#Hanazawa Koujirou

[liadadadam]

Family

[ss3nchw]

[goldenkamuyhunting]

It interesting to read your analysis or meta ( even though I read it 2 am while being stress ). I want to ask since I do remember you didnt really like how the story ended Ogata, so how do you think that it might be better ? The way it end he think that he always blessed feel weird for me but I do kinda like that what he do all those time it's just that he's thinking what broken person would do. Though this might contract about my first point about he always blessed, in the end what you become is always the choice is yours not always because the aspect from other people (I do found interesting fan comic what if Yuusaku and Ogata swap place). Sorry if it's going random or you actually the answer already in one of your post. Thank you once again 💖

Sorry for the late reply, I'm glad you enjoy my meta!

As usual WARNING as this is not a Noda praising fest.

Yes, I've ranted in the past about how I didn't like how Noda handled Ogata in his last 11 volumes but I don't mind repeating it.

The whole 'Ogata was ALWAYS blessed because maybe for a moment Hanazawa loved his mother' felt like very poorly constructed.

The ability to feel guilt isn't tied to your parents loving each other or not, but to plenty of other factors... and anyway it's pretty difficult to prove Hanazawa ever loved his mother and it wasn't just in Tome's head and he merely wanted her for sex.

We heard how Hanazawa spoke of her, without a shred of love.

I don't know if this is due to something in Japanese culture but to me, tying Ogata's ability to feel guilt to Hanazawa loving his mother feels like tying two completely unrelated things together, a leap in logic I can't follow.

I'm not sure how, at this point, the story could have handled Ogata. He was left useless for 10 volumes and then the last gave contraddicting info on his past and, basically, ends with a repeated the situation on Vol 19 only to have Ogata kill himself. At this point it was better to murder him on Vol 19 because... beyond the fact he was a popular character, the story had no need for him to survive (same as Vasily, really).

It's something I stated back then in Vol 19, I was interested in Ogata, I liked him as a character, because he was interesting. The moment Noda made him uninteresting because he gives 0 contribute in carrying on the plot, I see no point in having him in the story.

Not even his death affects the plot because in the end he murders himself on his own so the guilt for his death doesn't truly befall on Asirpa and whatever wound he gave to Sugimoto is of no consequence to the battle nor is his stalling them.

The most he did was to cause the drivers of the train to die (in the magazine version)/to escape (in the volume version).

Both moves feel stupid as he ends up on a train no one is driving when he could have just said he was one of Tsurumi's men and went aboard just the same (he's wearing an army uniform).

But Noda needed the drivers to get off so he used him to do so, though everything else would have been fine. They could have been distracted by the explosion and this would have allowed the bear to end up on the train and the bear could have caused them to escape.

It would have made more sense.

So my options to make the whole thing better are two: either write him off in Vol 19/20 or rewrite the last 11 volumes to give him a role in them. As the second option is way too complex and would end up creating a different GK I think the first one is the best one.

Let Ogata die in Vol 19/20, the story doesn't need him anymore and his faceoff with Asirpa back then had more impact than the last one.

His death could be used to push forward the discussion if it's all right to kill or not instead than... just happening.

And if Asirpa really need to show she's willing to kill someone to save Sugimoto she can shoot/try to shoot a arrow at Tsurumi instead than just aim at him and not shoot.

On a final note... GK wasn't a story about the importance of your choices but since this is still very discussed in the fandom, I want to toss in that the idea that we become what we chose is an over simplification.

What we become is the result of a combination of genetic, education, opportunities and personal choices.

We can make our choices solely among the opportunities we're offered, which might be plenty or just few or none at all, and we decide according to our physical/mental abilities and knowledge and understanding of the world.

Ogata had clearly a flawed understanding of the world due to the way he'd been raised, and a very limited number of choices due to his social and economical background.

His chances of becoming a second lieutenant like Yuusaku are so low they can as well not exist, his chances to get Hanazawa to love him are even less.

Ogata couldn't choose to become (someone like) Yuusaku, even if he wanted to. That choice was never on the table.

And, since his understanding of the world was flawed and he never managed to correct it, he took some objectively VERY BAD decisions to try to become someone he would never be allowed to become and, without even realizing, made his situation even worse instead than improving it.

GK though, wasn't the sort of story that was interested in this kind of aspect so, if you like stories that instead dig more into personal choices and their consequences, I recommend reading "Umineko no naku koro ni" (the manga as the anime is SO HORRIBLE they never finished it and the last chapter of the visual novel was poorly handled and Ryukishi basically rewrote it for the manga version).

Just keep in mind it's a mystery horror with some gruesome scenes... though since there are gruesome scenes in GK too, those might be not a problem.

Thank you for your ask and sorry again for the late reply!

