Mar @swimmingchicken9 - Tumblr Blog

if theres one thing that really pissed me off from my 3 years of architecture i took in high school it's learning about how we used to have all these little techniques to maximize or minimize heat or warmth and now we just merrily abandoned all those to have the same copypaste style buildings everywhere that are often INCREDIBLY unoptimized to the local weather and climate so we can just throw more money at our heating and cooling bills

the-supernatural-atheist

where i live it is hot as balls approximately 80% of the year. i do not want a massive butt-ugly grey mcmansion with a huge echoey open-concept kitchen-livingroom-foyer-diningroom-staircase that has huge windows so i can have an hvac unit the size of a barge heaving and straining to keep it at a constant 72 the grees. i want a north indian traditional style home with small windows to force the airflow to cool, decorative grates to limit the amount of sunlight, and a COURTYARD with a POND *smashes unspecified large object*

makaeru

I hate learning about instances of "oh yeah we know how to do that, we just don't".

marzipanandminutiae

this is exactly why I love talking about historical passive heating and cooling techniques

oh wow the glass-tower office buildings we constructed when we thought air conditioning and central heating would never have downsides...have downsides?

and we're still building them?

while the Victorian house museum where I work, with thick walls and small windows and big wooden shutters stays ~10 degrees above (winter) or below (summer) the outside temperature for days on end with no help at all?

uh. okay then

(also public transit. the history of public transit in the US is infuriating, because we had it! and then we destroyed it!)

headspace-hotel

THIS IS SO TRUE

#I was about to say COURTYARD!! before reading that op brought it up too. WE NEED BUILDINGS THAT SUIT THE CLIMATE THEY'RE BUILT IN!!! FUCK!!!#< prev tags #reblog #architecture

thiscityneedslessfog

The Four Co-Victims of the Midnight Channel Killer

So, we all know about the incredibly unfair deaths of Mayumi Yamano and Saki Konishi. These are the events titled the Midnight Channel Killings, and the sheer injustices they were is fairly obvious. But I want to cover four people who were close to these events and directly negatively affected by them mentally in different ways… as if we didn’t have reason to despise the Midnight Channel Killer enough. These four are Yosuke Hanamura, Yukiko Amagi, Naoki Konishi and Taro Namatame. I want to cover their grief, stress and the way their ties to these killings put them in the spotlight in various ways detrimental to their health.

Yosuke Hanamura

One of the few friends of Saki Konishi. Saki and Yosuke were fairly similar around the time they met, with both of their reputations being centered around their families and Junes. Namely, both of them had terrible reputations because of their connections to Junes. Yosuke was the manager’s child and Saki, despite being the heiress to Konishi Liquors, chose to work at Junes. This put them both under heavy scrutiny and made them both topics of disparaging gossip, which led to Yosuke taking solace in his friendship with Saki, though the two weren’t close enough to confide in each other, as shown by Saki hiding the fact she was the primary witness of the first Midnight Channel Killing from Yosuke.

And then she became the second victim. This did a lot to Yosuke, driving him to start the investigation to find the Midnight Channel Killer as he became nearly isolated after she was killed. But over the course of the game, he relentlessly pursues why she had to die—Yosuke’s grief manifests mainly as rage and a sense of injustice. He, alongside Naoto, almost kills Namatame after Nanako suffers a near-death experience (NDE), and has the most words to say when he meets the true Midnight Channel Killer. Among homicide survivors like Yosuke, this anger isn't rare.

For homicide survivors, the concept of injustice was synonymous with the devaluing of their loved one or themselves. Survivors’ stories of feeling minimized, unworthy, or unimportant were often laced with anger, disgust, frustration, and a mounting and self-protective cynicism. They frequently compared their treatment with the attention or advantage given to someone else. For example, the murderer only had to serve a limited number of years in prison to pay for the loss of their loved one’s life. A survivor pointed out society’s misplaced priorities by noting, “You can kill a federally protected wildlife species [and] do life … whereas you can kill a human being and do 5, 6, 7. 8 years and be out on the street.”

[Source]

And Yosuke is in a unique situation. Yosuke was a friend of Saki’s, not a family member or romantic partner. This means his grief is "disenfranchised," overlooked by the public as he was a friend and not family. Kenneth J. Doka gives this explanation as to what exactly it is:

Disenfranchised grief can be defined as the grief experienced by those who incur a loss that is not, or cannot be, openly acknowledged, publicly mourned or socially supported. Isolated in bereavement, it can be much more difficult to mourn and reactions are often complicated. It is important to recognise and try to meet the needs of those whose grief is not acknowledged by society, whatever the emotional or financial costs.

