Aren't we putting to much pressure on Deku for saving Shigaraki. They real issue isn't that he failed in doing, so because ofcoure he did he was 15/16. We can't really expect thess children to save these traumtised individuals. I think his inability to think past his ideals or what he has been brainwashed to believe since a child is very fitting for a teenager. People paint him to be horrible, but he was one of the few to see that villains are still human. Ig Uraraka did it way better. Let me say it like this he was one of the consider them as human a big majority of the class simlply didn't. The change is bigger with him that as he grows up he might be able to actually start realising they messed up system their society runs on and perhaps do something about it, then the rest of the classmates who simply don’t see villains as people. The real issue remains their system. But allot of people treat Deku as if he is evil because he didn’t save Shigaraki, whilst most of his classmates would chose to kill him off too and they wouldn't even care to understand him. As if Deku also isn't traumatised kid as well that is brainwashed like everyone else to think the villains are not humman. I think it makes sense he failed, the child shouldn't have been in the front lines of the war in the first place
Okay, so here’s the thing, anon: no, we aren’t putting too much pressure on Deku to save Shigaraki because Deku is not a real teenager. Deku is the main character in an ultimately-intended-to-be-uplifting fantasy action story about the nature of heroism, not a dystopian tragedy about the consequences of training children to partake in unthinking, politically reactionary law enforcement. (I mean, it is that, but that’s not what it’s trying to be.)
The promise of the very first chapter of the series is that we are reading a story about how our narrator became “the greatest Hero.” Unless you are telling me that Narrator!Deku was flat-out lying to us about that, then I have to assume that he believes we are reading a story about how he fulfilled his dreams of becoming saikou no hiiro. Nobody reading the first chapter—or, indeed, any part of the series all the way through the aftermath of the first war, in which Deku stoutly defends One For All as a power intended to save, not to kill, clearly drawing a line between the two actions—would have a reason to think that the series would wind up allowing “saving” to include “(only) their heart, anyway”[1] or that it would end up so badly conflating Heroism with stoic endurance.
1: There were, of course, plenty of people who thought Deku would/should kill Shigaraki, but I don’t think I saw even the most hardcore of those types describe that as “saving”; the assumption was rather that Deku would realize that some people were beyond saving, not that saving would get hastily redefined so that killing Shigaraki would qualify.
That being the case, I and every other Deku criticizer are perfectly within our rights to look at BNHA and say, “That’s what you think qualifies? Are you serious? This is awful, your heroism is awful, and you have failed to live up to what you told us this story was going to be about.”
(Hit the jump for more.)
Regarding Deku and his classmates’ presence on the battlefield, one of the things I’ve talked about in the past is “spotting a series its premise.” That is, if you’re going to get anywhere in a story, you have to allow it its basic scenario or you might as well not bother with it at all. In BNHA, that basic scenario is “Hero Academy.” The idea of a school for heroes is presented as something cool and positive, and if you can’t deal with that at all without starting to talk about child soldiers and police states, then BNHA was never going to be the series for you.
BNHA plays its premise of a school for Heroes with fantastical optimism, so it suddenly diving for a “realistic” ending, one grounded in a deeply pessimistic view about redemption and rehabilitation, is an active betrayal of its own tone and themes because its author lacks the courage to follow through on what his main character wants to believe. By “wants” here, I don’t mean that Deku has some kind of independent life and desires to believe something his creator won’t let him act on. Rather, I mean that Deku’s in-universe characterization and actions should be harmonious with Deku as a narrative device and embodiment of the story’s overall message.
Based on Deku’s presentation through the first war arc, he should have stuck to his guns about saving Shigaraki! He should have been willing to defend Shigaraki against All For One and Hero Society and Shigaraki’s own fatalism! Instead, though, he cowered in the face of all of them. He didn’t just fail to save Shigaraki; he actively killed Shigaraki. The tension (which had always existed in Deku) between his admiration of the Hero System and his innate, overwhelming drive to save should have resolved in favor of saving, not in favor of upholding a status quo he knows to be riddled with problems!
And that being the case, of course he should have been on the front lines. He’s the main character and it was the last battle! Where else should the main character have been? The trouble with Deku being the focal point in the final battle isn’t that it turns him into a child soldier; he was always that because it’s inherent to the premise of BNHA and the structure of young adult adventure stories more broadly. The trouble is that the story fails to convincingly justify his presence under its own previously established standards.
Like, if you look at how U.A. is stated to normally approach its classes, it’s obvious that the situation with Class 1-A is the result of unprecedented challenges! I’m totally willing to roll with that as part of spotting the series its premise! It’s when the series stops being able to justify 1-A’s role in events that my acceptance of the scenario starts breaking down.
Let me go over that in some more detail:
Internships: Per the story, internships are heavily chaperoned and focused on light work, really just dipping a student’s toes into what a normal day in the life of a Hero looks like, including all the non-combat procedural stuff and the social angles of endorsement deals and the like. Even a hardass like Gran Torino states that his intention is to take Deku to someplace where “minor crimes” are common, not to plunge him right into the deep end. Indeed, a fight breaks out, he firmly orders Deku to stay on the train. When Deku pursues, the first Hero who notices him tells him to follow police instructions and get to safety. It’s obvious that the focus is on a safe first-time experience—it’s even observed later on that the internships basically treated the kids as “guests,” and they weren’t allowed to do anything dangerous.
Work Studies: These aren’t even supposed to be offered to first-years. The only reason they are is that Class 1-A has been repeatedly targeted and thus, amidst a very divided staff opinion, U.A. made the choice to offer them to the first-years to better prepare them for the increasing danger and uncertainty that is both targeting them personally and becoming more prominent in a post-All Might world. U.A. personally vetted agencies offering work studies before approving them. These are more dangerous, but still strictly overseen, carried out with as much caution as can be managed for a job that inherently carries with it life-or-death risk.
So far so spotting-the-series-its-premise. The problem starts kicking in harder once the war arc rolls around. There are hundreds and hundreds of active Heroes in the country; I simply do not believe that the planners of the raid on the PLF needed e.g. Juzo’s earth-molding when they could have tapped Pixie-Bob for hers, or Tokoyami’s darkness-boosted strength when they could have just used Midnight to flood the staircase Re-Destro was using with sleeping gas.
However, there’s still a bit of an acceptable handwave in that we have started to see the corruption and desperation of the HPSC—a number of the adult characters comment on it being kind of Weird and Sus that the HPSC is ramping up combat training for high schoolers, especially first-year high schoolers. The anime adaptation goes out of its way to note that the students’ involvement in the war was hidden from the media, further emphasizing that the HPSC’s actions are intended to be read as over-the-line and suspicious in ways that the internships and work studies were not.
But that all goes completely off the rails for the second war. The story wants us to believe that all the HPSC’s corruption was neatly dealt with by Clone!Re-Destro murdering the President (as if she wasn’t succeeded first by a man who also took part in the child assassin program and later by one of the actual child assassins). Suddenly the kids of 1-A are cornerstones of the battle plans, with the only feeble handwaves given being that the first war reduced the number of Heroes drastically (but somehow didn’t impact any of the Heroes we’re actually supposed to care about beyond Midnight) and that the kids have extended experience with fighting the League (equally absurd; if it was just the experience, they should have tapped the kids for their knowledge during the planning stage, not the actual battle).
It’s obvious by this point that the only reason the endgame is rotating around the main characters is because they are the main characters, not because the admirable adult Heroes the story tells us we’re supposed to be rooting for have actual justification to put those kids in that position.
Now, I talked earlier about treating Deku as a character because he is one, so what’s the problem with accepting his presence because of his role rather than trying to examine the realism of the situation? Well, the problem is still the same: the story is trying to sell us one thing (realistic explanations for the kids’ presence that respect the prior worldbuilding and don’t undermine the good guy chops of their whole side) while providing us with something else (transparent contrivance that shrinks the scope of the world while doing nothing but undermining their good guy chops).
If the story had Deku stick to his principles on saving Shigaraki, to the point that he was willing to depart from the entire professional structure that was telling him he couldn’t, then it would be perfectly reasonable for him to have to fight Shigaraki one-on-one! Indeed, he have had to, and worse, he might have had to fight off his own erstwhile allies too. Conversely, if he’d stood up to the planners of the war and convinced them to believe in his intentions regarding Shigaraki, the same way he did the prior bearers of OFA,[2] then it would also make sense for him to be the central point of the battleplan.
2: Give or take the shamelessly easy out Horikoshi took by having Yoichi convince Kudou and Bruce rather than making Deku find a way to do it.
But Deku doesn’t do any of that. He passively lets himself be steered into a confrontation with a guy he wants to help but refuses to defend against others’ violence or to engage with honestly. The battle arena for Shigaraki is literally called, in-universe, the Flying Coffin; all the planners wanted to do at that point was kill Shigaraki. Deku never even whispered a protest, never so much as asked for a chance to talk to Shigaraki before firing up the electrical field. So not only do I not believe the Heroes' justification for putting Deku here, I don't believe Deku as-established by the story should have let himself be put here. The only Watsonian explanation is that Deku is a much lesser Hero than I thought he would be, and yet the story is still trying to convince me that he's this amazing Hero whose “mad” “drive to save” “eclipses all common understanding.”
You, anon, can’t tell me I have to credit Deku for doing the bare minimum when the story is telling me he changed the world. You can't tell me I have to see him as someone who might start realizing his society is fucked up and perhaps will start trying to do something about it when to the bitter end all he could talk about was about how he planned to Bring It All Back, with all talk about doing things better falling to characters as minor as Mirio or Jirou. You can't tell me it makes sense that he failed when the story is frantically trying to spin his failure into a feel-good success.
Deku being sad about killing Shigaraki for approximately a day and a half does not negate the story depicting Deku's defeat of Shigaraki as him literally punching the sunshine back into a stormy sky.
Deku told me that this was the story of how he became a great Hero, he told me that for him being a Hero meant saving people, and then he failed to save the person his whole arc was leading him to save. And then he had the gall to tell me that the point of the story wasn’t about him becoming a great Hero after all, it was actually about “reaching out to help,” regardless of whether that reaching out is actually successful or not!
I can and I will blame Deku for failing to save Shigaraki, not because I’m arguing about whether it’s realistic for a traumatized and brainwashed child soldier to be able to save a traumatized and brainwashed young terrorist, but because Deku lied to me about the kind of story I was reading.
What is your opinion on Bakugou? As a hero he also doesn't actually see the villains as humans, but I think with him it's more like a video game were you defeat stronger villains to upgrade.
As he is at the end of the series, I care for Bakugou basically not at all. I think he had a lot more promise and was a lot more interesting when he was getting teamwork plots, had a lingering connection to Shigaraki, and was allowed to present meaningful personal challenges to Deku and All Might in their capacity as bearers of One For All.
Basically, to me, Bakugou was at his best when he was taking All Might to task for being so secretive, taking Deku to task for trying to go it alone, and could feasibly offer some insight on Shigaraki (and also take him to task about taking his rehabilitation seriously post-series!).
It’s suggestive of potential plotlines we could have had that the three good guys Shigaraki tried to talk about his views with were All Might (USJ), Deku (the mall), and Bakugou (the kidnapping)—the exact same three who’d later be having so many private conversations about Deku’s role as the new bearer of OFA. Also too, both All Might and Deku’s first impulse to getting a glimpse of Shigaraki as a child in need (All Might’s being AFO’s bombshell reveal at Kamino, Deku’s his brush with Shigaraki’s psyche at Jakku) is to want to save him; while Bakugou didn’t and I think wouldn’t have that impulse, he could still weigh in on it via sharing his angle on Shigaraki’s motivations in gathering other Villains and also that tidbit about Shigaraki calling the hand on his face “Father.”
Bakugou would also have been uniquely well-situated to relate to a hypothetical post-series Shigaraki trying to atone for his crimes. I talked about this in an ask reply forever ago, but Shigaraki and Bakugou have a common personality trait in that they’re fairly black and white thinkers, unsparing with themselves and others. Bakugou would therefore be able to relate to Shigaraki as someone who’d done very bad things in the past while also not cutting him any slack about doing better going forward, which I think Shigaraki would respond to better than cloying sympathy or absolute forgiveness.
Putting Bakugou up against All For One does absolutely none of that, while simultaneously removing him as a challenge to All Might and Deku’s worst instincts and pissing all over the themes about teamwork and relying on others Bakugou had been growing into throughout the series, most prominently in Kamino, the Joint Training arc, and the Edgy Deku arc.
It’s a damn waste, is what it is.
Incidentally, what I said about Bakugou being unsparing also applies to how he views Villains, at least it could have. He doesn’t approach them with any sympathy because he thinks people have to be responsible for their actions, and Villains, in acting the way they do, are just running away from responsibility. It’s a form of weakness, and he’s got no time or patience for weakness.[1] That’s how I tend to read him, rather than him not seeing Villains as people. While he does use language like that here and there, especially at the beginning, once he starts growing past that “Get out of my way, extras!” stage, I’m a lot more inclined to treat his language as bluster and boisterousness. (Compare it to All For One’s use of the same kind of language, for example—AFO is dead serious about not seeing other people as people because his endgame writing dissolves into pure solipsistic caricature.)
1: He relaxes that militancy a few times in the story—see e.g. the way he softens a little on Shouto after finding out about the whole abusive father+dead brother thing, and how light a touch he is with Aoyama post-traitor reveal, but those are both him being gentle compared to his usual approach, not objectively kind and patient!
And those are my broad thoughts on Bakugou. I realize they’re heavily slanted towards how he relates to Villains rather than e.g. talking about his relationship to Deku or taking sides in the eternal Bakugou Defense versus Anti Bakugou wars, but like, making everything about the Villains is my brand here, so. XD
So I have stumbled on your mha rants. And I find your one of the few that really goes in depth with analysis/criticism wich I like reading. I have seen your criticism on Deku and see what you mean, but I link them beinf a result from him being a victim as well (bullying) and him not properly processing it. I feel that he himself is the depiction of a 'perfect victim" and pushes his perfect victim ideals to other victims if it makes sense what I'm saying. Him linking being forgiving with goodness, makes sense how he operates with Bakugou. Essentially what I'm saying he has deep issues and I think it's a result from his background (bullying/quirklessness) I wondered if you see it like that too.
I could see it, certainly. A while back, I got an ask about what I thought the Watsonian reason (that is, the in-character reason rather than the Doylist/meta-textual one) was for why Deku never really tried to talk to Shigaraki in the endgame. It’s very difficult for me to think about Deku in Watsonian terms, but after rambling about it for a while, my answer boiled down to this:
[He has] an inherent desire to help people that has been hamstrung by a learned dehumanization of Villains, a repeated emphasis on swift, unthinking action as a Heroic virtue, a culture that regards sympathy for those involved in a crime as a zero sum game, and, last but not least, a psychological complex about the basic nature of Heroism rooted in his fraught childhood.
You can see that touches on his past as a bullying victim, but it wasn’t something I talked about a lot in the post. Because I’d talked about it in other posts before, I only vaguely alluded to how his history as a “crying child” leads him to base his whole concept of heroism around what heroes do/mean for crying children, and how that conceptual identity influences who he is or isn’t able to perceive as a victim. So while that’s not exactly the same thing as your read of Deku as having hang-ups about “perfect victimhood,” I think it’s definitely compatible with it.
The trouble I have with committing to this read—both yours and my own!—is that it is so very Watsonian, and so many of my problems with Deku and his actions are so very Doylist. Like, it’s all well and good for us to outline how Deku struggles to see people like Shigaraki or Dabi or whoever as legitimate victims because of his personal views on how victims are supposed to behave, but a lot of those views strike me as not merely personal but cultural. Views very similar to Deku’s are espoused by any number of characters throughout the comic, both characters who do have similarly abuse-riddled backstories as Deku (Shouto, Shoji) and characters who don’t (Ochaco, Best Jeanist, the Flamin’ Sidekickers, that one Hero Toga murked, etc).
Think of everyone who ever tells a Villain, “I’m sure you’ve suffered, but when you [take X action Heroes don’t approve of], you’ve gone too far!” These characters never have real solutions to offer, only rebuke. They all have a “perfect victim” problem, bullying or no bullying, and that’s exactly what makes me think that the problem lies chiefly in Horikoshi’s views, not those of any given character.
This is particularly clear in that post-series anecdote we got from his editor about how much Horikoshi struggled to decide on Toga’s fate. He had ideas about her surviving but being in prison; for a while he was writing towards an ending where she just vanished, showing up to take things Ochaco left for her like an elusive faerie. But he couldn’t make himself write that ending because he thought Toga had to “take responsibility” for her crimes. You would think the way for her to do that would be to submit to the justice system and serve her time in prison, but he obviously viewed her being in prison as too much of a punishment—as well he might, since his setting’s incarceration conditions are cartoonishly inhumane.
Of course, the obvious solution seems to me that someone should try to make the prison conditions less outrageously awful, but that seems to never have crossed his mind. It’s certainly a common enough irl view: prison conditions are bad because they’re a punishment; if you don’t want to be punished, don’t break the law. This kind of simplistic, moralistic view has no room for nuance, for discussions of kind or degree. The stark absence of anyone in BNHA advocating for better prison conditions says quite clearly to me that Horikoshi agrees with that heavily punitive view.[1]
1: And that’s not even getting into the story’s glaring absence of any recognition of irl legal defenses—capacity, responsibility, necessity, duress, insanity—that should logically figure into the sentencing of any number of BNHA’s Villains, League or otherwise. Is Mr. Broken Home, Raised In A Cult, Very Possibly A Minor, Preemptively Arrested Geten going to spend the rest of his life in prison? Who knows! His backstory’s apparently not sympathetic enough for Horikoshi to care about. But I guess it at least means Geten survives, which is better than Toga can claim.
But that left him with the issue of how to treat Toga—if his setting’s prisons were too harsh but complete freedom[2] was too lenient, what was the middle ground? And apparently the only thing he could come up with, the only thing that seemed feasible and workable given the systems and characterizations he’d already established, was for Toga to willingly sacrifice herself, gaining freedom but taking responsibility through the act of taking her own life.
2: Insomuch as being a fugitive for the rest of her life with none of the friends she made in the League would constitute any kind of freedom for Toga at all.
Horikoshi was obviously tremendously sympathetic to Toga—indeed, he had a lot of sympathy for all of the League characters else he wouldn’t have written them as such sympathetic figures to begin with, nor would he have written such sympathy into Ochaco, Deku, Shouto, Shouji, etc. But he still had his own views on the consequences for “going too far,” and I can’t ignore the way those views pervade the story at large. So sure, maybe Deku does have a “perfect victim” mentality, but I don’t think that mentality is unique to him, and it not being unique to him makes it difficult for me to chalk it up as a unique consequence of his having been bullied.
That said, I thank you for your kind words on my rantings and ramblings, and thank you too for the ask!
Extremely random, but I just wanted to say that I really appreciate and enjoy your write-ups on the (Not Good) anime adaptation of MVA. I remember seeing them back in 2021 but only got around to really reading them now that I've had five years (jesus christ) to process my grief over What Could've Been and can actually look at things critical of the adaptation without feeling immense misery. They're extremely thorough and well-written!
(Regarding my MVA In Memoriam post series.)
Haha, thank you. Yes, they were very much my way of processing my grief over the same problem, though certainly the series as a whole gave me a plenty more grief to process as it wound its way towards its conclusion. I appreciate that you credit their thoroughness, as that was indeed my primary goal after watching one too many Youtube videos that mentioned only the most blindingly obvious of cuts, and seldom with real recognition of the impact those cuts had on the broader story, especially the stuff involving Spinner.
Of course, the Youtube video essayists weren’t the only ones missing the import of the cuts! One of these days if I get ambitious, I’ll go back in and do another Coda on all the stuff that MVA’s anime adaptation butchered that fouled things up in its adaptation of the post-Jakku story. Stuff like the deletion of the quirk counselling angle from Toga’s backstory that would be the entire basis of Ochaco’s accomplishments in the epilogue, the removal of the Man At The Door from Shigaraki’s flashback who turned out to be All For One, and obviously *waves at All Of Spinner*. I remember there being a hilariously high number of such issues, all of which fueled my schadenfreude about the mounting degree of Shocked Pikachu Face the production staff must have been feeling when it turned out that a bunch of stuff in MVA was, in fact, not just incidental bullshit they could trim without consequence.
I hope you can continue to find ways to engage with BNHA that do not provoke The Misery. Honestly, I don’t know that I’m there yet, either. I’m certainly still mad about it, anyway! But thank you for the ask!
A life time ago you said something about shoto fighting dabi and geten ( I really still can't believe he didn't end up doing anything of relevance ) and I'm curious on how you think shoto would be able to defeat them in the first place . From what I recal geten ice withstood dabis flames so while shoto could still take dabi down with phospor I really don't know how he'd beat geten , unless phospur has some kind of burning property ? Which considering it's a blend of both shotos quirks and the actual element phosporus does , it's not unlikely .