[unicat-w]

come, take an ojisan home

[wtfwheekwheek]

oh @bobadeluxe gave me a heavenly vision again. if you know you know.

[teitomonogatari]

[shipshinablog]

[kai-does-some-art]

Pietà, or Do wildcats dream of a home?

[startersword]

I wonder if Ogata ever looks in the mirror and gets angry about how much he looks like his father.

[ddosq]

[igorstory]

The Suave

When the chin and jawline need a bit of airing out, leave the mustache and sideburns to be extra cool. Show your fellow sims that they too can be fresh, breezy, and The Suave.

Created by request to have something similar to Koujirou Hanazawa from Golden Kamuy.

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[liadadadam]

Father

[ss3nchw]

[goldenkamuyhunting]

Hello,

I was wondering what are the things Ogata should avoid doing to not die (like some mistakes that could have been avoided for example) and how would you rewrite Ogata keeping his personality intact so that he doesn't die at the end?

Thank you very much

Well...

...this is a tricky question because:

1) According to Noda Ogata’s death was the stepping stone for Asirpa and Sugimoto to get in the right mindset before facing Tsurumi so it’s not something that he would have removed,

2) Even discounting this, Ogata is an antagonist that needed to be moved out of Sugimoto and Asirpa’s way and that had no reasons to come to an agreement with them (both he and Asirpa want the land deed) and he and Sugimoto want each other dead and this would forcefully affect a meeting between the two. The best would be if he and Sugimoto and Asirpa were to never met but... then Ogata would simply have no reasons to be in the story at this point and Noda could have just killed him in Karafuto.

3) Lastly and more important, Ogata is set up as the sort of character who couldn’t save himself on his own so it’s not like he could chose a different path if something outside of him weren’t to happen.

Let’s dig more on the last point.

Ogata is suicidal, he even claims his wish is being killed by Asirpa, and he’s suicidal because he’s plagued by guilt with which he can’t cope so his way to deal with it is to pretend his guilt is not there.

In order to stop Ogata from killing himself on the train you should remove his suicidal tendences, in order to remove his suicidal tendencies you should remove his own overwhelming guilt, in order to remove his own guilt he should find either a way not to find guilty or a way to cope in a healthy way with it which is not going to happen because his guilt is so much the moment he’s forced to face it he kills himself.

When your plan is offing yourself you technically don’t make any mistake if you end up on offing yourself, even if you do it personally and not through a twisted form of ‘assisted suicide’.

Of course one might say ‘but if Ogata hadn’t done the things he now feel guilty about, he would have survived because he wouldn’t have been suicidal’... which yes, it’s true, but then he wouldn’t have been Ogata.

Ogata is set up with a background that basically pushed for him to take a certain path, it’s a snowball rolling that ultimately creates an avalanche.

He starts from a setting that’s definitely out of his control, he’s the illegittimate kid of an important army man who dumped him and his mother, causing his mother’s insanity.

This greatly influenced him and all his major choices, it gave him tunnel vision. It’s not that there weren’t better options, it’s just that he couldn’t see them, that the most logical and better choice seemed one that wasn’t good because he was working with a faulty perception of things.

The healthiest things he could have done was to give up on Hanazawa, never care about him or seek him out and do the same with Tsurumi. Of course Ogata can’t because, due to his background, he’s consumed by his obsession for Hanazawa to the point it influences most of his choices. As for Tsurumi he likely started grooming him when he was young... and even if Ogata managed to distance from him more than Koito and Tsukishima will ever do... ultimately it was Tsurumi his father figure in place of Hanazawa.

What’s more, many of the choices Ogata takes, are taken in ‘good faith’ as he’s unable to foresee the consequences and genuinely thinks they’re the best options for him.

Let’s pick up Yuusaku’s murder as Vol 31 likes to yap so much about it [of course I hope we all know murdering Yuusaku is, morally, the WRONG choice, but this is a discussion about if such a choice would be good for a practical motive or not, not for a moral motive].

Ogata is sure he won’t feel guilty by murdering him.

His grandmother, Tsurumi, Usami, they all told him that if Yuusaku had been out of the picture Hanazawa would have loved him.

Ogata is obsessed with Hanazawa.

Getting rid of Yuusaku would genuinely seems like the perfect fix.

Yuusaku is in the way of Ogata’s happiness, and getting rid of him would apparently cost him nothing.

So of course the best thing he can do for himself is to kill him.

Only no, because his reasoning is based on two faulty beliefs.

1) It’s not because Yuusaku is out of the picture that Hanazawa would love him, Hanazawa wouldn’t love him no matter what so killing Yuusaku is as pointless as hell

2) Surprise, surprise, he actually feels guilty for killing people, however previously he was able to suppress it but with Yuusaku he fails.

Killing Yuusaku was the wrong choice because he gains nothing beyond being tormented by his guilt but he couldn’t know it beforehand.

