Beyond the Pedestal and the Pyre: How Disney's Darkest "Love Square" Teaches Us True Autonomy
Let's talk about the absolute exhaustion of the modern shipping wars. We have all seen it—whether it’s the boundary-crossing whiplash of Miraculous Ladybug or the painful, persistent tracking in TMNT 2012, modern television loves to reduce romance to a chaotic arena where characters fight like wild animals over a love interest. It strips away character agency, breeds toxic entitlement, and quite frankly, makes me want to turn off the screen entirely.
But once in a generation, a narrative comes along that completely subverts our expectations. It uses a tangled web of desire not for cheap romantic drama, but to deliver a profound, masterfully written commentary on human nature. We saw glimpses of this maturity when The Legend of Korra subverted early love triangles to forge deep, foundational partnerships. But the undisputed blueprint for this storytelling device remains 1996’s dark Disney masterpiece: The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Through what can only be described as a thematic "Love Square," this film dissects the stark, terrifying boundaries between Infatuation, Lust, and Genuine Love.
At the absolute center of this narrative web stands Esmeralda—the film's brilliant deuteragonist and a fierce Romani dancer. In lesser hands, a character described as universally desirable would be reduced to mere fanservice, a bland prize to be won, or a tool for the male gaze. But Disney gave us a powerhouse. Esmeralda drives the moral compass of the entire film through her razor-sharp wit, bottomless compassion, and absolute selflessness. She isn't wandering around waiting to be saved; she is actively fighting a system of corrupt authority to secure justice and freedom for her marginalized community.
To understand how her presence dismantles traditional romantic tropes, we have to look at the three radically different vectors of desire surrounding her.
1. Quasimodo: The Trap of Holy Infatuation
Quasimodo's attraction to Esmeralda is completely natural, but it comes from a place of deep psychological scarcity. Sheltered, isolated, and continuously abused by a tyrannical father figure who told him he was a monster, Esmeralda is the very first person to look at his face with genuine kindness, patience, and respect.
Naturally, he falls fast. But in his beautiful ballad "Heaven's Light," we see the hidden trap of his affection: he completely deifies her. He views her as a flawless, untouchable angel. While it is completely normal to develop a crush when someone shows you warmth, putting women on a holy pedestal is inherently unhealthy. It denies them their humanity, their flaws, and their reality.
Quasimodo has a heart of pure gold, but he isn’t emotionally ready for a romantic partnership—he needs to discover his own identity outside of his stone tower first. The beauty of his character is that when he discovers Esmeralda loves someone else, he completely subverts the toxic "Nice Guy" trope. He doesn't get bitter. He doesn't get possessive. He chooses radical, platonic allyship, remaining her protector and celebrating her happiness with the man she chose.
2. Claude Frollo: The Incel Logic of Holy Lust
On the absolute opposite end of the spectrum sits Judge Claude Frollo—the definition of a predatory, narcissistic abuser. Frollo’s obsession with Esmeralda is a toxic cocktail of systemic racism and violent sexual projection. He spent decades trying to ethnically cleanse her people, but the moment he sees her command the stage at the Festival of Fools, his rigid, self-righteous worldview shatters.
Because he cannot handle his own lack of discipline, he projects his sin onto her body. To Frollo, she isn’t a human being; she is a witch, a temptress, and a sexual object that must be conquered, dominated, and put in her place. The sheer visceral horror of him sneaking up behind her to sniff her hair and grope her neck remains one of the most chilling depictions of sexual harassment in animation history.
Frollo's entire psychology is built on modern incel logic: he blames the victim for his own desire. In his mind, it’s not his fault that he’s a predator. It’s not his fault he’s a stalker. It is always "Esmeralda's fault" for just existing and breathing. His legendary villain anthem "Hellfire" is a terrifying manifesto of patriarchal entitlement. When she escapes, his bruised ego burns down half of Paris, leading to the unlawful imprisonment and off-screen murder of countless innocent citizens. His ultimatum at the pyre—"choose me or burn"—proves that predatory lust would rather destroy a woman completely than allow her to possess her own bodily autonomy. Her spitting in his face is the ultimate rejection of his entire oppressive system.
3. Phoebus: The Clarity of Genuine Love
Finally, we have Captain Phoebus—the green flag that anchors the narrative. What sets Phoebus apart from both Quasimodo's deification and Frollo's objectification is that Phoebus sees Esmeralda as an equal.
He doesn't look at her and see an angel or a witch; he sees a brave, sharp-witted, soulful, and brilliantly confident woman. He respects her combat skills, listens to her political ideals, and is willing to throw away his entire military career and risk execution to protect her people. His love isn't built on what Esmeralda can do for his ego; it's built on a mutual, grounded respect for who she fundamentally is as a person.
The Ultimate Takeaway
Disney's "Love Square" is a timeless blueprint for media literacy. It teaches us the profound difference between loving an idea of a person and loving a real person. It reminds us that true love can expand far beyond romance—manifesting as the beautiful, platonic, chosen family that Quasimodo, Phoebus, and Esmeralda build together at the film's conclusion.
Most importantly, it delivers an uncompromising message on consent and autonomy: You are never, under any circumstances, entitled to someone else's body just because you are attracted to them. You don't get to manipulate, harass, or burn down the world because your feelings aren't reciprocated. True love values the safety, choice, and freedom of the other person above all else.
I’m reading Kyoshis book at the moment and I find Kyoshis conversation with Lao Ge about his immortality fascinating.
Kyoshi’s first reaction to Lao Ge’s teachings is disgust. She immediately compares the pursuit of immortality to Jianzhu’s obsession with control. To her, trying to escape death feels unnatural, like believing you’re more important than everyone else. Lao Ge’s response is interesting because he completely reframes what “immortality” even means and makes her question her world view.
He explains aging as entropy: the body slowly falls into disorder. His technique is simply keeping the body “clean, neat, and tidy”, not frozen, just continually repaired by bending.
Then Kyoshi points out what seems like the obvious flaw:
“You’d have to decide what version of yourself you’d be stuck as, forever.”
And Lao Ge basically says: Exactly. That’s why you can’t. Then says:
“Those who grow, live and die. The stagnant pool is immortal, while the clear flowing river dies an uncountable number of deaths.”
He’s arguing that the worst kind of immortality isn’t endless life. It is refusing to change. A stagnant pool never changes. It is “immortal” because nothing about it dies. But it’s also lifeless. A river is constantly losing its old water. It “dies” thousands of times every day, yet it’s alive because it never stops changing.
So Lao Ge’s philosophy isn’t “live forever”. It’s: If you’re going to live forever, you’d better become a different person over and over again.
Ie: Your body stays ordered. Your soul never stays the same.
That’s why I don’t think Kyoshi suddenly wakes up one day and decides, “Actually, immortality sounds great.” I think she eventually realises that longevity doesn’t have to mean clinging to life. It can mean having more time to change not just the world but yourself. It’s more time to learn and more time to fix mistakes. More time to protect people.
Ironically, the Avatar is already someone who experiences this on a cosmic scale. Every Avatar is literally a continuation of the previous one, but none of them are the same person. The Avatar Spirit survives because it is always becoming someone new.
Kyoshi’s longevity almost feels like an extension of that idea. She doesn’t remain the same Avatar for two centuries. She becomes someone else again and again. The Kyoshi who dies at 230 is not the same Kyoshi who met Lao Ge. Which is exactly Lao Ge’s point.
Maybe immortality isn’t about refusing death. Maybe it’s about allowing parts of yourself to die so that the person who continues living is wiser than the one who came before. That’s a philosophy Kyoshi could accept later in life. Not because she feared dying but because she refused to stop growing.
And honestly, I think the fact that she eventually chose to end her life makes sense. Lao Ge was trying to teach her: immortality is only meaningful while you remain like the river.
And the tragedy of Kyoshi is that by the end of her life, she had carried the world’s burdens for so long that she may have felt herself becoming something harder and less human than the girl who first met Lao Ge. Not just hardened, but desensitised, so repeatedly exposed to death and violence that the weight of it stopped effecting her like it once did. She was more…stagnant.
And if that’s true, then choosing to let go wasn’t a rejection of his philosophy but the opposite. It was a recognition that when even death no longer moves you, when it ceases to feel like something sacred, then you risk drifting into a stillness far more dangerous than mortality itself. And stepping away becomes an act of reclaiming the humanity that “immortality” had gradually worn down.
