aizuide - Tumblr blog

aizuide · 1 month ago

Text

Aren't you tired of being nice, don't you just wanna go apeshit: a ramble about the despair gimmick

In short- in my mind & my world, despair is basically just giving up on your/society's principles and deliberately becoming the worst version of yourself. It's kind of a rejection of society and expectations to a catastrophic degree- I am tired of being nice and I am going to go apeshit (I'm sick of trying to keep everything together, I'm doing a 180 and burning it all to the ground). Who hasn't fantasized a little bit about giving up the long fight for good and doing all the things you know are bad?

In long:

I do think the whole despair and hope, specifically, are moreso gimmicks to have easily recognisable and iconic words in your game rather than something you can actually summarise. I mean, the concepts are real, and the feelings are as real as any feeling is. But the spiral-eyes and super-saiyan mode are obviously moreso to make it dynamic and On Brand, and it's simply more fun that way. As a visual artist this is great for me!

But like, the actual despair thing to me is a more familiar feeling that a lot of people might recognize; a kind of sickness, not illness, but being sick of the world you were born into. Especially these gifted kids with their whole future already defined, whether they like it or not. If your world is rigid and unyielding, you might be sorely tempted to take a sledgehammer and just wreck it.

Akane example: her life was really rough, and her only way out was sports and the privileges being good at them brings. If she doesn't keep up, she just might end back in poverty, and at least in gymnastics there are less people abusing her. But she still needs to practice, mind her diet, wear the right clothes, socialize, compete, go to school, worry about her family back home, etc. Eventually she throws it all away, says FUCK IT and lets herself do whatever she wants, even ruins her body so there is a very slim chance she can even make a comeback- no expectations, nothing to live up to. Then, she can finally stop trying so hard to be good. It's easier to lay down and deteriorate, and after so long pushing yourself to make it, there's probably a kind of delerious joy to finally just. Give up, and stop trying. Absolving yourself of all responsibility for your life and others', whatever happens from here on out just doesn't matter.

Imagine your life is a castle of blocks (you know, the kind kids play with).

When you're little, everything is impressive. You made one block stand up, wow! Good job! Keep going, here's a block coloured improvement, here's one coloured discipline.

You should have a block coloured father figure, but instead you're handed violence. That one is misshapen and ugly and makes your whole construct unstable and much more difficult to work with in the future, but you're too young to know the difference. Once you're old enough to know, it's too late- you already built so much on that foundation.

As you go on, and make a bigger castle, not only does the building get harder, but people expect more, and it gets more and more imperative that you keep going and do not fuck up. Especially when you're a gifted kid that's supposed to be the very best at that one thing you do - it's exhausting!! Every time the castle so much as rattles, you're terrified it's all gonna come down, and you just start hating this stupid castle.

Then someone shows up and says, hey. You can just knock this whole thing down, yknow? If you do, people will stop hounding you about it, and if you do it with a big tantrum and a bang, they won't even expect you to try again. You can just rest.

And god, doesn't that sound good.

She hands you a baseball bat and you delightfully start smashing your castle to bits, and get splinters and blisters and tire yourself out with it. Once you're done, maybe you even start smashing other people's blocks. Maybe you even think you're helping them. It's just stupid blocks and you're so over treating them seriously.

(It so happens that she is making her own empire out of the wood chips of your life, but you don't see that. Or you don't care, or you're just happy to give something back to her.)

But of course it's not actually a castle of blocks. It's your life, and you don't get to switch out broken blocks for new ones and you can't un-smash them.

Kind of like waking up from a bender, a fun wild crazy time while it lasted, but now you feel sick and gross and hurt and you'd like to go back to the comforts you had, but... too late.

You get put into a rehab coma. Everything is a mess, everything hurts, and you don't really want to live in a pile of wood chips after all. You don't need to make a castle, you can make whatever you want, actually. But it's gonna be pretty hard.

A guy hands you band-aids and some glue and says, better get to work.

And you get to work.

260 notes · View notes

aizuide · 2 months ago

Text

on nagito komaeda and love

I just think it’s sort of funny that for a character whose (arguably) most well-recognized CG is this:

komaeda’s narrative so heavily centers love. and I don’t just say this because I’ve had komahina brainrot for years (though this is true!!). even if you don’t care about komahina, it’s tough to deny komaeda is a walking tragedy in large part because of the role that love plays in his life. his characterization is driven by the way his luck has denied him love, and how he seeks it out regardless. in that sense, I think that without understanding komahina as at least one-sided, you miss out on one of the juiciest, most miserable pieces of komaeda’s character development.

tldr; a love-centered reading of komaeda makes sense, recognizing komahina as “a thing” in DR2 (whether you ship it or not) is pretty important to understanding how komaeda operates, and I’ll try to prove it right here under this page break!!