Due to his own obsession and the misinformation spread by others it made sense to believe with Yuusaku out of the picture his father would love him.

Due to his habit of suppressing guilt, as well as Usami (and possibly other people’s) words it made sense to believe he wouldn’t feel guilty afterward.

When he watched at the situation before Yuusaku’s murder it likely felt like it would have been a mistake NOT TO MURDER YUUSAKU because things would continue to stay as they were and he would continue being unhappy. He couldn’t realize things would actually get WORSE.

And this applies to Ogata’s future choices as well.

He chooses the best option according to the information and beliefs he has, but they’re either faulty or misleading or he’s lacking information.

The result is he has some sort of tunnel vision that leads him toward his own end and he’s unable to see another path.

In fact when we met Ogata in the story, he’s already set up as a man who’s on a path of self destruction, only he’s still not fully aware of it.

And generally there are two paths for these kind of characters, one is that yes, they self destruct, the other is that they get saved by someone else.

Someone else gets in the way and shows them a turn they were unable to see on their own.

Solely at this point the character is presented with a choice, he can pick the new path he previously was unable to see or he can keep on marching toward self destruction.

But this step wasn’t taken with Ogata, no one showed him a different path so he continued being unable to see it.

Back during the Karafuto arc some of the readers were hoping Asirpa would do the trick because she was presented as a compassionate character who saved even Tanigaki despite the latter threatening her and using her as a human shield, a character with strong beliefs against killing, a character who mourned Suzukawa, even though the latter killed many Ainu and didn’t want Sugimoto to kill people, so not just a character who didn’t want to kill but who didn’t want people to kill in general.

But then it turned out that the goal of the story was to turn this over, Asirpa had to be the one who would kill Ogata for Sugimoto’s sake and not feel guilty about it afterward because it was to protect her crush, so Asirpa couldn’t be an agent of change in Ogata and, in fact, between the Ogata of Vol 19 and the one of Vol 31 there’s technically not a single difference.

We know that in the REPORT: Golden Kamuy staff talk event 19 April 2019 it was said Noda said “Noda-sensei told Geno Studio that Sugimoto was already a completed character, so they didn’t need to think too much about his growth.”

This likely was meant to apply to Ogata too (and to others characters as well). There’s no planned growth. Without it Ogata of Vol 31 is fundamentally still the same person who stood in front of Asirpa and told her ‘Do it. Go on and kill me.’ in Vol 19.

Things go slightly differently this time solely due to outside circumstances, not due to Ogata’s choices... which is why there’s a part of the fandom that think if we needed to have an ‘ice field 2′ in Vol 31, then Ogata could have been just killed off in Vol 19 and be done with.

So even if what happened in Vol 31 could have been written better (especially the part regarding Tsurumi), there’s little that could be done to save Ogata from himself.

Ogata can’t avoid a mistake when he can’t see another option or realize the other option would be better.

Of course the same doesn’t apply to us readers who can see the many things he could have done differently... but expecting them from him... would equate to ask him to go OOC all of sudden, to know what he wasn’t meant to know, to believe what he didn’t believe.

To set Ogata on a different path there needed to be a trigger along his way, something that would allow him to see things he couldn’t see on his own so that he would be able to change and therefore take other choices.

But as Ogata was meant to die, of course Noda didn’t go there and let Ogata’s character growth stagnate so that he would meet this exact ending.

At this point a ‘valid’ alternative could be to change the circumstances, for example, if Tsurumi has managed to knock Ogata off and left him behind on the roof instead than leaving him there to face for Sugimoto, Ogata would have probably gone through the same route as Tsukishima and Koito, who don’t get killed by Hijikata or Nagakura because they’re knocked out cold.

So, in the same way, Sugimoto would have probably passed by his unconscious body and, at most, would have kicked him out of the train hoping he would break his spine, but wouldn’t have really stopped there to stab him once or twice, nor Asirpa would have felt the need to shoot him.

Of course failing his mission could still trigger his suicidal tendencies or not but we can’t be sure of this. Maybe not.

Still, it wouldn’t be a great ending.

As said before normally, for a character with such a setting, to survive he needs to get saved by someone else... which can happen in a moltitude of ways (from being physically rescued to just triggering its character growth) but there was no one there who cared since the only character who normally was against killing and wanted to save people was set up to kill Ogata, not to save him.

So, sorry, but I fear there’s no good way to have Ogata change his own end on his own. Thank you for your ask and sorry if I couldn’t really be helpful.

[crowbito]

for microfic: "total control" or "this was a mistake" 👁️

thank you for requesting! kind of tried to fit both in. not sure I was successful... either way, hope you enjoy! <3

this was no accident (940 words, AU, canon-typical violence)

This was a mistake.

Ogata buries the thought as soon as it occurs to him, shoving it into the blank, empty corner of his mind where the rest of the thoughts like this don't exist either.