But honestly shotos only role in the role being spamming the same move twice is kinda anticlimactic and lame and making him do it a third time wouldn't be any better (despite the fact that I find phospur as a concept really cool and I like shoto geing out of his way to actually come up with a plan but yk still kinda wish there was something more to their fight )
That’s one of those things I largely file under, “Unless and until I have to write fanfic about it, that’s Horikoshi’s job to figure out, not mine.” But given Phosphor's treatment in the story as a move Shouto came up with specifically to beat Touya (singular), as well as its thematic weight as an inversion of everything Endeavor wanted (using his fire to make his body capable of handling his ice rather than the other way around), an optimum solution, thematically speaking, would have to be something that faces up to the problems on the Himura side of the family.
The issue there is obviously that, in the same way that Shouto holds Endeavor personally responsible for all his family’s problems rather than thinking at all about how Hero Society shaped Endeavor and ignored the obvious signs of the Todoroki family’s abuse, he also never seems to direct any blame to his mother’s side of the family despite how culpable they are for Rei being in the situation she was in. In my ideal world, Shouto would not be quite so narrow of focus.
That said, I think you probably could tweak Phosphor such that it could deal with both Dabi and Geten—what Phosphor does is largely arbitrary on Horikoshi’s part, after all; it could have the effects tweaked as long as they remain believably within Shouto’s power set! And he definitely doesn’t have to just do the same trick twice, much less three times! If you’re rewriting the story anyway, all you have to do is not write it Like That. For my tastes, Endeavor needs to get taken out of play in the first war—death, coma, quirk loss, anything that will mean Dabi’s focus can squarely be on Shouto rather than on murder-suicide with his father.
You’d also need to give Geten some reason to be focused on Shouto, who he has no motivation to care about as anything other than an obstacle in the story as-is. Shouto is a direct symbol of all of Touya’s issues, after all, but he’s pretty far downstream from Geten’s![1] The thing that most immediately suggests itself to me is putting Shouto in between Geten and Re-Destro somehow, though admittedly that just puts us back with someone Shouto's fighting having a priority of getting through him to the father (figure) on the other side. I think that’s more forgivable for Geten v. Shouto, though, given that they are more distantly connected than Shouto and Dabi. Probably no matter what you do, it’s more important for Shouto to find a reason to give a shit about Geten than it is Geten to give a shit about Shouto, for the same reason that’s true for Deku and Shigaraki, Ochaco and Toga, and basically the whole overarching theme of Heroes reaching out to Villains.
1: Endeavor isn’t uninvolved, in that marriages to outsiders were the inciting incident of the extended clan’s collapse, but we don’t even know if his and Rei’s was the first such marriage. Even if it was, given that Enji and Rei met via omiai, the clan collapse would still likely have dated to the Himura approaching a matchmaker to begin with, not Endeavor’s offer however much later it was brought to them. Marriage to a domestic abuser is a nasty end result of the Himuras’ problems, not a direct cause of them, so Enji and his in-home eugenics program are ultimately pretty peripheral to Geten.
In any case, as to how Shouto can beat Geten, Geten’s trick against fire-users is using remaining ice chips or fresh infusions of ice from outside the battlefield to refreeze his melted ice. A hot enough fire applied sufficiently quickly would mean no remaining ice chips, but from what we saw in My Villain Academia, Geten’s range is quite significant! You’d never be able to stop him from getting more ice so long as you were fighting him in an urban area you weren’t okay with getting wholly incinerated, so you’d need to put him e.g. on an island like the Heroes did with Toga. Per the story, of course, that’s a simple enough thing to make happen, but is it Narratively Fitting?
Well, I suppose you could try to spin that act of purposeful isolation as being Narratively Fitting to the Himura Problem. Given that their whole thing is being a clan of ice/snow/cold quirks, removing Geten from the presence of ice could be read as symbolic for removing him from the scope of his clan’s damage. It feels a little reachy to me, though, and doesn’t remotely address his whole thing with Re-Destro and the MLA. Of course, the MLA and particularly Geten’s quirk supremacist beliefs are a thing Shouto could also stand to give a shit about, given how much he’s a literal incarnation of his father’s attempts to create a supreme quirk, and therefore the life of pain he’s endured is something that would logically become much more commonplace in a quirk supremacist society like the MLA[2] is trying to enact.
2: Or at least the MLA as written in the second war, which I would also change.
But that’s about the sum of my thoughts, I think. A rewrite doesn’t have to be stupidly repetitive if the author doesn’t want it to be, and Shouto beating Geten is doable but him doing so in a narratively satisfying way would demand he be willing to acknowledge the existence of any problems in his world other than his abusive father. Thanks for the ask!
If you don't mind more questions about Vigilantes, what do you think about Koichi's flaw as a character? I recall the mangaka on a character note stated that Koichi never gives himself more then he can handle.
Plus, his tendency to passively stay in his lane until he absolutely needs to in order to help/survive? I think it makes him even more of a unique protagonist, personally. And even more of an interesting foil to Deku. So I'm curious to know what you think?
Okay, so, I apologize for the delay on this reply. I find I lag even more than usual when I get asks that are obviously sincere but which I just disagree with the whole premise of, because nobody sends asks this genuine expecting to get hammered and I hate to be the one delivering that sting.
On top of that, I’ve had a lot of personal life stuff going on (as I posted earlier), which made my inbox in general drop pretty far down my to-do list. But I did want to answer this because I think it raises an interesting question, and I do have an answer about what I think Koichi’s most significant character flaw is, even if I don’t think it’s the one(s) you mentioned! So I hope that you will take this answer in good faith, anon, if you see it, and thank you for your patience!
So, I had to go digging for this because I did not remember the author saying anything to the effect of what you mentioned, but I did eventually turn up the note in question in Volume 10, as reproduced below the jump:
Koichi's the type who never takes on any more responsibility than he can handle, so he pretty much never finds himself in a situation where he can't back off and beat a quick retreat. I found myself wondering, "What sort of enemy would he force himself to actually confront?"...And voila - the answer was "Oh, duh. Pop!" She's the only one who fits the bill...
Note how Furuhashi doesn’t actually describe this as a flaw of Koichi’s, just an aspect of his personality that Furuhashi wanted to explore by forcing him into a situation when he couldn’t do what he normally would. It’s basically forcing him to go Plus Ultra when he normally wouldn’t, and given that I don’t much care for the way the main series ultimately utilized the Plus Ultra thing, I certainly don’t mind that it’s not a motto of Koichi’s!
Like, I actually think you could just as easily read this as a marker of Koichi’s maturity, or perhaps simply his age/experience, that he doesn’t take on more than he can handle. Having a realistic bead on your capabilities and taking care not to exceed them is good self-care and responsible community member-ing, actually! All Plus Ultra All The Time is, regardless of what the main series says, a nice short trip to Burnoutville!
As to him “passively staying in his lane until he absolutely needs to,” I don’t think I really get that from him? I mean, this is a guy introduced to us as constantly going out of his way to help people, first as just a neighborhood do-gooder picking up trash and giving out advice on the train schedules, and later as a vigilante hero, always rushing towards the sound of screams rather than away from them.
In point of fact, I think Koichi’s passivity is often exaggerated by people trying to compare him—usually unflatteringly—to Deku, in ways that make it immediately apparent that they haven’t read the first chapter of the main series in quite some time. Deku, too, is nonconfrontational with bullies and also hesitates to jump in and save someone for several pages right up until he gets a clear look at the desperate plea for help flashing in their eyes. Setting aside the presence or absence of Heroes on-scene, Koichi’s attempted rescue of Pop is way more 1:1 to the main series than a lot of people remember it being!
That said, where Koichi does “stay in his lane” is in prying into peoples’ business. He doesn’t ask questions about Pop or Knuckleduster’s personal lives; he’s incredibly nonjudgmental (as Furuhashi notes in another character blurb on him in the final volume) about the Villains he fights; he doesn’t try to moralize or force some sort of “justice” on people who’ve done wrong, even to people who’ve wronged those he cares about, much less hurt him directly!
That’s certainly got more aspects that cause him problems, and if you’re a reader who does expect some moralizing and justice-bringing from your protagonists (and god knows BNHA Core has no shortage of that), then I can see how Koichi’s ready willingness to overlook crimes would grate! But as I said so often about Heroes in the main series, their job is really just about keeping the peace—stopping Villain attacks and saving people in (immediate) danger. It isn’t part of their job description to be the dispensers of justice in this society, and it sure isn’t part of their job description to stand around moralizing about it! So, again, I actually quite like this aspect of Koichi and don’t really consider it as flaw as such!
As to what I do think is Koichi’s flaw, it’s quite elegantly handled in that it’s a flaw that stems from the same place as his virtue—a personality trait that can be positive or negative depending on the circumstances. To wit, as part of being so nonjudgmental, Koichi is also extremely incurious. He doesn’t really ponder the obvious disconnect between his admiration of Heroes and his own approach to heroism; he doesn’t ever try to have a conversation with Pop about all the times she gets particularly fed up with him; he doesn’t stop to consider how his friendliness with Soga and company might make Pop feel given what they tried to do to her; he doesn’t tend to ask questions about why Villains got so desperate as to embrace Villainy to begin with.
Koichi is, as a crimefighter and a protagonist, extremely pragmatic. He deals with problems in front of him with as much compassion as he can manage and he doesn’t tend to worry about problems beyond his scope. Furuhashi suggests in the last volume that Koichi had the luxury of being nonjudgmental because he didn’t have the responsibilities that a real Hero would, including by implication the responsibility of dispensing public moral censure. That begs the question, however, of how Koichi will behave as an official Hero (or at least an official sidekick). One suspects that his “Let’s all just walk away and nobody have to get arrested today” attitude is not going to play very well in the United States or Japan!
I note that the Vigilantes epilogue is perfectly happy to only show Koichi dealing with a rescue operation rather than showing us how he’s treating Villains. Unlike the main series cast, Koichi was never really asked to confront How He Deals With Villains by his narrative—he was never as harsh with them as Deku & Friends anyway!—so it doesn’t feel as egregious as it did in the main series when the Vigs epilogue dodges the issue.[1] Still, it’s not a great look that the series just lets his transition from vigilante to pro slide by as a good ending, as if it hasn’t been made manifestly clear that Koichi doesn’t act like a Pro Hero is supposed to act.
1: Or outright bungles it, as in BNHA’s volume extra chapter, in which the great new “continuing to offer help where it’s not asked for” Class 1-A grads collectively treat a panicked carjacker in exactly the same way Mount Lady treated a panicked purse thief in the first fucking chapter. /dead horse flogging
In any case, while it should be fairly obvious from the preceding paragraph that I don’t have a huge problem with Koichi’s approach to Villains, at least compared to how they’re doing it over in the main series, I do think it’s a character trait that limits how much good he’s apt to be able to do on a structural scale. Whether because he doesn’t question how the system he’s now joined treats Villains or because his own approach to Villains disregards the needs and feelings of victims, Koichi is certainly no model for Responsible Pro Heroism!
And heroism aside, it’s definitely more of a flaw for him on the personal level. My god, just imagine what it would be like to date someone who can tell when you’re angry but just doesn’t care enough to talk to you seriously about the problem. Pop even still being interested in Koichi after he proves willing to shrug off Soga's actions towards her is so glaringly bad I can only chalk it up as a problem on the writer side rather than try to rationalize it from Pop's in-character perspective.
And like, obviously Pop had her own massive issues with being a bad communicator, but even someone as stellar at communication as Makoto would still have the right to demand better from Koichi in a romantic relationship! The fact that Koichi probably developed this problem as a result of having an abusive mother does not make it not a problem or not a flaw; it just makes it a sympathetic one.
It’s been awhile since I’ve been on this app and coming back to see you with multiple posts about Kagurabachi which has easily been my favorite manga for the last three years since the Sojo arc is a wonderful surprise just wanted to say to keep up the great work and I’ll definitely try to stay tuned in more here for those
Thank you very much! I’ve definitely been very absorbed in it, albeit not in a tremendously front-facing way. I’m taking part in the Big Bang running this year, so in between regrettable personal life stuff as mentioned last post, I’ve been beavering away at my fic(s) for that—I’m currently 6K into a story that will probably be 10-12K+ by the time I’m done with it, and have a relatively detailed outline for another. I’m mad to share them, even excerpts of them, but alas, event rules forbid. Look forward to them in December, in any case. XD
As to more meta, well, we’ll see. I have a certain amount of temptation to write a post on all the things I think the fandom should be cautious about in the series rather than the things they’re being cautious about, but I’m trying to avoid being too tetchy about fandom takes. Neither have I had any other major flashes of inspiration for meta about the series more directly, though, hence the relative quiet around here. We’ll see! Thank you for the ask and the ongoing interest!
Hey all, I'm back after two months of silence with a batch of ask replies. Some of these I'd been working on replies to previously, some of them I banged out yesterday and today, and I've got a few more in the inbox to get to yet, so enjoy the spate of activity.
As to the quiet--and this goes to anyone here who's on Patreon in particular--my father passed away at the beginning of April, so I was travelling to be with family, helping my mother with a lot of stuff going on with her and the house, and now that I'm back home, I'm also job hunting, thanks to my shitty job's new manager firing me rather than giving me the bereavement leave the old manager specifically told me I could have! (That's the extent of personal venting I'm going to do on job stuff, but like, seriously fuck that guy.)
In any case, this is mostly going to be about BNHA+Vigilantes, but there is a tangentially Kagurabachi one leading the pack and, when I get done writing it up, a more general rec post about manga that do "complexity" better than BNHA, so look forward to that. I've also got some stray 'Bachi thoughts and a few add-on observations about the Mikaboshi as Heike expys, so look forward to that as I have time in between the job hunt. Thanks, all!
The Rulers Return from the Sea: The Heike Clan and the Mikaboshi
So, I have been following the (Western) fandom’s discussion about Kagurabachi’s flashback arc and its potential historical inspirations with increasing bewilderment, and I'd like to throw my hat into the ring with an interpretation on What I Think Hokazono Is Referencing with the conflict between the islanders and Japan that runs somewhat counter to a lot of what I've been seeing these past few weeks. It’s my hope that this read might give some relief to anyone concerned about what Hokazono is #Implying in portraying the Mikaboshi as so aggressive.
As a disclaimer, I don’t actually think any of the overarching plots in Kagurabachi are a direct allegory for this or that conflict in Japan’s history. I think Hokazono is taking inspiration from a number of different events and sources – some of them modern and some of them not – to weave a story unique to his world. That’s especially true for the Seitei War, however. While there are certainly individual aspects of the war, its in-universe framing, and especially Akemura's rhetoric about it which mirror real life, I don’t think the war as a whole is intended to be read as a condemnation of any of Japan’s modern wars. Not because it’s entirely bereft of a historical model, mind, but rather because the model in question is buried much further in the past, with the Seitei War being a what-if scenario inspired by that real history.
And with that in mind, hit the jump and let’s talk about the Genpei War.
Genpei War 101
The Genpei War was the conflict that ended Japan’s Heian Era, taking place about eight hundred and fifty years ago, between 1180 and 1185. It was a war between two powerful, influential clans, the Taira and the Minamoto, known also by alternate kanji-reading of those names as the Heike and the Genji.[1] (I’ll be largely using the latter names, as they seem to be somewhat more popular in subsequent literature.) The two had in the past been allies in throwing down an uprising in 1156,[2] but the increasing influence of and imperial favor shown to the Heike resulted in the deterioration of the relationship, leading to a Genji uprising in 1160. The Heike successfully quelled this second rebellion, killing several of the most prominently involved leaders of the Genji, with the rest being exiled to more distant parts of the country, far from the seat of power.
1: Combining the ‘gen’ and the ‘hei’ alters the pronunciation of the latter to give you the name of the war, Genpei.
2: This uprising, the Hougen Rebellion, was centered around an imperial succession, about which both the Heike and the Genji were split into different camps. The Heike and Genji supporters of the winning imperial faction were thus allies with each other against opposing branches of their own respective families. This scenario, of different parts of a clan taking different sides in a war, was not uncommon in the period.
(Note for the following explanation that Japan’s Emperors in this period were following a tradition called cloistered rule whereby the nominal Emperor performed the ceremonial and formal duties of the role, while the retired previous Emperor – the cloistered Emperor – retained the greater part of political authority.)
Circa the Genpei War, then, the Heike were the primary political power in the country. The year prior, they had used the threat of military force to force their rivals in the government to retire, and in 1180, pressured the Emperor, grandson of the then-cloistered Emperor Go-Shirakawa, to abdicate in favor of their clan leader’s infant matrilineal grandson – a young Emperor they could appoint regents for in infancy and influence into adulthood!
This power play, the last and most overt straw in a years-long chain, was the inciting incident for the war. The still massively influential Go-Shirakawa, by now very out of love with the Heike despite the aid they'd rendered to him in the past, covertly sought the aid of his and their erstwhile enemies, the Genji, who’d spent the intervening twenty years recovering their power out in the provinces. This alliance against the Heike and their child Emperor would eventually bring about the Heike clan’s downfall.
The Genpei War was a massively influential conflict, a pivotal event in Japanese history. The Genji clan’s victory led directly to the establishment of the Kamakura shogunate, with the shoguns from then on being the de facto political leaders of Japan for nearly seven hundred years,[3] leaving the Emperors in Kyoto to serve a more religious, ceremonial role. The war chronicle/oral history epic Heike Monogatari is a foundational account,[4] one from which a tremendous amount of art, theatre, literature and pop culture borrow their depictions of key events and central figures.
3: The first shogun, Minamoto no Yoritomo – the Genji clan leader who came out on top of the Heike, imperial influence, and his own family rivals – appointed himself shogun in 1185. There were a few different iterations of the shogunate, and a thirty year gap between the fall of the second and rise of the third, but the final collapse wouldn’t come until 1869, at which point real political authority finally returned to the imperial line.
4: Albeit one whose historicity is sometimes undermined by its composers’ use of the tales within to impart moral lessons on proper Confucianist values.
You can find stories set during the war in everything from venerably traditional kabuki plays to modern dating games, sudsy TV dramas to tabletop war sims. Sources that take inspiration from the war range even broader, from fictionalized accounts in which the lives of original characters intersect with historical events (see for example Tezuka Osamu's masterwork Phoenix), the ever-popular genderbends and swordboy gijinka of gacha games like Fate/Grand Order or Touken Ranbu, to stories that use aspects of the war to contextualize stories set decades or even centuries later. A recentish example that made a splash in the West was 2021's anime film Inu-Oh with its restless Heike ghosts.
That’s the basic gist of things, along with some examples to make clear that the Genpei War is an extremely recognizeable touchstone for Japanese authors and audiences, but there are several things I want to note specifically for their potential relevance to Kagurabachi.
Rulers on Land, Rulers on Waves
First and I think most notably, the decisive battle that ended the Genpei War was the Battle of Dan-no-Ura. Dan-no-Ura was a naval battle – the Heike were lost to the sea. Their story, that of a ruling clan being overthrown and facing their ultimate defeat on water, is thus particularly apt as the inspiration for the Mikaboshi: a long-lost clan who emerged from the sea to reclaim a country they never stopped seeing as theirs by right.
The resonance doesn’t stop there, though! The Heike have a ton of associations with water, both as part of how they built their influence and as a result of that final battle.
The one that jumps out at me the most as relevant to the Mikaboshi is an event found in many dramatic renditions of Dan-no-Ura, the death of the child Emperor, Antoku. His Heike grandmother, seeking to deny the Genji the capture of the Emperor and the imperial regalia, gathered Antoku and the regalia into her arms and leapt overboard with them. The accounts that include this event say that she used her last words to comfort the boy with the promise of an imperial capital beneath the sea. Feels pretty relevant to the Mikaboshi’s underwater safe haven, no?
Incidentally, I mentioned Yuasa Masaaki’s Inu-Oh before; one of its co-leads’ backstory involves him and his father, fishermen in the strait where the battle of Dan-no-Ura occurred many generations prior, inadvertently dredging up the Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi, a sacred sword and part of the regalia.[5] He was struck blind when his father drew the sword – not the first time I’ve encountered a Japanese source invoking blindness as a consequence of looking upon something connected to the divine! And in Chapter 119, we see the diplomat bleeding from the eyes from something he saw of Prince Ariu before anyone else noticed. This is reachier, but to say the least, I'm going to have some Big Thoughts if the Mikaboshi prince ever shows up with an ancestral sword.
5: There is a sword currently used for ceremonial purposes when a new Emperor of Japan is enthroned, but as all of the regalia items are tightly controlled, it’s not public knowledge whether that sword is the real Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi (and if so how it was recovered) or a replica (and if so its age). Check the Wikipedia article on the imperial regalia of Japan for more on the sword and the other two objects – a mirror and a sacred stone - that make up said regalia. It’s a good trio to be able to recognize references to as an anime fan!