Sometimes I think back to a time when, on a post talking about how it'd be interesting to see Guillermo del Toro direct a Beast Wars movie, someone replied "yes, and he could really show how evil the Maximal government is" (paraphrased). As this isn't the only time I've heard this sort of take, I'm very curious about how some folks came to this conclusion.
We have very little information about the Maximal leadership. The worst thing we know for sure they've done was the Protoform X thing. It's certainly awful, but is that really enough info to claim that the Maximals lead a truly terrible and oppressive government? Dinobot would be arrested upon returning to Cybertron... But that's because he was involved in stealing the Golden Disk and in the initial battle that crashed them on Earth. But Megatron talks about how the Maximals are oppressive! Are we really taking what the guy who calls himself a tyrant says about the government he intends to overthrow at face value? This is something that children are meant to be skeptical of. While I have my strong criticisms in the effectiveness of Beast Machines as a sequel, the portrayal of Megatron as ruler of Cybertron isn't one of them. If we try to point to the Tripredacus Council, it's a similar matter to Megatron. We know that they want to overthrow the Maximals and are willing to sneakily murder everyone on Earth to avoid the disruption of their plans. We have no evidence that Megatron or the Triredacus Council have a driving force besides power.
How Depth Charge talks about the Maximal government can be taken more seriously, but his feelings still largely stem from the Protoform X situation. Now Rattrap has the vibe of a disillusioned young veteran (think a 30-something who did several years in the military and has feelings about it). However, Rattrap has the strongest sense of loyalty in the entire crew and would never imagine turning on the Maximal government. Optimus Primal, while recognizing the Maximal government has its flaws as we see in his conversation with Depth Charge, still believes them to be merciful/reasonable in his conversation with Dinobot. Dinobot may be cynical, but also self-aware about the fact he broke Maximal law and the fact he still wasn't a "real" Maximal (at the time).
Beast Wars isn't telling IDW1's story. IDW1 didn't get its inspiration from Beast Wars. The 2021 IDW Beast Wars is a flawed reinterpretation of the original Beast Wars cartoon and can't be used to accurately gauge the original. None of the Beast Wars comics were telling the same story as the cartoon. A government doesn't have to be super evil oppressive to be flawed. There's actually a lot of gray area between "perfect utopia" and "nightmarish fascism/dictatorship".
So recently, mainly on Reddit, I’ve seen talk of how G1s characters are very one dimensional. Sometimes it’s to defend G3 and explain how it expands on its characters better, sometimes it’s a stand alone critique of G1. A lot of it seems to boil down to dismissing G1 as shallow characters who only care about fashion, boys, makeup, and nothing else. While G1 did focus on this a lot- they are fashion dolls after all- I don’t think it’s entirely fair to say that’s mostly all it focused on.
It’s easy to say they’re one dimensional if you know nothing about the characters, but the fact of the matter is we know a lot about a lot of these characters.
Pic credit to Toy Box Philosopher
Right off the bat when you’re introduced to G1s characters, they come in a box that features a small biography about the character. It features their name, their age, and various facts. It gives a small glimpse into their personalities as a whole and what they’re like as monsters.
Pic credit to Toy Box Philosopher
With Operetta, there’s a lot of music based facts and of course you could argue that makes her one dimensional, after all clearly she only cares about music. Again though, I don’t think that’s the case.
“I’m a bit of a diva and a perfectionist”
No, it doesn’t tell us exactly how that manifests for her, but it does give us a better look at who she is as a whole. It opens her up beyond just being music obsessed.
Pic credit to Toy Box Philosopher
Even with characters where their whole personality is being self centered and they very much could be an easy excuse to make a very bland, one dimensional character, we’re still given snippets that reveal there is more depth to their character than just that.
With Nefera de Nile, we see that her favorite activity is annoying Cleo and reminding her of her place. Again, this doesn’t reveal much, but it does give us a look into the fact that there’s some tension within her family. That beyond her mean girl, stuck up behavior, there is more.
Pic credit to the Monster High Wiki
The thing is though, when you’re introduced to the G1 dolls, the boxes aren’t the only thing you’re given that contains information about each character. You’re given a whole diary that contains small peaks into the characters daily lives.
Pic credit to ghoulsarchive.carrd.co
In Frankie’s wave one diary, we get various entries that explain her day. All of these entries give insight into various parts of herself; she’s naive and new to the world, she says and does things that makes people laugh but she doesn’t know why and because of this, she’s left wondering if other teenagers are like her and have families like hers. We also get a slight glimpse of what could possibly be insecurities about her being so new to the world; what if she gets excited about something totally normal, that everyone else has experienced?
Yes, it all ties into her being new to the world and you could argue that’s her entirely personality I guess. But I see a character who we see figuring themselves out, who is new to the world and trying to figure out what they like and who they’re supposed to be. I don’t think that’s one dimensional at all.
And then you have characters like Jane Boolittle, whose diary touches on her being found in the jungle, her not wanting to attend Monster High and being hesitant to socialize while her dad insists she goes and eventually touches on her finding out she really likes the school. Her diary gives so much information about her life and herself.
Mind you, this is only two diaries out of many more. There’s diaries in the MH universe which touch on loss, relationships, betrayal and so much more. These diaries provide more than just surface level information on the characters!
“What about the webisodes? They all seemed pretty basic in that.”
You’re right, a lot of the webisodes do focus around basic topics like shopping, dances, etc. and really aren’t the best place to get information on each character, especially because sometimes they can be a little inconsistent, there are still episodes that do give you more to go off of than just “oh, these girls only like makeup and shopping” that I feel like G1 is so often boiled down into when people call it one dimensional.
In the webisode “Scare-itage”, we get to learn more about Skelitas family history and the importance of a necklace that has been passed down in her family for generations.
In “Fright Dance” we see Rochelle dealing with bullying from Howleen and Operetta due to her not being able to preform as well during a dance audition due to how heavy stone is, Rochelle feeling insecure over it and upset because of the bullying. From this, we can gather that Rochelle battles with insecurity due to how heavy she is and we can see that both Howleen and Operetta can be bullies, again giving us more insight into how these characters act.
And then there’s the movies!
In the movie Friday Night Frights, we get introduced to Robecca Steam and her backstory. We find out that not only is Robecca the first girl to ever play scream, but we find out that Robecca was subjected to sexism because of this and ultimately met her demise because of it. Robecca was intentionally destroyed by male scream players because she was a girl. That’s an extremely in depth and sad piece of her lore and makes her far more than just a one dimensional character.
And then you have Freaky Fusion, where one of the plot lines is Frankie struggling with the fact her heritage is unknown. It doesn’t have anything to do with her being new to the world or being naïve, instead it’s a different side of Frankie we get to know about: the fact that she knows very little about her family and that she struggles with that.
Both of these ghouls are just two of the characters in these movies too, both movies have more characters we see and learn things about, whether it be things they’ve had to deal with or quirks in their personality. The point is we get to learn more.
G1 isn’t perfect and neither are its characters, acknowledging that is important, but it isn’t fair to act like they were just shallow, stereotypical teenage girls. They had issues they dealt with, things they hated, fears, aspirations, but they also liked makeup/fashion and liking makeup/fashion does not make you one dimensional.
disney doesn't care about oswald, they do not, Im aware the hybrid show is in process of being made but honestly I think the process of it being made only highlights how little do they accualy give a fuck
we don't know how he will look like, we've got no previews, we have no plot premiere, from what we know oswald could be the only toon character in it and that would be a tragedy, not only because of all the missing dynamics we would get, not because of the fact he as a character needs people to play off of, not because it would be ignoring his painfully important relationship with mickey, but because I fear they would do exactly what they did with his last 2 apperances
strip him of his character
Oswald always even before epic mickey has a visible temper, he got in trouple, he was kind of a dickwad to people and in the process of having fun alot of people around him ended up with stars floating around their head iykwim, epic mickey gave him amazing depth and lore but he did have a character before that and I think it got translated beautifly to epic mickey, especialy when you pair him up with mickey and have their personalities and worldviews clank against eachother, oswald was a pessimist, he was a hardass! he was mischievous and chaotic while still being understandable, unlike with alot of current support/main cast you didnt really know what he would do because he was just so much more flawed that the usual, was his apperance gonna end up with him needing humbling and getting a lesson into that thick head of his or would it end with us rooting for him the whole time? a bit of a shake up of those both?
