After reading various analysis, I’m amending my opinion from this post somewhat.
Eiichi is an interesting character. He’s probably my least favorite character for personal reasons, but he’s definitely interesting and quite fun to analyze. I said before that what Eiichi did is unacceptable no matter what his reasons, and I still stand by that. Even though I have no doubt that Otoya is going to end up stronger by the end of this, that does not excuse the methodology that Eiichi used. However, I’ve started to wonder about what made him think that bringing out Otoya’s dark side in that particular method was okay?
The root cause here, I think, is Raging Otori. It’s fairly obvious that Raging is not a good father, and not a good president either. He’s the one who came up with the whole disbanding thing at the end of season 2, and - like I saw someone else say (I think utapribr? correct me if I’m wrong) - I wouldn’t be surprised if he did it again if HEAVENS loses here. With Eiichi saying that he and Otoya have the “same soul” and how excited he was to see that, Eiichi has some serious issues, and it’s 99% likely that it’s from a lack of familial love. Really, I think Raging is the true antagonist here, and if there’s a character to hate, it’s him.
This episode also made me wonder if Nagi is the way he is because of Raging as well. I saw some interesting similarities between what Nagi did in his episode and what happened here, except on different levels. Nagi’s methods aren’t as hard to swallow to me because of one thing - how isolated the person on the receiving end was. At least part of Otoya’s isolation was done by himself in a figurative way (by pushing them away), but the “training camp” was a physical isolation from the rest, and made sure that Otoya fell off the deep end.
In the end, I think Otoya’s going to end up fine, although I do think that some mental scarring is going to result from this. He did need to acknowledge his past in some way, and that happened. However, the way it happened was not a healthy way to do so, and I think that’s going to hurt him at least somewhat for a long while