Going back to before their defeat, the Heike in this period had cultivated a strong trade relationship with China, their near monopoly over which made them exeptionally wealthy, with access to foreign and luxury goods that they used to further grow their influence. One project that's still visible in the modern day was their massive expansion of Itsukushima Shrine, which was built right on the shoreline, where the tide comes in, of Miyajima Island, revered as a sacred dwelling-place of a trio of goddesses, daughters of Susano-oh and patrons of safe travels on the sea. If you've ever seen a photo of torii gates standing in water, it was almost certainly the famed “floating” gates of Itsukushima. Much of the shrine is built in such a way that high tide conceals the stilts in its construction, leaving the visual impression of the buildings placidly resting atop the waters.
Some accounts claim that Taira no Kiyomori – the Heike clan head who oversaw their rise to their greatest heights, whose political maneuverings directly incited the Genpei War, and who died before he could see his clan’s ultimate defeat – dreamed that an old monk of Itsukushima promised him rule over Japan if he would pay honor to the trio of goddesses enshrined on the island. And, indeed, his patronage was so impactful for Itsukushima Shrine's own fortunes that, as its regional influence and popularity with the Heian court increased, its sea-faring goddesses became associated with whole new spheres of high culture and the arts.
Thus: an island with a connection to a divine entity that allows people to survive the sea, venerated by the ruling clan and closely tied to its fortunes. The timeframes are different for the connections between the Heike and Miyajima Island versus the Mikaboshi and their small island with datenseki, but the similarities are pronounced!
As a final example, and a more colorful one, there’s a species of crab found in Japan with a pattern on the back of its shell that bears a striking resemblance to a scowling samurai face. They’re called heikegani – the Heike crab, Heikeopsis japonica – and are folklorically believed to be reincarnations of the warriors who died at Dan-no-Ura. This superstition means that heikegani aren’t typically cooked in Japan, even though the meat is perfectly edible. Keep the Heike crabs in mind; I'll be circling back to them later.
Samurai, Nobles and Samurai Nobles
The ukiyo-e print we see of the battle between the Mikaboshi and the Soga depicts the Soga warrior as a very classical samurai, while the Mikaboshi warrior has a much more monstrous, youkai-like appearance. Historically, however, the Genji and the Heike were both warrior clans, both full of samurai. Indeed, a large factor in events leading up to the Genpei War was that samurai clans were becoming more influential in Japan at the time. The cloistered rule tradition had led to growing numbers of factions clashing with one another increasingly violently, so clans who could hold their own militarily became more dominant than clans who relied more heavily on courtier-style social maneuvering, which had generally been a better tactic when power was more heavily consolidated under a single, clear ruler.
Following the Genpei War, with the establishment of the shogunate, samurai became a social class ascendant, while the courtiers surrounding the Emperor decreased sharply in prominence and influence. It makes sense, then, for Kagurabachi to associate samurai with the Soga clan, who we’re told have been closely tied to the government for millennia. (And note, too, how that plural logically implies that the Soga must also once have had close ties to the Mikaboshi, in power as recently as but one millennium past!)
But this dynamic also puts the lie to the monstrous portrayal of the Mikaboshi in the Soga-glorifying ukiyo-e of Chapter 117, as we see that in the Mikaboshi’s artwork (Chapter 119), they and the Soga clan leader poised to destroy them are depicted looking far more alike than not! The only real difference visible between the two is the clothing style, and what we see them respectively wearing makes perfect sense for the story we’re told.
Soga Ukizane is dressed as a samurai, with the most obvious marker of that status being his jinbaori (陣羽織), an over-the-shoulder sleeveless coat with long front lapels.[6] It was designed to be worn over armor in a similar way as a knight might wear a surcoat. The Mikaboshi, conversely, with the exception of their dark-clad king, are wearing garments called kariginu (狩衣), coats with distinctive, long front panels and separated sleeves that show the kimono and hakama pants worn underneath. Kariginu originated as looser, less constricting attire for hunting but were gradually adopted into court dress.[7] The samurai clan defeats the courtiers, see?
6: It could also be a kataginu, but I think they have more prominent, stiffer shoulders, and are more often worn tucked into the pants rather than flowing loose.
7: Kuguri’s outfit is modelled on this same garment, by the way, albeit with some more modern flourishes like that high collar and the obi-style belt. You can really get the sense of the mobility the outfit allows in seeing how exaggerated Kuguri’s movements are as a fighter – all those big, stagey leaps and full-arm swings!
Signs and Symbols; Insects and Flowers
On the topic of costuming, the Mikaboshi seem to have a centipede as their clan emblem – you can read more about traditional Japanese folkloric associations with centipedes in a great post from @hestzhyen on Chapter 117 here. Ariu has manifested them as a power, and of course they're one of Magatsumi's most characteristic invocations, behind only its butterflies for recognizability.
As it happens, though, the Taira clan emblem was also an insect. What sort of insect, you ask? Well...
Would you believe a butterfly? Swallow-tailed, even, just like Magatsumi’s.
From left to right, one of Magatsumi's spirit energy butterflies, the Heike clan's butterfly emblem, and the Mikaboshi's centipede emblem.
We haven't seen the Mikaboshi associated with butterflies yet, but given how grotesquely Magatsumi's powers parallel the Mikaboshi's, and how prominent butterflies are for Kunishige's wartime masterpiece, I'd be shocked if it's not just a matter of time.
I mentioned above, too, the Heike crab. Now, crabs aren't insects like the Mikaboshi/Magatsumi are associated with, but they are part of the same biological phylum, Arthropoda, that includes centipedes, butterflies, spiders, dragonflies, and all the rest, so they could be fair game.
How about the rival clan, though? Any similarities in clan imagery there?
Well, making connections to the Genji’s clan emblem for the Soga is dicier. The only clear emblem we see associated with the Soga is worn by Soga Yoshinojo, the older of the two clan members at the beach; it’s a stylized pattern that I would assume to be either an unfolded fan or emanating sunbeams. Ukizane, the historical Soga, has some roughly circular squiggles on the front of his jinbaori; positioned where they are, I’d normally expect them to be his clan emblem, but they don’t even especially match each other (which is what I’d expect of clan emblem embroidery), much less Yoshinojo’s fan design.
The Genji clan emblem, meanwhile, is a trio of gentian flowers over a spray of bamboo leaves. The bamboo leaves are similar in shape to the fan-shape of the Soga emblem, but inverted – the leaves are drooping down while the fan is upright. The fan emblem lacks flowers entirely, but Japanese gentian flowers do have the same sort of “trumpet” shape lilies do, which could also represent a tie back to Magatsumi? It feels less on the nose than swapping in one insect for another, but it's not nothing.
Here're some images to compare for them:
Clockwise from top left, the Genji emblem, the (presumed) Soga emblem, one of Magatsumi's lilies, and a Japanese gentian.
Who's Writing This Alt-History, Anyway?
One final observation that I think is interesting, and promising for Kagurabachi’s chops as A Story With Nuance, is that the scholar who informs readers about the Mikaboshi (Chapter 117 again) says they used to rule Japan, but he never says anything about the quality of their leadership that would explain why the Soga wanted to overthrow them to begin with. Were they excessively indolent in the face of crises? Greedy with the nation’s resources? Cruel to their subjects? Or were they perfectly capable leaders, no better or worse than average for their era, and the Soga just wanted to take their place because the Japan of that time was rife with clans jockeying for power and that’s just how things were?
The narrative doesn’t say! Nor does it specify whether the Mikaboshi were truly ruling the country openly or whether theirs was, like the Heike’s, a more behind-the-scenes power, an influence over the (presumed?) imperial family that made them the de-facto authority but not the official one.[8]
8: Kagurabachi never tells us whether its version of Japan still has the irl imperial line (called the Koushitsu, the Imperial House, rather than having a family/house name). If it doesn’t – whether because they were deposed by the Mikaboshi in the distant past, never came to rule to begin with because of the difference sorcerous powers made to the timeline, or some completely different reason – that would put us so far into alt-history territory that I’d need a whole different post to even talk about how far afield we are! Frankly, in terms of “expected settings” for anime and manga, a Japan where magic is real is business as usual compared to a Japan without the Chrysanthemum Throne!
Historically speaking, in research for this post, I haven’t seen much that implies to me that Taira no Kiyomori was noticeably terrible as a ruler. Of course, he wasn't openly ruling Japan, just exerting heavy-handed influence over the imperial line, so the worst he could have been was a cruel regent or a giver of poisoned advice, but none of what I read suggested worse than that he was very ambitious and, eventually, willing to throw armed forces at that project. I’m not convinced that was a crime unique to Kiyomori, though; he sounds like he was just better at it than most!
I’ll spare further waxing on about Kiyomori’s personal character as getting beyond the scope of this post (though if my readers are curious, his Japanese Wikipedia article has a whole section about various reads on his moral character). Suffice to say, most of what I could find on a casual research binge suggests that Kiyomori’s status as one of the key antagonists of Japanese history has a lot more to do with the other noble and religious institutions he opposed than how he or his clan actually exercised their power over the common man. The Genpei War was about who would rule, not about anyone’s moral qualms with how rule was being wielded.
Time will tell whether Kagurabachi gives us something different to go on regarding why the Soga rebelled against the Mikaboshi.
Caveats and Conclusion
Now, with all of that being said, I do want to throw out a few more disclaimers – factors that serve to distance the Mikaboshi from the Heike rather than draw closer parallels.
For starters, we’re told the Mikaboshi were driven into the waters off the coast of Chiba Prefecture, and that location, smack in the center of Japan, is all wrong for them to be a direct analogue to the Heike, whose final, fatal battle occurred much farther south. Itsukushima Shrine is a bit closer, but not significantly so.
Further, many of the Heike who died at Dan-no-Ura were said to have chosen suicide over capture or death in battle, leaping willingly to their deaths, clutching anchors or dressed in heavy armament to drag them down, which is a sharp comparison to the Mikaboshi being forcibly driven to what Soga Ukizane (at least per their version of the story) very much intended to be their deaths.
As the attentive reader may have noticed earlier, the dates don’t quite line up, either: the Taira were at their most powerful from about 1150 to the outbreak of the war in 1180 – between 840 and 890 years ago, rather than the “over a thousand” we’re given for when the Mikaboshi ruled.[9] Also too, as I discussed above, it does sound the Mikaboshi were ruling in reality, rather than merely ruling in effect like the Heike.
9: Though note that we're also never given a concrete year for Kagurabachi's current events! The setting is at best modernish, given that everyone's using flip phones instead of cellphones, but the murkiness surrounding just how divergent sorcery has rendered its (and potentially the rest of the world's!) history makes it impossible to say for sure what year it's happening in and how much a date would even matter.
But as I said at the outset, I don’t think Hokazono is actually writing a direct allegory for any conflict in Japan’s history – certainly not their colonialist violence (modern or ancient), but neither a pure 1:1 for the Genpei War. Shifting something like what body of water the expy!Heike clan was defeated on is a fairly cosmetic change! But the story of the Heike Clan – fallen nobility sinking into the water to a city beneath the waves, crawling creatures and flying insects associated with the once-rulers of Japan – cannot help but feel inescapably relevant to Kagurabachi and the Mikaboshi.
I hope people will give some thought to how this framing – the Mikaboshi as a deposed clan of Japanese nobles rather than a historically oppressed ethnic minority group or a sovereign people subjected to colonial violence – colors the depiction of their aggressiveness and especially how Hokazono depicts his mainland, modern-day Japanese cast's response to that aggression. While it's true that the Mikaboshi should certainly count as an ethnic minority now, and they are likewise a sovereign people whose country was, over the course of the war, invaded, the optics of that are very different if we're meant to read them as themselves an imperialistic force trying to conquer a modern democratic nation and (re-)establish divine monarchy!
The obvious ways Akemura (possibly with Kunishige's knowing aid!) used the Mikaboshi's own cultural signifiers in his eradication of them is indeed grotesque, but my suspicion is that Hokazono is writing those parallels more as an illustration of Akemura's poisonous hatred turning him personally bigoted and cruel rather than as a meta-commentary indicting Hokazono's entire heroic cast for their participation in society-wide, government-approved colonialist violence. Trying to read that meta-commentary into places it's not intended to be feels like a recipe for a lot of fundamentally misguided discourse about historically sensitive topics down the line.
Here on the cusp of the anime putting the series in front of more eyes than ever, the thought of how ugly I can easily see that discourse getting exhausts me, so I'm doing my part to counterprogram. Thanks for reading!
For some less landmine-filled Kagurabachi analysis, check out my posts analyzing its narrative deployment of food and the way Chihiro's character development parallels the forging process of crafting a katana. You can support me in writing more posts like this by tossing some bucks at my Patreon (also includes deleted material like extraneous analysis or salty kvetching!) or Kofi, linked here.
Rokuhira Chihiro is – contra his almost hilariously edgy early presentation and the long-running gags about how straight-faced he is even in moments of surprise or consternation – a wonderfully dynamic, involving protagonist. Much of this, as I will examine in this piece, is a credit to the highly productive rhythm the story strikes with its antagonists – and I mean “rhythm” quite literally.
I hope readers will enjoy me spending sixteen thousand words talking about a thesis I could explain simply by posting this first page. Hit the jump.
On the very first page of Kagurabachi, readers are introduced to a key aspect of Japanese swordsmithing, one visually demonstrated later in the same chapter: the way that the metal of a traditionally crafted katana is hammered and folded repeatedly as part of its forging. This same pattern can be found in the way Chihiro is continuously, in steady rotation, faced with antagonists who fall broadly into two camps.
The first camp is composed of antagonists who allow him to assert the validity and worth of his ideals as they stand. Continuing the forging metaphor, we might call these encounters “foldings.” As with fold-forged steel being doubled over on itself, increasing its thickness and evening out impurities, when Chihiro is faced with these antagonists, he doubles down, reinforcing his values with determination (or pure obstinance) in order to triumph.
The second camp, then, the “hammerings,” are encounters with antagonists who challenge Chihiro’s ideals and force him to change. As with a blade’s steel being hammered into shape, Chihiro must adapt to the forces being applied to him, altering the shape of his beliefs to incorporate new information without breaking.[1]
1: As a note, which group of antagonists get called the fold-type and which get called the hammer-type is somewhat arbitrary on my part. You could change the metaphors and reverse the labels – saying that the ones that force Chihiro to change are the ones he “folds” to, for example – but I have written it the way it fits best in my mind. The name each camp gets is less important than the two camps a) existing as distinguishable types based on Chihiro’s respective responses to them, and b) alternating in prominence in the narrative.
As this process is repeated, fold-forging a katana reduces the amount of impurities and inconsistencies in the metal; so too does Kagurabachi’s fold-forging of Chihiro via this alternation between two different types of antagonist ultimately allow him to strengthen himself (as a character and as a person!) by exposing and correcting patterns of thought that are simplistic, reactionary, or based on false assumptions.
This meta will examine the process primarily as it is applied through Kagurabachi’s major antagonists. While the same analysis – folding or hammering – could likely be applied to more intermediate antagonists, the rotation pattern is most evident with the more arc-defining threats. I will also be examining Rokuhira Kunishige’s ethos of swordsmanship, as its recurrence throughout the manga turns it into a sort of mantra that Chihiro and others invoke as their moral guideline. Through these invocations, the mantra itself is subjected to significant testing. While we can assume that the protagonist will be, at least in some way, validated and victorious in the end, the same is much less clear for the mantra!
Preparing the Forge
-Kunishige Rokuhira-
The opening chapter of the story establishes not only the forging process, but also, in Rokuhira Kunishige’s stated ethos of a proper swordsman, a key mantra. Katana, Kunishige says, have the ability to save lives and open the way to new futures, but they’re still weapons for killing, and those who make them are complicit in the deaths they cause. Therefore, swordsmiths must have principles and accountability: it’s their responsibility to ensure their weapons are wielded by people dedicated to “vanquishing evil and protecting the weak.”
Kunishige’s specific phrasing is echoed by numerous parties throughout the manga. Unfortunately, the Viz translation, which I quoted above, varies significantly more than the Japanese, making it easy to miss how fervent and faithful those echoes are! The specificity of those repetitions are really what transform Kunishige’s words from a moral guideline into a mantra. Thus, I want to look at that phrase in Japanese for a moment, to flesh out specifically what he’s saying that will be so repeatedly invoked.
It says something about Kunishige’s characterization that he maintains this wording as-is despite knowing what it was used to justify.
In its original language, Kunishige’s line is as follows: 悪を滅し弱者を救う. This can be romanized as, “Aku o messhi, jakusha o sukuu.” The connecting bits are grammatical,[2] but the key terms and their broad meanings are as follows:
悪 aku: evil, false, wrong, bad, vice.
滅 mee: destroy, ruin, overthrow.
弱者 jakusha: the weak, weak/vulnerable/disadvantaged person(s); this is a compound word formed from its two kanji, which respectively mean weak/frail and person/someone.
救 suku: salvation, save, help, rescue.
2: By which I mean that they indicate things like conjugation of verbs or subject/object relationships.
Viz’s translations across the different invocations of this term are inconsistent. Out of the five instances I’ll be examining, they universally use “evil” and “protect” for 悪 aku and 救 suku, but use three different terms for 弱者 jakusha and a whopping four different terms for 滅 mee. Some of these choices work better than others. For example, “evil” is perfectly fine, and while “the vulnerable” is a bit more descriptive and specific, “the weak” is poetic and evocative in a way that works for the simple (dare I say simplistic) nature of the mantra.
On the other hand, I don’t love “protect” used for 救 suku. Protect, to me, implies something more constant, more present – a guard, a vigil, a preventative measure always in place to help counter danger. The usual Japanese word that’s translated as “protect” is mamoru (either 護 or 守, both read the same way and have similar meanings of guarding or protecting). Someone who’s protecting the weak should ideally prevent them from ever being in danger to begin with! Conversely, saving or rescuing someone implies that the person is actively indanger and the helper is jumping in to intervene rather than having been there from the start. There’s nuance and overlap in the terms, to be sure, but the emotional potency of “saving” is made stronger by the immediacy of the threat of harm. “Salvation” gets at the intensity of the feelings involved, the urgent need and heightened terror in the face of a danger that’s tangible and present rather than hypothetical or distant; the spiritual dimension of “salvation” likewise better suggests the profound feelings of relief and gratitude that follow from being saved. Given the heightened meaning Kunishige and all the rest are assigning these words, then, I would much rather see “save” used than “protect.”
Finally, there’s 滅 mee. For Kunishige’s initial invocation, Viz uses “vanquish,” and while that’s a good word for sacred missions, it is also a little noble-sounding as a translation for a word with the meanings I listed above! A later translation of “eradicate” is definitely more in the tonal zone, but also quite charged to the English ear – which, I assume, is why that word choice is only assigned to villains. In keeping with the broad absolutism of the rest of the language, then, I’d probably go with “destroy.”
So: “To destroy evil and save the weak.” That’s the purpose of katana as Kunishige imparts it to his son. Keep the phrase firmly in mind for the rest of this piece.
There’s one other crucially important thing that Kunishige impresses on Chihiro, however, this time found in Chapter 2. When he first shows Chihiro the enchanted blades (or at least their containers), Chihiro’s response is to observe that these are the kinds of swords he should also strive to make – and why shouldn’t he think so, when he’s had people like Shiba telling him his whole life that the swords his father made saved Japan back during the war, and his father is a hero for making them?
Kunishige, though, has always been uncharacteristically morose on the topic of his alleged heroism, and while he doesn’t look as harrowed in this scene as he does in some others, he’s still markedly more serious than his goofy norm as he tells Chihiro firmly, “These aren’t necessarily the right answer. You can’t just strive to make strong enchanted blades. You’re gonna have to look at the world through your own eyes and think carefully about what kind of katana it needs, and why.”
This admonition will prove to be the other key to Chihiro’s development. Principles and accountability, yes, but also deliberation: these are the virtues Kunishige imparts alongside the mantra, frontloaded in the story to set the themes and narrative demands going forward.
Shortly after all this, of course, Kunishige gets summarily assassinated, the enchanted blades stolen, and the story jumps to three years later.
Folding and Hammering in the Versus Sojo Arc
-Madoka Norisaku and Sojo Genichi-
Madoka, aka Daruma, is the biggest departure this piece will make from analyzing major antagonists. Clearly, he isn’t one in any sense of the word! Nonetheless, he and the other low-rung yakuza and yakuza-employed sorcerers are an important establishment of Chihiro's status quo as of when the story exits its establishment phase and really gets underway. Through Madoka, readers get an opportunity to see how much of his father’s teachings Chihiro internalized, how much he retained after a three-year whirl of pursuing bloody revenge.