last apperance of oswald that gave him his personality was epic mickey and partialy that fuckass christmas comic i personaly hate but can admin theres nothing really horrible in
his last apperances in dreamlight valley erased everything about him. and thats not my opinion that's just a fact, he doesn't act like he did in the old shorts, he does not act like he did in epic mickey, in universal comics, in disney comic, in adaptations, in fanworks- he had no personality. period. the only thing he was given in dreamlight was saying INCORRECT 1920's slang and being sm more catooney that other equally rubberhose characters, his relationship with mickey has been erased, his motives and ambitions are not there, he doesnt's even have his shorts colored because it would ruing the only "vibe" they were going for
witch I think says alot because dreamlight makes a giant deal of forgetting things, of being frankly putting it depressed and turning your back on things you love because of your inner negative feelings...and that was LITELLARY oswalds story last time we saw him, he was horrified of being forgotten again, he wanted to become a star again so desperatley he didn't take care of his own home and exiled himself only to watch mickey as bitter jaleousy rotted into him it didn't fully brush off even at the end of the game, what about mickey and his relationship with him? something most of us have been going crazy for to see? DV is a perfect game to give us something anything but instead they cared so little about oswalds character they erased something not important just to him but to mickey as welll
do I even have to mention speedstorm? they didn't even get his model right there! and it's a raising game, it's hard to not get a characters personality in those because they need like 70 lines total and few custom winning/losing animations, but somehow they menaged
at this point I personaly started to belive not only does disney not care for oswald, there afraid and are tryint to burry him.
disneys whole thing is marketing, I mean look at how many concepts they've rejected because they woudnt sell well despite being amazing and more artisticly ritch than anything they've made in the last 50 years, and oswald is perfect of "rare" and "antique" merch, an exclusive character so rarely used selling anything with him can be priced 3x higher than it accualy should be, I mean fuck look at how much that one 8 page comic with him makes people bet on it, despite not looking that good nor being lenghty at all, they wanna avoid making oswald a more negative character he accualy is because it makes it harder to make him sellable to those who arent fans and are just by passers, its the same reason mickey is not allowed to have any female friends or villians for long term and so often he's not allowed to have an accual character outside the sometimes well sometimes not italian comics because if you decide that maybe you preffer him w someone other than minnie or maybe accualy you don't like him as a character that much SO MUCH less merch would be sold
my fear per say for the new series is him being the only toon there because they just want to strip him of his personality again and make him the "zany old rubberhose pal" to "accualy serious normal characters"
and lets say disney does accualy cook with the series, lets say they give him his personality and there is somwhat good plot with him and his relationship to those randomass people is accualy good
that doesn't take away from everything I've said before, they do not care for him and I will be real with you if you want more oswald content you need to support other fans, the writers, the artists, the public domain users, because disney does not care, but those individual people who don't have to but do make things with him things with passion, that's who's hands he's been in for years and sorry to say it ain't changing because of one 6 episode series.
unless youre gonna accept anything that just has "oswald" slapped on it even if it's clearly not him, youre gonna get dissapointed.
Rin was wrong about the Kyoto arc and most of you are too
But like Rin, you don't have to hold onto your assumptions.
With the slight resurgence in aoex popularity, I'm seeing a new rise in some fundamental misunderstandings about the characters and plot. I've been asked a lot of questions about a few certain characters over the years, and I've noticed that the base of the misunderstandings people tend to have with everyone originates in the Kyoto Arc.
What am I calling the Kyoto arc? Everything that happens in the second season of the anime and everything that happens after chapter 13 in the manga . (The point when the anime said let's go off and do our own wild thing and forget about the story and characters Kato is making! It'll be fun and totally not still be causing long lasting chaos over a decade later) and up to chapter 35. It's a 20 chapter arc, roughly. And honestly I think most of the manga exclusive Kraken arc should be included in the Kyoto arc because it is a direct continuation of Rin and Yukio's story line there, but I digress and we will get to that!
I am going to assume that you, the reader of this lengthy essay (I'm wordy and won't apologize for it, lol), are aware enough of the manga and Blue Exorcist to know that every episode in the first season of the anime after episode 16 is NOT CANON and does a poor job of depicting all the characters involved from Angel to Yukio. (There is no character with a Z, lol. So Yukio wins that role.) No one comes out looking correct in that. I know some people will argue that Rin is fine, but no. He is not similar to his canon hot headed, impulsive, loud, often violent/aggressive, and past avoiding self who would never have let his twin pull a gun on Kuro and would never have let Yukio leave after that without a fight. Sorry guys, they nuked him too. Just in a more pathetic victim way so people let it slide because he obviously needs to be protected from all the other meanies.
I am also going to assume you know character names. You can google them if you get confused ദ്ദി ( ᵔ ᗜ ᵔ )
Anyway, back on topic. I'm going to go heavily into the start of this arc and more broad as it goes on. The initial area is where most of the misconceptions start and they kind of carry through from then on meaning the entire rest of the arc and arcs there are a few flaws in the understanding of character motivations and reasons and some just basic plot stuff.
In chapter 13 of the manga, we get this tremendous clip
Just before this moment the exwires have found out that their classmate is not a human and is powerful.
You'll notice Shima leaning against the railing there. That's because he has a cracked rib and probably a concussion. Konekomaru is now sporting a broken arm, and Ryuuji got strangled out enough to be choking on blood. Shiemi was hypnotized and controlled and carried around like a possession by a demon king who tried to eat her eyes and kept taunting about making her his bride all while she was unable to move or do anything. There is not enough written about the truly terrifying kind of assault that is for the youngest member of their group, and that's without the tangle of a relationship Amaimon and Shiemi have in it.
It is vital that everyone take a second to think about that. Izumo and Takara were not there. They stayed in the camp. They didn't pursue Amaimon, Shiemi, or Rin. They chose not to fight or try to help. The Kyoto Trio did (because Ryuuji/Bon is impulsive and ran after Rin and Shiemi to help and the others followed him) and it took all of thirty seconds for the Demon King Amaimon to knock them all out without even really putting any effort into his attack.
They manage to get out of the forest and back to the pictured bridge with Yukio leading them out while the forest catches dramatically on blue fire. (Remember that the Kyoto trio grew up hearing about how much the blue flames of Satan destroyed their home and killed their family members. Their entire life was irrevocably changed because of blue flames.) And Rin and Amaimon are wildly fucking shit up. They even yeeted Mephisto who is a much higher ranking king.
All that leads to the Paladin appearing, Arthur Angel, who orders the exwires to be interrogated and checked by medics. (Honestly a step up for True Cross. They almost never remember medics.)
The Paladin appears and then Mephisto appears, and he has Rin in tow. Rin who is entirely feral and tries to lunge for the exwires. The traumatized exwires see Rin try and attack them with an entirely demonic face. They do not know anything about his story or Shirou or even ow he got here, but they can easily see that he's tied to Satan because of the flames and now he clearly wants to hurt. Hurt them.
Now in Rin's defense, he's not in his right mind. Mephisto sheaths the sword and the demonic part is forced to retreat and Rin passes out until he's slapped awake. At that point he's the Rin we know again (the exwires still have no idea what the hell is going on) and Angel takes him into custody. Rin looks over and sees his friends bloodied and bruised and sees Ryuuji with blood on his mouth staring with an unreadable expression.
It leads to this shot:
Question for the group: Who is Ryuuji asking this to?
Not Rin, that's for sure. It's Mephisto, in my opinion. Ryuuji is asking, quite understandably, why the hell the child of Satan was put in a class of ordinary students and why none of them were told about it. They just had a Demon King attack their class of exwires all of which were struggling against a simple moth and had to reseal it instead of exorcising it. A Demon King that attacked them because he wanted to do something to the son of Satan and they had no extra protection against that. Enough so that four of them are injured or traumatized.
(Also, if you get strangled do not yell and IMMEDIATELY seek medical help. There are a lot of terrible conditions and long lasting effects that can occur with strangulation.)
So at this point everyone is made to split ways. The exwires will get a small update from Yukio, and Rin will get put on trial for his life. Neither party knows what the other is aware of, and as far as we can tell, Rin does not remember that he tried very hard to lunge at and attack the exwires.
That does not mean that Rin did not lunge for and try to attack them. Not remembering trauma you caused someone else does not erase that trauma.
There is also this moment, and you best believe I am also here to defend Shiemi because she deserves it.
