i guess this is a natori character study now
first i am excited by everyone’s thoughts here and just wanted to...jump in if nobody minded, ahahaha.
made this post into a separate post based on @teresashiho & @sepiaglass conversation about natori, matoba, natsume, because my thoughts got extremely rambly and im not going to use a read more for reasons we do not need to explain at this juncture.
mostly wanted to go more into natori
since i think everything else was really well covered for matoba and natsume
specifically will ramble about 3 things: natori-his self image/learned helplessness, natori & the letter, natori & his special chapter interactions with matoba
warnings maybe that i am definitely, uh, biased perhaps since natori and matoba somehow?? sneaked into my top list of faves in natsume yuujinchou. will contain a lot of manga/anime spoilers. also may pull in some personal stuff into the mix.
natori’s self image/learned helplessness
+natori was never meant to be a fave character for the longest time and then the special chapter(s) and the rest of the manga came along and ambushed me with emotions. current!me is cackling at past me. like with the loudest cackling.
+pretty much everything else sepiaglass said about natori always being alone, and what his family thinks about him was extremely painfully accurate:
A quick aside about the scene where he pulled away from Takuma, and in response to Takuma’s assertion that he is kind, says, “No. Just scared.” I think that this scene demonstrates that Natori believes his family’s rhetoric about him being selfish, useless, attention-seeking, and a bringer of bad luck, because a selfish person cannot be kind, only scared (motivated by their own fears rather than out of goodwill toward others)... Natori blames the yokai on his body for all the estrangement he’s been through, all of his personality faults.
+so his self-image: really really in the negative end, especially when going back to the earliest episode/chapter that introduced him and when he was talking to hiiragi as a 5-year-old kid (6-year old kid?), hiiragi had to reassure him along the lines of “humans can’t bring bad luck to other humans.” basically, from a very young age, natori already thought of himself as someone who...shouldn’t exist around other people? or keep away from other people for their own safety
+actions he can take to change this self-image/sense of self worth or lack of connections to others? there’s nothing he can do about it until he reached his teen years and ran into his very first exorcist meeting, ran into takuma and seiji and others who were able to see the same things he could, and could do something with that power.
+the mention of learned helplessness kind of hit me in a weak spot actually because {personal story time, feel free to skip if it is not of interest}. just to give some background, culturally asian-american, raised in a suburbs-ish area. high school was a rough time-- i had a few rl friends (some who i could keep in touch with up to now thankfully). but if you counted them it would be less than the fingers on 1 hand. i very, very, very rarely got to meet with them in-person. whenever i thought about making more friends, or leveling up friendships with people i knew very casually--well, to do that, you have to spend some free time with them. totally easy equation for friendship, right? however, whenever i did ask the parentals that i got invited to one thing or another or wanted to meet with a large group of people, the answers would usually be something like:
no, you can’t, you have a music lesson that day
no, you can’t, you got a mediocre score on your last quiz, you need to study
no, you can’t, we heard on the news that some kids in iowa got kidnapped while walking home from the movies, if something bad happens to you it’ll cause trouble for us. (dear reader: i did not live in iowa).
eventually, i either told myself something like, i didn’t really need to focus on friendships right now when i was busy with studying, or i...gave up making an effort to ask about attending meet-ups with friends, because what was the point, exactly if the results were the same each time. disclaimer that i’m sure my family was....doing what they thought best, or just being extremely controlling, but in hindsight it was a fucked-up lady of shalott type of experience (a curse is on her if she stay / her weaving either night or day / to look down to Camelot)
+which is just the most roundabout way of saying that if natori was told all the way up to his teens that who he was---that his existence could hurt other people---it would be very very difficult for him to overcome that internal criticism and reach out to others. if he already has a hard time connecting to others, and if he knows that it would be even harder for their connection to feel genuine because of the lying about what he sees in the scenery--then i don’t blame him much for not being the friendliest person initially.
+i just remembered now that there are at least 2 times in the manga in which natori tells natsume that i don’t have any other friends!!!! *cheery smile* and natsume looks at him and says something like, wow...that’s a pretty sad thing to say, especially from an actual adult person like you
natori & the letter
+i think between teresashiho and sepiaglass, you guys covered most of the stuff about how it was not a Good Action for natori to take at all and the breaking of trust it would have on natsume
+nyanko-sensei might agree with natori’s actions though. at least since nyanko is willing to ride around on natori’s shoulders and thinks about natori as a person natsume could personally go to for help in occasional troublesome situations (see the de-aged natsume arc in the manga chapter), that’s...a good point in natori’s favor?
+anyways, random off-topic, there was a post once about harry potter and his hero-martyr complex, but the main point was that harry never really went to other people to help him out of trouble or to help others because from his personal experience, no other adult would care/bother to help except for him.
+which is not supposed to excuse the wrong that happened in natori taking away that choice about the letter from natsume, but sort of...parallels natori’s logic, if you will, ie something like no one else will understand the situation natsume is in with these exorcist politics, so i have to help him like this
natori & his interactions with matoba
+anyways, if you were interested in finding out about natori’s more...positive interactions with matoba seiji after special chapter undistorted world, for the untranslated special chapter, @epiphenomenal KINDLY MADE TWO POSTS ABOUT THAT second special chapter. and @izumisays EVEN DREW ART
+to recap; natori: little sense of self worth until exorcists meetings came into play -----> desire to prove to others that he has somewhere to belong in the exorcist community, even if he doesn’t fit in with his family (at least when i’m around others who can see youkai, i don’t have to lie)
+so!! natori’s sense of self-worth (almost zilch) versus his desire to prove himself as a capable exorcist (who can help others) interacts in interesting ways
+i don’t think in special chapter 15, he turned down credit from matoba because he already had a negative opinion of matoba; to kind of reiterate what sepiaglass said, he was more disappointed in himself, for not being strong enough to do something on his own & if other people helped him on that way, then he wasn’t really...worthy after all, to be around other people, to be able to help other people, it didn’t count.
+because he’s not used to being able to depend on other people, or he’s not used to others wanting to depend/trust him; more of an independent personality-type thing
+seiji does try to make an effort (he was so tiny and shady already!!!), at connecting with shuuichi-san oh boy does he try. sadly, seiji’s social skills are...uh, already a bit manipulative & conniving & tsundere in the i’m not acting friendly to you just because i am nice i also have super-pragmatic reasons for hanging out with you all the time. yes, this will work!! & in the untranslated chapter, shuuichi does seem to want to reciprocate that connection in his own clumsy way that chapter was ridiculous in 200x different directions!!!!!
+oddly enough, natori’s first refusal might have...increased seiji’s respect for him a little bit after their first meeting. as a head of a powerful clan, seiji is surely used to other people trying to use him for exorcist intrigue reasons, and shuuichi is someone...more close to his own level of life experience & refreshingly blunt about not wanting to use seiji as a stepping stone for any advantage/personal advancement
+in conclusion, i have too many emotions about characters with complicated families and confused multiple motives between them