In that sense, Madoka offers Chihiro no moral challenges or reasons to rethink his path whatsoever. While Madoka does have a human dimension,[3] it’s shown solely to the readers via Shiba’s interrogation and subsequent act of mercy towards him. To Chihiro, he’s simply a maniac screaming about how a little girl should watch and see what gruesome fates befall anyone she tries to ask for help, aggravating an obvious emotional wound about that girl’s dead mother, on top of killing a completely innocent restaurant worker and making light of enchanted blades. The little girl pleads to be saved from him; Chihiro immediately complies. Further, given how ruthlessly Chihiro dealt with the yakuza in the first chapter, Madoka surviving this fight is entirely down to him having information Chihiro wants. Our protagonist is established, then, as someone who’s very ready to go all-in on destroying evil, but not so zealous about it that he can’t leave a survivor to question, nor so dogmatic that he demands those evil people be slain in cold blood after being neutralized and giving him the answers he seeks.[4]
3: And a gratifying one to see; Kagurabachi is often pretty quick to use rando sorcerers-for-hire as mobs with no internal life or survival instinct, there simply to die in droves as Chihiro or his allies stylishly slaughter them en masse. I really have no idea how people can make jokes about the Hishaku being perpetually broke when they can somehow always afford so many goons willing to fight to the death for them! There’ve been a few questions of brainwashing or magic as an explanation for this, and given the Hishaku’s tactics during the Kamunabi invasion, blackmail is also possible, but I’m hoping it’s something the story will deign to clarify eventually.
4: This is not conclusively demonstrated in these early conflicts, with the first yakuza boss dying as a result of an implanted Hishaku seed and Madoka at Sojo’s instigation, but it tracks with Chihiro’s later behavior, and with the fact that Shiba – despite being a considerably more jaded and experienced adult, and Chihiro’s presumed mentor in learning the ropes of the violent world in which he now finds himself – is similarly merciful.
“Seeking answers” is part of the framework of a lot of this initial mini-arc. Not just Madoka, but Char also nominally has information Chihiro wants: a lead on one of the stolen enchanted blades and thus, presumably, a lead on the people who stole them. Indeed, Chihiro engages in a degree of pretense about protecting Char solely for this reason, that helping her advances his own goals, not that he’s protecting her because it’s what his beliefs tell him is right. However, it’s fairly clear from the get-go that the pretense is just that, and he would have helped anyone he found in that situation regardless of how involved he was or wasn’t initially. As we see in the subsequent confrontation with the mud doll and trauma sorcerers,[5] Chihiro continues to help Char even after Shiba’s gotten information from Madoka that would render any knowledge Char still has largely redundant – if Chihiro were really so heartless that he was only helping her to advance his own ends, he could easily have given her up then and there. But that’s not the kind of protagonist you’re going to find much of in Shonen Jump!
5: The latter another helpfully illustrative antagonist, who gives Chihiro the opportunity to respond to a grueling psychic PTSD bomb with the words, “You just made [my] reason clearer.” No faltering, no adapting, just doubling down on what he came into the fight already believing.
All the same, let’s not disregard the pretense entirely. It does signal some of Chihiro’s other motivations, which will be articulated at greater length during the material with Sojo and the Rakuzaichi arc: his feelings about his father’s murder and the possible consequences of the blades going unreclaimed. More on that later, then, but for now we’re left with this: Chihiro deals with Char, Madoka and the rest in exactly the way his father’s mantra dictates: he destroys (the threat of) evil and saves the weak, emerging through a degree of mild introductory peril triumphant in upholding that ethic.
Love the cornerpiece darumas. Put two more on the bottom and you’d have a nice little wildly out of place Utena reference!
Where Madoka presents no upsets to Chihiro’s worldview at all, Sojo is quite the opposite. He impacts Chihiro in ways that are felt and remembered well into the arcs to come! He doesn’t, however, do this by being sympathetic by any means – indeed, he’s a much worse person than Madoka! Rather, he has that all-important shonen character quality, conviction. Worse luck for Chihiro, the sword Sojo carries responds in kind.
(Briefly on the topic of that sword, by far the most aggravating of the Viz translation’s inconsistencies for Kagurabachi is the howling inconsistency about translating or simply romanizing the enchanted blades’ names and abilities. Given that literally every other blade in the English translation has its name left in Japanese, I’m inclined to do the same with Cloud Gouger. Accordingly, I’ll be referring to it as Kuregumo.)
Sojo is a weapons dealer and would-be manufacturer, a man who’s not just callously but casually violent, not merely to people who’ve failed or betrayed him in some way, but just for fun, just for a warm-up, just for practice.[6] He shows up in front of Chihiro with Kuregumo drawn, blood already on the blade, and shrugs off Chihiro’s question – whether the blood is that of an evildoer – as irrelevant.[7]
6: You can understand why he’d kill Madoka, and even Madoka’s family – that’s pretty par for the course for a crime lord in a story like this one! But the trauma sorcerer’s younger brother is the one that really paints the picture of Sojo’s lackadaisical attitude towards bloodshed.
7: It probably is, in fact, given that the younger brother was, if not already engaged in the same sort of business as the trauma sorcerer, then certainly watching eagerly from the periphery and cheering his older brother on! But of course that’s immaterial in Sojo’s eyes.
After expounding on his love for Rokuhira Kunishige, Sojo returns Chihiro’s question with some of his own, and from basically the same motivations: why are you wielding that blade; I want to know if you’re worthy of it. Chihiro hits him with the mantra, clearly a young man who believes the words he’s saying are obviously logical, the only sensible conclusion anyone could possibly come to. It’s therefore a shock to him when Sojo’s demeanor abruptly and sharply shifts: he goes from a man who came out to attack and is honestly having such a good time right now to a man who’s just gotten the same gacha pull for the eighteenth time in a row. He avows that he’s the only one who understands Rokuhira, that to call him a hero is an insult, and that the only reason to make weapons is so that they can be used to kill – the enchanted blades are “the ultimate weapons of slaughter.”
Continued talk in this vein finally provokes Chihiro – who earlier coldly refused to tell Sojo how he came to have a new enchanted blade no one’s ever heard of – into snapping, “Don’t you dare talk about my father!” The integrity of Kunishige and his legacy is already prominent in Chihiro’s mind – we saw him thinking of his father earlier, parallel to Shiba and Azami having a conversation about how precarious that legacy might prove to be if Japan starts seeing battles between enchanted blades happening in highly populated areas – and in that way, Chihiro and Sojo both reflexively reject the other’s perspective on the man they both revere.
Interestingly, though, Sojo, for as terrible as he is, proves to be the more open-minded of the two!
Their initial fight is broken up by Chihiro being pushed into making a choice between continuing the fight with Sojo or jumping to save an apparently recaptured Char – quite literally choosing which half of the mantra he prioritizes, the injunction to destroy evil or the one to save the weak. Unsurprisingly for a kid with so much baggage bound up in the heroism and nobility of these weapons, he chooses the latter. Sojo, meanwhile, is left in a contemplative state of mind – Chihiro being the son of Rokuhira Kunishige, after all, would put him in a pretty well-informed position vis a vis understanding the man’s motivations! That bodes thinking about; it bodes follow-up. Thus, when Sojo retreats, he does so already thinking about how he wants to talk with Chihiro more, while Chihiro (having been led astray by a decoy and thus failed to successfully enact the part of the mantra he chose) is left stewing in resentment and the other half of the mantra.
Everyone’s discovering new emotional needs today!
The prioritization – which we see again in the hospital, when Chihiro has the choice of either agreeing to focus on rescuing Char or pushing to be included with Hagiwara’s group in their attack on Sojo – is an important tell about Chihiro’s characterization. It’s not something his father gave him specific guidance on! The mantra, after all, says that those who wield swords have to do both – destroy evil and save the weak. It gives no priority to one over the other, nor does it dictate doing one as a means to achieving the other, e.g. “Save the weak by destroying evil.” Perhaps someone stronger than Chihiro could do both at once, or both equally well; perhaps there would always be circumstances in which any swordsman, no matter how strong, would have to prioritize one aim, and the mantra can’t always be perfectly fulfilled. Whichever is the case, our main character will often find himself having to choose one or the other, and so it’s important to note which one he picks.
Consider, though, how that whole fight goes for him: when he tries to face Sojo while stubbornly clinging to his preexisting mindset, he spectacularly fails, unable to destroy evil or save the weak! Clearly, a different approach is required.
When they next meet, it’s after an interval fight for both of them – Sojo against Hagiwara’s unit and Chihiro against Sojo’s goonsquad – in which each discovers a new way to apply one of their swords’ abilities. Notably, Sojo reached his by doubling down on what he believes in, that the blades are sublime weapons of slaughter – his belief led to increasing his harmonization with Kurogemo and unlocking the ability to “ride the lightning” of its Mei ability. Chihiro, meanwhile, in developing the Shred variation on Kuro, gets there by remembering his father telling him that he should be more open-minded and flexible when he’s struggling with something, that he shouldn’t be trying to walk precisely in Kunishige’s path, but rather trying to find his own! (This is something he’s still sometimes backsliding on, but we’ll get there.)
As he and Sojo set to, we start cutting between the actual fight and a really wonderful allegorical conceit – the mochi sequence. The two sit on tatami mats across from each other at opposite ends of a finely lacquered table in a traditional Japanese dining room. It’s the first setting of its sort we’ve seen so far – the other kitchens and dining spaces have been much more Western in style – which works to signal how much of himself Sojo is putting into this conversation; he’s the one who’s gotten the more traditional Japanese surroundings, after all, despite not much looking the part at all![8] He offers Chihiro food and drink, protests when the other declines that he wants to have a heart-to-heart here, and if they just fight to the death without that, it’s too big a waste. Despite Chihiro’s initial refusal to engage, as Sojo himself begins to eat and talk, the purpose of this visual metaphor emerges: correlating sharing food with communication and compromise.
8: Sojo’s got sleeve and back tattoos like any proper yakuza, sure, but the style is wildly different from the stereotypical yakuza irezumi. In those, you typically see a central animal or folkloric figure framed by decorative elements like flowers, clouds, or waves. They're ornate artworks, scenes in miniature, colorful and highly detailed. Sojo's tattoo, on the other hand, is heavily, darkly mottled, an overarching silhouette containing obscure, only vaguely discernable internal patterns. It took me until the first bonus chapter to realize it was a huge butterfly (one of many hints that Sojo had some kind of formative run-in with the shinuchi when he was younger), because rather than featuring a butterfly as an accented central element surrounded by traditional motifs, the butterfly is the only element, its wing patterns barely visible in the darkness that defines its overall form. His outfit, meanwhile, is not remotely traditionally Japanese, but I trust that's visible even without me rambling on about it!
Sojo acknowledges Chihiro’s belief – he says he accepts it, though it’s nauseating. The blades can be used to destroy evil and save the weak: Chihiro just proved it by, with virtually no assistance, taking out Sojo’s whole base to rescue Char. Nonetheless, Sojo still holds his own belief, as well, that the blades can just as well be used as weapons of mass destruction. He proved that, when Kuregumo harmonized with his own goals and desires, helping him achieve the slaughter of the Kamunabi team sent to take him out. He has taken his own message from the swords’ existence and abilities, and he isn’t obligated to cede that message to anyone, even Rokuhira’s own son, who claims to speak for him – it’s Death of the Author, but for the ethics of weapons manufacture! Their battle is, in Sojo’s telling, a battle for who can win the right to claim a more definitive interpretation.
In response to this and the events of the ongoing battle, Chihiro finally picks up his own mochi. With an expression like he’s chewing cement, he eats every ball of chewy dough off the stick. It’s an implicit acknowledgement of Sojo’s own perspective that quickly becomes an explicit one; he says it aloud, but we see the reason he bows to it in his flashback to Kunishige telling him solemnly that swords are tools for killing people. If his own father espoused that, how can he deny Sojo’s belief in it? The only difference is in the motivation behind the killing. And so, as he swallows the last bite, he tells a very smug Sojo that he accepts Sojo’s claim that both of them speak for Rokuhira – but he still won’t pay Sojo respect, intending only to cut him down even harder.
And as the fight reaches its final blows, we get a flashback to father and son at the forge, crafting blades, before we see the pain in Chihiro’s eyes as he cleaves Kuregumo in twain.
It’s gonna look real boss in the anime, yeah.
Chihiro has acknowledged a truth he didn’t previously wish to examine, incorporating that truth into a new and slightly but critically altered worldview: the noble swords that define his father’s legacy contain within them a darker potential, one that can be tapped into by someone who only sees them as tools for slaughter rather than protection. That, too, is a truth about swords.
Note how Chihiro’s response to that acceptance is still filtered through his respect for his father and his avowed refusal to put Sojo – however valid a point Sojo may have – above his father. He still holds true to the mantra: destroy evil. He’ll do that, even if, as he has now seen with his own eyes (which Kunishige told him he had to use!) that that evil is one of the precious blades he originally sought to redeem. This is not a fundamental shift in Chihiro’s morality – he’s still basing it wholly on what his father taught him! But it is still a change that his encounter with Sojo has wrought in him, a new openness to the possibility that his father’s legacy can mean different things to different people.
And boy oh boy, is he going to need to remember that!
Folding and Hammering in the Rakuzaichi Arc
-Sazanami Kyora and Kagari Hiyuki-
The Rakuzaichi arc introduces a somewhat different structure for its major antagonistic figures, at least for the purposes of this piece. Sazanami Kyora is the obvious arc villain, but the one Chihiro actually winds up adapting to is Hiyuki. Rather than being sequentially placed like Madoka and Sojo, however, the two trade off, with Chihiro encountering both of them repeatedly before reaching an ultimate outcome. The arc’s climax is also entwined with the ominous influence of the shinuchi, which we can’t really call an antagonist as of yet, but which still has a major impact on Chihiro’s final decisions in this portion of the story.
One of the first things this arc establishes is Chihiro’s terror that an enchanted blade could be used to take innocent lives.[9] This particular dimension of concern for his father’s legacy was present in the material with Sojo, but less clearly articulated. At that time, Chihiro seemed to feel more possessive of Kunishige’s life and works, more concerned with what they meant to him personally – it was Shiba and Azami’s conversation that highlighted the danger to Kunishige’s reputation with the broader public. But Sojo’s ability to utilize Kuregumo to such dangerous effect haunts Chihiro – a specific visual motif of ocean waves, one that’s repeatedly associated with this fear and that we’ll see several times in this arc, makes its first appearance in Chihiro’s elevator conversation with Hakuri. He has an idea, now, of what it really means for evil men to take hold of the blades.
9: It is interesting that Chihiro doesn’t apparently consider the Kamunabi squad Sojo massacred to be “innocent.” The Japanese term is romanized as “tsumi no nai hito,” literally “people without sin” or “the sinless.” While Hagiwara’s team didn’t deserve to get cut down by Sojo, and judging by the beach motif Chihiro does find their deaths harrowing, it’s perhaps also hard to say that combat-trained government employees who knew exactly what they were getting into are “innocent,” especially if any of them are old enough to, like Azami, also have fought in the war! One suspects, in any case, that Chihiro is more fearful of uninvolved innocents being slain than people who are already in the muck like him.
The imagery refers back to the slaughter of Hagiwara’s team – we saw Kazane kneeling on this same beach in the aftermath of that massacre.
This points to an interesting dimension of Chihiro as a character and a conflict that is still evolving in the story as of this writing: while Chihiro’s a good person who wants to help others, he is also profoundly driven by his desire to preserve his father’s image as a hero, both in his own mind and to the public eye. He frequently cites the mantra as something he’s responsible to as a sword wielder, but his personal motivations are less about being a force for good in the world than they are protecting his father’s legacy. The two goals coincide in the early portions of the story, but begin to diverge as Chihiro learns more and more about the war and the world outside of his fishbowl. That will become a particular issue in the third arc, but the Rakuzaichi arc is laying plenty of groundwork!
So, as I said, Kyora is obviously the principal antagonist for the arc, but he doesn’t fire Chihiro’s personal motivations in anything like the same way Sojo did. Chihiro’s response to him is far more measured, more akin to his response to Madoka; the places where he does get more wound up are not about any threat Kyora poses to Kunishige, but rather about Kyora’s callousness as a father.
Consider:
Chihiro faces a fanatically devoted son in Tenri, unquestioning and unswerving in his loyalty to his father. The resonance is obvious for Chihiro, leaving him extra vulnerable to the back-to-back cruelties of Kyora dropping a death sentence on Tenri via that datenseki shard and the reveal that the emergency door Tenri and the others were staking their lives on protecting has already been destroyed, serving as nothing more than a bit of bait to expose Rokuhira and company’s hand that it might be better countered.[10]
10: The implication here is that the door was real, and would have been a valid way to access the storehouse, but that it would normally have been more hidden in Kyora’s subspace. He chose to expose it, anticipating the conclusions his enemies would draw, not to fake it entirely. Just like a swordsman, he left an intentional opening in order to draw the enemy into overreaching.
Hakuri, meanwhile, alternates between a person for Chihiro to save, a person who saved Chihiro, and a personal role model throughout the arc. Across those various roles, he intersects with the mantra in all sorts of ways!
For example, when he takes Hiyuki’s blow in her and Chihiro’s first encounter, his defiant proclamation that Chihiro saved him uses the same kanji the mantra does; so too does Tafuku calling Hakuri weak when explaining to Hiyuki why the subspace fell apart early. When they finally make it to Kyora, Chihiro reflects that Hakuri was better able to live up to Chihiro’s own ethic of destroying evil than he himself has been able to do during this whole misadventure – he killed his own brother, while Chihiro faltered, both against Soya (hesitant to kill Hakuri’s kin, no matter how evil he might be – and I wonder if hesitation to be a kinslayer might prove relevant down the line!) and against Tenri (aching with empathy towards Tenri’s filial piety[11]).
11: I’m not going to get into a whole diversion about Chihiro, Hakuri’s conception of him as a cool samurai, and the Bushido code(s) of samurai ethics, but just know that it’s definitely an essay someone could write.
Even Soya, awful as he is, is not entirely exempt from Chihiro’s pity - when Chihiro remarks on Kyora getting emotional about the Rakuzaichi and what he thinks Kyora should be getting emotional about instead, he specifies sonS’ deaths, plural, which you have to go a little out of your way to do in Japanese! He uses “musuko-tachi”when, from my understanding, the more common thing to do would be to just say “musuko” and leave it ambiguous whether he meant one or both sons.
None of this, however, forces Chihiro to doubt his goals or his truth. Kyora’s got nothing that could rattle him more than an earlier unexpected encounter with Yura, not even how close to home Tenri’s death cut. Kyora’s withholding the shinuchi from him, yes, but he doesn’t threaten it ideologically like Sojo did. All told, then, if Chihiro were only fighting Kyora this arc, we’d be well on our way to a proper folding, with Chihiro doubling down on everything he entered the arc already believing.
On which note, let’s circle back and talk about Hiyuki.
Hiyuki is a running antagonist/ally through this arc, and her contention, in her introduction and elsewhere, is that the enchanted blades are far too powerful to be controlled by individuals, who are prone to base selfishness; that they should all be under the control of the Kamunabi for the betterment of the nation. This sets her directly at odds with Chihiro, who believes that the swords belong to/with his family (i.e. just him), as they were crafted by his father and maintained by him likewise after the war.
Luckily for Chihiro, the Kamunabi is a lot grubbier and more practical than Hiyuki much cares for – when she returns to HQ after their first encounter, she’s greeted by a face-full of bureaucratic moral compromise that gets right up her nose. It’s doubtlessly annoying to talk about how super-weapons should be in the hands of the state for the national welfare only to report back and find your bosses gearing up to perpetuate a monstrously harmful system with gobs and gobs of government dosh!
Chihiro has got another round with her in mind when he makes the deal to trade Enten for Hakuri. His eternal contract with the blade makes his life valuable to the Kamunabi in that he is self-evidently a less dangerous person to have control over Enten than literally anyone who might buy it at the annual underworld human trafficking festival, and if the person trying to buy it is a government agent, they’ll have to spend less government money on it if its contract is still intact than if it’s available to be pacted to a new wielder. Also, he got a decent enough bead on Hiyuki in their first fight to wager that she won’t like the “government tacitly endorses major human trafficking event” plan.
This maneuvering, in combination with an appeal to her better nature (a guilt trip, really, about financially backing human trafficking), makes a temporary ally out of Hiyuki, in that it gets her to resolve to cut lose on everything aggravating her about the situation but save Chihiro for last. For Chihiro, this is mainly a matter of staggering out his fights so that he doesn’t have to face the Kamunabi’s best combatant and the might of one of Japan’s oldest sorcerous lineages at the same time.
But does this mean Hiyuki actually changes his mind, forces him to adapt? Well, at this point, no, not really. While the specter of Sojo was definitely on his mind when Hiyuki was first rebuking him about the dangers of independent agents wielding the blades, that in and of itself wasn’t enough to change his mind, and certainly the Kamunabi deciding to throw money at the problem rather than actually confront it didn’t improve his opinion! Absent any other factors, Chihiro would just have killed Kyora and then had to turn around and fight Hiyuki; whatever the result, his mind wouldn’t have been changed.
Pictured: The other factor.
The shinuchi, however, overturns everyone’s composure, and it does it in impeccably terrifying style! Witnessing just a fraction of its power unsettles Chihiro deeply, giving him fresh context for his father’s reluctance to talk about the blade and likewise his insistence that it never be used by anyone again. It becomes the tipping point of Chihiro’s development in this arc, as we can see in how it informs his final responses to Kyora and Hiyuki respectively.