[Source]

This makes Yosuke's situation worse, as he initially doesn't have any social support whatsoever. He can only find it in the Investigation Team, and heavily leans on the fact he's got a Persona user on his side (and as of a few minutes later, is a Persona user.) After all, many co-victims such as Yosuke have conflicts with the police due to lack of communication from the police to the co-victims, and this is exacerbated by the fact there is no known cause of death due to the Midnight Channel Killings being supernatural.

Survivors feel dependent on police to solve the crime (Connolly & Gordon, 2015; Reed & Blackwell, 2006) and more specifically describe a sense of powerlessness and helplessness as that process continues (Bucholz, 2002; Stretesky et al., 2010, 2016). Researchers have suggested that a sense of control is one of the primary drivers of well-being (Mirowsky & Ross, 1989), yet survivors report frustration and lack of control as they are often, and with little exception, forced to sit idle or find alternate ways to keep the investigation alive (Englebrecht et al., 2014). They also report feeling ignored or dismissed outright (Pasia & Palys, 2016) when they call with new information that they think may be helpful, when they feel they are being lied to (King, 2004), or have the impression police are following lines of inquiry that are weak or futile (Reed et al., 2019). Goodrum and Stafford (2003) have summarized this phenomenon as “avoidance, professional composure, organizational shields and information control” by law enforcement, causing secondary victimization to take hold. All of these behaviors or perceived behaviors by law enforcement can lead survivors of homicide to experience additional grief, frustration, exacerbated levels of anxiety, and anger (Amick-McMullan et al., 1991; Kilpatrick & Acierno, 2003).

[Source]

And we also get to see the impact of her death on him in his Social Link. Yosuke constantly questions why she had to die at only 17. Yosuke consistently focuses on how unjust her murder was, since she was not an adult, and Yosuke knows was a very kind person. Yosuke has to notice so much how Saki is perceived negatively by people around her, like those two gossipers in his social link, which makes the feeling of injustice he faces worse. Saki was not a perfect victim, due to her frequent dating, which makes some peers lack compassion for her situation. This causes Yosuke's emotional distress to get worse, since this mistreatment has a negative impact on co-victims such as Yosuke--this source covers media, which is pretty much gossip on a larger scale with more professional standards.

Insensitive media coverage could hinder survivors’ ability to grieve normally (Dawson & Riches, 1998), because sensational reporting may make the details of the homicide seem worse than they really were or, alternatively, give a negative portrait of the deceased family member (Adkins, 2003). For example, the media might have depicted a murder victim as having played a role in his or her own death or might have questioned the victim’s moral fiber (Dawson & Riches, 1998). The media might have publicized the case without first notifying family members of their intention to do so.

[Sources]

We see this quite a bit with Saki, with how gossipers focus on how she dated around, and one NPC in the very early game admits that because of that she cannot bring herself to feel sympathy for Saki. Fortunately, this is not said in front of Yosuke, but the gossip in his social link is, and Saki is even used as a weapon to hurt him by the gossipers (and later the Midnight Channel Killer).

Yosuke moving on is shown in his Rank 10, where he promises to live every day of his life to the fullest. He says this for reasons stated in his Rank 8, that Saki’s kindness made living in Inaba not be as miserable as he feared it would be due to a bad reputation outside of his control. She made his days in Inaba better, and now that she’s no longer alive, he resolves to do what she did himself.

But that sense of injustice is still alive, he still wants closure for the Midnight Channel Killings. He’s very ready to accuse both Mitsuo Kubo and Taro Namatame, because he so desperately wants to find the Midnight Channel Killer and put them to justice. And he does get to eventually confront the real Midnight Channel Killer, Tohru Adachi. Who he notably has the most lines to exchange with when the Investigation Team confronts him. There are cases of homicide survivors meeting the offenders who victimized them and the survivor’s loved one, but usually these are mediated in order to give the survivor closure and help them move on. Yosuke has no such fortune, though, which causes him to butt heads with the one who victimized him. Adachi is very hostile towards the Investigation Team and towards his victims living and dead, and judging from his tone of voice and facial expressions, he makes it clear that when the two meet, he is purposefully trying to provoke Yosuke, and does so successfully, which is absolutely not helping Yosuke’s mental state.

However, Yosuke is shown to be very much on his way to recovery in his epilogue rank, where he thanks Yu for the help he's been--Yu is not going to replace Saki, but he is a dear friend to Yosuke, helping him get the closure he needed on who exactly killed Saki, and being there to support him throughout, like when Yosuke vented to Yu about how much he wished she could live in his Rank 8. It shows how much his support has been instrumental in helping Yosuke recover. (We will also see Yu do this with Naoki later!)

