An Exhumation Of Hikaru Kamiki's Character Intermission II: An Eclectic Assortment Of Thoughts And Ruminations
Spoilers for the entirety of Oshi No Ko below.
These are some various thoughts about Hikaru that don’t quite fit with the pacing of this essay but I found important enough to include here for various reasons.
I’ve often seen hints of people using the songs from the anime as a foundation to interpret Hikaru’s character—which might as well be putting the horse before the cart. It’s the same reasoning to why I heavily dislike 45510 being used to justify Nino’s character being used to misdirect the readers during that interval where she was the red herring antagonist of the series.
If this material was so necessary to understand important facets of the character, then why wasn’t it included in the manga itself rather than in a side story or in an adaptation? Why didn’t the narrative take the time to organically flesh out a character of some importance if they were going to make said character an important piece in the manga? If one has to rely on side material to fully flesh out a character and tell a coherent story then more often than not said story will fall flat in certain aspects simply because not all the fans of said story are going to go out of their way to read the side material.
On that note, the songs might be good materials to use as supporting evidence to interpret his character, but using them as the lens and main focus to interpret a character which the narrative has already painted so clearly as little more than an antagonistic force responsible for so much of the series’ conflict simply reeks of bad reading comprehension and a willful disbelief of the events of canon. One simply can’t interpret a character without accepting all the facts about him and the sheer fact is that Hikaru was a murderer—one can rage against how his character ended up but to deny that he did commit those atrocities goes against the entire point of his character in the first place!
One of the other things I’d like to touch on is an interpretation that I’ve seen floating around online a couple of times that I find laughable but found the time to talk about here. It’s one that places Hikaru as some sort of godlike figure or possessed by some supernatural entity throughout the series. Funnily enough, it is one that I put some stock in as a joke when I used to believe that the series could conjure up some good writing and give some payoff to the little mythological references it posed.
It is also an interpretation that is completely divorced from most aspects of logical reasoning and fundamentally misunderstands Hikaru’s character.
The interpretation, from what I remember of it, goes something like this. Due to the fact that Ruby calls herself the embodiment of Amaterasu in Chapter 3 and the fact that Crow Girl describes those who reincarnate as gods—ergo Aqua and Ruby—that would mythologically place Aqua as X. After that, it’s a hop skip and a jump away from getting to the interpretation that Ai is actually an embodiment of Izanami and Hikaru as an embodiment of Izanagi since from actual Japanese mythology, Amaterasu is a child of Izanami and Izanagi. If I’m wrong about any part of how the interpretation goes, then that’s on me for not wanting my braincells to commit seppuku reading a bunch of slop that’s somehow of an even lower quality than the last few chapters of the series. In any case, I’m relatively certain that’s how the story goes. Maybe they’re calling Hikaru another god now, I don’t know and it doesn’t really matter because the foundation behind it is just as rotten as the last few chapters of the series.
I don’t think I need to enumerate all the reasons behind it for those without sufficient reading comprehension but I’ll do so anyway. While Ruby did claim to be the incarnation of Amaterasu in Chapter 3, similar associations simply aren’t seen in Aqua, let alone for Ai or Hikaru in a clear manner throughout the manga. There is no real hint that Ai or Hikaru were divinely blessed or cursed within the bounds of canon a way that would indicate that it was due to any supernatural creature nor that their existence is even relevant to them beyond their own relationship with Aqua and Ruby, two characters that we know that Crow Girl has been watching over. It’s little more than using the series’ small mythological references and stringing them together to create some sort of warped narrative without acknowledging any of the logical facts presented by the series.
Now let’s talk about some more topics that don’t require me to bemoan about reading comprehension for the nth time. I was posed this question by some of the people that have heard me bemoan about this bitch of a series and I think it’d be pertinent to answer here. Do I think Hikaru was supposed to have been defused after their first confrontation and that the manga was pushing Nino as the final antagonist of the series? I dislike engaging in this sort of speculation but that’s the entire point of this entire section so I’ll indulge in said speculation.
The truth is I simply don’t care about either scenario. Whether Hikaru or Nino was going to be the final antagonist after Hikaru’s confrontation with Aqua doesn’t matter because in both cases it would simply be a badly executed mess. We already know where Hikaru went with the antagonist title. A very shoddily written confrontation between the protagonist and our antagonist. Nino would be worse, even, because so much of her character is locked behind a fucking SIDE STORY that the narrative didn’t even have the decency to show us on screen. Not to mention if Aqua was already aware of Nino’s instability that would’ve been an easy capture and turn in and then we’d simply have no conflict if Hikaru was to turn himself into the police. Of course, these are all hypotheticals. I’m under no delusions that the alternative scenario would be better written than the slop we got for the final chapters of the series.