Kyora, like Sojo, concedes to Chihiro in his last moments, but the difference in Chihiro’s response to them is telling for the purposes of this piece: Chihiro demurred Sojo’s concession, saying that Sojo wasn’t wrong about his beliefs – the blades did choose both of them, not Chihiro alone – an admission of his changed perspective. When Kyora concedes that Chihiro was right, Chihiro makes no attempt at all to contradict him! Thus we can see that Chihiro does not change his perspective to align more closely with Kyora’s; he simply “folds” – wins through by doubling-down on his beliefs and using them to motivate himself through the rigors of the battle.
Conversely, however, he does change his perspective to align more closely with Hiyuki’s. Not entirely, to be sure, but he sees that they have similar enough ideals that he opens up to her about the way his mind has been changed by what he saw of the shinuchi’s power, his belief that it does need to be sealed again rather than just taken back to his basement[12] as-is. That means it has to go to the Kamunabi, but he fears that this is exactly what the Hishaku wants, and while he’s unwilling to risk the blades by keeping them solely under his own power, he’s also unwilling to cede oversight of them completely. And so he does what he would never have considered prior to this arc: asks to join the Kamunabi. Thus has the combination of Hiyuki’s strength of character with the realization of just how dangerously ignorant he is about the shinuchi served as the hammering accompanying Kyora’s folding, and once again, Chihiro adapts.
12: Or wherever he was planning to take any blades he managed to get back, given that Hatshaku’s pine tree sorcery did a real number on Chez Rokuhira. It’s unknown to what extent Chihiro and Shiba tried to repair the buildings and barrier in expectation of Chihiro returning one day, let everything stand as-is for the time being, or finished the job of razing it to conceal evidence of who lived there once it was decided that Chihiro would be accompanying Shiba long-term.
Folding and Hammering in the Sword Bearer Assassination Arc (Part 1)
-Hiruhiko and Samura Seiichi-
The Sword Bearer Assassination arc is the series’ longest thus far, so I’ll be covering it in two parts, for reasons that should readily become apparent. To wit, the arc can be divided pretty neatly into three sub-arcs – we might call them the (titular) Sword Bearer Assassination sub-arc, the Kyoto Bloodshed Hotel sub-arc, and the Kamunabi HQ Invasion sub-arc – all three of which feature a climactic battle encounter with a quickly sequential pair of antagonists. This part covers the first two sub-arcs because they feature the same pair of antagonists, while I’ll use the second part to cover the final sub-arc and its different antagonist duo.
That established, where Madoka and Sojo were sequential but firmly separated, and Kyora and Hiyuki intertwined, here we have Hiruhiko and Samura, who are paired together in rapid succession for the two sub-arc climaxes. I say “paired” here not because Hiruhiko and Samura are fighting together(they certainly aren't!) but because both times Chihiro faces the former, the battle flows without pause into facing the latter, with the overall outcome following the fold-forge rotation.
Here, that rotation reverses! It shows us the consequences of Chihiro failing to adapt quickly enough to pull out a victory in a hammering phase. Against Sojo, Chihiro is shielded from the consequences of his initial rigidity by Sojo choosing to retreat in the face of the Kamunabi’s arrival rather than press his advantage. Chihiro comes to their second encounter still resistant to change, but ultimately capable of making it during the battle and thereby winning the day. His confrontation with Hiyuki follows a similar pattern: an inconclusive initial encounter followed by one that forces Chihiro to adapt on the fly, mid-battle. Samura, conversely, affords no such opportunities for withdrawal, nor does Chihiro reach a new equilibrium mid-fight, and so Chihiro simply loses, quite conclusively, and is left with a bunch of unresolved nastiness courtesy of Hiruhiko, to boot. Accordingly, he has to do all his equilibration afterward, and it’s thanks to the changes he forges in himself as a result of the hammering he takes in the first sub-arc climax that he’s in a place where he can fold in the second.
That all claimed here in the intro, let’s take a closer look at how it plays out in the reading.
Hiruhiko and Samura, Round One – The Hammering
So, it’s important to note for the purposes of this first sub-arc’s outcome in particular that, while Hiruhiko and Samura don’t fight together, flashbacks to Chihiro’s early encounters with Samura are scattered liberally throughout the first encounter with Hiruhiko. Samura’s example underlines a huge part of Chihiro’s response to Hiruhiko’s “You and I are the same because we both kill people!” rhetoric. See, Chihiro has folded the bearers into his grievance with the Hishaku to a degree – he wants to protect them because to him they’re a part of his father’s legacy, and because he failed to protect his father before. He was observant enough even back when he first met Samura to have noted that everyone who was connected to the war says everyone else is the hero but doesn’t want to claim heroism for themselves. He understood, too, that, yeah, it probably doesn’t feel great to be praised for being awesome at killing people.
All the same, he still did admire them, all those war heroes he grew up around, so he justified his hero worship as being about respect rather than admiration, respect for the burdens Samura and the rest chose to bear so that others wouldn’t have to.
In the present day, then, when Hiruhiko posits that he and Chihiro are the same because they’re both 18 with bloodstained hands, Chihiro takes it very poorly. The very idea that the killing he’s done makes him the same as one of the group that killed his father triggers him with the memory of that death; he’s not thinking rationally in his response to that moment, just lashing out angrily, very much the same way he lashed out at Sojo.
At the theatre, Hiruhiko’s aim is to engineer a scenario where Chihiro has no choice but to hurt someone – not willfully or maliciously, but to accept that it’s unavoidable if he doesn’t want to get slowly bled to death by Hiruhiko’s cranes. He does this by controlling the battlefield to make himself impossible to pinpoint while pinning down all three of Chihiro’s movement, attack, anddefense by surrounding him with innocents who’ll get hurt if he tries to do any of those things too freely. And the innocents are terrified of him the whole time, looking at him like a monster, which is exactly what Hiruhiko wants him to be.[13]
13: This is because Hiruhiko wants a friend and doesn’t have a clear idea how to go about making friends, so is trying a variant of the good old “fight to understand each other” trope: attempt murder to understand each other.
Note the intrusive heartbeat sound effect, a sure indicator of a stab of sudden emotion.
This does have some effect on Chihiro! He’s gotten his initial upset back under control, but as in the picture above, you can see the flares of vulnerability and pain when people look at him like a monster. It eats at him, now, and continuing into the next sub-arc. He calms himself down in the moment by rationalizing that he’s a “monster” only in the same sense that Samura claimed to be: someone who kills in order to protect innocents from having to partake in, or be victimized by, that violence. But Samura is still one of Chihiro’s heroes, someone he thinks of as a good person – not really a monster-monster, just someone willing to be taken as one for the sake of protecting others.
In so many words, this is a mantra invocation, and the thought process, while not exactly wrong, is still setting Chihiro up to fall into two really hideous logical traps. The especially nasty one is towards the end of the arc, but the other is nigh-unto immediate, because Hiruhiko has one last kick in the groin for the road!
My favorite Chihiro character beat: so overwhelmed that he goes incoherent and has trouble processing plot-relevant dialogue.
He asks Chihiro about “school,” implying very strongly that it’s a nice cozy place for learning nice cozy state propaganda about the heroes of the war. Chihiro picks up on what Hiruhiko’s laying down because he saw the shinuchi in action at the Rakuzaichi, where it planted its insidious seeds in him: grave doubts that such a blade could ever have been made with “saving the weak” in mind. Further, from the feeling of someone “else” inside Kyora, the fear that maybe the problem isn’t the sword at all, but rather the sword master, i.e. one of those sword bearers he’s determined to protect because they’re all heroes and part of his father’s legacy.
He asks Hiruhiko directly if that’s what he’s implying – that the sword master is not a hero who needs to be protected – but his brain is too fried from the events of the day[14] to catch Hiruhiko’s reply of, “That’s what Samura thinks, anyway. That’s why he made a pact with Yura three years ago.” He tries to double down, telling himself that it doesn’t matter what the truth is about the sword master because the status quo is still safer than what he fears could come of the Hishaku getting access to a useable shinuchi. So Hiruhiko has to poke him again about Samura being allied with Team Kill All The Sword Bearers, which is the note the fight ends on, with Hiruhiko drawing the apparently suddenly useable Kumeyuri just as Hakuri teleports Chihiro out of that mess and right into the next one.
14: Remember that this is still the literal day Chihiro regained consciousness after passing out at the Rakuzaichi. As he says, it really has been nonstop!
Chihiro's a little too late to catch Samura invoking the mantra word for word, but the audience is not, so let’s double back and talk about Samura. The arc’s been building him up, too, crosscutting as it has been between Chihiro’s fight with Hiruhiko and the Hishaku-planned assaults on Senkutsuji Temple!
See, Samura knows a very key thing that Chihiro (and the audience too, at this point) has been kept in the dark about[15] – Akemura Soga’s hideous act of genocide against an enemy who had already surrendered. His whole thing, then, is that he was willing to barely tolerate the Kamunabi burying the truth and praising the sword bearers as heroes if and only if it meant a lasting peace.[16] He absolutely will not, however, tolerate innocent children dying to preserve the lives of old war criminals. The Hishaku are not going to give up, which means children who had nothing to do with the war are going to continue to die saving the worthless hides of people like Samura himself and the sword master. Well, not if this black blade has anything to say about it!
15: Most recently by one Uruha Yoji disapprovingly noting that some of the Kamunabi turned on Rokuhira Kunishige and his swords after the war, glazing entirely over the elephant in the Kamunabi basement in favor of acting like this betrayal of poor innocent Rokuhira came wholly out of nowhere.
16: Exactly why Akemura was willing to be arrested for said act of genocide too, of course – and isn’t it interesting that Yura is the one to convince both of them that lasting peace was never in the cards?
And so we see that Samura’s dedication to Rokuhira Kunishige is such that once he has Tobimune in his hands, he’s obligated to resume saving the weak and destroying evil. Unfortunately for Team Don’t Let Any Sword Bearers Die, Samura’s opinion is that the sword bearers (or at least their public images) are a bigger evil and a bigger threat than even the Hishaku. That means they have to be dealt with, even if it takes colluding with the Hishaku to do it!
English translation notwithstanding, Samura’s wording continues to echo the mantra of “aku o messhi,” destroy evil.
A very key difference between Chihiro and Samura emerges here: where Chihiro tells himself he is a “monster,” yes, but one fighting for good and therefore still better than the Hishaku, Samura tells himself he’s a monster andis therefore worse. Chihiro claims the label to reinforce his self-esteem; Samura claims it to reinforce his self-loathing. No wonder, then, what happens next!
Samura’s betrayal on top of everything else that day sends Chihiro into full-tilt meltdown. He can barely string words together, he’s got crazy eyes, he’s clearly not going to listen to a single thing Samura has to say because all he’s seeing is one of his heroes – one he was clinging to the image of not five minutes prior to deny that his killings are anything like Hiruhiko’s! – has allied with the murderers of his father. Samura, who has probably seen this kind of full-throttle hysteria before, back in the war, clearly recognizes that he’s going to get nowhere trying to explain himself to this kid, surmises that this is all about revenge for him, and gives him exactly one chance to lay down Enten.
That goes about the way you would guess, and Samura only doesn’t vanish into the sunset with two enchanted blades because Shiba finally makes his designated appearance for the arc. Chihiro, then, wakes up in the hospital with his contract to Enten severed and a broken worldview he doesn’t know how to make any sense of.
If this was a hammering, it hammered him nearly in half.
In this house, we love protagonists who lose on a regular basis.
And so he does what he did against Sojo in their second fight: reminds himself of his father’s words. Not the mantra, because it couldn’t help him understand Sojo then nor Samura now, but rather the words about seeing and understanding the world with his own eyes. He knows he has to adapt to some horrible truth, something so awful that everyone has hidden it from him for his entire life.
In order to do that, though, he first has to convince someone to spill. Luckily for him, Shiba is a man who doesn’t know how to say no to him. What, then, does Shiba tell him?
Well, it must be said that the following sub-arc is a little unfair in how it doles information out to the reader. There are still some things Chihiro is struggling with as the next sub-arc gets underway, but the worst of his uncertainty is pretty much resolved right there in the hospital room! Shiba tells Chihiro both the truth about the Malediction and his theory as to what Kunishige’s intention was in forging Enten, so by the time Chihiro meets Samura again, he’s already finished the hammering Samura began! The reader, however, isn’t let in on this right away, with the specifics of what Shiba told Chihiro and Chihiro’s response to it being spread out across several flashbacks more to underline drama of any given event in the narrative than to let the audience have a clear view of where Chihiro’s head is at from the outset.
As I said, though, even though Chihiro integrates the truths behind Samura’s betrayal quite quickly, he’s still not completely calm and collected for the length of this sub-arc. He may have already acclimated to Samura’s hammering, but what he has not resolved is all the lesser psychological prodding from Hiruhiko about normalcy and monsterhood. Adjusting to that is the stuff of his interactions with the Masumi and Iori.
Hiruhiko and Samura, Round Two – The Folding
Chihiro spends the first portion of this sub-arc tangling with Kuguri, but not in a deeply involved way. What the aborted fight with Kuguri displays is Chihiro’s need to improve his swordsmanship rather than a need to change his values or mindset towards his opponents. Otherwise, it mostly just provides, in its opening scene at the school, an opportunity to show that Chihiro was not as untouched by Hiruhiko’s prodding about school and normalcy as he made himself out to be. You can see in the class scene how distracted and unsettled he is by the whispers about him being the murderer from the theatre!
Kuguri can see it too, and Kuguri does not like it.
Notably, the classroom scene also shows just how unsettled he is because he gets very close to a significant shift in his usual prioritization of the two parts of the mantra! His grudge against the Hishaku means he’s itching to chase after Kuguri, ready to abandon a plan that’s built with the protection of an ordinary, innocent girl as its highest priority.[17] I imagine that his desire for revenge and unbalanced emotions grate somewhat against the Masumi trio’s trained practicality and composure!
17: In fairness, though, even in wanting to bail on the plan and pursue Kuguri, Chihiro knows he’d not be leaving Iori totally vulnerable, as she’s still accompanied by the Masumi, and taking out her attacker would at least temporarily save her as well – we can imagine he might do something different if he was flying solo while trying to protect her!
Notably, we saw him wrestling with this same conflict when presented with the choice between backing up Hagiwara’s team taking on Sojo or focusing on Char, and likewise when Yura tried to goad him into wasting time and Kuregumo’s firepower at the Rakuzaichi when Hakuri was getting his ass kicked on the other side of the pine tree barrier. In both of those instances, though, Chihiro managed to get himself back under control; here, he outright declares that he’s abandoning the plan to go after Kuguri instead!
It takes an outside voice, Moku, to calm him down and get him back on task. To both their credit, this is accomplished without a great deal of fuss. We see via flashback that Ro has stressed that this is a team mission and Chihiro has others to rely on, people he can share his burden with. This goes some way to addressing Hiruhiko’s prodding about normalcy, in that, sure, Chihiro doesn’t have any kind of normal life, but he’s not alone in that, and he doesn’t have to be! Not once he can make himself believe it, anyway, and the plan going off without a hitch surely does ease his mind somewhat in that regard.
As the group settles in at the hotel, we see that Iori’s situation cuts Chihiro deeply. He’s got a particular resonance with her feelings for her father and her willingness to risk danger to regain that relationship. He thinks about the normal life he could have had if he hadn’t lived with his father – the life Hiruhiko prodded him about, which he saw in passing at Iori’s school – and while he does understand the draw of it, he still thinks he wouldn’t trade his time with his father for anything, no matter what he’s lost because of it. He gets a bit emotive about it, even! There’s an understated but clear vehemence to his assertion that Iori should be told everything and then allowed to choose for herself whether she’s better off forgetting it all.
He will later admit that he had the idea that living with the truth was better, but that assuming Iori would make the same choice as him was arrogant – he was comparing his fishbowl life with his father to her peaceful and fun school life, but he’s never experienced the kind of peace that comes from having freedom to leave his own house without an adult chaperone, nor did he ever have friends his own age, so he can’t really evaluate the value of her life fairly. Even admitting that, however, he does retain his belief that she should have the agency to choose for herself whether she prefers to prioritize her school life or her life as Samura Seiichi’s daughter.
That decision – to focus on protecting Iori[18] and her choice, whatever it might be – as well as the ability to rely on the Masumi brings Chihiro back to a place of stability for his second round against Hiruhiko and Samura.
18: Notably, Hiruhiko calls Iori “Samura’s weakness,” using a word that includes the same 弱 jaku kanji that’s in the mantra. Chihiro has come back around, then, to saving the weak, per his usual priorities.
He mostly winds up holding Hiruhiko off in this second engagement; he doesn’t question or doubt himself this time, doesn’t have to realign himself to seek victory. He folds – doubles down on his beliefs and what he already knows, using examples he’s seen in the past (Samura) or which are available to him because of his renewed dedication to the mantra (Iori). His absolute lack of interest or investment in Hiruhiko this time around is what obliterates the rest of Hiruhiko’s fighting spirit after Samura brings down the hammer on the kid’s heart.
(Incidentally, we also get the ugly detail of Hiruhiko’s first killing in this sequence, that the man he killed at three years old was trying to “assault” him – a word that can have but does not insist upon sexual implications in English used to translate a phrase in Japanese that is archaic and uses metaphorical language but is much less up for interpretation about denoting sexual assault.[19] Chihiro neither knows nor cares about this history – at no point in either of their confrontations or at any time in between them did he pause to consider why and how Hiruhiko killed someone when he was only three years old! But it does position Hiruhiko as someone who was weak and in need of salvation from evil but who had to save himself instead. We will eventually find Yura at that same intersection, with Chihiro’s unconcern reiterated to far more disastrous effect.)
19: A similar English word might be something like “ravish” or particularly “deflower,” and while I understand that those would see wildly out of the story’s usual tone, I do wonder if the Japanese read the same way, and thus the translation should have embraced that jarring note.
Now facing Samura, Chihiro reveals (to him and to the audience) that he’s been told everything about the sword master and the Malediction.[20] Samura tries to reassure him that the crime was only the sword master’s, not Kunishige’s; that Kunishige remains a national hero. Chihiro, with noted ambivalence, says that Shiba told him the same thing, to which Samura reflects, “He’s not swallowing it.” As well he shouldn’t! One of the most important lessons Kunishige taught Chihiro was, after all, those words in Chapter 2, about the responsibility of a swordsmith for all the lives taken by the swords he makes. Throwing out that belief would require Chihiro to throw out every other word his father ever said to him. Whatever else he may think of his father now, Chihiro has to hold Kunishige responsible at least in part for the islanders’ genocide because that’s so clearly what Kunishige imparted to him – indeed, when we see Shiba telling Chihiro about the Malediction at the hospital, Chihiro thinks directly back to his father telling him about a swordsmith’s complicity with death!
20: BIG MAYBE. There are some pretty glaring gaps and discrepancies to the story of the war as we have it so far, mostly revolving around the established timeline of the island’s appearance, the invasion, how long the war lasted, and how long the sword bearers were active. At the very least, though, the story seems to be true as far as it’s known by people like Samura (who doesn’t contest any of Yura’s version of it) and Iori (who hears the version Chihiro got from Shiba).
The realization that stopping the blades from taking innocent lives is a lost cause and has been from the very beginning.
Here, then, we have a change that Chihiro has incorporated into himself: Kunishige is someone whose memory Chihiro still treasures, but is no longer his sole guiding light and inviolable hero. That change is reflected in the circumstances in which Chihiro thinks about his father during this sub-arc: as his father who he loved his life with in spite of that life being so cut off from “normal,” but much less as a moral bellwether for the purposes of wielding swords than we saw in previous arcs. As we see in that same hospital flashback, Chihiro has a new context, now, for his father’s creation of the enchanted blades, and most especially Enten.
“To face the past and connect to the future.” That, Shiba supposes, is Enten’s purpose, and it’s with that purpose newly forged into his heart that Chihiro faces Samura. Then, because this is the folding and not the hammering, this time he doesn’t flinch, doesn’t change, doesn’t alter—just redoubles his determination to save Samura from the despair that keeps him from looking to the future, metaphorically and literally blinded.
That works out for him well here, but it’s got some concerning undercurrents that will resurface in a big way before the day, or indeed even the hour, is out.
Folding and Hammering in the Sword Bearer Assassination Arc (PART 2)
-Yura and Soga Akemura-
As discussed in the lead-in for the last section, our antagonist duo for this final sub-arc of the Sword Bearer Assassination arc follows the same pattern as Hiruhiko and Samura in the first two: a rapid-fire confrontation in which a battle with one antagonist immediately transitions into a battle with a second. As we also saw with Hiruhiko and Samura, Chihiro is ultimately successful against the first antagonist! Unfortunately for him, there’s one final way that this sub-arc echoes the structure of its predecessors: Chihiro gets hammered to fuck in the fold-forge rotation pattern and does not have the opportunity to withdraw and adapt. So while he might “win” against Yura, he does it exactly the same way he did against Hiruhiko the first time – a nominal victory that comes with a boatload of unprocessed baggage immediately preceding a catastrophic loss. And this time the arc will leave him there because it’s ending and he has got way too much adaptation he’s going to need to do before he’ll be in a place where he can fold himself against this pair of antagonists.