Yukiko Amagi

Yukiko is a unique case, as she did not know the victims of the Midnight Channel Killings very well, so she's not quite a co-victim like everyone else. However, she is the wakaokami, or heiress/manager-in-training, of the Amagi Inn, the location of Mayumi Yamano's murder, making her a witness, though less direct than Saki Konishi. She also was the first in a line of people to be unintentionally victimized by her fellow co-victim, Taro Namatame. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The first Midnight Channel Killing took place in the lobby of her inn, right under her family’s nose.

This causes intense stress on her, as everyone begins to put focus on the Amagi Inn in relation to the Midnight Channel Killings, which we initially see when people comment on Yamano staying at her inn right before her death. Furthermore, Yukiko actually gets the trauma of being tied to the Midnight Channel Killings. Initially it is connected to Yukiko's relationship with power and how it connects to the inn, but goes beyond that. Oftentimes, media will focus on witnesses and survivors to add more details to the story that they are reporting, which can be damaging to their mental health.

Of the 71 homicide and traffic fatality survivors who completed the survey, all but 6 reported at least one negative outcome. Thirty-eight respondents described the media as contributing to their trauma. Of the 40 negative categories that emerged from the surveys, this was the one reported most often. The second most-cited negative impact was the reporting of misinformation (25) , followed by upsetting images or details (19) , privacy concerns (14) , lack of follow-up (12) , and perceived harassment by members of the media (11) . The emotion that surfaced most often was the feeling of being angry or furious (20) , followed by hurt, sad, or demoralized (16) . Eight people reported feeling vulnerable; the same number reported feeling afraid. Seven survivors reported that the media had had a direct, negative, long-term impact on them personally, including Heather, whose husband, a Canadian police officer, was murdered while on the job, and who wrote: “I am shy and private, and the exposure and invasion of my privacy, my family, my children, [my husband]’s death added to the trauma and has changed me forever.”

[Source]

We actually saw this with the first and only direct witness, Saki Konishi, who would end up becoming a direct victim of the Midnight Channel Killings for reasons indirectly related to her exposure as the first witness. She appeared on TV as a result of her status as a witness to the first Midnight Channel Killing. Yukiko also gets media coverage, as we see.

Especially since secondary trauma exposure such as the murder of Yamano can cause symptoms of traumatic disorders, Yukiko not being allowed to separate from Yamano’s murder is detrimental to her health. Not only this, but Yukiko has an already-present sense of helplessness due to being seemingly inextricably tied to the inn, which is explicitly shown to be amplified in her dungeon when she expresses rage at people questioning her over the inn, and in both cases these interviews were caused by her inn's connection to the Midnight Channel Killings.

Speaking of her dungeon, Yukiko is the first of five people to be thrown in the TV by her fellow survivor Taro Namatame, and during this time focus is squarely on the Amagi Inn. I bring this up because this is an amplification of the events of the Midnight Channel Killings putting focus on Yukiko, partly because one way the Midnight Channel Killer himself attempts to spin it. He attempts to push the blame onto Yukiko since, due to never having seen a clear Midnight Channel Episode thanks to how quickly he threw Yamano and Saki into the TV, doesn’t quite know if Namatame can take the fall for him yet.

This itself can be damaging—it doesn’t get mentioned directly, but is one more stressor on Yukiko, since even though the person suggesting this knows about the TV World, Inaba’s general population does not. So for all they know, she could be the Midnight Channel Killer. Not to mention how this event where she was missing accidentally put her in mortal danger, since Namatame mistakenly believed he was protecting Yukiko.

We get to see more on how this association with the Midnight Channel Killings affects her in her social link starting at her Rank 5, where a predatory news agency tries to dramatize the situation and take advantage of the inn.

She initially does not know how to feel about it, since part of her still sees the inn as her cage, but then realizes how much the news station is intentionally taking advantage of those she loves, even deceiving them to try and force the interview, and threatens to sue them.

I think part of the reason she decided to stay with the Amagi Inn was influenced by this, though not the whole reason—the nail in the coffin was definitely the entire staff telling Yukiko they suspected she planned on leaving and wanted to support her. I think another part of it was this scene showing how the members of the inn were so willing to protect her from being taken advantage of, such as Kasai, an inn worker, telling her to hide.

Yukiko’s unique position means she doesn’t really have as strong a connection to the victims so much as she has to deal with being a witness, and herself and her fellow Amagi Inn workers having to support each other while they’re being taken advantage of by the darker side of the media trying to capitalize on the Midnight Channel Killings, which risks Yukiko’s inn that she realizes she doesn’t have all that much against. She has to deal with the stress of everyone swarming her over the Midnight Channel Killings a piled on top of her anxieties over whether she has a choice in her life, as Yamano’s death represented everything flying out of control for her, even endangering her and her family.

