#a person who has experienced firsthand the trauma of losing a loved one to murder

[theexistentiallyqueer]

"but he murdered people”

This is a post about Goro Akechi, murder, its aftermath, trauma, and two things that are in real short fucking supply around here: critical thinking and empathy.

Listen, I’m a veteran of the Dragon Age fandom. If you want to talk about toxic fandoms, they’re your Bible. As far as your Judas Iscariots and Nebuchadnezzars go, I was one of them. I’ve seen it, I’ve done it, and I’m done with it. It’s exhausting to carry that much rage inside of you, to live it actively every second of every day, and to inflict it on other people and laugh about it. So I’ve been disengaged, largely, for a few years. 

And now I’m in the Persona 5 fandom and find myself enthusiastically appreciating Goro Akechi, because who doesn’t love complex, morally flawed, ambiguously gay-coded characters? Shit, maybe you’re not on board, but I’ll sign right up. I’m a relative newcomer, despite being a longtime Persona fan and playing P5 around when it came out, because I didn’t engage with the fandom then. I jumped back in with the Royal announcement and absolutely saturated myself in this vibrant fan space. Invested in the idea of Akechi being explored as a fully fleshed-out character, I find myself following Goroboys. Which is great! Because so far, they’re all great! Nicest bunch of people you could ever hope to meet!

Except there’s Discourse. There’s always been Discourse, I find, but this is my first exposure to it in this fandom. This weekend was my first week of seeing Goro antis active, seeing people I follow, people I like and appreciate and some I considering genuine friends, actively attacked and harassed because they like a fictional teenage character who killed some other fictional people in a fictional world where you, playing as the main character, have the ability to perform a metaphysical lobotomy on people who literally can’t consent. Here I thought the only people who hated Akechi were white cishet men who saw his rage against a parent and said, “Nah, too bitchy for me,” because they’re too afraid to look in a mirror and see Masayoshi Shido’s fascist, misogynistic mug staring back. 

Are you awake yet? Have I woken you up to the fact that Persona 5′s premise is a wish-fulfillment fantasy of “what if I could make the person who took advantage of me when I was a teenager apologize in front of the entire world by using an alternate fantasy dimension to completely violate their brain”?

I see my friends saying, “Wow, it’s amazing how people who hate Akechi can’t leave people who like Akechi alone,” and within an hour they have replies saying MURDER IS MURDER as if they know what murder actually is.

We’re about to get real personal up in here because maybe, only then, will some of you people take the hint that your behavior borders on actively bullying other people on the internet over a fictional character.

Ready? Here goes.

Murder is your mom picking you up from summer camp three weeks after your ninth birthday, driving you to your grandparents’ house, and telling you that when daddy was at work today, someone tried to steal the money, and they had a gun. Daddy was brave and Daddy died.

Murder is blacking out when you’re nine years old and coming to to yourself two houses away on a neighbor’s swing set with crickets chirping in your ears and the crushing reality of never seeing your father again turning your brain into static.

Murder is asking your mother if she asked for the death penalty, and your mother telling you, in a pleading voice, that she didn’t because he was mentally ill and it didn’t feel right. Murder is feeling angry afterwards because you feel like something was taken away from you, and something should be exchanged for that. Because that’s how fairness works, right? If you steal candy from the store, you have to give up your allowance for the next five months.

Murder is realizing you’re an atheist at fourteen and driving past the cemetery where your father’s remains are interred, and having the gut-punching, soul-suffocating realization of what never ever ever actually means. Murder is building an internal cosmology where forever means my atoms and yours, creating new life in perpetuity as the comfort you drag out of the west’s cold, uncaring atheism that never found its own poetry.

Murder is your first two years in college, when you discover social justice and realize the world is bigger than your own life experiences, and that violence at the bottom is a reactionary symptom against violence at the top. Murder is understanding the fact that the man who killed your father was himself a victim of a racist, ableist, capitalist society with a morally bankrupt healthcare system, and that every single one of those things is in and of itself is more hateful than the act of your father bleeding out in the parking lot, in the ambulance, on the operating table.

Murder is your mother confessing to you in college that your father was physically abusive of her and that she had threatened him, only weeks before he was killed, that she would leave and take her daughters with her if he didn’t change. Murder is knowing that your father ran after an armed robber because he was raised by a Sicilian father in a household overflowing with toxic masculinity, and what killed your father wasn’t a man with a gun: what killed your father was the patriarchy whispering in his ear, This theft emasculates you. 

Murder is looking your own mother in the eye and telling her that one day you want to visit the man who killed your father and open your heart to him, because all you can think is, He didn’t plan this. He can’t have wanted this. What must it feel like to kill someone without intending to and then have to live with that for the rest of your life with no one to help you? Murder is the sound of betrayal in your mother’s voice when she responds, disbelieving.

Murder is spending years wanting to at least write to him, and then forgetting, and then going back, because you are a fluid, impermanent, imperfect person with your own flaws and failures and mental issues that hold you back from being the paragon you want to be. Murder is throwing yourself into the left and embracing prison abolition so hard it hurts, because you know that if the state can lock up someone who doesn’t “matter,” the state can lock up anyone. 

