i keep thinking about how it seems like Tanaka sort of soft reset Hikaru when he chopped off his head. Like, sure, he wasn’t perfect before, but he also wasn’t walking to Yoshiki’s house in a trance in the middle of the night bc of how much he wanted to eat his soul, ya know? I can’t help but think that maybe Hikaru would have continued to settle into town and carve out a life for himself if Tanaka had found a different method of testing him for monster-hood.










