toji: his entire piglet era was pretty repugnant, but he hurt himself with that first and foremost and he's in recovery now love and light
shuichi: taking advantage of/facilitating the spread of the app, which endangered literally all of tokyo and enabled the machinations of the very people who put him and all the other clones through hell, but also was inevitable so like 🤍 vriska moment + i don't think he should be judged that harshly for it. he's DEFINITELY killed someone though, almost certainly more than one person. also considering he fights with a non-app weapon, he's like, 100% severely injuring other players on a fairly regular basis but 🤍 he's allowed to do that. he gets both a girlboss pass and a 'loves his baby brother' pass, in addition to the neurodivergent and a minor card, which adds up to him being a perfect blameless darling actually 🤍. also outing claude to babs' would have been pretty fucked up if she didn't literally deserve it
duo: holy SHIT. what he puts shuichi through in faking his kidnapping through chapters 7/8, then The Confrontation & staged abandonment in 8, and then by chapter 9 exposing him as a clone to CLAUDE of all people. just like, the way he treats shuichi in the main story (and likely other loops as well if the yog dungeon loop is any indication), very deliberately manipulating his emotions, is... disturbing. all to maneuver him into actions THAT SHUICHI GLADLY WOULD HAVE DONE IF HE'D JUST ASKED. like, you examine it and you can understand where he's coming from! but the fact that he genuinely loves his brother & Does All That to Help and doesn't seem to be acting out of resentment for him at all just makes it more disturbing imo, even if it does arguably make it slightly less Morally fucked intentions-wise. like there's something about a patronizing sort of callousness, especially to that extreme, that's just like Worse to me than a callousness borne from plain old resentment. (you have to wonder who he's even modeling this behaviour from 😶). but then you think about the Genius role he's trying to emulate, and why he's trying to emulate that role and it's like... what other way was there for this to unfold lol.
cainbaiting aside, there's also his tendency to set off Exceptions in populated areas, which i think would literally be a war crime, but he gets a baby pass for that one 💛. (ADDING THIS AS I WRITE BABS' SECTION) hey actually how much of what went down in chapter 8 did duo deliberately engineer
cullen: creating life frankenstein-wise alongside bertro & aisaac i GUESS 🙄. f to breke or w/e but she was literally playing house with her brothers, baby pass 💙. also she wasn't especially nice to him i GUESS, but like... from WHOM exactly is she supposed to learn the value of life lol? let alone treating the life you create with the consideration it deserves? it's obvious where she's modeling that behaviour from! baby pass, and if you say anything bad about her i kill you in real life 💙
bertro: having a frankenstein moment as well 🙄. also dropping the moon on tokyo in an attempt to permanently kill literally everyone, but like. it's quite likely memphis tennesse manipulated him into doing that, and even if not you LITERALLY cannot blame him.
avi/aisaac: frankenstein again, but aside from that. complicated question. at the very end of chapter moon, it was set up that aisaac has been like... enforcing the facility's continued control over the other Geniuses, but to my understanding, that was dropped in his debut chapter. it's still true in my heart though. but another thing that's true in my heart is that the aisaac that would have acted as the facility's enforcer isn't the same ai that the original isaac (avi) created. aside from that, he seems to have like... SERIOUSLY fucked some people up mentally? tenuous baby pass until further notice
arc: straight up war crimes! but their mom asked them to really niceys and they feel reallyyyy bad about it sooooo.... they still are willing to literally torture people outside of those circumstances but it's REALLY funny. to me. the neurodivergent and a minor card does not excuse them being catholic however :/
babalon: another holy SHIT, in much the same vein as duo's. the sheer destruction wrought on the walled-in wards aside, bc it's not clear how much of that the finishers were directly responsible for & moreover because it was inevitable/deliberately engineered by the people actually holding the cards. 😬 (edits duo's section). and also because she was right! but her manipulation of the protag and especially arc, who she had to have known wouldn't be able to bear being responsible for the destruction she was planning in addition to the destruction she had outright asked them to cause- the fact that she manipulates them for that reason, specifically to absolve them of responsibility. going so far as sacrifice azathoth- one of her other children, more helpless than either arc or the protag- specifically to unbalance them. the scene where she STABS HERSELF ON BOUNDLESS TAIL... if the protag were an actual character that probably would have been one of the MOST traumatizing things to happen to them. babs was the MOST impactful antag in the game to me, and she was horrifying as she was sympathetic. very interesting compare/contrast to duo now that i think about it.
the different ways duo and cullen respond to their need for support and those needs not being met. no thoughts on this yet just rotating them in my mind
like. shuichi can't support duo through the loops to the extent that he needs (or strictly regarding canon, duo decides he can't accept help if he's going to grow and develop) and he's like 'okay i'm doing everything on my own forever.' (and then relies on others all the time because Total Independence is utterly untenable but as a Leader so it doesn't count).
whereas cullen like. is very attached to the idea of hers and the others Collaborative Relationship and committed to teamwork even when the others aren't supporting her, she's cleaning up bertro's mess and aisaac isn't responding to her calls at all and the both of them are breaking the rules and she's still holding out for them to go back to working together, despite IMMEDIATELY deciding she should kill duo at the first hint he's stepping out of line.
i don't really know what i'm getting at here these are just two unconnected dots i guess
top tier thing that i haven't stopped feeling unwell about in the literal years since i realized: when shuichi calls himself duo's big brother in his victory line ('I won! Little bro, your big bro won!!' iirc) he says nii-chan, which denotes closeness/affection, but duo himself calls him big brother as in onii-chan, which is still affectionate but also denotes respect/admiration like 🤯. like 💀