Murder is throwing away or selling every childhood thing you ever possessed because you are not by nature a sentimental person, but never giving up that doll you were gifted, the doll you coveted and wanted more than anything else, three weeks before your father was shot and killed. You have no pictures, no mementos, no nothing, but she sits at the top of your bookshelf to this day, a weighty child goddess, the symbol of your torn and labyrinthine childhood.

Murder is having to see a bunch of petty-ass people using actual trauma that real life people have experienced and continue to experience to directly and repeatedly harass your friends online (and yourself, indirectly, by tagging their hateful shit) because you and your friends like a fictional fucking character who, by nature of being fictional, did not actually murder any real existing people.

Murder is building your entire identity around how you sympathize, deeply, with the person who killed your own father, because that takes hard work and deep empathy and the ability to see past a lot of bullshit just to get to that point, and having some fuck-ass anons act like none of that matters because there is (apparently, I must assume) some omnipotent god of justice saying “Fuck you and everything you’ve been through” that apparently only these bullies can hear.

Murder is seeing fandom moralizers talk about murder like they understand it. Like they’ve read this, plus the last ten-plus paragraphs, and decided they know best anyway because mommy and daddy always told them Criminals Are Bad and walked wide-eyed and innocent into a social network overrun with TERFs, exclusionists, and a rotten segment of the political left that acts like some extras straight out of The Crucible.

I have never once been triggered by anything relating to my father’s murder. I cried at the Resurrection Stone scene in The Deathly Hallows, I cried when I completed when I completed the DA2 DLC Legacy after the end of act 2. When I see a parent die, I have an emotional reaction, because it’s familiar.

But the Akechi antis who all say “but he killed people!”, The Akechi antis who say “murder is still murder”?

The murder of my father is still murder. The man who killed him, his murderer, is still regardless a human being, the man who killed him deserves sympathy and compassion and understanding and respect and, above all, a chance.

I am a living example of what’s left behind when someone is murdered. You can walk into the mausoleum where my father is interred, face his headstone, and let the earth open up beneath you and drop you into hell.

So most sincerely, from someone who lost their father to gun violence, to armed robbery, to murder: Stop fucking using our lived experiences as your justification to harass and bully people online for committing the Grave Moral Sin of just liking a video game character.

Between the fact that the American government is keeping real people in concentration camps and a bunch of strangers on the internet liking a twiggy teenage anime boy who used a fantasy world to kill people who don’t exist, which one is actually important to deserve your moral outrage?

You’ll die eventually; fascism won’t kill itself.

[ohayohimawari]

Kakashi Asks-Answer

Q: (From @cyabae) Do you think that Kakashi had a gut feeling that Obito was still alive? It seemed to me that he couldn’t get over Obito’s “death” whilst he was able to process his grief over the loss of his other loved ones.

A: This is such a fantastic question. Thank you for presenting me with an opportunity to climb into this ninja’s quirky brain to pave over what I think is one of the biggest holes in canon!

Throughout Naruto’s story-before and after the time skip-Kishimoto doesn’t allow the fans of the series, or Kakashi, to forget Obito. Every time we see my favorite ninja dork at his regular hangout (the memorial stone), it’s like Kishi is telling us, ‘Hey! Pay attention to this!’ Canon provides more questions than answers to this, so I’m going to rely upon my knowledge and interpretation of Kakashi’s character, as well as my imagination to resolve it starting below the cut.

First of all, Kakashi is no idiot.

He knows that he’s talking to dead people that can’t answer him when he visits their graves. He understands that death is final, permanent, having learned that lesson the hard way at a young age. The way he processes grief differs with each loss, however.

We know that Kakashi made it a point to distance himself from his father’s legacy after Sakumo’s death. In the series, I can think of only one instance in which we see Kakashi visiting his father’s grave, and it seems to be out of obligation. Further, when that angry little Kaka-brat is standing at his father’s grave in the rain, he places a flower on Sakumo’s marker while saying he won’t grow up to be like him. Ouch.

When it comes to Sakumo’s death, I think Kakashi spends a lot of time avoiding it. First, because he’s angry, later because he feels guilty (see also: Kakashi’s Legendary Self-Loathing). As long as I’m drawing from my imagination to answer this, I like to think that Kakashi comes to Sakumo’s grave more often after they made peace over a campfire during their brief visit in the afterlife.

It isn’t long after Sakumo’s death that Kakashi loses the closest thing he has to a father figure when his sensei Minato dies. This is another grave that I can’t recall (off the top of my head) Kakashi visiting. I think there are more than a couple of reasons why this is. Because he was a Hokage, Minato’s grave is already well-tended, or perhaps his remains are inaccessible (unless you’re Orochimaru). Another reason is because Kakashi has something better than a grave marker to turn to: the Yondaime’s bust carved into the mountainside that dominates Konoha’s skyline. When Kakashi wonders what kind of guidance his late sensei would offer, he looks up at his likeness. Side note: is it just me, or does that seem to give him a sense of calm? That’s a big headcanon of mine.