She, just like Yosuke, converses with and meets the Midnight Channel Killer, but she has less to say, other than calling out his actions to be as heinous as they are, also expressing her rage at the trauma he inflicted on her. She does leave him with a very impactful line where she points out his sense of learned helplessness, but this can be also attributed to Yukiko having striking similarities to the MCK, since she shared that sense for a long time. And it is the case that his actions are what indirectly spurred her to realize that, giving her the tools to very succinctly call out his behavior and unwillingness to improve his life.

Naoki Konishi

The bereaved younger brother of Saki Konishi. The very public nature of her murder absolutely messed up his grief, as the press kept hounding him and his parents. The Konishis had been fighting a ton before Saki’s murder, considering that she’d worked at Junes prior to her murder. Right after, the press pretty much was all over them.

The Konishi family chooses to process their grief through avoidant coping mechanisms, which is considered nontraditional. They do not like to speak about Saki's death, which is a common tactic used to cope in bereaved families.

Naoki points out how his nontraditional grief made him question whether he was even truly grieving his sister Saki's death, as he (and many Inabans around him) believed he should not have been expressing himself as he was.

Although some families engaged in complete avoidance of the topic, many participants described how avoidance rules centered on particular topics. One specific type of memory that participants avoided talking about was the circumstances surrounding the family member’s death. Unfortunately, many social network members wanted to know this information, so the conversations were difficult to avoid; however, participants were adamant that these interactions were not ones they typically chose to partake in. Betty (deceased brother) explained the discomfort that accompanied these discussions: "I don’t like talking about how I saw my brother alive and then next time I saw him he was laying in a morgue[. . .] For me, it’s just not exactly comfortable, especially with all the circumstances surrounding it. People tend to prod, not because they are trying to be rude or offensive, it’s just there’s a lot to understand about it." To circumvent interactions like the one Betty described, many participants completely avoided talking about the death. Participants described when avoidance rules were broken (RQ3); they felt uncomfortable when others initiated conversations about their deceased loved one when they wanted to avoid the topic. In other words, asking bereaved individuals to talk about the death at all violated a tacit agreement of avoidance. Marie recounted her discomfort with conversations about her father’s death. She said the discussions felt like a “big thing” because they spotlighted how unusual she perceived her family to be, a topic she wanted to avoid. Marie said, “And so we seem so normal so it’s just like when we have to get into how we actually are not, makes me uncomfortable.”

[Source]

This ended up wrecking his self-esteem, since he ended up believing that he didn't truly grieve for Saki. He says he believes it was easier to think that, which is true, but Naoki is in a lose-lose situation. If he confronts his grief, he ends up letting all the pain he has out. If he doesn't, he begins to hate himself for not feeling anything involving his sister.

He doesn’t get a chance to express his grief since the way he’s reacting doesn’t follow a certain expectation, which confuses the people around him, since they do not know what it's like and start poking at him, mistakenly believing they're helping him out when they only exacerbate his belief that maybe he never loved Saki, and messing up his recovery.

We see Naoki beginning to recover in the later ranks of his social link, when he meets Yosuke, his co-survivor, in his Rank 8. And in his Rank 9, he finally goes to the place where Saki’s body was found, since the way his family grieved was by trying to ignore that anything was wrong, so they would avoid anything reminding them of her death. Now he’s trying to allow himself to express his thoughts after the judgement of others weighed down on him and tampered with the grieving process.

Taro Namatame

The lover of Mayumi Yamano. Namatame is probably the most intimately tied to the Midnight Channel Killings, due to the intense one-sided hatred and jealousy the Midnight Channel Killer experiences towards him, doing everything in his power to make Namatame's life a nightmare after apparently taking Yamano away from him.

Let’s cover the events before Yamano’s murder. Namatame and Yamano were exposed for the former cheating on his wife, Misuzu Hiiragi, with the latter. Namatame explains that the reason for this was because his wife’s success indirectly caused problems in the relationship (likely because they could not be as close to each other, Ryotaro Dojima states that Misuzu Hiiragi was overseas). Namatame didn’t want to communicate this to Hiiragi, and therefore started confiding in Yamano, and then their relationship got romantic, as Namatame recounts.

The exposure put a ton of media attention onto Yamano, and led to Namatame being fired. Soon after, Yamano was murdered, for reasons we learn were very tied to the scandal—the Midnight Channel Killer has an obsessive crush on Yamano and didn’t want to accept that he had no chance with her. Namatame states he wanted to apologize to Yamano and make it up to her somehow, but obviously did not get the chance.