Go girl. You're so right. There's nothing funny about any of this. Not your abduction, not how assaulting that entire thing was, and not the fact that he was feral and that you're feeling like a lot of this is your fault. (And it was not her fault.)
Rin's defense in most bad situations is laughter and ignoring whatever the uncomfortable thing is. This rubs everyone around him the wrong way almost every time. And that's their right. I also truly think he doesn't know what he just did and doesn't remember much past drawing the sword and he's scared, and he's able to tell the vibes are bad and he's in trouble, but doesn't really get why/how. He is a bit (a lot) of an idiot and we love him for that.
Another vital thing to understand about Rin is that he sees the demonic and violent parts of himself as someone else. He is not that demon. He is not the guy that tore apart the forest, everyone is wrong. He didn't lunge after his friends, someone else did that. He isn't out of control of his flames, that isn't him. That demon with the flames and frightening strength and burning anger isn't him. They've got it all wrong. He's just Rin.
That is a big part of Rin's story. Rin accepting that he is all those things. He is the human and he is the demon and he is all the things that comes with both of those things. He is right and wrong and kind and cruel and caring and callous and gentle and dangerous. He is Yuri and Satan and Shirou's son, and he is complicated and trying his best and slowly learning to accept what he is and isn't.
Anyway, they split ways for a shitty night. Rin's is unquestionably shittier, but again, the rest of the exwires don't get told what the hell happened.
Anime only fans will already be noticing differences, but wait, there's a lot more that was missed/ skipped over.
The Kyoto trio are all at the hospital for the next few days and get a call about the temple having been attacked. Shima's dad and Ryuuji's dad were said to have been hurt in it.
This is the second hint we get that Ryuuji is not on good terms with his dad, and the mere mention of Kyoto visibly upsets him. That'll be important a little later.
Rin goes back to class with the girls but is pulled out by Yukio for his own individual classes with Shura before anyone can say anything. The cram teacher then explains the following:
The entirety of their school is giving them instructions on what to do if Rin goes wild because the exorcist and teachers all think he will go feral again.
Rin does not know they're getting this instruction.
We then see what Yukio told them is basically: Yeah, my twin has flames. I don't because I was too weak. I get tested daily for it. The koma (a nickname for Kurikara because you can't exactly go around calling a stolen sword by its name or people will catch on) sword sealed him. I don't know why we were allowed to live when True Cross has a very loud 'no Satan or Satan offspring allowed' policy. Kay, thanks, byyyeeeeee.
So no one is happy and no one really knows anything. Just Yukio who has always known everything and had the biggest emotional, responsible, and mental burden of everything about his brother. He was left holding the bag again. Responsible for a class he's the same age as, mourning his father whose death he doesn't know the full story of, responsible for killing his own brother if he goes feral, now ostracized even more by a community of exorcist he already didn't blend in with, and now made to bear all this. Yukio is a king for holding out for so damn many arcs without showing how bad his mental health was getting with all that stress.
At this point we see Ryuuji is placing the guilt for Konekomaru and Shima being injured on his own shoulders (Konekomaru tells him it was his fault that they were injured) and Shiemi is realizing that Rin became her friend as he was revealed and that she was never as much of a support or friend to either of them as she thought.
Meanwhile Izumo who, and I cannot stress this enough, did NOTHING in the fight and was not part of most of this and has at this point made NO effort to be friends with anyone past cleaning a shirt Rin loaned her, is judging all of them visibly.
A brief interlude of Toudou being a creep and Rin showing he cannot follow orders from absolutely anyone and making Yukio and Shura frustrated at how unpredictable and manageable he is, and we're now given the mission to go to Kyoto and help there.
Ryuuji is just so blatantly shocked and not okay with the assignment to his home. Like I genuinely don't think we have a shot of Ryuuji looking more shook and shit gets wild in this manga.
Ryuuji does not want to go back to Kyoto. He left on terrible terms with his parents and swore he would not return until he had his meisters and rank. He defied his parents in even going to the cram school and now he's being forced to return a bit busted up and long before he was ready. If you do not have a bad family dynamic, you can't really get how devastating this is, but try and imagine it. It's a tremendous source of stress and frustration for Ryuuji, and the main thing he's dealing with through this arc. He has a lot of history with his father ignoring and denying him and trying to control him, and it is not a healthy dynamic. THAT is what drives Ryuuji in this arc. Kyoto, the temple, and his father. It is NOT Rin. Rin is at the bottom of his list of things to be thinking about right now.
This is essentially Ryuuji's arc, and it is, quite simply, not about Rin for him. Rin becomes a part of it, but not until later. At the moment, it is Kyoto and the shame and frustration and resentment about that which is driving him forward.
Shiemi is melting under her own self loathing at this point. She is hating herself and has never been confident and always been prone to thinking poorly of herself, and shown she is unaware of when relationships are abusive with how severely Izumo bullied her and continues to bully her.
(And I could write another essay on how fucking misogynistic it is that everyone flocks to team Izumo when she's slightly nice to Rin and blatantly ignores the Shiemi abuse because well Shiemi is annoying anyway. Check yourself and ask why you feel that way if you do. Why is violence and cruelty okay against Shiemi? Why is it forgivable in her case but not in others?)
We all board a train to Kyoto and see each other for the first time. Rin has zero ability to ever read a room (we love him for it even if he will occasionally kill us with second hand embarrassment) and is acting like he didn't try to kill them on their last interaction and like everything is normal and there isn't a big and awkward elephant in the room taking up most of the train space.
THIS GOES DOWN DIFFERENTLY IN THE MANGA THAN THE ANIME. The manga stretches this scene out to give three characters very important breathing room while the anime cuts this far shorter and mixes up the dialogue some, muddying the motives.
Rin, not reading the room, sees Shiemi and calls out happily to her. Shiemi utterly freezes and can't decide how she should respond or what she should say. She has, as far as we know, never had a friend outside of her family and the twins. She doesn't know how to interact with them and she is drowning in guilt of failing them as a friend. A lot of that is because Rin said she wasn't his friend to the Kyoto Trio and because Izumo is always telling her she's failing as a friend and saying she doesn't like her. Izumo is a bully at this point. I will not back down on that point and will continue to reiterate it. You do her incredible arc a disservice to pretend otherwise.
That leads us to the confrontation:
Ryuuji does not show any sign of anger until Rin talks about Kyoto. Then it's instant grouchy face Grouchy face and grouchy boy until one of the other two interject and then he swallows all that Kyoto frustration right back down and stomps off to sit behind Rin with Konekomaru -- who has been given a talk by their superiors on what to do if their classmates loses his shit and goes feral on them and who lost his entire temple and family to the Blue Night -- voicing his worry about Rin losing control of his flames on a tiny train where there is no where to go.
Rin visibly deflates and sinks back on his chair Izumo, the drama queen who would deny being one, enters and sees. Now Izumo has conflicting reasons for her next act. She has been ostracized and bully quite a lot in her younger life, and that is part of why she is now an ice queen. She sees Rin and wants to help him feel better and is no more in the know of what the others are actually dealing with than Rin, and I dare say that was her first and primary motive.
However Izumo cannot allow herself to do something solely out of kindness to help someone. That is a weakness she will not allow herself and dangerous. Kindness and helping gets you hurt or killed by stronger parties and she has sworn off that in all cases but Paku. (No one quite knows what magic Noriko Paku possesses, but man does she, lol.)
So Izumo sits next to Rin and waits until after the debriefing about why they're here (meaning Ryuuji is now even more upset because yep, it's absolutely his temple and their miasma and their secrets and their weaknesses being discusses and revealed and flaunted) and they chat a little about the fact that lots of people have demon blood (*cough* FORESHADOWING *cough*) and then, after getting flustered about Rin complementing her and thanking her and getting buddy-buddy enough to use a nickname, she goes cruel and decisive and makes a pointed jab at Ryuuji, who takes it in stride for a moment, and then Shiemi, who visibly deflates thinking even less of herself and that Ryuuji does not take in stride.
Izumo did a kind thing in sitting with Rin, however, the others did not do a cruel thing by not sitting with him. They simply chose to give themselves a little space from a situation they were still struggling with. The cruelest one in the moment before she spoke was probably Konekomaru, and even he wasn't talking to Rin. He was nervous and scared and talking to his friends about Rin. None of them owed Rin anything. They did not owe him their time or space or attention. They are allowed to recover from their trauma and physical injuries while not having him constantly shove his over-excited puppy-energy self in their faces constantly and make everything all the more difficult for them while they try and reconcile that guy with the feral monster that wanted to take a chunk out of them and who was not in control of the flames they've grown up terrified of.
