I honestly feel like i'm back in HS right now, watching the cool kids all sit together laughing at their own lunch table while i'm standing over here awkwardly against the wall eating out of my bag of cheezits. Fr. Like you guys seem so cool and we have a lot of the same interests and sense of humor so...why am i not sitting there with you? I had no idea a grown-ass adult could feel like this. It's such a horrible, lonely feeling.
Like i actually have no friends. At all. I dont talk to people. Ever. Actually that's a lie, i do occasionally talk to my ex. Which is sad on so many different levels. I do try, sometimes. Like i don't go out of my way, but if someone talks to me i'll talk back. but it peters out until eventually i just ghost them. It's not even intentional.
I don't usually feel it this keenly. I just wish i could talk to the people i have the same interests with. If only i'd been part of the fandom ten years ago. I feel like i missed out on a huge life-altering opportunity.
Anyway don't mind me, just a vent post. It's gotta go somewhere ig.
tpg character mini-analysis: hajime kashimo + honor
i wanted to talk a bit about one of kashimo's defining traits that no other tpg character has: honor. after gojo meets them, he trudges away thinking kashimo has no moral structure, but this isn't...quite true. this quality shapes how hajime views the world as they evaluate others' actions based on a certain standard of conduct.
take a look at this line of theirs:
“What [the sorcerers] did back then in order to execute [Sukuna]…I can’t think of anything else so honorless. It doesn’t matter how many sorcerers he took down. There are some things you just don’t do.”
sukuna's yet-unrevealed backstory is incredibly devastating and tragic. in most people, it would evoke intense feelings of sympathy, sorrow, and anger on sukuna's behalf. others would say the people who did That to sukuna were heartless.
but instead kashimo says it was honorless. to them, this is the equivalent of the visceral reaction other people would've had. it's about perspective and priorities.
more below cut!
hajime continues to say:
They shake their head. “If the stories of what the sorcerers did to him back then are true...as far as I’m concerned, they deserved it.”
they deserved it. they DESERVED it? even mahito says he's surprised hajime would take sukuna's side. i'll say this conclusively about sukuna's backstory: the myth that after his failed execution, he wiped out an entire prefecture upon becoming a curse is true.
but hajime still thinks that punishment was deserved. what the sorcerers did to execute sukuna was so far beyond their rigid standard of conduct that such a fate was an appropriate punishment to them.
further, something that significantly annoys them about mahito is that he kills people who can't fight back. tpg 37 got long as hell, so i cut a few things, including this short snippet:
It’s not the violence that repulses them; that’d be illogical for someone whose body count is in the triple-digits. But there’s no honor in it, just slaughtering people who can’t even put up a fight. Kashimo’s fought more than their fair share of unsatisfying, ultimately one-sided battles, but that’s what they were: battles. Reciprocated killing intention. Of course weaklings deserve to die, but that’s a retroactive punishment.
they're repulsed at the idea of killing someone who's done nothing at all for no reason. killing the storehouse guards had a purpose: those people were in the way of their goals and actively fought back to try to stop them. but mahito frequently kills innocent people just for fun, which is completely honorless to them.
four hundred years ago, when sorcery was all about duels and death matches, honor existed in the place of laws or a legal structure. since death was a permitted end to a fight, there had to be something to keep sorcerers from just going around slaughtering people. honor is a form of social currency that earns respect and dignity within a community. conducting actions that fall outside its definition result in being hated and shunned.
however, despite mahito's misgivings, mahito is still rapidly becoming someone important to them -- the first person ever to be important to them. this does not fit in their current moral structure. take a look at what kashimo says when gojo is surprised they'd lay down their life to protect mahito:
Hajime flinches. “I made a promise,” they try. The glow beneath their eyes flickers, a store sign that can’t decide if it’s open or closed. “Breaking it would be honorless. I’d rather die than not be able to live with myself.”
Honor? No one has done anything strictly for honor in hundreds of years. “Is that really what you’re worried about?”
“Of course it is,” Hajime replies, after a delay too long to be entirely convincing. “I have no interest in forming bonds with others, least of all him.”
they're still pretty in denial regarding caring about mahito, so they're trying to convince themself it's about honor, because they can tie that to their existing values. since caring about someone is new, it's far more grounding to sort it into a value structure they already possess rather than face the horrifying ordeal of creating a new one that goes against their current worldview.
in that quote, they say they'd rather die than not be able to live with themself. honor is so important to them that the idea of acting without it is worse than death; they couldn't sleep at night. extreme, right? but i actually got this idea from canon.
take a look at this panel from hakari vs kashimo:
this. why did no one talk about this?? kashimo is someone who exists for fighting strong opponents. they let kenjaku brutally mutilate their body into a cursed object to incarnate four centuries into the future with the sole purpose of fighting sukuna. if hakari killed them here, that goal would not happen.
and yet.
they ask him to kill them. or rather, they think hakari should kill them. it was a fair fight. a fair loss of which they accept the outcome. therefore, they believe it is hakari's right to kill them. that's so, so interesting to me, and it really stands out against the backdrop of their otherwise shallow personality, so i just couldn't resist expanding on it.
their character will continue to develop throughout the story, so stay tuned. thanks for reading!
