#TYSM FOR ASKING HEHE i hope this isnt nonsencial

[thricedead]

HIIII I'd love to ask some questions wheeeee. one character that rlly caught my interest was rantaro... he seems to be wearing a priest outfit and I was curious about his relationship with religion/level of religious belief as well as how it bleeds into his daily life and overall perception of the world :0

HI HI OMG HI LEMYA ^_^ i was hoping youd appear hehe. Im glad you asked about Rantaro! I keep his profile low and usually leave him out of the central 6, but he is the game's true antagonist and a very powerful, sinister figure.

I almost immediately decided that he would look like a catholic priest, and built from there onwards. I have a difficult relationship to religion, i essentially spent 3 years of early childhood being babysat and educated in a nunnery and severely abused by the nuns. When I realized how Christianity twisted itself very early in its life into a flag of violent conquest that abusers who like to justify their own greed readily rally around, it helped me make sense of how my own abuse within its walls wasnt an isolated case, and I was actually fairly lucky because i escaped his clutches. However, a strange image of beautiful, young, pure and kind nuns and priests stuck with me, even though Ive only ever met child abusers, bigots and thieves in my vicinity.. sorry for this digression but i had to explain this in order to explain rantaro! He is not christian, and does not hail from a christian family either. He was raised vaguely Buddhist and in fact he is still known by the public as a kind benefactor to a local temple. Religion anf spirituality dont really have any value to him, and neither does money even though he has a lot of it. He perceives trust to be the true currency of value in his world. When Rantaro was young, his father (a politician, albeit a small fish in a vast sea) stole from the european mafia that he had a give-and-take relationship with, and as a result was executed alongside his immediate family members. In a moment of desperation, fifteen-year-old Rantaro began begging for his life in a snivelling, embarrassing display, promising to swear loyalty to the mafia boss and be his dog if his life was spared. The boss was faintly amused with how he only begged for his own life to be spared and not his parents' and siblings' and promised Rantaro an office job in exchange for him disposing of the corpses. The boss fulfilled his promise, and young Rantaro became fixated on the idea that doing disgusting and shameful things for others' sake will make them trust and love you. He performed diligently at his job, and not long after he met Seiya. I will not spoil their relationship because it's central to the ending, but Seiya became the embodiment and object of Rantaro's obsession with establishing a tie through witnessing and being made to witness the most terrible parts of the other person. At some point, Rantaro created his stage persona called "Father Pius" (to separate it from his business persona). Father Pius is always portrayed on the stage as a priest in a confessional booth, usually ending up seduced and driven to lechery by characters played by his other 3 unit members. There's a dark irony in the man who abused Seiya, who in turn abused Odile, to paint himself to the audience as a paragon of purity being dragged down into the muck by outsider temptresses. Guilt and a feeling of responsibility and blame fester in his victims, and the stage play blends with real life.

All in all, his outfit represents a surface-level purity and deep-rooted depravity being brushed off as a momentary loss of sound judgement due to the seductivr powers of evil. The character of Father Pius is well accepted by the fans, though fans still favor the star crossed lovers dynamic between the Leader's character and Jiang Bin's character to the story of the Leader seducing Father Pius. Rantaro does not want to kill himself over this (self affirmation)