We see the story mainly through Rin's perspective, all the more so if you're an anime only, but that does not mean Rin is always an honest and reliable narrator. He is unaware he tried to hurt them and unaware of their own trauma. He can't imagine any of their actions and reactions aren't centering around him at this moment because Rin too is going through a lot of trauma and stress of his own that they don't know about.
What I find over and over again in this story is that people excuse any poor or selfish or cruel act of Rin's because of trauma and not being perfect, but they will not excuse it in any one else. This makes for a frustrating unfairness in expectations, and frankly, turns the story boring. If no one but Rin can make mistakes, or you choose only to see other's mistakes and not Rin's, you are robbing the characters and Rin of their complexity and growth.
Izumo was kind in sitting next to Rin, and she was purposefully cruel at the exact same time. This is who Izumo is. Kind and cruel for quite a long time. Brave and selfish. Confident and self conscious. Guarded while slowly falling in love and denying it every step of the way.
So the train ride immediately goes to shit and they get loud with Ryuuji calling her out (reminder, she can call them coward all day long but she did not leave the circle and didn't fight and has not stepped forward once in any of their missions to work as a group or fight until she had to)
And Shure (in the manga) wakes up and makes them sit in a different car of the train with bariyons on their laps as punishment. Konekomaru continues to stress, Ryuuji tells him to chill, Shiemi continues to hate herself, and Izumo continues to be purposefully cruel.
The bariyons get aggressive and one pins Shiemi to the ground. Rin does Rin and burns it without warning, freaking everyone out because wow! Blue flames are just suddenly everywhere. Ryuuji interferes because again, his temple was devastated by Blue flames and he has no reason to think they can behave differently and he is nothing if not determined to protect and help his team at all times.
Shiemi realizes Rin still has control of them and tells everyone to relax, and they do.
The flames are put out and Rin immediately attacks Ryuuji.
Rin demands trust and honestly, I could understand if he was unaware that he'd caused mayhem in the forest and tried to lunge for them, but if he was aware then he has to be smoking those flames of his because there is no reason to trust him at this point. He's lied (he didn't have a choice but they don't know that and reasons do not negate that a lie happened and we are now in the lies arc) and he has shown he is dangerous and that Demon Kings kind of follow him and will attack indiscriminatingly. (It's not like they know Amaimon is not allowed to kill them.)
Rin knows he won't hurt them and thinks that should be enough. No one else knows that they can believe this at this point. Ryuuji explains that Blue Flames have killed a lot of his people and that he can't trust someone who endanger his family. It is once again Kyoto he is thinking about and Kyoto he is worried about. They are on a train to Kyoto where Blue Flames destroyed a lot and now they're bringing the one guy with Blue Flames there and he keeps flaming up so it seems like what little he still has there is going to be devoured by flames.
Rin says basically, sorry that happened but it has NOTHING to do with me. This is a naïve thing to say and while technically right, is missing the point of what Ryuuji said. I can't trust you because you haven't shown me I can trust those deadly flames with you and they have absolutely devastated my home before.
The fight amps up more -- and again, Rin was the aggressor. They're both hot headed but he's the one that grabbed Ryuuji, not the other way around, and in a fairly close way to how Amaimon had grabbed Ryuuji and that can't be helping things. The fight gets louder and Konekomaru bravely intervenes and grabs both of their arms and tells them to stop. A bariyon choses that moment to cause chaos and try to kill Ryuuji and Shura has had enough and kills it but kindly doesn't kill the exwires for interrupting her nap twice over and the conversation is left entirely unresolved.
And for the next long stretch, they will not have that conversation resolved. They get back, Ryuuji is immediately accosted by his powerhouse of a mom, Torako Suguro who is pissed, and finds out that his dad has been absent and that things are going south fast in Kyoto.
From this moment on, Ryuuji will have one goal and that is to find his dad and save what few temple members he can. He wants to reunite his temple--that has always been his goal--and his dad's failure to lead and potential at being the traitor in their midst is causing what few of his sect are left to fracture even more. He is around Rin a few times in the next chapter, but his mind is never on Rin or their drama. He is wholly focused on Kyoto and the drama here.
This is where a lot of people misunderstand him. He is not avoiding Rin, he simply has a much bigger priority, as he should. This is his family and this temple is everything to him. We find out that Tatsuma has thrown their reputation in the mud and that he has caused a lot of their sect to abandon the temple, and that he has fought Ryuuji's hopes and goals every step of the way, and that he was the first to laugh at Ryuuji (which we know is an immensely traumatic memory for him) and that Tatsuma is actively working to avoid Ryuuji, and that he was at the Keep during the break in, and that several members of the Sect absolutely think Tatsuma is the traitor.
And if he isn't the traitor, then he is still failing them and running away from his duties. What's worse, we see a few of the sect (Mamushi specifically) even place some of the blame of the failure on Ryuuji.
Rin is seen working with the Kyoto trio on some kind of chore after they arrive, and actively being ignored and mistreated by the teachers. They absolutely deserve ire for the way they treat Rin like he's already gone feral and refuse to let him help.
Rin is being ostracized and thinks everything happening here is about him. He thinks the others are ignoring him and that they're upset about him. They're largely just... Not. Izumo and Shiemi are put on helping the large volume of patients and from what we see, Izumo doesn't chat with Rin again after the bus.
Shiemi sees this as a way to not let people down (she thinks she let everyone down in the forest. That it was her fault and she isn't good enough or strong enough or just enough to be their friends. Probably partly because the one friend she thinks she has is a bully.) and dives hard into work. She still doesn't know what to say to Rin and freezes up a lot.
That leads to a fantastic scene in chapter 18 with Izumo and Shiemi in the garden and Shiemi positively sobbing about being a useless friend and not being strong enough to help like she wants and Izumo telling her she's really strong and able to talk about friends and her emotions without getting embarrassed and that she's stubborn and strong as a weed and Shiemi, who has clearly not gotten enough praise in her life just glows and determines to be as strong and stubborn as a weed.
It's a vitally important moment for both these girls. Izumo is kind and doesn't turn it cruel and sees how strong Shiemi is and helps Shiemi see herself as strong too. Izumo has done a lot to break Shiemi down but she is also, arguably, the one that did the most to build her back up too.
She dives back into her work to the point she inspires Rin to try harder on his own training because he is lazy and she isn't, and he admires that.
At this point Shima has decided that to keep going on his own path in the laziest way he can manage that ignoring Rin was too much work so they're just going back to before and acting like nothing ever happened. Rin is drunk and insults him in this with the list.
Rin confronts Konekomaru later and finds out what happened to Konekomaru's family and Konekomaru begs Rin to leave Ryuuji alone because he is dealing with a lot of stress. Rin (correctly for once) realizes that Konekomaru will absolutely be his friend if he can show that his flames aren't a danger. If he puts in the work to get control of those, he can be friends. Rin goes off determined to do that.
Ryuuji and Shiemi are now the only two who haven't had their Rin moment, and they firmly busy in their own stuff. Rin still thinks they're avoiding him because they're mad at him and blaming him for the Blue Night stuff and they're simply not. At no point does he ever really seem to get that he's assuming stuff incorrectly about all this either.
Ryuuji does some not at all stealthy spying and follows Juuzou to the Keep to find most of the staff unconscious and gets himself in the middle of the theft of the Impure King's last eye. Mamushi betrays them to Toudou and states that it is because of Tatsuma that she is. That he has failed them as a leader and conspired with Mephisto by giving away the sacred relic of their temple (Kurikara) and letting the son of Satan have it.
She is not entirely wrong, and she is not entirely right. She is very wrong about Toudou, but they both escape to cause more havoc elsewhere and leave Ryuuji to finally catch up to Tatsuma.
We have been building for several chapters at this point that Ryuuji and Tatsuma do not have a great relationship. There is a lot of frustration and confusion and hurt in it. A lot of history and pain and Ryuuji is trying to get his dad to tell him anything. To deny the allegations if they're not true and do something to help with the fact that one of their members just left.
Tatsuma refuses to. We later learn why and it sucks, but it doesn't lesson the hurt in this moment. Being unable to explain something does not mean that your actions, justified or not, did not and do not hurt someone.
