The Writing of EnNatsu / Mark x Nelly in Ina11: VicRo reflects that one famous fascist dog whistle
⚠️ Victory Road Story Mode spoilers ⚠️
have you finished vicro story mode and then think "wow, endou and natsumi are such horrible parents" boy do i have a brief "essay" for you! (brief for an essay written by me, anyway)
First of all, let's get aquainted with these three ideas:
if the people who wrote them would make their characters consistent with who these characters are fundamentally then there is no possible way they can even be close to how their characters were portrayed in vr's story mode;
i need you to not pretend right now that these characters are real people that the game is documenting instead of characters to be used for a plot by real life people who can slip their implicit biases in their work (that eventually stood for nothing); and
death of the author means that whatever the author says the text/story was supposed to mean cannot be more meaningful/truthful than the biases and stereotypes that bled in their story.
Now that we're done with that, let's start.
While the ennatsu depiction is yes taking a large page from misogyny, it is also essentially how a centrist/right-leaning person thinks how socialists think and live.
i think fandom people have already discussed in length where the misogyny bleeds in so I'd skip that for now and go straight to the elephant in the room.
remember the conservative's myth about how socialism is bad because people who takes care of a community would neglect their own kid? that socialism is anti-"traditional family values" and endangers kids because you are making a stranger take care of them and "stranger bad because they're not even like you and they're super evil" (but they usually refer to black, indigenous, muslim, jews, asian, and other minorities) so you should let the big man of the family protect you? don't trust your neighbors rule? hey, does that seem very familiar to you?
"my parents never gave me a birthday gift because they think having a party and feeding everyone and hanging out with everyone is the greatest kindest thing any person should do and should be doing" (implication, nonverbatim).
the line that haru said in the game absolutely disgusted me because they really actually went for not only the laziest conflict they can come up with writing-wise but also a dangerous interpretation of community people/leaders. for a long time fascists have this weird image of socialists being so incredibly different from them that they think "they probably inflict their socialist mindset on the kid like that in a very young age." a lot of them follows the idea that a socialist couple are people who blindly and automatically think of the community first and "their own (family)" second (this phrase taking from the fascist belief that your blood family is all you have and the only people you should trust and house).
have you ever met people who live like that? have you ever been a member of an offline community?! have you ever done physical volunteer work at the very least?!
it really baffled me to see it but knowing what kind of stories that L5/Hino has written so far before victory road... yes, i should have expected that.
communities are not an enemy of a nuclear family just because you are inclusive of other people and prioritizes helping each other. that's the most common stereotype/bias/propaganda that rightwings are always spreading. because it's the easiest to believe since everybody we know grew up in the idea of individualism now and that a couple stranger danger dogwhistles have been in full effect now more than ever.
i strongly believe this game isn't created as propaganda despite it all (they really just want that money and play it safe so it's "apolitical" in their mind) but it's so obvious that hino and the majority of the writing staff here have this long list of unchecked biases that they're letting through in their work and it's highy concerning.
it's so obvious that the writers/hino see both endou and natsumi as community leaders too (they literally are). from how natsumi is propped up to be a really competent and diligent chairwoman and endou's history in go and the implications that he was doing a lot of work on the side. it's clear the writers want this to be "they were really kind people who supports everyone and are great leaders" but failed so miserably because none of them seem to have ever been part of communities built and run by minorities before.
and it really just sucks so bad that ennatsu has to be depicted like that just for some drama for a nothingburger "villain."
NOTE: if your takeaway from this "essay" by the way is that the ship is horrible, to ignore the ship, or that the ship disgusts/angers you, I'm going to need you to read up on some literature because you definitely not only missed the entire point but I'm going to automatically think that you're probably just mindlessly consuming media and let anybody spoonfeed you information blindly.
[I showed a preview of this post back then here but it was actually an original post of mine in bsky dated Nov 23, 2025 || if you want to read a positive analysis of vicro i also wrote about its main theme here about self-advocacy]
[just stating for the record that i am not american and have never lived there but the USA technically has my country by the neck and continues to benefit from it to this day]