We can see him throughout the year in shock over Yamano and Saki’s deaths, wondering who on earth would do something so terrible.

I’d like to thank @aroaceyunarukami once again for this screenshot. man she’s amazing

But considering he is one of the three chosen, he, much like Yosuke, tries to use his newfound power to prevent any more Midnight Channel Killings. He actually attempted to protect Saki by warning her, but this failed since he didn’t realize the MCK hated him in particular. After this, he tries to call the police and afterwards continues to attempt to protect the potential targets of the Midnight Channel Killer… and through this event is the most directly victimized of the four. The officer who was on the other end of the phone was Detective Tohru Adachi, who offers the solution to put them somewhere nobody can find them. Which is already odd, but Detective Adachi is the Midnight Channel Killer and wants to actively harm Namatame, due to jealousy over his perceived ability to obtain a romantic partner (and also, Namatame happened to interact with the two people Adachi latched onto).

Especially since Adachi was all but stated to have seen Namatame around frequently and was possibly stalking Saki (considering he was strongly implied to have stalked Yamano judging from the holes in his story when he visited the Amagi Inn), Adachi certainly was aware of Namatame’s grief and used it to take advantage of him.

Namatame’s grief was specifically manifested via self-blame, which made him feel responsible for Yamano and Saki’s deaths, akin to survivor’s guilt. Survivor’s guilt is when someone who survives a traumatic incident while someone else dies feels responsible for the other’s death, usually because they witnessed it. Namatame’s not the only character to suffer survivor’s guilt in the game, but his is very tied to the Midnight Channel Killings.

Alternatively, family homicide survivors sometimes transform their anger into guilt about the murder and blame themselves for the death. Self-blame can result in self-criticism and lead parents to become overprotective of surviving children (Rinear, 1988). Survivors frequently suffered from ‘‘survivor guilt’’ if they had witnessed the murder but had not been physically harmed themselves (Gross, 2007). For example, family members may feel guilty for not cautioning or safeguarding the victim, for not helping the victim earlier, or for not predicting that the murder was going to occur. They could also believe that they unintentionally encouraged the victim to engage in a risky activity, which led to his or her death (Friedman et al., 1988).

[Source]

Namatame in his case had not witnessed the murder of Yamano, instead only realizing after the fact, but the symptoms of blame are still there, with him often stating he wanted to apologize to Yamano and being more distressed that there is no way to make the trouble caused up to her. Namatame is someone who has always wanted to be helpful to the people around him—he cannot stand being a burden. He explicitly states this to be the entire reason he became a politician.

This sense of being a burden was likely intensified by Yamano's death, as he blamed himself for it, and this is likely what fueled his savior complex that we see in the Heaven dungeon, where he is mistakenly convinced the Investigation Team is going to harm Nanako Dojima. Namatame states later that he convinced himself he is the only one capable of saving people from the Midnight Channel Killer, but this is likely not the full story. He states in his recounting that he prayed Yamano would give him strength to do what he believed was necessary at the time, and it is heavily implied that Namatame's actions were out of belief that he had to be the one, or else the perceived blood on his hands over Yamano's death would never be able to be washed away. Especially since Namatame makes it clear he's strongly affected and deeply stressed by the fact that Yamano's killer isn't found.

It's actually the truth being revealed and the closure the Investigation Team gives that allows him to recover. I mentioned how survivors of unsolved cases often have their grief and sense of powerlessness intensified in Yosuke’s section—and I’ve spoken before about the similarities between Namatame and Yosuke. These are strongly related to them being homicide survivors, and their usage of the TV world to combat their sense of powerlessness. Now that Namatame can help the Investigation Team catch the real Midnight Channel Killer—two members of the IT being deeply harmed by the MCK’s actions like himself—he can work on himself more and become the politician he always wanted to be.

The throughline I notice between all four is, whether the media focused on them (Yukiko, Naoki) or not (Namatame, Yosuke), the four of them all got suffocated in the chaos of the Midnight Channel Killer’s actions, and it didn’t give any of them much time to process and heal from the trauma they faced until they had some room to breathe, given sometimes by each other, sometimes by others in their social circles. It’s not just a testament to how good a support network can be, as all four of them come to realize (especially Yukiko and Namatame), but it’s also a way to show that the trauma of a murder and who may have it may not always be who you expect—not just the family, but friends too, like Yosuke. And how it can manifest in various ways, like Naoki’s numbness, Namatame’s self-blame, Yukiko’s desire to run and Yosuke's anger. It's just really interesting. I love this game.