Ryuuji, seeing his dad turn his back on him without even a hint of an explanation to all the terrible accusations and all the pain and trauma around them, pleading for some kind of explanation to anything, plays the only card he has left.
His father has already all but disowned him for the cram school, so he returns that. He warns that if Tatsuma leaves now and like this, he might as well not bother to come back because Ryuuji will no longer (can no longer) consider him his father.
Rin, who has kind of snuck into this dramatic meeting, overhears this and has a violent trauma induced reaction.
Now, Rin has trauma and it is entirely understandable why hearing those words would make him react dramatically. That does not excuse the violence he reacts with. You enduring trauma and having triggers and painful emotions does not give you the right to inflict violence on someone else.
And inflict violence Rin very much does. Once again flaming up some too, not at all in control.
This was not Rin's fight to get in the middle of. I will die on the hill that others do not get to determine what a child can and cannot do in their own parent and child relationship. Others can offer opinions and advice, but they do not get to order or dictate the relationship. They are not part of it and cannot possibly know what it is actually like. This is the same sort of mentality that tells people who have had to make the immensely difficult choice to go no contact with a parent that they should try and make up because it's hard to be a parent like it's easy to be a child and under the parent's control and guidance. Ryuuji has a lot of reasons to have made that ultimatum, and while we will learn a lot more about why Tatsuma has failed as a parent and leader, the reason does not absolve or eliminate the failures. He has failed Ryuuji multiple times and at this moment, tied by a cruel fate, he has to fail and hurt him again.
He did not have to choose to do it this way though, and do not forget that.
And Rin knows nothing about their relationship. He is putting his own reactions and motivations on Ryuuji who does not have them.
Rin is in the wrong in this moment. I will not back down from that either. Rin hurt his friend and revealed himself, and in the next panels defied Shura and continued to try and fight Ryuuji and make him understand that you can't disown your father because you can't take that back--
And it is in this fight that Ryuuji is first made aware that when Rin talks about his dad, he has not been talking about Satan. Rin was raised by someone else. They still don't learn the real story yet, we're not really told when or if they do get the full story about Shirou, but you can see him realize something happened to whoever raised the twins, and it was bad.
Rin gets knocked out and arrested and Ryuuji is sent to ice his swollen face and he will have the injuries Rin inflicted on him here through the entire rest of the arc.
And I am now over 5k words so I'll try and wrap this up some. I'm going to have to post the Yukio half on another post xD
Rin gets a letter that tells him that Tatsuma and Shirou were in cahoots about the sword (look, Mamushi was partially correct) but that the sword did not have Karura in it like it was supposed to. He also finds out that Tatsuma wants him to kill the Impure King. Mephisto then shows up and locks him away giving him a death sentence. Yukio has to leave with that knowledge to try and stop the rising Impure King before he infects and kills all of Japan.
Tatsuma goes and shows that he had made a pact with Karura and that the Suguro line has always guarded the secret that the Impure King was kept sealed under the temple by Karura. That were he to be reunited with his eyes, he would rise again. Toudou wants to get Karura so he did all of this to get Tatsuma to reveal Karura.
Tatsuma is stabbed through the back of the throat and Karura mostly devoured, and the Impure King is rising and reforming and going to poison everyone.
Shura gives the letter to Ryuuji and Kurikara and offers the camouflage ponchos to go break Rin out if they want, and Ryuuji and Shiemi are the only two who do not hesitate for even a moment to go and rescue him.
The jail freezes them and gives nonviolent Shiemi a moment to shine. She confronts her own self doubts and goes to find Rin and coaxes him back out, showing she knows he won't be a danger to her by embracing him and his flames. She realizes that her fears and self loathing caused her to only think about her own emotions, and not how he was feeling (something Rin could also very much stand to do) and she immediately switches to comforting and encouraging him.
Rin busts the prison with style, Konekomaru says he's ready to be friends, Shima and Izumo state they're only here on Shura's orders, and
Rin still doesn't get it. He still has no idea what Ryuuji is dealing with or why he's upset about any of it. He has spent this entire arc trying to find his dad and trying to help the sect, and failing every step of the way. He has tried to help everyone around him in any way he can and show that he can be depended upon and trusted.
Rin has never opened up to any of them. Rin demands that they lean on him and listen to his advice and accept him entirely, and gives them nothing in return for that vulnerability and openness. He doesn't talk about his own life or emotions or thoughts. He keeps conversations light and easy and doesn't even tell them that he was raised by a guy that's now dead. He shoves himself in conversations and dynamics that don't concern him all the while demanding trust, and then will not let them in in return.
Ryuuji is seeing that so clearly now and it is hurting. How can you trust a guy who won't trust you back? How can you trust someone you thought was one thing who never showed you who they really are and still won't be open and real with you? Who has enough power at every moment to level half the world and is emotional and stupid and impulsive and won't be real with you?
Rin has been under a death sentence and told he had to keep his heritage a secret, but even outside of that, he really doesn't talk about himself. He doesn't open up to his friends like he expects them to open up to him. Neither brother is good at expressing themselves (and a lot of that is because they weren't raised to be that way. Shirou did his best but had a lot of limitations too.)
He demands they trust him wholeheartedly but will not trust them in return. Or he hasn't shown in any way that he does trust them.
This arc, at its core, is about lies and how those and trauma can and do make relationships messy. How even ancestral drama can go down the line and get us caught in cycles of it. But it also shows that we can do the work to get past them, and that it's messy and painful and loud and not always easy to see what's right and wrong while we do it, but we can get past it and move on together. We can make terrible mistakes and seek forgiveness and understanding and sympathy or empathy and try to do better. We can laugh in a field of disease and trust entirely on someone because we know we can even if the world is falling down around us and it doesn't make sense.
Neither Rin nor any of the exwires or Yukio are a villain in this arc. Even Mamushi and her cruel words and betrayal are not a villain in this arc. Everyone acts kindly and selfishly or in fright or confusion or in motives that are entirely misunderstood. They're all dragging their own emotional baggage with them and they're all getting tangled up and not listening, but they still strive on and strive to understand and talk it out when they can, because they care about each other and getting it right.
To act like it's as simple as "The exwires bullied Rin!" is naïve and robs Kato's story of so much richness and deprives the later arcs of so much character value she built starting here. Kato does a beautiful job of building all of her characters and giving them rich personalities and motivations and flaws and she shows us them through Rin sometimes, but she also gives them a lot of time without him at the forefront. She gives him flaws too, and a lot of wrongs, and that's why he's such a powerful and alive protagonist for our series.
You're free to dislike who you like and love who you like, but I do so encourage anyone who thinks the exwires were villains in this arc to really dive into the manga. Read through all the scenes and ask yourself why did Kato show that? Why is this character thinking that? Why did the character react that way? Kato gives us so much richness to dive into and to see so many people not do that and to take such quick and often incorrect or fragmented interpretations of the events is heart breaking and honestly robbing those people of a really good story.
Rin was wrong in assuming that everyone hated him and assuming that it was as simple as trust. He was wrong to try and force things and to try and force his own interpretations on others. It was only once he started to listen and hear what they themselves were saying that things got better. Now some of this is just the mess of the anime between season one and the start of season two, but a lot is just misinterpretation by the fandom. It can happen to anyone, but that does not mean it suddenly becomes factual because of that.
It's been at least six thousand words and I don't know if this came across as clearly as I wanted it to, but I hope it encourages those who haven't to dive in deeper. It's a rich arc with so many fascinating moving parts in it. I've barely brushed on Tatsuma, Juuzou, Mamushi, and Mephisto in this and their plots are all entirely interesting and add so much! Expect a Yukio and Izumo and possibly Shiemi follow up at some point, lol. Probably just as long though I'll try to be more concise.
If you read this far, thank you! You deserve to crash with the rest of the exwires in Toraya on a nice futon.
As always, look up my tag '#raven rambles' for more of my aoex meta and analysis.
I posted a bit ago that I would be doing something big and while I’m not even sure if it’s gonna really live up to that yet, I have been thinking about this for a while and hopefully my thoughts end up being satisfying.
This is the character™️ for me. The one that I think about the most, I guess because I’d like to be the kind of person she is. What that says about me is complicated I guess, given what we are about to go through, but I think in the end it’s for the best. Another note, I’m gonna be spoiling pretty much everything from Xenoblade 3 and probably some of the other games as well, we will see where this ends up going. As it’s my favorite game of all time, I do want people going in blind as much as possible. So yeah, only continue if you’ve played already or really don’t care about spoilers, I’m not your mom I guess…
Without further ado…
Miyabi Xenoblade 3, yep that’s her last name I checked!