In the opening exchanges before the fight begins, Yura exposes the lie that is the sword master’s madness and says he plans to bring him back. He talks about bringing order to chaos, says (quite neutrally compared to how he’ll say the same thing in a few chapters!) that Rokuhira Kunishige made the wrong choice, and that the shinuchi is the power the world needs.
Chihiro doesn’t immediately rise to this provocation; he’s in locked-in, not-acknowledging-my-opponent’s-viewpoint mode again, determined to end all this business with the Hishaku with this confrontation. Chihiro contends that “the whole point” of the enchanted blades is to save lives – clearly words coming from a young man who has not yet grasped the enormity of just how fully dedicated to slaughter the Magatsumi is[21]– and, as he gets more fired up, accuses Yura of lying about wanting to bring order to the world.
21: For real, that is a sword that has zero cloaking, zero teleporting, zero ability to affect the mind or inanimate objects – the closest is gets is Spider, which immobilizes people, the better to hit them with its damaging attacks. Even the vitality boost to the wielder isn’t a specific effect powered by the wielder’s own magnified spiritual energy (compare to Enten’s Nishiki or Tobimune’s Suzaku) but rather is an “always-on” power fueled by draining the life force of the world and people around it.
Two things here:
First, note how Chihiro’s contention willfully ignores the lessons he’s spent the entire series up to this point learning. He disregards the lesson he learned from Sojo about how the blades can be attuned to the purpose of slaughter. He disregards the horror he witnessed at the Rakuzaichi and the fear it struck in him that at least this one blade could not possibly have been intended to save lives. He disregards learning about the Malediction and how it led the blades’ maker to try to destroy his own creations. He even disregards Shiba’s testimony from only a few days ago that the initial six enchanted blades were forged to defeat enemies at war. While he doesn’t have as obvious a meltdown upon facing Yura as he did the first time they met, Chihiro nonetheless backslides here into old, comforting bedtime stories about his father’s noble and heroic legacy.
Second, Chihiro knows good and well that the current world is a dangerous mess.
Note how he thinks about the Rakuzaichi even though it long, long precedes the war? Hold that thought for, like, two paragraphs.
Back near the beginning of this arc, he opened Chapter 50 by directly acknowledging that the enchanted blades protected the country during the war, but that Japan is now in “a state of chaos.” Because of his hatred for the Hishaku, however, he can’t contemplate for even a moment that Yura could have suffered from that chaos in a way that radicalized him. Yura and the rest of the Hishaku are monsters – the real kind, not the secretly noble kind – and there’s nothing they could have endured that would even explain their actions, much less justify them!
Underscoring all this self-righteousness, Chihiro flashes to the dead protesters from the very first chapter as well as the Rakuzaichi (the same things he thinks about in that opening to Chapter 50!) and makes the frankly absurd claim that the Hishaku were “behind” all of this, that it’s all their fault, that there’s nothing greater good about any of this, and finally yells a demand for Yura to release the enchanted blade.
I call his claim absurd, of course, because of the two examples Chihiro specifically thinks about, only one of them is even semi-credible while the other is sheer bias. Fair’s fair; the Hishaku weren’t personally stringing up anti-yakuza protesters, but they were – or at least Hatshaku was – backing that yakuza group in some vague way, seemingly lending them some magical support and help with managing local officials in exchange for money. The Rakuzaichi, though? That’s been running for over two hundred years, presided over by a rich, established, powerful sorcerous family clan! The absolute worst the Hishaku, a group in veritable infancy compared to the Sazanami, did regarding the Rakuzaichi is submit an item to it once, but Chihiro himself, even as he makes this accusation of Yura,[22] is working under the auspices of people who fully planned to participate as buyers!
22: And you can tell Chihiro is thinking about the evil of the auction’s existence rather than the dozens if not hundreds of people killed that day because his flashback panel is not to any of the scenes of floral carnage but rather to the auditorium full of would-be buyers waiting calmly for proceedings to start.
That’s all to say, Chihiro is right back to where he was when he first encountered Sojo, shouting accusations rooted in his trauma without even pausing to consider that his opponent might have valid reasoning behind their stance. Well, the pattern of the story is clear on what’s going to come of acting like that!
So, in amidst all this roused temper, Chihiro’s gambit is revealed: use Suzaku’s flames to sever Yura’s connection to the shinuchi via healing while simultaneously burning him to death. And, you know, it’s super-effective! It’s also so grueling that it finally pushes Yura hard enough to reveal himself, and what he reveals is devastating.
Yura’s flashback establishes him as a once-normal young man, one half of a pair of newlyweds[23] who have recently managed to survive the ordeal of living in an area the war occupied.[24] It stands out somewhat that Yura seems to have been a civilian here, not a recently returned soldier, though going into that in too much detail rather begs the question of whether Hokazono’s Japan has been through World War II and subsequently had to restructure the Japanese Imperial Army as the JSDF. Yura’s young and able-bodied, though, so you’d expect he’d face social pressure to march off to defend his country even if there wasn’t active conscription going on, on top of being targeted as a potential combatant if an enemy army came marching through – or especially occupied – his town.
23: The woman could possibly be his fiancée rather than his wife – conflicting evidence mostly revolves around the ring we see her wearing – but I’m confident that, whatever they are to each other, it’s a recent change, and that’s also because of the ring, specifically the POV shot of her admiring it on her finger. In any case, for simplicity’s sake in referring to her in this piece, I’m assuming they’re married.
24: The Viz translation seems to conflict a little here with the language in the Japanese, in ways that make it difficult to say exactly what Yura and his wife have just recently gotten through. Viz uses the terms “war-torn” and “area ravaged by the war” (the radio announcer and Akemura, respectively), while the Japanese term, used by the radio and Akemura alike, translates literally to “formerly occupied territory(/ies).” While I can’t speak to the actual usage of the Japanese term, at least in English there’s a big difference between e.g. a town that got shelled by repeated air raids and a town that was living under occupation! That’s especially the case given the differences we might expect to see between people who only saw the islanders on the battlefield versus those who lived for a time under occupied control.
I hope we get more details on this eventually, but the important point here is that the loss of his wife hit Yura all the harder because of the expectation of peace, and the peace was all the more welcome because of the likely quite harrowing situation the two of them had only just managed to survive.
Back in the present, Yura rejects the responsibility Chihiro is trying to pin on him, and – critically – he does it by invoking the mantra. He doesn’t do it intentionally! It’s spread out over a few different talk bubbles, for one thing, and for another, unless Kunishige or one of the sword bearers told a journalist the mantra during an interview circa the war or something, Yura’s probably never heard the phrase in his life. All the same, in his language, in his rage so rooted in betrayal, he uses the same words, expresses the same expectation: Destroy evil and save the weak.
He brings up the weak – Viz translates it as “the defenseless,” but it’s the same 弱者 jakusha as always – in the line, “The Rakuzaichi was at the forefront of numerous illicit organizations that preyed on the defenseless.” Destroying evil, likewise, is word for word in the question Viz renders as, “Who held the means of eradicating evil…and just disappeared?!” All Yura wanted or expected was for the sword bearers to do exactly what Kunishige’s mantra said they should do. His life went off-track precisely because, after the Malediction, Kunishige himself took that option away from the bearers. Like someone with power hiding from responsibility, he locked the swords in his basement and lived a quiet, happy and small life with his son while, outside of the protective wards he enjoyed, what should have been a newly peaceful era instead spiraled ever further into chaos and disorder.
Yura as an antagonist is a response to so much of what Kagurabachi spent its first hundred chapters having its protagonist and other heroic allies profess. He drags to the forefront all the failings they haven’t let themselves dwell on or admit.
“The swords should be in the hands of the state to ensure the public good,” said Hiyuki. “Yes,” agrees Yura, “So why did they let Kunishige seal them?”
“Because our resources are limited, the Kamunabi sometimes has to compromise with evil for the greater good,” reasoned Ichiki. “Yes,” agrees Yura, “and that’s why the country needs something stronger.”
“People who make katana have a duty to ensure they’re used to destroy evil and save the weak,” said Kunishige. “People who wield katana have a duty to ensure the same,” said Chihiro, and Samura likewise. “Yes,” agrees Yura, and demands to know, “So where the fuck were they?”
Chihiro in Chapter 50 merely leaves it implicit that the country’s current disorder is a direct result of the blades’ influence being removed from it – he says the swords protected the country during the war but, when he jumps to talking about the current state of things, he elides an out-loud articulation of the Point B that connects his Points A and C: “Because after my father sealed them, the swords weren’t there to protect people anymore.” Yura, however, makes this connection explicit and he lays blame. He may not be eviscerating Rokuhira Kunishige and his devotees for the specific crime of abandoning the mantra they claim to follow, but his existence stands as accusation of that all the same.
Another particularly telling thing we see here – again not something I think Yura is consciously aware of – is that, while Chihiro’s flashback to the Rakuzaichi is a panel of all the evil men participating in it, Yura’smention of it is instead underscored by a panel of Mr. Inazuma, one of those weak people who needed to be saved from the evil running rampant after the war.
It would have been so easy to have Chihiro’s panel feature Mr. Inazuma’s sister, too, paralleling his and Yura's grievances, but instead…
In this way, Yura and Mr. Inazuma – real name Yuu[25] – are narratively paralleled: nobodies who stood up to try and fight back against impossible odds after their worlds broke in half. Yura is, functionally, a Yuu who lost the important woman in his life to some bastard group of sorcerers and wasn’t able to get her back. A Yuu whose loved one was simply killed rather than kidnapped, leaving no chance for rescue, no matter how brash or bold. A Yuu, in short, who Chihiro never came for.
25: The similarity in the names could be more pronounced – they don’t have, for example, any shared radicals in the kanji of their names (and Yura even has two to choose from!) – but there’s no shortage of single kanji given names for boys Hokazono could have chosen that wouldn’t have had a first syllable in common with Yura. Might be coincidence, especially if Hokazono hadn't settled on Yura's name yet at the time. But it also might not be.
(The person who does finally come for Yura is a darker figure by far than Chihiro was in saving Yuu, but we’ll get there.)
So, that all said, it’s no wonder that Chihiro’s eyes go so wide and shocked as Yura, in a direct visual callback to Chapter 31, and having spat the words of the mantra right into his face, gives the distraught answer to Chihiro’s distraught question from back then:
“Why did you kill my father?!”
“Your father made the world like this!”
This is an even sharper rebuke in the original language, too. The verb “made” isn’t saying Rokuhira transformed the world or caused it to become the way it is from a preexisting state; it’s “made” in the sense of manufacture or the creation of art. He didn’t make it “like this”; he simply made it, whole and entire. Rokuhira, creator of the miraculous blades, who had all the raw material of a Japan newly at peace after the war at his fingertips, used his twin tools of cowardice and negligence to craft a world in which evil flourishes, a world in which the weak can do nothing but suffer. That’s what Yura means by, “Your father made this world!”[26]
26: Note that Chapter 112’s flashback to this exact panel has a different, more direct translation of the line: “Your father created this world!!” I’d love to see the translation in 104 get revised to this when it comes out in volume-form in English, but given that the English release of Volume 6 didn’t even manage to correct “Makizumi” to “Masumi” the way the Japanese release did, I’m not getting my hopes up.
(…Okay. Okay, I think I’m done waxing poetic about my favorite character.)
Throughout the rest of the sequence, Chihiro remains visibly struck by this burst of emotions from the previously unfailingly collected Yura, but he stays the course, watching Yura burn with an air of resigned sorrow that nonetheless isn’t enough to break his clear-eyed determination.
Note the eyeshine; it does a lot to code this expression as more “positive” than it would be otherwise.
One gets the impression that if he and Samura had succeeded in killing Yura here, Chihiro would have had a fair amount to reflect on and regret, if only in a fairly academic “sad that it came to this” way, but he ultimately wouldn’t have had to change to win – another folding on the heels of the one he just pulled out against Hiruhiko and Samura.
Just as with Hiruhiko and Samura, though, the fight with Yura flows organically[27] into the next confrontation. Because while Chihiro wasn’t convinced by Yura’s words, he wasn’t really the one who needed to be – Yura opened the battle reflecting on how it would “demonstrate his beliefs” to the quietly observing presence of the sword master.
27: Quite horrifyingly so.
And the sword master, unlike Chihiro, is convinced.
As Yura’s body fails him, he thinks, “We were nobody. But we needed a hero,” and Akemura Soga responds, “I understand. I’ll be the hero.”[28] It can’t help but feel like a direct echo of Chihiro agreeing to become the samurai Hakuri needed, as will indeed soon be underscored by Akemura identifying both himself and Chihiro as such samurai. In the meantime, though, Akemura is exactly what Yura asked for in that moment of collapse: someone who holds to the mantra, someone willing to make great sacrifices to enact even greater deeds, someone who isn’t ethically timorous about killing on a broad scale for the sake of bringing peace and stability to the country at large.
28: He uses the word “eiyuu” (英雄) rather than the newer, more pop culture loanword “hiiro” or the very JRPG fantasy “yuusha” – Yura didn’t need a superhero in a spandex suit or an up-and-coming brave; he needed someone larger than life, someone who’d already done great things, a war hero, a legend. There’s a lot of nuance there and the one Yura asks for – and that Akemura answers as – is telling.
To Chihiro, however, as indeed to any reasonably well-adjusted person with qualms about mass murder, Akemura is a nightmare, an embodiment of every secret his father kept, every cloud that ever crossed that sunny man’s face, made all the more horrifying by his invocation of the same mantra that guides Chihiro.
Akemura is unbothered by having carried out a genocide – his rhetoric justifying the slaughter of children is cold, utilitarian, and skin-crawlingly identical to real-life justifications for the same action – and likewise unbothered that some people object to it. Of course they would, he says, it’s not a decision that’s compatible with “mainstream ethics.” That’s fine; he did it so none of them had to live with doing it – or the consequences of failing to – themselves.
What does bother him is Kunishige seeming to have turned away from his own ethos. Akemura espouses Kunishige’s mantra just as readily as Kunishige, Chihiro, or Samura ever did, and he can’t square it with Kunishige’s actions. He expects proactiveness, not reactiveness – the swords were made with a purpose and a failure to pursue that purpose is in itself a betrayal of it. Nowhere does that sting Akemura harder than in finding out that Kunishige’s repudiation of the mantra is so total that the newest enchanted blade’s purpose, as given by its wielder, is to destroy the other enchanted blades.
This is a rather profound verbal error by Chihiro – he inherited the mantra from Kunishige too, after all! But he’s been so thrown by the reveal of the Malediction and the changes he had to adopt as a result of his first battle with Samura that he neglects to mention that his father very much still believed that the purpose of a sword is to destroy evil and save the weak! Instead, he focuses on something wholly unrelated to the mantra his father taught him because he’s come to believe that Enten is basically an expression of his father’s regrets – not a sword to save or protect anyone, but simply a sword meant to destroy other swords.[29]
29: Another misstep: he says Enten is intended to meant to destroy the enchanted blades when the only one he’s ever come into battle intending to destroy is Magatsumi. Destroying Kuregumo is a calculation of necessity, not desire, and indeed, he openly asks Samura to continue using Tobimune to help him. Likewise against Hiruhiko, his thoughts are entirely focused on victory through draw-speed, not breaking Kumeyuri.
Mind you, the narrative has mostly backed that up so far, in that there’s been no doubt cast on Shiba’s – and accordingly Chihiro’s – reevaluation of Enten’s purpose, and indeed that reevaluation did help him win over Samura! The omniscient narration in Chapter 107, too, specifies that defying the Magatsumi is the Enten’s mission and true realm. It’s also worth remembering that Kunishige imparted the mantra to Chihiro before they even started making Enten,[30] so it’s possible Kunishige’s own ideal for swords became somewhat compromised by him suddenly seeing a path to rectifying his past mistakes.
30: Presumably, anyway. Chihiro in the second chapter’s flashback doesn’t even seem to know they have swords in the basement before Kunishige tells him so, nor does Kunishige seem to have had any previous conversations with him about the gravity of making and bearing swords. Shiba will also attest, much later on, that Kunishige “struggled in the darkness with the knowledge of what he’d created” for nearly fifteen years – in other words, right up until the story begins and he has this exact conversation with Chihiro! So, it’s not 100% clear, and there is art reuse that could point in the opposite direction, but Hokazono reuses art all the time, so until we hear otherwise, my assumption is that it’s seeing Chihiro’s sincerity, conscientiousness and resolve that gives his father the final push he needs to start work on Enten.
Even so, I very much doubt it’s a coincidence that Enten becomes defined solely as a weapon meant to destroy Kunishige’s own flawed legacy all of two chapters before Akemura breaks “that” Enten clean in half!
I love the positioning of Akemura’s off-hand here. It feels like such a samurai-by-way-of-kabuki thing.
The strength of the swords is often a stand-in for the resolve of their bearers – we saw that in Chihiro’s fight with Sojo, but especially his second fight with Samura, where cracking Tobimune is a direct reflection of cracking Samura’s resolve. Akemura is completely sure of himself, has thought through all of his decisions and made them with a clear mind – indeed, this is in large part what makes him so terrifying!
Chihiro, though? Well, immediately after telling Akemura that the purpose of Enten is to destroy the other enchanted blades, he does exactlythe opposite of what his father told him to do. Instead of looking at the world with his own two eyes, he willfully shuts his eyes to it: he thinks he’s glad he didn’t know the sword master was related to him and that his own emotional responses to Akemura don’t matter. His own thoughts and beliefs, his own questions, his own experience: all of them are irrelevant, unnecessary, meaningless to the task at hand.
Just like he used Samura as a mental crutch against Hiruhiko’s overtures, here he leans on his father’s desires, his father’s mission. But just as Samura did, Akemura claims to be a servant of Kunishige’s mantra – he quotes it word-for-word! – and just as Samura had, Akemura has thought about what the mantra demands of him personally. Even if Kunishige, as Akemura now believes, abandoned the ethos he imparted to the sword bearers, Akemura has made that ethos his own; he follows it now because he believes it to be correct, not as an expression of his faith in his brother-in-law. Chihiro, by contrast, in this moment of terror and desperation, uses his father’s will as an excuse not to think for himself.
The result when he tries that tactic is always the same: devastating loss. Where Chihiro survived Sojo by way of Kamunabi intervention and Samura by Samura’s own mercy, Akemura shows him no such lenience. When he finally gets serious with Chihiro, he snaps Enten with a single clutched-up sword stroke and then stabs Chihiro right through the heart with Magatsumi. It’s only Chihiro’s earlier convincing of Samura that means the story doesn’t end in this exact moment, and while his failure here doesn’t cause Samura to have second thoughts and revert back to despair and abnegation, the failure still has a cost. The price of surviving this defeat is exactly what Chihiro just fought so hard to win: Samura’s future.
In the aftermath of this, the most thorough hammering yet, Chihiro returns to his roots: the forge. In doing so, he returns yet again to his father’s adjuration to see the world through his own eyes. This time, though, instead of simply remembering his father saying it, Chihiro thinks the words himself, in his own way and in his own voice.[31] This is, of course, an important part of the story’s overarching pattern in how it handles Chihiro’s development, but there’s one more thing I want to examine before moving into the conclusion: how Chihiro’s ability to self-reflect contrasts with Akemura.
31: In keeping with the weight of the moment and Chihiro’s general levels of seriousness and formality, he switches kanji for “eye.” Kunishige uses 目 me, which is a casual, everyday word that means eye in both the literal sense (eye, eyeball, comments about someone having nice eyes, etc.) and the metaphorical one (vision, perception, one’s perspective, insight, etc.). Chihiro, conversely, uses 眼 me, which is used in medical, scientific, or otherwise technical contexts, but can also be used in a formal register to emphasize the metaphorical aspect of perception and insight. Shiba uses the latter when talking about The Rokuhira Eyes, for example.
In Chapter 112, in between the scene in the bar and Chihiro returning to the forge, there’s a quick cut-away to Akemura. He’s still feeling the sting of the wound Samura gave him, and reflecting back on Samura’s last words to him: that the war cursed all of them, but that Chihiro lifted the curse on Samura and will do likewise for Akemura himself. Akemura didn’t like the line when Samura first delivered it and is no more comfortable with it now! He rejects the idea that he was cursed by the war; instead, he thinks that it taught him a lesson.
He doesn’t articulate exactly what that lesson was, but the important thing for my purposes here is that this is not the first time he’s rejected something Samura has tried to tell him. When Samura’s flames went black in their confrontation above the Kamunabi’s headquarters, he told Akemura that countless people who didn’t deserve it would die because of Akemura’s judgement – Akemura returned, coldly, that, no, those people not deserving death was Samura’s judgement.
The word the two use is 裁量 sairyou, which doesn’t mean judgement in the sense of a court’s decision, but rather a more personal deliberation; it can also be translated as “discretion.” Basically, Samura is saying that Akemura’s intent to kill is discretionary; it’s not an inevitability or a requirement the way Akemura is trying to frame it, but rather a decision Akemura is choosing to make based on his opinion and beliefs – and if he wanted to, he could choose otherwise! Akemura, with rather less eloquence than he managed against his nephew, basically responds, “no u.”
