to be reborn… in death. “The darkness is finally over” and so is his own life.
I’m almost done, I promise, I just wanted to highlight a parallelism which I find quite beautiful: the one between Reiji raising his eyes to the sky and being able to feel emotions again after being freed from the darkness and Rushe being able to see again thanks to Reiji himself, who paid the medical expenses of her eye surgery.
“ Rushe, I want you to watch closely with your eyes… and feel with all of your senses the magnificence of soccer, the sport I have spent my whole life hating… but also loving. “ Reiji writes in the letter that Rushe will read only after his death.
The final scene of episode 106 in which:
the news announces the death of Kageyama
Rushe reads the letter and expresses her wish to see Reiji asap to talk with him about soccer
and Jude, hearing the little girl’s words, bitterly sighs and clutches Reiji’s glasses in his hands
is heartbreaking, almost gut-wrenching to say the least, especially if we take into consideration the fact that Kageyama had decided to take care of Rushe a long time before… he could no longer stand the idea that someone could get hurt because of the sport he most hated and loved at the same time (this makes us understand that he had long ago decided to turn his back on Garshield: his process of repentance had already begun), that’s why he paid for her eye surgery, visited her several times at the hospital, sent her letters… and eventually learnt to love her as if she was his daughter. All of this made him feel a bit relieved: “After all, by doing so you felt that your heart was little by little escaping from the darkness into which it had sunk, didn’t you?“ Nakata once said to him. But the guilt was still too much. The sins on his conscience were terribly heavy. He knew he did not deserve the gratitude, the light, the smiles of that little girl who so cheerfully talked to him about wanting to learn to play soccer from him and who so lovingly called him… uncle (おじさん).
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