There’s a lot of reasons to enjoy her as a character, and I’m gonna go through every one because I’m insane. Sure, there may be better characters objectively than her, I’m in no position to argue that she’s the “best” character in any capacity, even within the game she’s in. As a side character, she can’t really ever get the same level of development and screentime as someone like one of the main cast. Despite this, I feel like her character has wide enough implications for some of the main party members as well as a dynamic in both character and gameplay that I could easily consider her the canon 7th party member.
So let’s get the easy and less interesting part out of the way first, the gameplay. She’s a healer class, but many of her abilities focus on art recharge and cooldown manipulation. I won’t go too in depth with this because I’m not the person you should be consulting for gameplay advice; thats Enel’s job. I just really like how her gameplay is all about supporting her allies through morale boosting, similar to Fiona, but takes a more musical approach to it. Since she’s an off seer too, and given the contents of her hero story/Mio’s side story, it makes sense that the ideas from those arcs come back into play to some degree, with the feeling she brings across in her music allowing for the party to attack faster and fight harder as it were. This stuff will come back later, but it’s mainly just a nice integration of ideas between gameplay and story, something I believe this game does better than most.
Ok, I’ve stalled long enough, let’s get into the meat of things. One thing I want to talk about before we get to the part of the story where we actually get to see her in flesh and blood is the first time we ever get a mention of her. This happens near the end of chapter 1, while the party is recovering from their first encounter with Moebius and the death of Vandahm. After he passes, the party stares at all the notes around them, dumbfounded by everything they’ve just learned. Mio is the first one to do anything, almost instinctively pulling out her flute and starting to play. After a bit, Noah joins in, and she’s surprised about him doing that, so much that she briefly stumbles before continuing. After they finish though, she thanks him for it. Noah responds, saying that it’s just what they’re meant to do… “to send on the voices of the departed is an off seer’s purpose”. Immediately we cut to a flashback of Miyabi talking to Mio, saying that exact same thing word for word. Mio doesn’t really respond much, but I sense a hint of comfort hearing that from someone she didn’t know. At the same time, their memories had just been merged after the first time they became ouroboros, and Noah saw a lot of images of Miyabi and even heard Mio scream out for her. Part of me wonders if he also latched onto that idea because of that. It already is an aspect of his character prior to that encounter, so it’s not like he’s changing his mindset at all when saying it, but it does make me wonder if that’s something he remembered from their time as ouroboros and latched onto the idea. This is really the first time we see Miyabi have a tangible impact on the plot, and it helps to draw the two main characters together. Mio sees something of her dead best friend in Noah, and that seemingly gets them to trust one another.
Now, there is one other scene in chapter 1 I want to discuss before moving on to the part where she is brought into the story. Mio is looking at her journal, lamenting her imminent death in the next three months time. She tells Noah she’d been thinking about it a lot, especially what she’d leave behind and what she could do to make a legacy. She specifically also mentions seeing off so many people who felt the same as she does. Noah agrees, and says he thinks about it a lot too. Already the chemistry between these characters is very interesting, both having the same role and thus being forced to think about things like legacy and death far more than even the soldiers around them. This allows them to bond over their mutual understanding and feelings about their roles and how they might be able to build something more than this life they both despise. A lot of this for me is setup for the story, but it gives us some important context and shows where Mio is at character-wise. Not to spoil too much of the following, but this point in her character is important, as she wouldn’t have ever made it there had it not been for Miyabi and her interactions with Mio. So let’s look at some of those interactions.
We are now skipping into the beginning of chapter 6. So much has happened, multiple characters have died and only some have come back. We just went through the best part of the game, everything in the latter half of chapter 5. Players are probably emotionally exhausted and most likely had to take a break after the end of chapter 5. I personally stayed up until like 3am finishing that chapter and the associated scenes, and I am usually lights out by 11:30 even on weekends. That’s how hooked I was. I finally passed out and had to continue the next chapter the next day.
After some brief lore building about the old City that gets expanded upon in Future Redeemed, we are introduced to Mio’s side story. It’s framed as part of the main story while also being its own detour for Mio’s sake, to check out her former colony that had been destroyed some years ago. She suspects something strange is going on there, and that Miyabi might be involved. This is really when the story starts to focus on their relationship. We start out seeing Miyabi is not the best soldier, and as she puts it, a klutz. This is directly compared to Mio, who’s a top soldier with pretty much the highest marks around. Despite this, they are both chosen during training to be off seers, which makes Mio very upset. She’d rather be taking life than sending it off, while Miyabi is just happy she’s able to contribute at all. Initially, Mio blows off Miyabi’s attempts to get to know her, not necessarily because she’s a bad soldier but because she views this whole deal as a waste. This comes to a head after a large battle where a lot of their colony is killed, but they win. Mio questions again what the point of all this is, and Miyabi says that’s its obvious, that they can just only contribute after death. She then explains that she’s touched motes of light from Kevesi soldiers, and discovered that they live the same way that she and her friends do, with the same hopes and fears. She sees their job as sending on those feelings, and this is where we get the line once again: “To send on the voices of the departed is an off seer’s purpose”. After they play, one of the soldiers from previous cutscenes calls out to them, thanking them for sending off their fallen comrade. This is enough to give Mio a whole new outlook on life, seeing that she can accomplish something in her role her, and forever linking the two.
And yeah she carries this purpose throughout the rest of the game. You can see it in a lot of her interactions with Noah discussing off seeing and their goals in the world. Off seeing in general is such a good foundation for characters who want to change the world because they are the closest to those who suffer the most and die in this horrible world, and yeah Miyabi is also an off seer and that part is just about to be elaborated on!
So the next scenes in the flashbacks are about their time at colony Omega, where they’re experimented on and didn’t have to fight. Interesting that while they didn’t have to fight they also didn’t really have a purpose either during that time, as they were never told what the experiments were for. And then the accident happens! Again it’s foggy in the details but it leads to both Mio and Sena being knocked out and unable to do anything. Miyabi drags them both to a conveniently placed escape pod (gonna be honest why are those even there I guess for the illusion of safety in a lab where the only person valued there was Y). But the interesting part is that once she brings both of them to the escape pod, she gives Mio her flute, a representation of her life and mission, and tells her to live for her before closing the door and launching the pod. She then gets caught in an explosion and seemingly dies. Mio wonders why she did this since she was actually younger than her and would have had more time to exist than Mio. Also, practically, she could have easily gotten into the pod and gone with them, since there was shown to be more than enough room for everyone. I think there’s a lot going on here actually. Primarily, I think Miyabi wants Mio to accomplish what she set out to do and make it to her homecoming. She believes she wouldn’t be able to make it the same way that Mio could and thus makes the choice to give her more of her life. But then there’s the darker aspect to it, kind of similar to how Joren’s arc went in that she didn’t really have the choice to live the life she wanted or one that would bring her the most happiness because she was too busy fighting in a pointless war. Her choice was not only one to give Mio a chance to make it to her dream, but also an (supposed) escape from a world that she could never truly be comfortable in. This comes back much later in the ascension quest and trust me we’ll get there, but you gotta sit through me yapping about the rest of this one first!
So we’ve gotten through the backstory. They both feel guilty about letting her down but decide to impact others in a positive way the way she did with them. Unfortunately she didn’t stay dead, as people tend to do in Aionios. She is required by Y as a way to tend to his new project, creating soldiers who bear the greatest life forces to feed off of by only allowing them one year of life. Off seer’s melodies are required in order to keep them from going feral, and Miyabi is brought in as one or the recently deceased to control them. Now this next part is a bit silly but I’ve grown to kinda like it because it’s very Xenoblade. She’s controlling them because the off seeing melody is a way of giving people feelings, the same way as we saw Miyabi explain to Mio the purpose of their mission, except now much more literally. The party figures this out, and realizes that they also have a chance to do that using their own melody. If they can reach out through song and impart their own feelings upon those fighting, then they could break through the conditioning and return the soldiers to their normal state. They also need to overpower the control of Y embedded into Miyabi, but that’s easy with the gimmick of tearing apart the world that Lucky Seven has, resonating with the melody and allowing for it to cut through the conditioning. It’s quite silly but as I said and Nia also mentions when you meet her a bit later, lucky seven and Ouroboros are just gimmicks and what really matters is the desire of the world and its people for change, something that directly goes against the power base that Moebius has built up all that time. They want things to stay the same but are build off of the will of those in Origin who are also the soldiers in Aionios. If the world wishes for change then they become vulnerable, and can be fought against and that’s exactly what they do here and throughout the game. Ok that tangent is done now we can move on!