In this, we see what will almost certainly prove to be the key difference between Akemura and Chihiro: Chihiro is capable of self-reflection, of questioning and correcting his beliefs. We saw this as far back as Sojo, and indeed, it’s a frequent marker of Chihiro’s victories that he’s able to cause his opponents to reassess themselves as well! We saw that with Sojo, too, as well as Kyora and most especially Samura.
Akemura is not willing to self-reflect, not willing to budge an inch on his beliefs. That makes him a terror, certainly, and the Magatsumi along with him, but it also marks him as rigid. When Chihiro behaves the same way, it inevitably sets him up for a fall! The same can be said for all of his opponents who, in being unable to bend, wind up breaking instead. Akemura is (barring some improbably productive personal growth spurred on by his situationship with Yura, anyway!) heading down the same path.
Really, it’s simple metallurgy: the more rigid the material, the more brittle, and the more brittle, the more likely to fracture under stress.
Conclusion
True to its metallurgic metaphors, in Kagurabachi, flexibility is a sign of strength compared to the rigidity of minds that have become closed to change or correction. I think a reason Sojo impressed so many readers early on, remaining quite popular even now, is because the way he straddles that divide - and the impact of that duality on Chihiro! – feels so much more nuanced than what many had come to expect from Shonen Jump battle manga.
See, there’s a strain of anti-intellectualism in a lot of classic Shonen Jump manga, and one of the more beguiling ways this manifests is in valorizing unthinking, mule-headed resolve – as I described it in another piece touching on this idea, “young men flipping the bird to a logic that dictates their defeat.” That’s all well and good, but it bleeds over into a distrust/disdain of characters who are more rational, or more willing to second-guess themselves, in ways that I find troublesome (and certainly tiresome too!) in light of the ascendant anti-intellectualism of the U.S.’s current political situation. This makes Kagurabachi, with its framing of ideological adaptability as not just a heroic virtue but a moral necessity, quite refreshing!
Certainly the series is not immune to narrative flattery of the strong-willed – its framing of Sazanami Kyora in the moment of his death is a textbook example! All the same, though, Hokazono treats a strong determination as not inherently morally good, as seen with Samura Seiichi’s stubborn, guilt-driven rejection of the future and the terrifying conviction that led Akemura Soga to commit genocide. A strong will is important! That’s the whole point of the folding half of Chihiro’s fold-forge characterization! But a truly strong and admirable person is one who can hold true to their beliefs while also being open to the possibility that their beliefs are wrong – one who sees the world with clear, open eyes and uses what they see to make active, informed decisions about how best to live.
That is a far better way to live than holding tight, eyes screwed defiantly closed, to a gut instinct or childhood lesson and calling it conviction.
Looking ahead to Kagurabachi’s just-begun Part 2, much of the fallout of Chihiro’s defeat remains to be explored! He’s had a fresh reminder that he cannot turn his brain off and try to steer himself through his stormy world on filial piety alone, but while an undefeated Sojo simply returned to his base and pre-existing plans and an undefeated Samura enforced a top-down armistice, the undefeated Akemura is being exactly as proactive as his interpretation of Kunishige’s mantra demands. That being the case, who knows what the new status quo is going to be by the time Chihiro is ready to tackle the problem again? Who knows how many more times he’ll have to repeat the hammering and folding process before he stands a chance against Akemura?
Personally, my hope is that we’ll see some of the story’s other characters get to partake in this narrative process as well. Many of them have conflicts and flaws written into their current situations that could provide a tremendous amount of grist for development via the model of alternating between holding to their beliefs and refining them.
For example, how many times will Shiba have to see Chihiro lying dead before he changes his approach? Will Hakuri ever have a major crisis over people being killed right in front of him given that he resolved to never let a life slip through his hands again? And will there ever be a conflict between that resolve to save lives and his other motivation of “proving his value” to Chihiro, given how easily Chihiro takes lives? How will Iori handle the contradictions inherent to her motivations and likely character arc, protecting her normal school life by wielding an enchanted blade, and harmonizing with that blade when she wants nothing more than to see it broken? How is Hiyuki going to reconcile her belief in the state’s monopoly on legitimized violence[32] when the state has been subordinated by an openly xenophobic mass murderer?
32: See Max Weber’s “Politics as a Vocation,” 1919, or simply look up the phrase “monopoly on violence.”
And what about the villains? Hiruhiko in particular seems like a strong candidate for introducing to the fold-forge pattern of character development, as Yura obliquely suggested with his comment that experiencing the world and meeting Rokuhira Chihiro would be good for the kid. Indeed, you could argue that Hiruhiko has been through a round of fold-forging already, given that he doubles down on his beliefs at the theater and gets a useable Kumeyuri for his perseverance, only to be driven to inconsolable waterworks when his “student of freedom” shtick doesn’t pan out at the hotel. In that light, he ran the fold-forge rotation in opposition to Chihiro, a pattern I’ll be very curious to see if holds in their future encounters!
It also strikes me as no accident that the arc that did so much to establish how crucial Yura was to the Hishaku[33] is the arc that ended with Yura removed from play. Even if their leader’s possession is at least somewhat willing, it’s anyone’s guess how the rest of the Hishaku are going to settle into or around Akemura’s newly reorganized Kamunabi. There’s the question, too, of whether getting a flash of insight into Yura’s grudge will change how Chihiro engages with the Hishaku, and while that feels pretty plausible for someone like Hiruhiko – Chihiro might be well-served by asking why Hiruhiko had to kill someone as a toddler! – we still haven’t seen Chihiro face one of his father’s actual attackers. If he gets PTSD flashbacks just from meeting the Hishaku’s leader and mastermind, I can’t wait to see how he takes meeting their pine tree sorcerer. I expect it’ll put a pretty severe crimp on any attempts at empathy!
33: Exemplified by Yukisada’s cult-like reverence towards Yura’s words and Hokuto calling Yura the irreplaceable leader the Hishaku all swore allegiance to.
Getting even further afield from Chihiro’s circle of enemies and allies, there are two whole sword bearers we still haven’t met, old compatriots to whom Akemura may not be very kindly inclined if he holds them responsible for their willingness to be retired from blade-wielding.[34] I wonder likewise about the future dispositions of people like Izaru (antagonistic to Kunishige in the backstory and Chihiro now, yet with clear reservations about helping Akemura murder people over ideological disagreements!) or Kazane (the Anti-Kuregumo unit’s sole survivor, who knelt on the shore and resolved that enchanted blades should not be allowed to exist in the world).
34: Him regarding the eternal contracts as a “loose end” he needs to take care of is a particularly bad sign for them. Still, while he could theoretically just kill his original body to break those contracts – he’s got a perfectly serviceable new body, after all! – leaving the other two bearers as a tragically untold story, I don’t see that in the cards for Hiruhiko, much less Iori.
And aaaaall this without the story even hinting about the motivations of the islanders whose appearance triggered this whole story! I can’t imagine a work that combines a largely unexplained backstory war with themes about facing uncomfortable truths and connecting the past to the future will let that war’s mysteries stay unaddressed forever (as we now see with our new arc being an arc about that war). Indeed, I will think considerably less of Kagurabachi if it goes the route of creating and burying an entire nation just as the foundation for a story about an all-Japanese cast. While it wouldn’t surprise me if Part 2 is mostly dedicated to dealing with Akemura’s rise to power and the targets he will surely choose, if we are to have a Part 3, I wonder if Chihiro might turn his eyes to the victims of the past by then?
Here’s hoping, and certainly if the fold-forge pattern of the story holds, we can guess at how Chihiro’s response to them is likely to play out! Suffice to say, I look forward to continuing the journey with him.
Readers, he IS my favorite Shonen Jump lead of all time.
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If you don't mind me asking, how did you learned/practised to write your metas? They are very well structured and thought out, as for me!
A combination of practice, rewrites, and reading other peoples’ stuff – and thank you very much; I’m glad you find them well-built!
So, I was always pretty good at writing essays – I was a voracious reader when I was a kid, one of those no social life nerds who always had my nose in a book. Mostly I was reading fantasy and YA horror, but I had just enough morbid interests to sometimes read exposé journalism and Wikipedia articles about historical atrocities. Even these days, when my reading is almost exclusively manga, I do still read a fair amount of big journalistic essays (and Wikipedia articles!) because they seem interesting, or just in the name of keeping up with goings-on in the world.
Outside of general interest reading, I have a deep wariness of talking out of my white ass about things online. I do my best to research things before I write about them, both for fanfic and for meta purposes, and that does sometimes lead me down rabbit holes of e.g. explanatory reports or academic texts.[1] That gives me a measure of exposure to ways of formatting and structuring different types of non-fiction writing – you can definitely see a difference in my levels of formality between lengthy but relatively casual ask replies to full-length, standalone essays!
1: Some examples of things I’ve read to varying depths for BNHA meta: a report put together for Congress about Aum Shinrikyo in the wake of the Tokyo subway sarin gas attacks; a global survey of various countries’ criminal justice systems; a journal article on the evolving perception of mass protest in Japan. Research for fanfic tends to be a bit lighter – more quick searches to fill gaps than in-depth reads to inform the entire basis of a project – but even that does sometimes get me skimming digital copies of books on e.g. the development of Japanese stage theater post-war.
The other factor is, of course, simply that I’ve been doing this for a long time. I don’t think I was writing meta analysis all the way back in my earliest fandom days (the late 90s, for the record), but pretty much as soon as I hit Livejournal and forum-like web communities in the early aughts, I was interspersing my fanfic with posts about character analysis and prevalent fandom attitudes.[2] Those early posts were surely much more off-the-cuff, less polished, and considerably more inflammatory than meta I write these days! But a lot of it does simply come down to that timeframe: I’ve had a lot of practice because I’ve been reading and writing fandom meta for twenty-five years!
2: The main reason I have such a strong disinterest in getting drawn into fandom arguments is that I got all that out of my system twenty years ago! Flame wars over other peoples’ bad and wrong opinions are entirely too stressful for my blood, thanks.
So I think that’s what most of it is: I’ve been doing it for a long time and I do a lot of research first because I don’t like being Wrong On The Internet.
Also though, it must be said that one reason my meta feels pretty polished (if I may flatter myself by taking your word for it that it does, anon) is that I’m not a very timely writer. I don’t respond to plot events or asks quickly. I’m much more comfortable with retrospective analysis than meta about developing arcs. I’m also a very train-of-thought writer, so my first drafts have a lot of talking in circles, extraneous footnotes, acidic barbs, and responses to hypothetical counterarguments. The extemporized talking in circles has to be collated and structured to be persuasive rather than just ranty; the footnotes, barbs, and paranoid responses to potential disagreement have to be examined for relevance. I often end up cutting quite a lot! So if my meta feels well-structured and well-thought-out, well, that’s a reflection of the fact that I prioritize those things far more than I do timeliness!
Finally, there’s likely a bit of it that’s just learning to format for the platform I'm posting on. For example, I used to put all my footnotes at the end of posts until a kind anon asked if I would consider scattering them throughout to spare the beleaguered souls reading my long-ass ramblings on mobile who couldn’t just open the post in two different tabs or use a search to quickly jump back and forth. My current style of footnotes is a result of some experimentation to try to fulfill that request. When I eventually manage to get a blog up and running, some proper Wordpress outfit that will actually let you embed links to and from footnotes properly, I’ll likely go back to having footnotes all at the end.
Thank you for the compliment and also the ask! As with many questions of this sort, the answer is that there’s no quick lifehack; it takes practice and time. But putting in the work and the hours is a lot easier when it’s something you enjoy! So if you want a few takeaway tips, anon, I suppose these are mine:
Seek out examples of the kind of writing you want to do that involve stories or topics that interest you; this will make reading them rewarding in its own right on top of giving you some working models to use for yourself.
All meta writing is, on some level, persuasive writing. You’re trying to convince the reader to accept your perspective, your interpretation, the outcome you’re anticipating, the character motivations you believe are in play, etc. That being the case, try to put yourself in the shoes of a casual reader. Don’t assume they have the same knowledge base you have, be that cultural awareness, career experience, or even just knowing a story down to the smallest detail because you’ve read it seventeen times. Structure your meta in a way that gives that reader what they need to follow your argument from Point A to Point Z without getting lost or stuck.
Practice practice practice. Try jotting down observations and sharing them with friends, or just writing them down for yourself when you have them. If you particularly like or dislike some aspect of a story, interrogate the feeling some! Try to articulate what it is specifically that led you to feel that way. Chapter/episode reviews (personal or shared) can be a great way to practice active engagement with a source as opposed to just taking everything at face value, and that’s a critical skill for both good analysis and also not being taken as a mark by bad actors in real life.
This is more a personal bugbear than a major tip about writing well-organized persuasive writing, but if you’re going to do fandom analysis, it is so important to learn the difference between Watsonian and Doylist arguments. If you don’t already know the terms, look them up. It’s the fastest way I know to unlock the analyzing of stories and ensure productive engagement with the analysis of others.
One of the things that makes going back through the series again very fun is that I really only ever read through it once! Unlike BNHA Core, which I read through multiple times over the course of the last few years (excluding the second war material, which I've reread in bits but never in full), I pretty much just read Vigs as it was releasing. I’d duck back in to look up specific things when writing meta, then read along for a few chapters for fun, but I’ve never done a dedicated reread prior to the Patreon posts.
That is to say, I don’t know the material well enough to have an answer off the top of my head, in part because I don’t really remember Vigilantes in terms of clear arcs – clear individual story beats, yeah, characters, for sure, but not so much arcs! But, luckily for the purposes of questions like this, BNHA’s wiki is crazy comprehensive and easy to reference. And but so…
Naruhata Lockdown: For Tsukauchi’s much awaited hard turn into antagonistsville and for the series finally going all-in on what its title had been promising all along: Koichi as an illegal hero and all the complications and confrontations with the setting's powers-that-be that entailed. Also for Koichi’s material with Six – not so much the fight itself, which I recall finding pretty contrived and overlong, but the unimpeachable emotional beats. Also for Soga mouthing off at Tsukauchi and Pop singing for Six.
Underground Masquerade: For the absolutely hilarious stuff with Mirko and Rappa, and for showing that O’Clock, despite how clean-cut he looks in costume, was very much still Oguro Iwao. That Knuckleduster persona – especially the street smarts – didn’t come out of nowhere! It’s just a rougher, more aggressive version of the person he already was.
First Queen Bee arc: For the great father/daughter confrontation and the very fun concert material. Also, just comparing the respective anime concert scenes, I’m not going to claim a remixed department store jingle is a flat-out better song than “Hero Too”…but I will 100% claim that “Marukane Store Song REMIX” is better in that it’s a more apt interpretation of its respective manga material.
That said, I suspect I’m also going to get a good amount of enjoyment out of going through the Tokyo Sky Tree material again. It’s a part of the story I’ve had no meta-writing reasons to revisit since I first read it, but I’m looking forward to it! I remember the rehabilitation of Captain Celebrity as being very solid material.
That’s about all that jumps out at me for now. Thanks for the ask!
Hello! I've been thinking about starting Kagurabachi after seeing your metas. Would you mind sharing what got you interested in this manga👀?
Hello and thank you! I hope you’ll give it a try! For myself, I kind of got into in two phases? I first started reading it in December of 2024, but the investment really kicked into high gear just about a year later. If you’ll indulge me, I’ll tell you about what prompted both.
As best I can reconstruct things, the series first started popping up on my radar when a bunch of people I knew/knew of through BNHA started talking about the series circa the climax of its second arc, in July of 2024. At the time I was still very burned on BNHA, which had killed Shigaraki only two months prior and was wrapping up its tremendously dispiriting epilogue, and so I was not in a hurry to jump on a new Shonen Jump battle series that might break my heart. As the story was still pretty new, I thought it hadn’t really run long enough to prove itself one way or the other, and the biggest talking points I was seeing – that the first arc villain was incredible and that the second arc was doing The Todoroki Plot better than BNHA did The Todoroki Plot[1] – didn’t do much to sway me because I don’t take Shonen Bros on Twitter seriously when they’re screaming about GOATs and I was never all that invested in The Todoroki Plot to begin with!
1: While there are obvious similarities, I wonder, at this juncture, what the basis for that judgement was other than, “There’s no talk of forgiveness and reconciliation for the abusive family members and we like that better!”
Eventually December rolled around, and it brought with it two things: the Twitter Bros starting to talk very excitedly about backstory war crimes, and the widespread posting of this particularly self-evidently great spread:
I’ve long had a weakness for bird-themed powers, so while the art in Kagurabachi had been looking great when I’d see it in the wild, a massive city-spanning owl face materialized in the sky was particularly well-suited to grabbing my attention!
I also always have some interest in manga that purports to touch on the idea of Japanese war crimes, especially in a publishing environment like Weekly Shonen Jump, and while I retain some caution and reserved judgement about Kagurabachi’s handling of that element thus far, just seeing it raised as a point of discussion did pique my interest!
I read the series for a good portion of its run without falling head over heels for it – the first two arcs certainly have their strengths, but the first time I really felt what I would call interest in a character didn’t happen until well into the third arc, when main character Chihiro’s adult guardian is depicted as wrestling painfully with a difficult choice between wanting to protect Chihiro and recognizing his agency.
Not too very long later, the story impressed me by being willing to spend, by its own fast-paced standards, a downright exorbitant amount of time fleshing out a really compelling father/daughter conflict, a plotline that served to further endear me to Chihiro by having him staunchly on the side of giving the daughter all the knowledge she needed to make her own choice when she’d spent much of her life being buffeted around by her father making decisions and keeping secrets from her “for her own good.” I ran out of patience with male characters keeping secrets from female characters “for their own good” ten years ago,[2] so I reeeeaaaally appreciated Kagurabachi being willing to take that stance! And the daughter was a really welcome addition to the series’s fairly limited female cast, too, particularly in how much she looked set to stick around in a more major way than most of KB’s women had up to that point.
2: I place the blame for this squarely on Cardcaptor Sakura: Clear Card, by the way.
What really and truly won me over, though – what made me tick over from “solid but casual enjoyment” to “I’ve saved a hundred pieces of fanart off of Twitter and Pixiv in the last two days” – was the series giving its overarching villain, Yura, a real showcase. I am, of course, an incurable Villain Appreciator, but Yurahadn’t done much for me initially – he was a bit too smooth and self-controlled for my tastes, as I have limited time for flawlessly Smooth Operator villains.
Because I am such an incurable Villain Appreciator, however, it doesn’t take much to win me over! In this case, it took Yura’s façade cracking into mundane frustration over the antics of one of his allies, taking a bunch of injuries fighting heroic characters, and rolling up the sleeves of his now heavily blood-stained white dress shirt to just below his elbows[3] with the attitude of a man who’s just clocked in for a shift at the Locking The Fuck In factory.
3: Along with bird imagery, I also have a weakness for three-quarter-length shirt sleeves.
(Yura is on the far left; his problem-causing coworker, completely great from the moment he was introduced, is the one down an arm and having a laughing fit.)
Too, this whole arc benefitted a lot from introducing the remaining members of Yura’s villain group, and it turns out I love every single one of them! Yura managed to hold my attention through the rest of the arc, only getting cooler and scarier and more intriguing, until finally he dropped some crucial hints about his backstory and fell into a very fraught situationship with another major villain.
That chapter is what drove me to spend a weekend binging my way through a full series reread and writing situationship fanfic – in mid-December, just about a year after I started reading it! And now I like pretty much every character (or at least I don’t dislike any of them[4]) and Chihiro has become my favorite Shonen Jump lead of all time.
4: Though true to form for me, alas, the five most popular ships in the fandom are, to the last, ships I have minimal-to-negative interest in.
So to sum up: likeable characters headed up by an uncommonly great lead, a story that gets better and better the longer it runs, and incredibly ambitious, creative visual composition to highlight action chops so good they won over a gal (me) who doesn’t give two shits about action.
Also Chihiro’s signature magic power is spirit energy goldfish that are deeply emotionally poignant while also frequently giving him the aura of a goldfish-themed slasher killer. Where else are you going to get that?
Now available to both free and paid members, 16K words about Chihiro's back-and-forth development between meeting his antagonists with showcases of resolve and with moments of growth. Read it on Patreon for free now or find some excerpts below the cut to tide you over until I post it here next week!
Get more from Stillness in Green on Patreon
From "Folding and Hammering in the Rakuzaichi Arc: Sazanami Kyora and Kagari Hiyuki"—
One of the first things this arc establishes is Chihiro’s terror that an enchanted blade could be used to take innocent lives. This particular dimension of concern for his father’s legacy was present in the material with Sojo, but less clearly articulated. At that time, Chihiro seemed to feel more possessive of Kunishige’s life and works, more concerned with what they meant to him personally – it was Shiba and Azami’s conversation that highlighted the danger to Kunishige’s reputation with the broader public. But Sojo’s ability to utilize Kuregumo to such dangerous effect haunts Chihiro – a specific visual motif of ocean waves, one that’s repeatedly associated with this fear and that we’ll see several times in this arc, makes its first appearance in Chihiro’s elevator conversation with Hakuri. He has an idea, now, of what it really means for evil men to take hold of the blades.