He hit his target, as he always does. He didn't miss and he never has, not when it mattered. Not that this shot, or this target, is more important than any of the others he's taken over the years.

Hanazawa Yuusaku means nothing to him. Maybe some of the same blood runs within their veins, but that doesn't make them—brothers, or anything like that. They're nothing to each other.

He takes a slow breath, ejects the empty cartridge and cycles the next bullet into the chamber. Takes aim again, with perfectly steady hands, and looks for the next target.

Ogata's in total control, as he always is. It doesn't matter that Yuusaku looked back at him when he never falters, not when he's leading men into battle just as Ogata pulled the trigger. He was too far away to spot Ogata, much less for their eyes to make contact. For anything to pass between them, other than Ogata's bullet.

That still found its mark in Yuusaku's thick skull, and that's the only thing that matters.

Usami finds him, after.

"Haven't you heard the awful news, Hyakunosuke?" he asks, one arm hooking companionably around Ogata's neck, just on the right side of strangling.

"No," he says flatly, shrugging out of Usami's grasp. He can guess, though. The enlisted men loved their blessed flag-bearer so much that they even took his corpse back behind their own lines, though Ogata can't begin to understand why. He didn't miss, so Yuusaku was already dead. What difference does it make at that point? It's not like Yuusaku could complain about the indignity of it; he'd probably approve, somehow, of being treated the same as the thousand other bodies already strewn over the hillside. So what was one more?

Why is Hanazawa Yuusaku always the exception?

"—guess someone got to Second Lieutenant Hanazawa first," Usami's saying, when Ogata buries those thoughts along with the others and finally turns his attention back to the conversation.

"What," Ogata says, too sharply to pass off as casual annoyance.

"Yeah!" Usami smiles, wide and feral. "It was pretty sloppy. Hit the side of his head and lodged there. I guess the Russian sniper had to take any shot he could get."

It was a mistake. No, Usami's the one who's mistaken. "The bullet didn't go through?" Ogata demands.

"Nope~"

Fuck. It's not as if the army bothers examining any of the bodies that this bloody war produces before tossing them in a shallow grave or onto the pyre. But for the only-acknowledged son of Lieutenant General Hanazawa Koujirou, they might make an exception. Even if they find it's a bullet from a Type-30 in his head, that doesn't mean it can be traced back to Ogata, though—

Usami blinks, the wildness receding as his eyes narrow at whatever he sees in Ogata's face. "You seem upset, Hyakunosuke."

Ogata clenches his jaw once, trying to school his expression into blankness. "I'm not," he says.

"Oh, of course not. It's not like you and your little brother were that close, after all. I mean, if you were, you'd already be on your way to visit him."

"I've seen a dead body before." He just has to look over the top of the trench if he wants to see more; besides, Ogata's intimately familiar with what a corpse with its brains blown out looks like. Yuusaku wouldn't look any different.

Ogata could go to view the body, though, under the pretense of their shared blood. He could dig his bullet out of Yuusaku's head, and dispose of it. There might be witnesses though—people would notice that someone had gone rummaging around in Yuusaku's skull, at the very least, and they would wonder why. Better to leave the bullet where it is.

"Dea—Were you even listening to me?" Usami complains.

"What," Ogata says again, voice unforgivably shaken, as the poorly-stifled feelings and thoughts threaten to overwhelm him. Usami—He's messing with Ogata. This is another of his stupid pranks, an attempt to goad a reaction out of him. "There's no way Yuu—Second Lieutenant Hanazawa is still alive."

Usami stares back at him with the same lack of comprehension for a long moment. Then, with a terrible dawning light of realization in his face, he leans in to whisper, "Hyakunosuke, did you miss?"

"I didn't," he snarls, shoving Usami away. "I don't miss."

Usami cackles gleefully. "Did your hands shake at the wrong second?"

"Shut up—"

"Did the thought make you feel guilty?"

Ogata lashes out, catching Usami off guard and silencing his obnoxious laughter with a fist to the face. The upper hand only lasts as long as it takes for Usami to overcome his surprise, so: a second or two, at most.

Tsukishima himself hauls Usami off Ogata a few minutes later. His scowl looks heavier than usual, and he steps bodily between them when Usami makes to lunge at Ogata again.

"Clean yourself up," he says, in that particular tone that combines exhaustion and exasperation.

Ogata sits up, licking at the blood on his lips. "It's just a bloody nose." His teeth feel loose in his mouth when he prods them with his tongue, but they're all still there.

Tsukishima frowns even harder at him. "Second Lieutenant Hanazawa woke up. He's asking for you."

Ogata stares up at Tsukishima, something like panic building back up. Behind him, Usami starts to laugh again.

[unicat-w]

He's lost his sight long before he lost his eyes