CAN ANYBODY HEAR ME.... (long post. the tags are long too haha)
akane kishida is in the middle because i feel like she has traits of both others, while akane (vlr) and asumu are less similar to each other...
i feel like i was overly reductive on how i wrote about akane (vlr) so SORRY about that but you get the general idea. unfortunately i have not touched zero escape in quite a while so my memory (and reading of it) is a bit fuzzy. on the other hand i feel like her writing is the most intentional, whereas the other two could've just been the writers stumbling into gold by accident. she's the least idealised in the sense that her, uh, more questionable choices, are very well known but she's probably the most unattainable feeling in my opinion. she could never be free to choose junpei if she wanted to, because the fates have decided otherwise... ("help i became too important at work" moment) ...fate and time shenanigans as this dehumanising force that never allow akane to live (or die) without consequence... there's very much this sense that by the time of vlr it's too late to really do anything for her, even though she is much longed for, searched for, and beloved. #doomedbythenarrative
asumu is fun because she never appears on screen alive, so we hear about her purely through others' eyes... 6 years after she's passed. jesus christ yall are really hung up on her, huh? (in this sense she's kind of like kinzo's depiction but taken up to eleven). obviously every account of her is biased somewhat, but we can get a general sense for the kind of person she was (with a grain of salt taken). asumu was well loved by her husband (despite his cheating) and son, and it really sounds like they all would have lived happily if she never unexpectedly died. battler probably has the strongest feelings for her but is also very biased, being that he was raised by her -- he leaves the family after feeling his father betrayed her, and their relationship is a strong part of his identity because of that. asumu is always presented as this warm, loving, caring, feminine mother, in his eyes. a symbol of motherly love, often faceless (not shown in the vn, and only sometimes with her face shown in the manga). kyrie (rudolf's second wife, who he cheated on asumu with) even emphasises asumu's femininity over her own as being a contributing factor as to why rudolf chose asumu over her (though again, take this with a grain of salt), so clearly the femininity is a part of the idealised image. asumu's death only valorises her -- immortalises the image of the perfect mother in battler's eyes and solidifies rudolf's guilt (in that he never confessed the truth of battler's parentage to her, though he thinks asumu suspected the truth anyway). kyrie's account is the only one who casts doubt on this idealised image. while the others present asumu's good traits as being incidental, a natural part of her, kyrie calls them intentional: asumu's relative femininity compared to hers, the way she refused to talk about rudolf's work (as if she were playing dumb) -- kyrie sees asumu's presentation as an intentional ploy to ensnare (lol) rudolf. obviously kyrie's account is VERY VERY VERY biased but she does at least give asumu credit for ending up where she wanted on PURPOSE. and it makes sense -- asumu did not end up the happy wife of a womaniser while being innocent to his nature. she did not end up his wife by accident, either. she has depth that is flattened by rudolf and battler's love for her, turning her into an idea of a mother more than a person
akane kishida is probably the most straightforward -- believed dead for decades is pretty damn unattainable. akane is essentially the woman who made arakawa: she's the reason why he took out his patriarch (and family), and she gave him a son -- creating both his image as arakawa the assassin and in later years, his role as a loving father (of both masato and his family). he told others about her, and how much he loved her, cared for masato thinking she had given up her life for him to live (not knowing she lived, and that masato was not that son...) and arakawa died not knowing the truth. despite the fact sawashiro could have told him at any time, that longing and regret he had for her was never resolved, and he believed it never could have been. unattainable. like asumu and her son/partner, time distorted their relationship -- akane became a memory, a regret, despite still being alive, unbeknownst to arakawa; and to ichiban, who had never known her as a mother (let's be honest, in shangri-la he has no shortage of motherly figures anyway), she is the beloved of his patriarch he holds in high regard. the idea of a birth mother doesn't quite register as reality to him, despite knowing it's true, and their relationship is shaped by that. she is a mother to others, but not to him. and it's a distortion that akane has contributed to (not to say she has done anything wrong!!) by deciding to stay in hawaii, choosing to keep living a new life instead of abandoning it for an old one (at the cost of being a mother to her son, and a partner for arakawa). to those in her old life in japan, she ceased to be a person -- she was dead and gone.
anyway, my point is. mother figures who mother so hard it eclipses their selfhood as a human being. mother figures who can't exist as humans again because of how others perceive them. (and the forces. always the forces.)
