Hebi Anon (having to rewrite this because my browser crashed)
Here’s the big announcement, hand me the megaphone
KAGERO WAS NEVER SUPPOSED TO COME BACK
Interviews and production notes confirmed that Kagero’s death was supposed to be permanent, he was never meant to come back in any form and that that the retcon to reveal that he was alive was relatively last minute. Which means that most of Daiji’s actions during this arc was written with the notion that Kagero was actually dead, later changed to simply being totally isolated from Kagero. It’s why Kagero went from “You think we can work together like Ikki? No. The only way this ends is with one of us dead and the other in permanent control” to “I was waiting for you to admit you needed me”.
You can also see this physically with Perfect Wing as it’s just the Holy Live armor with added black stripes over the old Evil/Live body suit. Infact, in the first magazine previews, the stripes were literally stick ons that were visibly peeling (though I think they properly painted the stripes on later).
I said I would give my interpretation of Daiji during this arc once I’ve announced the big retcon, so here it is.
In short, I think that if you lose your inner demon, you not only lose the ability to perform the “evil” actions embodied by the demon, but you also become incapable of understanding anything “evil” from both others and your future actions. Primarily because Inner Demons embody character traits that can be seen as or learned to be recognized as “bad”. Like how a child that hasn’t had enough experiences to learn from can fail to recognize why stealing would be bad, and in turn why a child can fail to understand why someone would steal in the first place. Remove the demon, remove all that learning. And with the Igarashi family, it’s heavily implied that they can only ever have one inner demon, they can’t develop a new one.
Kagero was incredibly underhanded and scheming, so when he was gone, Daiji lost the ability to do the same. It’s why his big “plan” to stop Akaishi was to just jump in the announcement and just scream “don’t listen to him” instead of anything more underhanded like sabotaging the signal to prevent it from coming out. Then, after Akaishi and Giff literally beat the idea that the only way towards peace/the only “good” way forward was to bow down to Giff into Daiji’s head, Daiji was left completely incapable of understanding why people would fight back against that. It’s why he was left confused, outright saying he doesn’t understand when the Weekend refugees refused to go along with him, even after they all said why. He was doing the good thing in his perspective, so why would people object to that? What Weekend and the rest of the family was doing had a horrible risk as if they lost, all of humanity would die, so it was evil in his eyes as what Daiji was doing would guarantee survival. It was the opposite of good, so it is evil. And evil needs to be defeated. So on and so forth.
Absolutely mind-boggling to me that they fr had Kagerou killed off for good pre-retcon
Your entire analysis here though is fr fire because I absolutely agree with you. It would make sense then, with how Daiji was written, that without Kagerou homeboy would be unable to tell the difference between bad and good (more notably —- the nuance of it).
Did laugh though at that ‘not being underhanded’ (during the broadcast) part because that scene was wild 🔫 😛
