#Naoya went farther than anyone thought he’d go then

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did the zenin every try to convince megumi to stay with them by not beating the hell out of him? like were they ever nice or kind? other than maki and mai and the few times together, does megumi have any positive memories of anyone in the zenin?

idk just seems a bit counterintuitive to continuously isolate and destroy your relationship with the biggest thing since sliced bread by never showing him an ounce of kindness or sympathy even when he’s a kid.

So yes and no.

In their minds, they absolutely did, but Megumi would say they didn’t. The key issue is that they never tried to appeal to Megumi for who he actually was, but who they wanted him to be. They were trying to be nice to someone who wasn’t real to begin with.

Megumi got special treatment from the rest of the clan. He had the nicest clothes. He had personal trainers. He had the direct attention of the head of the clan. He had a private bathhouse and servants to attend him in it. He had a private room in the home of the clan head, who had the nicest home in the entire compound. All his meals were prepared for him and brought to serve him directly.

In the eyes of the clan, they were spoiling him. Everyone else was fighting for scraps. They all trained, but it was in crowded, sweaty rooms where they didn’t get attention unless they were already exceptional. The Zenin clan is very old fashioned, so they don’t really have private baths in homes. They were all bathing in communal bathhouses where you had to wait for your turn and half the time you got there and realised that you were out of soap.

Beating him was never a big deal, in the Zenin’s mind. They all got beat. It was a part of training. You learn to think through pain and react in a fight if you’re experiencing real pain, which is the exact reasoning Maki brings to hitting Yuuta during training. If they made the Ten Shadows exempt from that, they’d be weakening the person who was supposed to be their strongest by coddling him.

So the Zenin would say Megumi was already being spoiled by the clan, and any attempt to stop his training in handling pain was just another attempt at sabotaging his development.

The thing is that Megumi didn’t want any of the things that they were “spoiling” him with.

He hated the clothes they had made for him. He wanted to wear his own clothes. He couldn’t even pick what to wear. It was another way he lost control. Yeah, they gave him his own room in the nicest house, but he was getting locked into it, and he was only in there when they had finished training him to the point of collapse. The bathhouse was a traumatizing experience for him. He was stripped down and forcibly bathed by strangers. It wasn’t a luxury to him; it was a violation. He would have taken the communal bathhouse any day. He had no say in what he ate, and his meals were brought to him because it allowed the Zenin to pack his schedule even tighter, because he didn’t even get real meal breaks. He just paused to eat and then immediately picked up with whatever they were teaching him. But they never registered any of this as driving him away, because they were too deluded by who they wanted him to be rather than who he actually was. The Ten Shadows in their mind would not only not be upset by this, but he would appreciate it. Megumi was meant to be honoured by the clothes and the room and the private bathhouse. And he would be, as soon as they broke him of Gojo’s control. Any time he expressed upset was just another show of what Gojo had done to him. He needed to be freed from it, so they never actually heeded him begging them to stop.

It’s also important to note that most of the Zenin didn’t know how bad the beatings were.

Again, all of them got beat. The clan head got beat when he was a kid. It’s expected for them. But none of them got beat as badly as Megumi, except for maybe his father when he was Megumi’s age.

Because a lot of the beatings weren’t coming at the hands of someone who wanted him to love the clan. They were coming from Naoya. Who hated him.

Naoya wants him to hate the clan. Fuck, he wants him dead. Megumi is everything he was supposed to be, and he wants him gone. He wants to hurt him.

Naoya got more access to Megumi than anyone else in the clan when Megumi was a kid. He was one of their most gifted fighters and high up in the clan, but not so high up that he was busy with actually running it, so he was tapped in as his trainer. He went farther in hurting megumi than anyone else in the clan thought or expected he was. He was just supposed to hit him when he taught him how to fight, to train him how to take pain, and as a disciplinary measure to break him of Gojo’s influence. But even then, discipline in the Zenin compound usually stops at a few slaps. Like, they still all are abusing their children, don’t get me wrong, but the extent of the abuse that all of them face was no where close to the abuse that megumi was under.

Naoya wasn’t beating Megumi to train him. He was beating him to hurt him. He wanted Megumi to suffer as much as possible. He wanted to make him feel pain.

The rest of the clan never heard Gojo’s claims that he had taken Megumi away because they were beating him, but they wouldn’t have believed them if they did. Megumi was supposed to be their strongest, so if they could take training, he could take training. He was getting every luxury and benefit that they weren’t getting. The whole clan thought he was being treated like a little prince. Of course he didn’t need to be protected from them. They all have the mindset of “my parents hit me when I fucked up, and I turned out fine.”

If Megumi hadn’t had cursed energy, Naoya would have killed him with how badly he was beating him within a month. Even with cursed energy, he almost killed him.

It’s not the expected norm to beat clan members within an inch of their life, unless they’re failures like Megumi’s dad who they actually want to kill. That would be counterintuitive. They need their members in peak physical condition to be fighters. No one there would believe that’s what Naoya was doing if they knew.

The worst of the abuse came from someone who actually hated megumi and wanted to hurt him. But none of the “positive” things they said they spoiled Megumi with actually had any kind of positive impact on Megumi, because they refused to accept him as he was. They were trying to spoil the fantasy they had of him. But the actual child had lost all control of his life, was terrified of them, and was traumatised every time he set foot on the compound.