Part 1: Komaeda’s Love Life (or, his life without love)

I think it’s safe to assume that if you clicked here, you know about komaeda’s absurdly miserable, tumultuous childhood, but I’ll do a quick recap just in case! meteor kills his parents on a plane, he inherits a ton of money. he’s kidnapped by a serial killer, he finds a winning lottery ticket in the garbage bag he’s thrown out in. he’s diagnosed with terminal cancer and dementia, he gets into hope’s peak.

in his free time events, komaeda *explicitly* frames his luck cycle as something that takes away the people he loves. it only “takes action” against him after his relatives have died (for the sake of this essay, let’s assume that komaeda loved his parents, or would have at least been hurt by their passing). by way of other close connections… well, his wording here implies that by the time of his diagnosis, he didn’t really have anybody in his life.

either komaeda didn’t allow himself to get close to anyone after the meteor incident, or he did, and they were taken away by his luck. at some point during his childhood, komaeda learned he should view himself as a death sentence.

so, how does this loss of love shape the komaeda we know? I’ll talk about this in terms of four of his defining (and connected!) traits in DR2 canon – the ones that really make his actions make sense: his self-loathing, his hope-seeking, his learned helplessness, and his certainty that his existence poses a threat to those around him. komaeda’s experience with loss makes him view himself as a source of death, which in turn fuels these tenets of his character. ultimately, his loss and the complexes that arise from it give him good incentive to push people away.

his self-loathing

komaeda hates himself. he views himself as worthless outside of his potential to serve as a “stepping stone” for the hope of the ultimates. he claims that this is driven by his beliefs around talent, which are in turn linked to the way his worldview rests on viewing hope as “absolute good.” the talentless (himself included) are only good for advancing the hope of the talented. still, his self-loathing is a bit more personal than that. take what he says and dig just below the surface, and it’s a clean cut trauma response all the way down. which leads us directly to…

his hope-seeking

komaeda is willing to do literally anything to serve hope. on the island, this (in short) means dying. this is where I prod at komaeda’s reasoning a bit more: komaeda’s willingness to act the way he does in canon also stems from his belief that his dying would be a net good for the world. his existence kills the people around him. his illness will kill him anyway. he has less than no value, and hope is invaluable. to go out for the sake of hope would give his wretched life purpose; it’s his dream come true.

and it’s no mystery why komaeda cares so much about hope: again, it’s a coping mechanism! komaeda’s belief that all bad luck is a necessary precursor for good luck and that hope will always triumph over despair is (as he himself says!) the only reason he’s managed to stay alive. I’ll say it again because I really can’t emphasize it enough – komaeda thinks that just by existing, he kills the people he loves. ouch!

learned helplessness / his existence as a threat

komaeda has, essentially, learned to submit to his luck cycle. all bad luck is good luck in the end – isn’t that amazing?! almost paradoxically, he’s hyper-vigilant about the negative impact his luck has on those around him. this is a tricky one. I make sense of it this way: komaeda’s perception of how much his luck impacts the people close to him isn’t inflated, like, at all. the supernatural way the world bends around komaeda to screw him over really does pose a danger to himself and others, and he takes measures to minimize that danger. his stated acceptance of his luck cycle is… well, again, he’s coping.

if komaeda really thought that all bad luck is ultimately good luck, he wouldn’t try to protect his classmates from his bad luck. but, as we see in island mode, he does!

but really, who could blame komaeda for lying to himself? I’ll restate the facts. komaeda thinks that luck is absolute power. he says that he’s powerless against it. his luck has taken his family, and it’s left him with nothing but money that he doesn’t want. he’s certain he’s a curse, and there’s no end to that in sight: so long as komaeda exists, he’ll keep on losing – murdering – everything he loves.

in the face of all of that despair, what can you do but abandon your self-esteem and pray for something good to come out of all of it? how else could somebody possibly survive carrying that burden, truly believing that load will never be lightened?

tldr; komaeda thinks his existence is a threat, and a big chunk of his personality is a frankensteined way of surviving the pain that comes with that. still, we should question how much of his worldview komaeda has really internalized without inner conflict.

Part 2: Enter Hajime Hinata

we get some answers on that front when we see that despite the clear and obvious danger it poses, nagito komaeda still finds himself falling hard for hajime hinata. that’s really, really loud.

