It's painful to watch Mikage try so hard to be human, fail, and try even harder to be a machine. It's as if he feels he needs to be inorganic to exist. But why would he want to undergo such a metamorphosis? Why does he prefer plastic and metal to living flesh?
He understands the consciousness of the machine, or rather he thinks he understands. If he doesn't have that consciousness of the machine, then what does he have? What is he if he isn't a living computer?
Mikage is alienation. Mikage is nothing. He is nothing at all. It is impossible for him to exist. He can only strive to embody an unattainable ideal, because he cannot possibly exist without trying to mold himself into impossible shapes, because acknowledging what he really is, acknowledging himself in his entirety, is too absolutely terrifying that he doesn't even deem it a possibility.
To quote the opening line of the haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson (the woman the myth the legend), “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.”
Mikage, even though he refuses to accept this, IS a live organism; and cannot exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality: when the truth about Mamiya is reestablished, he simply breaks.
He is a live organism. He just doesn’t know that he is, because he has been othered for so long and he has reached such a complete state of alienation that he thinks that none of the rules that apply to human beings apply to him!! He is not allowed by others to be alive, to be human, to be real. To Tokiko, he is a genius. To the 100 boys, he is a machine. Is there a difference?
He is not allowed to exist! He is an impossible, paradoxical thing: his very existence bothers people. It shows them what they do not want to see, they see their flaws in him and they see the flaws of the world they have built for themselves and imprisoned others in, they keep him hidden until the very end (the black rose arc episodes where we barely see him, until truth eventually comes out in ep 22 and 23!!). In that way, he is just like Anthy, with the difference being that Mikage shows the fated failure of absolute dissembodied rationality rather than the violence of the patriarchy.
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