This points to an interesting dimension of Chihiro as a character and a conflict that is still evolving in the story as of this writing: while Chihiro’s a good person who wants to help others, he is also profoundly driven by his desire to preserve his father’s image as a hero, both in his own mind and to the public eye. He frequently cites the mantra as something he’s responsible to as a sword wielder, but his personal motivations are less about being a force for good in the world than they are protecting his father’s legacy. The two goals coincide in the early portions of the story, but begin to diverge as Chihiro learns more and more about the war and the world outside of his fishbowl. That will become a particular issue in the third arc, but the Rakuzaichi arc is laying plenty of groundwork!
From "Folding and Hammering in the Sword Bearer Assassination Arc (Part 2): Yura and Soga Akemura"—
Immediately after telling Akemura that the purpose of Enten is to destroy the other enchanted blades, Chihiro does exactly the opposite of what his father told him to do. Instead of looking at the world with his own two eyes, he willfully shuts his eyes to it: he thinks he’s glad he didn’t know the sword master was related to him and that his own emotional responses to Akemura don’t matter. His own thoughts and beliefs, his own questions, his own experience: all of them are irrelevant, unnecessary, meaningless to the task at hand.
Just like he used Samura as a mental crutch against Hiruhiko’s overtures, here he leans on his father’s desires, his father’s mission. But just as Samura did, Akemura claims to be a servant of Kunishige’s mantra – he quotes it word-for-word! – and just as Samura had, Akemura has thought about what the mantra demands of him personally. Even if Kunishige, as Akemura now believes, abandoned the ethos he imparted to the sword bearers, Akemura has made that ethos his own; he follows it now because he believes it to be correct, not as an expression of his faith in his brother-in-law. Chihiro, by contrast, in this moment of terror and desperation, uses his father’s will as an excuse not to think for himself.
The result when he tries that tactic is always the same: devastating loss.
From "Conclusion"—
There’s a strain of anti-intellectualism in a lot of classic Shonen Jump manga, and one of the more beguiling ways this manifests is in valorizing unthinking, mule-headed resolve – as I described it in another piece touching on this idea, “young men flipping the bird to a logic that dictates their defeat.” That’s all well and good, but it bleeds over into a distrust/disdain of characters who are more rational, or more willing to second-guess themselves, in ways that I find troublesome (and certainly tiresome too!) in light of the ascendant anti-intellectualism of the U.S.’s current political situation. This makes Kagurabachi, with its framing of ideological adaptability as not just a heroic virtue but a moral necessity, quite refreshing!
You can find some more excerpts in my previous shilling post, here. Otherwise, keep an eye out for the full post here next week. <3
Thank you for the thoughts about Vigilantes! I was a big fan when the manga was still being released, and reading your analysis while coming back to the anime has been an absolute treat. How do you feel about 6? He was never my favorite, even before a subset of the fandom soured my feelings towards him, but I'm curious to hear your opinion!
Thank you very much! Hoping to get back into those analyses soon, myself, and I hope you’ll continue to enjoy them at that time.
As to Six, I like him quite a bit! Have some scattered thoughts below the cut.
(Disclaimer: Contains a modest degree of BNHA Core slander, if that's any part of what soured you on Six. Also may contain inaccuracies as a result of being based on my memory of Six from my single readthrough of the series as it was being published compared to the several exhaustive rereads I've done of the main series.)
O: I find Six's understated tragedy to be very compelling – that he never was a child with no identity, just one who, due to his particular strain of facial agnosia, struggled to develop a sense of self in a way that made him convenient for AFO and Ujiko, so they did what they will do and turned a kid with significant but surpassable problems into a monster. I really wish we had any idea of when they actually got their hands on him! Like, he's pretty clearly school-aged when we get that shot of the little "doll" Six looking in a mirror at a reflection of himself he can't see, and I assume that (at least if you take late-series BNHA as canon for Vigilantes) he's one of their orphanage kids, but I'd love to know if he's an orphan because e.g. his parents died or because his parents found his agnosia to be too troublesome to deal with so they gave him up/neglected him until the state removed him from their custody.
O: I love that Six, despite his incredibly flippant posturing, has all these deeply felt emotions of yearning and resentment, envy and admiration. He’s got a lot of emotional palette in common with All For One, appropriately enough, especially in his envy of people who have the life he wants for himself, but his responses to other people feel a lot more genuine and unfiltered compared to AFO’s suffocating layers of solipsism and comic book demon lord affectations. I also don’t remember him having AFO’s profound possessiveness of others – Six may resent others for having things he wants, but the way he expresses that is by trying to mimic them, building himself into a simulacrum because he thinks if he copies someone well enough, then obviously the rest – the relationships, the successful career, the happiness – will naturally fall into place. AFO tries to get what he wants by locking people in vaults until they submit; Six tries to get what he wants by cuckoo-ing his way into peoples’ good graces.(1) Ultimately, I think that's much more compelling than AFO's rather shallow treatment.
1: In the way of a cuckoo, of course, this does sometimes involve trying to murder the bird already in the nest.
O: I like that the main trio of Vigilantes all have such different responses to Six. Knuckleduster, being the way that he is, doesn't really give a shit about who Six is or why the guy is so hung up on him, nor does he waste any time or sympathy on some maniac trying to kill him/Koichi/a bunch of innocent people. Pop (to the extent that you read Koichi's hallucination of her in the last battle as meaningfully reflective of the real Kazuho, and I do) has got every reason in the world to hate his guts and hold a grudge, and she doesn't not do that, but she still made a connection with him as Rokuro, one that was a lot more real than I think he was expecting it to be! The fact that her song made him cry - genuinely made him cry, not a show of crocodile tears to win her over! - left her with a degree of empathy for him despite everything he'd go on to do to her, and I love that beat of her singing for him, not for Koichi, right at the end.
And as for Koichi...
O: I disliked a lot of Six and Koichi’s last battle, but it was always about the power mechanics and pacing, never about the emotional beats. I love what Six pulls out of Koichi, what he’s able to – as Koichi’s ultimate antagonist – draw Koichi into demonstrating. Six and Koichi’s last fight is one of the things I point to to demonstrate how goddamn awful Deku’s approach to Shigaraki is, how judgmental and entitled and self-righteous.
I’m sure Deku fans and defenders of BNHA’s ending would argue with me that Deku “saved Shigaraki’s soul” or whatever, whereas Six went out with joyous spite in his heart, still very much a Villain, and that's Bad and Wrong. But like, firstly, I think it’s important that Six does go out on basically his own terms, having found some measure of personal satisfaction in ensuring that someone will remember him, whereas Shigaraki goes out with a sense of deep ambivalence, more resigned and trying to make the best of Deku’s victory than truly at peace with his loss.
Secondly, I just think Koichi’s attitude about the whole thing is so much better! It’s bullshit that Deku makes no effort to help Shigaraki separable from his attempts to understand Shigaraki – he’s not obligated to tell you his whole backstory as a prerequisite for you treating him like a human being, you little green twit!! – and thus Koichi, whose whole attitude to Six can be summed up as, “Woah, hey, let’s calm down and get you to a hospital, okay?” comes off so indescribably better and more heroic in comparison that it’s difficult to put words around.
Basically, Koichi is a perfect parallel of Knuckleduster: he doesn't waste time trying to figure out the maniac obsessed with and trying to kill him because it genuinely doesn't matter to him why Six is acting this way. But where it doesn't matter to KD because Six is still a Villain, dangerous and needing to be subdued, it doesn't matter to Koichi because Six is still a person, needing to be calmed down and helped. Six allows Koichi to demonstrate what "his" heroism looks like, and Koichi's heroism is beautiful, simple and empathetic and true.
That's all to say, I appreciate Six for being an actually functional antagonist for Koichi and the rest in ways Shigaraki and the League (through no fault of their own!) aren't for Deku and his cadre.
O: I love the child imagery in Vigilantes, and moreover, I love it so much more than the same beats in the core series. Vigilantes got there first, it did it better, and it makes me so preemptively annoyed that the anime-onlies are going to think Vigilantes is just ripping that imagery off from BNHA Core.[2]
2: The truth, of course, is that they’re both ripping it off of Chainsaw Man, which does it better than either of them.
(Apologies for the extended slagging of the main series I'm about to do, but I want to establish why I loved this moment in Vigilantes despite having nothing but disdain for it in the main series. I loved it from the moment Vigs debuted it, of course, but I've only developed more appreciation for it in light of seeing how much worse it could have been done.)
See, the child imagery in the main series is basically just an extension of Horikoshi’s wretched late-series turn towards valorizing “shoulder-patting heroism.” It’s evoking these tragic “what ifs” about how everything could have been different if only the (three, hyper-specific, connected to the main character) Villains could have had someone there to encourage them when they were younger, but those what-ifs don’t mean anything. They’re fundamentally built on false premises.
“Wow, what if Ochaco and Toga could have connected as children?” Well, what if they had? How would that have changed anything? What could a four-year-old Ochaco have done about the profound abuse Toga was suffering at the hands of no fewer than three Responsible Adults in her life?
“Wow, if only Izuku could have been there to reach out a hand to Tenko when he needed it!” Okay, except the real Midoriya is even now using that hand to punch the real Shimura into ashes because he's only capable of reaching out to crying children, not grown men, so what does that cutesy child imagery even prove?
“Wow, if only Touya and Shouto could have had this talk sooner.” Yeah, wow, if only they oh wait, Touya already had a kid brother to talk to and it didn’t solve shit because it’s not on toddlers to bring salvation to other toddlers.
Would it have been okay to leave Eri with the Shie Hassaikai if there’d just been some other kid there to comfort her after each time Overhaul got done cutting her up? Of course not, but that’s pretty much what late-series BNHA is saying – all across the endgame and epilogue, but especially in these Sad Cute Child Imagine Spots.
Aggravatingly, it would actually be more emotional resonant if BNHA would just let those moments play as-is! It is meaningful that Ochaco is talking to Toga! It is meaningful that the Todoroki family are finally connecting![3] But it’s meaningful because it’s happening now, in spite of everything that’s come before and is yet to come after. Trying to make it about how sad it is that this couldn’t happen when they were young is just treating child abuse as some kind of inevitable, unavertable natural disaster that children should band together to help one another endure rather than laying the blame where it deserves to be: on the adults abusing them.
3: It is not meaningful that Deku is committing psychic assault on Shigaraki to get him to reveal a truth Shigaraki would happily have just told him if he'd bothered to ask during e.g. the first war arc just so he can find out Shigaraki's secret truth before annihilating him. Fuck Deku for real.
Conversely, nothing in the scene of Six and Koichi playing together tries to suggest that maybe everything would have been fine if only there was someone there when Six was young to pat his shoulder and tell him everything was going to be fine. It wouldn’t have been fine, and so that’s not what Vigilantes is using that imagery to say.
Unlike in the main series, what the audience sees is not just the actual conversation that's actually having except with a Cute Child Filter slathered over it in a cheap play for emotional resonance. Instead, it's a combination of Six’s crisping brain hallucinating and Koichi’s unflagging desire to just be there – with Six, for Six – until the “real heroes” come along to fix everything and save them. Them playing together with dolls is invoking themes of companionship and commonality: their shared immaturity, shared desire to emulate those they admire, shared lack of place in the “real” world. It’s lovely and transient and heartbreaking because they’re not children and heroes are not going to come and save the day, but just for that moment, Six feels like he’s being seen and connected to, not as a false identity, but as his true faceless, formless self.
This connection is, I think, what allows Six to be satisfied with leaving a mark on Koichi – because Koichi saw him, because Koichi was there, then Koichi knows enough that the scar will have some meaning. Where BNHA's child imagery is about how sad it is that what's happening now couldn't have happened then, then maybe all this could have been avoided, the Vigilantes child imagery is about how, even if Koichi can’t ultimately save Six and maybe never could have, what's happening now still has meaning and worth. That layer of unreality that depicts a deeper truth is what makes the child imagery poignant where BNHA's use is lazy, shallow, and, ultimately, hollow.
...Which I appreciate is a lot of talking around Six as much as it is about him. But it is a thought I have when asked, "How do you feel about Six?" and so I dutifully provide it.
hiiiii are you taking fanfic commissions? i really liked how you wrote lady nagant and nemoto in moon shot aim and really wanted to see more of that >.< they are my beloved rarepair
Shamefully belated for an ask of this specific nature, but I had Kagurabachi meta burning a hole in my brain since Christmas and was in no mental place to try to juggle that with commissioned fanfic. Now that I’ve finally gotten it out of my system, though, I can in better conscience turn back to this ask.
So first off, thank you very much! I'm really happy to hear you liked that story!! Like, I've always known it was such a niche fucking concept for a fic – too much about Lady N for someone who just wanted Overhonest shipfic, too much about a Shie Hassaikai slash pairing for someone who wanted a Lady N character piece, and probably too much esoteric soulmate AU mechanics for anyone – so I’m always thrilled to hear that anyone other than the specific person I wrote it for enjoyed it. Somewhat lumpy shape and all, it’s got a tremendous amount in it that I’m extremely fond of and would be happy to have an excuse to revisit.
On which note, I'm not 100% clear, from your phrasing, what specifically you're asking for, but I am open to further conversation, if you are, two months later, still out there and interested. Feel free to shoot me a Tumblr message or send another ask with ways to contact you for more one-on-one talk. I've never specifically written fanfic-for-hire before so I don't want to just start plopping out my tentative rates in public Tumblr posts, lest I give people the impression that I'm more available for that than is in fact the case.
As to your specific proposal, I did want to clarify how I was reading it, just in case that impacts your interest in commissioning me:
If you just wanted to see "more Moon Shot Aim," I will say that I originally planned for it to run longer. I'd intended to get through the confrontation with Deku and do a few scenes in the aftermath, but it was a Christmas giftfic I quite simply ran out of time for it, and so I wound up having to just find the most reasonable endpoint I could and call it finished. But I have my notes and brainstorming for how I planned it to end originally and I'm definitely open to being bribed commissioned to write at least to the original conclusion!
If you wanted something shippy because they're a rare-pair you like, that’s more of a toss-up for me. In any context in which Nemoto joined the Shie Hassaikai per the way he did in canon, I’m a pretty dedicated Overhonest shipper. His obsessive, rather self-flattering affections are a defining part of his character for me, and those are pretty definitionally focused on the first person who honestly told him they wanted him around. So Nagant getting there first would require a significantly different from canon AU scenario! On the other hand, even as I sit here musing about it, I can maybe see a path to that scenario, given Nagant's hang-ups about facades and the ability of Confession to tear those facades down! At the least, though, if you have a couple of specific ideas you can pitch me or are willing to partake in brainstorming, I’m amenable to having the discussion!
If you wanted more of the general approach I took to Nagant and Nemoto in Moon Shot Aim but in a new story – that is, you like Nagant/Nemoto as a rarepair in a more platonic "I just really enjoy the idea of them interacting" sort of way – that's a split the difference option for me. So long as you're okay with Nemoto's Most Important Person still being Overhaul, I could likely come up with any number of scenarios to connect Nagant to the Shie Hassaikai that are less heavily focused on Overhonest as a ship, be it stories set after the canon's jailbreaks or in AU scenarios where she never winds up in Tartarus at all. Or, again, if you have some specific ideas in mind, I'm open to hearing about them. Even when I'm writing shipfic, my concerns and priorities are often those of a dedicated genficcer, so exactly how pairing-focused you'd want this hypothetical story to be would be one of several things I'd want to talk to you about to see what kind of story you'd enjoy enough to pay money for (tone, content, length, rating, openness to my withering disdain for the canon's ending coming through in fanfic, etc.).
That all said, whether or not you decide to follow up or even see this at this point, thank you very much! Three cheers for Nemoto enabling the hell out of Lady Nagant's entirely warranted cynicism!!!!
New Patreon mega-essay! Sixteen thousand crunchy, crunchy words about how Chihiro's development is - quite intentionally, I posit - paralleled with the fold-forge process of crafting katana, alternating between opponents who allow him to prove the value of his beliefs as-is and ones who challenge him such that he is forced to grow. I also examine Kunishige's mantra on the just usage of swords and the many, many places in the series that mantra is repeated word-for-word or narratively invoked.
You can find some preview text below the jump, or just head straight over to Patreon using the link below. As with the big piece about Kagurabachi's use of food, this is locked to paid members ($3) for a week, then will release to free members, then be posted here on Tumblr!
Get more from Stillness in Green on Patreon
From "Preparing the Forge: Rokuhira Kunishige"—
There’s one other crucially important thing that Kunishige impresses on Chihiro, however, this time found in Chapter 2. When he first shows Chihiro the enchanted blades (or at least their containers), Chihiro’s response is to observe that these are the kinds of swords he should also strive to make – and why shouldn’t he think so, when he’s had people like Shiba telling him his whole life that the swords his father made saved Japan back during the war, and his father is a hero for making them?
Kunishige, though, has always been uncharacteristically morose on the topic of his alleged heroism, and while he doesn’t look as harrowed in this scene as he does in some others, he’s still markedly more serious than his goofy norm as he tells Chihiro firmly, “These aren’t necessarily the right answer. You can’t just strive to make strong enchanted blades. You’re gonna have to look at the world through your own eyes and think carefully about what kind of katana it needs, and why.”
This admonition will prove to be the other key to Chihiro’s development. Principles and accountability, yes, but also deliberation: these are the virtues Kunishige imparts alongside the mantra, frontloaded in the story to set the themes and narrative demands going forward.
From "Folding and Hammering in the Versus Sojo Arc: Madoka Norisaku and Sojo Genichi"—
Their initial fight is broken up by Chihiro being pushed into making a choice between continuing the fight with Sojo or jumping to save an apparently recaptured Char – quite literally choosing which half of the mantra he prioritizes, the injunction to destroy evil or the one to save the weak. Unsurprisingly for a kid with so much baggage bound up in the heroism and nobility of these weapons, he chooses the latter. Sojo, meanwhile, is left in a contemplative state of mind – Chihiro being the son of Rokuhira Kunishige, after all, would put him in a pretty well-informed position vis a vis understanding the man’s motivations! That bodes thinking about; it bodes follow-up. Thus, when Sojo retreats, he does so already thinking about how he wants to talk with Chihiro more, while Chihiro (having been led astray by a decoy and thus failed to successfully enact the part of the mantra he chose) is left stewing in resentment and the other half of the mantra.
The prioritization – which we see again in the hospital, when Chihiro has the choice of either agreeing to focus on rescuing Char or pushing to be included with Hagiwara’s group in their attack on Sojo – is an important tell about Chihiro’s characterization. It’s not something his father gave him specific guidance on! The mantra, after all, says that those who wield swords have to do both – destroy evil and save the weak. It gives no priority to one over the other, nor does it dictate doing one as a means to achieving the other, e.g. “Save the weak by destroying evil.” Perhaps someone stronger than Chihiro could do both at once, or both equally well; perhaps there would always be circumstances in which any swordsman, no matter how strong, would have to prioritize one aim, and the mantra can’t always be perfectly fulfilled. Whichever is the case, our main character will often find himself having to choose one or the other, and so it’s important to note which one he picks.
Consider, though, how that whole fight goes for him: when he tries to face Sojo while stubbornly clinging to his preexisting mindset, he spectacularly fails, unable to destroy evil or save the weak! Clearly, a different approach is required.
From "Folding and Hammering in the Sword Bearer Assassination Arc (Part 1): Hiruhiko and Samura Seiichi"—
A very key difference between Chihiro and Samura emerges here: where Chihiro tells himself he is a “monster,” yes, but one fighting for good and therefore still better than the Hishaku, Samura tells himself he’s a monster and is therefore worse. Chihiro claims the label to reinforce his self-esteem; Samura claims it to reinforce his self-loathing. No wonder, then, what happens next!
Samura’s betrayal on top of everything else that day sends Chihiro into full-tilt meltdown. He can barely string words together, he’s got crazy eyes, he’s clearly not going to listen to a single thing Samura has to say because all he’s seeing is one of his heroes – one he was clinging to the image of not five minutes prior to deny that his killings are anything like Hiruhiko’s! – has allied with the murderers of his father. Samura, who has probably seen this kind of full-throttle hysteria before, back in the war, clearly recognizes that he’s going to get nowhere trying to explain himself to this kid, surmises that this is all about revenge for him, and gives him exactly one chance to lay down Enten.
That goes about the way you would guess, and Samura only doesn’t vanish into the sunset with two enchanted blades because Shiba finally makes his designated appearance for the arc. Chihiro, then, wakes up in the hospital with his contract to Enten severed and a broken worldview he doesn’t know how to make any sense of.
I'll preview some text from the Rakuzaichi section (Kyora and Hiyuki), the second part of the Sword Bearer Assassination section (Yura and Akemura), and possibly the Conclusion next week when I try to tempt people over to Patreon again. Until then!