What does Hikaru even do as an antagonist? He is mysterious for 2/3rds of the series before unveiling his sad and tragic backstory and then confronts Aqua twice before Aqua pushes him off a cliff in a double suicide. Sure, he’s affected things in the series but all of those are so indirect and happen before the protagonists are even born that it feels like he isn’t even focused as an antagonist in the series. He certainly doesn’t get the kind of screentime and character depth that other characters has. Kana Arima, the second most useless human being in this cast of characters within the story, has more screentime than the series’ main antagonist! You simply can’t get good payoff to a story when your main antagonist has less depth and screentime than a useless side character!
There is a question that I’ve seen some talk about and that I think I want to give my two cents on now that the story is pretty much finished with Hikaru. Was Ai wrong in asking Aqua to and save Hikaru? From what we’ve just seen during his final confrontation with Aqua—absolutely—but this isn’t a flaw on Ai’s part. Ai made that plea to Aqua under the assumption that Hikaru wasn’t, y’know, the reason that Ai died in the first place? Or that he manipulated Nino in order to get Ruby killed? Or, a murderer in general, really! I can’t fault Aqua for going against Ai’s wishes to save Hikaru here after he tried to kill Ruby like that. At a certain point you can only help someone who wishes to be helped, and from what we see from Hikaru’s current last words that man is definitely not someone who wants to repent for his sins.
Another question that’s been on my mind is the following: Does Hikaru engender sympathy as an antagonist? This is a question that is highly dependent on the reader and their viewpoint, but I’ll first bring up certain beats of his backstory again. Hikaru was a victim of the darkness of the industry that was trying to find solace with the one person he could connect to wholeheartedly before he was rejected by said person on a note that ripped up all of his trauma to the surface. Does that justify in any way any of the horrible things he did afterward? That much is up to the reader and how you interpret him.
My two cents on it: Absolutely not. It isn’t just that Hikaru murders people that makes any sympathy towards him plummet out the window much like the manga’s writing quality in its final few arcs—but the method of which he murders people. He doesn’t kill people like Ryouske or Nino, where they just went up to their victim and stabbed the shit out of them. No, he kills people indirectly, more often than not using proxies so he couldn’t be held accountable, as we’ve seen with Ryousuke and Nino in order to keep his hands clean. It’s a more unsettling form of murder compounded by a whole heap of manipulation that he performs so that Hikaru doesn’t have to stick his neck out. He has to consciously choose which actions will push a person who is unstable—since this is a trait that Hikaru can use to manipulate people easier—to murder another living person over a vast period of time. Ryosuke and Nino’s crimes were ones of passion and obsession. Hikaru’s crimes were a result of a calculated effort meant to push those who were unfortunate to murder. There’s no contest that I think the latter is much more insidious and deplorable.
To top it all off, his last words as he sinks to the ocean floor were that he wished he could kill his own daughter to feel closer to Ai! Hikaru may have had a sad backstory and motives for his crimes, but at the end of the day the man is still a murderer. No matter what kind of “noble” soul he might’ve had that the manga might have us believe—which is funny because there’s nothing about Hikaru as he is now nor before that would make me put the word “noble” to him—at the moment he’s nothing more than a deluded murderer that needs to be put down to save the people who can still be saved. Ai may have loved him as he was when he was younger, but the man who insidiously manipulated others to serve as tools of his demented needs is no longer that troubled boy that held onto Hoshino Ai like a lifeline. I doubt that Ai would look on him with any sympathy after everything he’d done—not to mention his actions to try and kill Ruby, one of his last links to Ai—and honestly, neither do I. There are other CSA victims that don’t go out and murder people in an attempt to deal with their trauma and suffering. There are other people who have been completely destroyed after a bad breakup and don’t go out killing people in order to cope. There are people who’ve had their entire world evaporate into smoke after a single bad day after an uncountable number of bad days and never took other people’s lives into their own hands. Judging Hikaru based off who he was and what happened to him rather than who he is now and the choices he's made reduces him to his trauma and deprives him of his agency in the fact that he did make bad choices. There can be sympathy for the person he used to be—sympathy for the child swept away by the darkness of the industry and forced to suffer because of it—but also condemnation for the lives of the people that he has ruined in his attempts at reaching out to the only person who he’d ever truly loved after he’d callously pulled the strings in order to orchestrate her death.
>ACT III ACT II ==> >EPILOGUE ==>