I’ll preface this part by saying that you don’t need to actively ship komahina to understand what I’m trying to get at here. this said, I’ll be recapping an argument you’ve almost definitely seen before: komahina is definitely “a thing” – at the very least as a one-sided thing. to this, I’ll add the (perhaps bold?) claim that without recognizing that much as true, you’re missing out on a big part of what makes komaeda so interesting.

komaeda’s FTEs make it abundantly clear that komaeda has feelings for hinata. apart from his famed failed love confession, the fact that komaeda is willing to allow hinata to get close enough to learn about his views on hope and luck is telling.

(the smoking gun here hinges on trusting that komaeda was telling the truth during the time you spent with him; in so many words, that he only lied about lying. so, for the sake of argument, let’s assume this is true! there’s good proof for it, anyway.)

if you read his final FTE as komaeda flashing his soul to hinata and making a decision at the very last second to retreat, turning to old coping mechanisms to protect hinata from his luck, it’s sort of a komahina bombshell. that capitulation spells out for us that komaeda understands sharing his life experiences with hinata to be one of the most intimate things he could possibly do.

he recognizes the exact moment he lets hinata get too close – when his life story is finally told – and he does what he’s learned he needs to do to get them both out of that situation safely: he tries to make hinata hate him, and tells himself (and hinata!) that he did it for the sake of hope.

(and yet, komaeda let hinata approach him every FTE, knowing damn well that they were both playing with fire… very interesting.)

now, let’s say you don’t consider the FTEs to be integral to canon. I mean, you can really easily miss out on all of komaeda’s content if you choose not to hang out with him in chapter 1! so, for the skeptic, in the unskippable main story, komaeda tells hinata this:

komaeda cares about hinata despite everything. and I really, truly mean despite everything. at this point in the story, the fact that he still cares about hinata calls into question basically every single one of his core beliefs. he’s read his final dead room prize – not only does hinata not have a talent, we can presume that komaeda also knows hinata became ultimate despair along with the rest of them.

hinata has continually sought out komaeda’s company, even though komaeda knows himself to be worthless at best, lethal at worst. komaeda was willing to let him get closer, even though he knows how dangerous that is for hinata. he can’t help but let hinata try to know him.

isn’t he awful? to want what he knows he can’t have, even though that wanting has never done anything but cause pain? he’s really the lowest of the low, to love someone who destroyed the world, who makes him question the views that will allow him to do the only good thing he’s ever been able to do for it: to die for hope.

and yet, it’s a nod to how incredibly capable of love komaeda is that he’s still willing to reach out for it, no matter how many times it’s burned him in the past, and how much it hurts him in the present to want it. he understands more than anyone that his feelings can only result in disaster. reading komaeda as someone who can’t help but go on loving anyway makes his story hurt so much worse.

but, you miss a whole lot of that without an eye for komahina. seeing hinata as the eye of komaeda’s emotional hurricane (and keeping tabs on their connection accordingly) allows us to glimpse past the cracks in komaeda’s front. we see that komaeda’s worldview is less stable than he presents it as – hinata is where komaeda’s coping mechanisms, for better or worse, run up against a wall. that tends to be uncomfortable for a guy who’s just barely coping in the first place. then again, growth is supposed to be uncomfortable, isn’t it?

Part 3: The Future He Chooses

so, all of this considered, I think one of the most interesting ways you can flesh komaeda out post-canon is by asking how he’d find himself willing to accept love. whether that love is from hinata or the ultimates, whether it’s platonic or romantic, love is the thing that komaeda wants AND fears in equal measure more than anything. it’s the source of his self-loathing and his obsession with hope. it’s the reason he’s lived the way that he has for so long – lonely, and afraid of being anything but.

getting into a relationship wouldn’t solve komaeda’s problems for him, and that’s a good thing. it would force him to confront old ones, and probably create dozens of new issues for him, too. writing him through that makes for great character study!

hinata (or anyone else, for that matter) can’t love komaeda into loving himself, but he can give him a shoulder to cry on while he works through 22 years of fear and sorts through the wreckage of a worldview that’s long since stopped serving him. I don’t think his progress would be linear. but, I think that he could do it. komaeda learning to accept care is what his healing looks like.

(well. and physically recovering from cancer and dementia. but that’s neither here nor there!)

a post-canon komaeda learning to love narrative is also in line with the themes of DR2. hinata leads the survivors out of the neo world program because he makes the decision to choose his own future, creating a new version of “hope” for himself and his classmates. likewise, komaeda can make the decision to save himself. that is, if he trusts himself enough to actually touch and hold the thing that he’s never been able to stop reaching out for, anyway.

after all, hinata is lucky too. (and if it turns out he isn’t… y'all like angst fics, right?)

(shoutout to @cynopter for looking this over and confirming that I'm not spouting nonsense <33 thank you for reading my thesis of the week <33)

340 notes · View notes