So we free everyone from the control of Y and Miyabi gets to be reunited with Sena and Mio. They have little heartfelt conversation about how she likes Noah and Mio’s melody, which leads to Noah realizing he’s using her flute, and trying to give it back like the goofball he is. She rejects this politely, and explains that her wishes have been passed from herself to Mio and then to Noah, and that she wants that cycle to continue. Another example of how change can happen, we stay winning! She then asked to join the party and yes absolutely you can come along of course. I feel like she’s basically the canon 7th party member anyways due to her dynamic with most of the party being on point and generally just slotting in nicely as a moral anchor for them alongside Noah. She also synergizes really well with everyone battle wise so that’s also fun! When she’s not traveling with the party she goes to hang out in the city, and talks about how she’s enjoying the peace as opposed to the war that she constantly had to find herself in while still a soldier.
This leads us, finally, into her ascension quest. She’s been through a lot, literally dying and coming back with all her memories, fighting battles she never wanted to, watching so many people die over and over again. After all that, she finally gets the peace that she honestly deserves in the City. This peace, it turns out, leads her to want to give back to the City, after they accommodated her and let her live the life she wanted. She’s finally found happiness, and wouldn’t you know it that’s the name of her ascension quest.
So what exactly happens? Well for those of you who’ve seen my yap sessions before you might be familiar with my feelings on this subject, as I’ve made a post before about this quest. It’s been quite some time since then and also I don’t know if you in particular have read that post so I’m just gonna go over it again and also add some new takes if I stumble across them. I’d just like to say though that Xenoblade is so good about its sidequests in the more recent games, like they have improved so much and become really a staple of why these games are so good. They turn into character studies more often than you might expect and a lot of them genuinely benefit the gameplay experience and also the story if you go out of your way to do them. This is one such quest I feel that does this.
Now time and time again we see people failing to find what they want in this world, in fact before this you probably watched Joren literally jump off a floating building after he realized he was wrong about himself and his ability to contribute to the team, and that even as Moebius he was stuck as someone’s lackey when he could have been so much more. So yeah there’s a lot of people in the world who didn’t get what they wanted out of life and changing the world is the only real solution. The City stands as a bastion of what life could be outside of the world doomed to war. Sure it’s got its problems, and a lot of them stem from the differing factions having different ideals leading to conflict, but overall it’s a much better existence than what the soldiers of Aionios are offered. Miyabi agrees with this outlook, and she wants to find a way to give back to the people who gave her a chance at peace. Initially this feeling is directed towards the members of the City, and a nearby cooking competition gives her the perfect opportunity to make something that can do that. Manana, being the cooking master she is, also decides to join because she wants to win. Mio notes that Miyabi doesn’t like competition and wonders why this is the route she chose. Nevertheless they want to support her in her choice, so off everyone goes to collect ingredients and get ideas for dishes. Manana goes for a dish that she knows is spectacular and objectively delicious to all, focusing on the taste itself being quality and all the trappings of good food. Miyabi on the other hand takes a different approach. She doesn’t go for a complex, intricate dish that intends to win on objective quality, but a dish that inspires a feeling in those who eat it. She’s very good at inspiring feelings through the musical arts, and as it turns out equally as good at inspiring feelings through the culinary arts as well. Her dish, while not the most impressive of the lot, is one that gives the judges a sense of homeyness and warmth, a feeling no other dish inspired.
Just a small detour before we continue, this quest is so fun and has a lot of great moments even outside of Miyabi. Ghondor being one of the judges and reluctantly saying her mom’s dish is good, the commentary from the host throughout it all, and of course MR BOOMER!!!! Our goat!!! The whole thing is packed with great little moments and overall hits so well as just a nice exploration of what life could be like in a world without the constant war.
Anyways by the end of it, the winner gets announced and we don’t immediately hear who won! It gets cut off and we go to afterwords where all of the patrons are eating the dishes that the chefs cooked. Everyone’s having a grand old time and Miyabi is very happy about this. We learn that Manana actually won the competition, turns out the master chef is in fact a master chef, but they both compliment each other’s dishes and Miyabi asks if she can learn more from her. When Mio and Sena try to console Miyabi after she lost, she puts that all to bed, saying that she really wanted to do this as a thank you to them all for freeing her and allowing to live her life without the fear of conflict and death. She’s found her place in the world and knows what she wants to be. A place that, again, wouldn’t be possible in the world as it currently is, and just another reason to change it!
Overall, I love her story arc throughout the game and it really goes to show just how much you can get out of even the side characters in this game. Practically all of them are top notch and explore the themes of the game and provide foils to the main characters in ways that allow for a deeper understanding of both the themes and characters of the game. I should really write a post about the foil characters in this game because so much can be said about them, but that’s for another time. What isn’t for another time, however, are my thoughts on the one actively bad foil character in the game! Why am I talking about him in the Miyabi post? Because he’s her counterpart in the story for the Keves side, and completely unnecessary!
Crys is genuinely one of the most pointless characters in the game, and I don’t think anything could change my mind on that. He’s SUPPOSED to be Noah’s counterpart to what Miyabi did for Mio, but the main issue I have with that is that Noah never needed a reason to not like fighting or seek change in the world. He already possessed that character trait as shown in the kid cutscenes where he didn’t want to summon his blade even though he could. Crys didn’t change anything for Noah the way Miyabi changed Mio, and the story would honestly not have changed at all had he not been a character at all. He also comes back in Noah’s side story as a freaking Consul but there’s so many issues with that!!! He doesn’t really have a reason to be a consul save for the existence of Noah!! But he died like 4 years before Noah and the gang got the ouroboros powers and actually became a threat to Moebius so there’s no way Z would have grabbed him specifically for this purpose as they weren’t even on the radar prior to the ouroboros awakening! He literally only exists to be a roadblock in chapter 7 and to give Noah a mentor figure with none of the actual story impact that Miyabi had for Mio! You can feel her presence when watching the cutscenes with Mio especially early on in the game, you can feel no such thing with Crys even when he is arbitrarily forced into the game late in the story. He’s just not a character worth the time he spent. He could have worked it Noah needed some more changes to his ideals to become the person he was at the start of the story between his child cutscenes and then. The most you can really say is that maybe he gave him more conviction in his choices but like I feel 8 years of constant combat would do that to you anyways??? And don’t even get me started on him retroactively being the one to invent off seeing like dude that has absolutely no relevance to the plot and you’re just doing it to show off him being a cool character despite that being a different version of him and also M was the reason that even happened anyways. Redundant, I say!
Ok mini rant over, back to the Miyabi glazing. In summary, she’s probably the most important hero in the game due to how her influence led to Mio deciding to trust Noah and getting the party together in the first place. Her life and sacrifice allowed her to contribute to the change she wanted to see in the world, and she was rewarded for it by being able to be there and find peace. She’s a catalyst for so much of the development of the other characters in the game and an ideal role model for someone like Mio who never needed help on the battlefield but needed to learn to see more than what was in front of her. She needed to learn that her influence on the world wasn’t limited to the enemies she killed, but included the way she made others feel. She’s able to show the power of feelings and beliefs and was also brought back due to those same powers. Happiness ties it up nicely with her using the power of a feeling to thank the residents of the city as well as Mio and Sena for saving her allowing her to live the life she desired for so long. A great arc from start to finish, and one that enhances many of the themes and characters we see in the game as well!
Alright wow that was a lot! Thank you for reading through all of this and hopefully it got you to appreciate Miyabi as a character in the same way that I do, or maybe it sparked some of your own thoughts about her! Would be interested to hear others observations about her as well, especially regarding her effects on the narrative and the characters of Mio and Sena! Also sorry about the Crys rant to all Crys enjoyers (if you’re out there), please tell me why I should like him and who knows maybe you’ll change my mind! Am I just missing something?
Like I said prior, I might also do a post on the foil characters in XC3, specifically I wanna run down all the heroes and do a base level analysis on why each character was chosen to inherit their class and what aspects they share and give us insight into regarding both characters. So stay tuned for that, coming eventually depending on when I have motivation somehow even with a 40 hours a week job…