There’s something else that Minato left behind, or I should say someone, and that would be the main hero of the whole series. I definitely think that, although Minato’s death is an ending to a part of Kakashi’s life, it opens the door for this knucklehead to reckon with the future during his grieving process. But I have another Kakashi Ask waiting in my inbox about baby Naruto so I’ll wait to go into this when I answer that question.

This brings me to what canon presents as the most traumatic experience Kakashi has had with loss. There are countless flashbacks to the death of Rin Nohara at Kakashi’s hand before we’re given the full explanation for it. I can think of only two times that we see Kakashi visiting Rin’s grave: when he’s tending to it during a break from guarding a pregnant Kushina, and again when Tenzō is spying on Kakashi in the ANBU Black Ops arc. Although we don’t see him visiting Rin often, it’s implied that he does go regularly to her grave. He washes her marker, brings fresh flowers to adorn it, and tells her of the happenings in the Hidden Leaf.

Personally, I think Kakashi goes to Rin’s grave out of a sense of duty and keeps his visits brief out of guilt and pain (just an opinion; please don’t @ me). He can’t escape the physical moment of Rin’s death. It haunts him, frequently. He relives it more than any other experience he’s had in his fictional, angst-filled life. It seems to me that he thinks of his visits to Rin as the least he can do, after his involvement in her death. It’s all that he can do to continue to keep his promise to Obito to look after her. I’m not saying that he doesn’t have fuzzy friendship feelings for Rin, but I can’t imagine those are feelings that he’s able to maintain easily after the circumstances surrounding her death. Truly, I wonder if those visits are out of wanting to atone for his part in her death or to appease the angry spirit that Rin appears as in Kakashi’s nightmares. Probably a little of both.

The grave that is Kakashi’s home away from home is the memorial stone. Out of all the names that are etched on it, there’s only one that keeps him coming back to it. Obito Uchiha.

The million-ryo question is, out of all of the deaths that Kakashi has experienced, why is Obito’s grave the one that he turns to and returns to? Canon doesn’t portray them as the best of friends while they were schoolmates and later, teammates, so…?

This was the first peer that Kakashi lost, and that had to have rocked his little ninja world. Obito sacrificed himself for Kakashi’s sake and that too must’ve been a great big wtf moment for my precious murder baby. Also, there’s the sheer suddenness of the unfortunate boulder incident in Kakashi’s literal blind spot. I mean, wow, those reasons alone could show why Obito’s death would be next to impossible for kid!Kakashi to process.

But kid!Kakashi becomes adult!Kakashi and he’s still hovering by the memorial stone every time he gets a chance. I know that I’ve presented this dork as a creature of habit, but in this case, there’s something more to it. Two somethings, specifically.

First (to be blunt): there’s no body.

Obito Uchiha is presumed dead and for a ninja who has firsthand experience with proven death, that blows the door wide open to the possibility of Kakashi’s teammate surviving that rude boulder.

During the Land Waves arc, we see Team Seven’s leader waking up unconvinced that Zabuza is really dead. This knucklehead has more brains than chakra, and he doesn’t leave things to chance.

So, to Kakashi, presumed dead is way more alive than dead.

This is why he doesn’t just relate the news of the village to Obito like he does when he visits other graves. He asks questions and unloads his conscience there because, in his mind, he might be communicating with someone that could answer him.

But wait! There’s more. The second something is (drumroll): the sharingan.

Sharingan literally means “copy wheel eye,” and it is described as an “eye that reflects the heart.”

Kishimoto seems to enjoy beating his characters with a trauma stick, so canon gives us many (so many) accounts of how tragedy affects the sharingan’s development. However, if it reflects the heart, there are plenty of positive emotions that could affect it that simply weren’t explored in the series.

Another thing that isn’t fully explained in canon is how Kakashi and Obito’s sharingan eyes are connected. We only know that they are connected because the mangekyō awoke at the same time in each of them (this is very important btw), and because of their shared tsukuyomi/ninja dumpster. This is great imagination and fan content fodder because the possibilities of their shared sharingan are near endless.

What follows is my headcanon.

Rather than having a gut feeling that Obito is still alive, I think Kakashi allows for the possibility that his teammate survived. That becomes a probability after he learns more about the sharingan from his subordinate, Itachi and student, Sasuke.

It would be years after Obito’s presumed death that Kakashi would learn that the mangekyō is awakened by witnessing the death of the person that the sharingan-bearer is closest to. As much as I adore Rin’s character, she is not the person that Kakashi feels closest to when he witnesses her death. I believe that Kakashi is closer to Gai, or even Minato when Rin dies.

As Kakashi learns more about the sharingan, the bigger his hunch becomes that Obito survived. I’m sure he’d question how the mangekyō could’ve awoken in the first place if the person that gave it to him was dead.

This borrowed eye is surgically attached to Kakashi’s optic nerve and not his heart. So, if the sharingan is still developing, the heart it was connected to must still be beating.

More speculation, but perhaps Obito can use all of the jutsus that Kakashi has copied. Maybe snippets of Obito’s emotions are processed as information in Kakashi’s brain. It would make sense to me in Narutoverse.

So why didn’t Kakashi tell anyone that he had reason to think that Obito might still be alive?

The experiences that would lead him to think that are subjective. Kakashi is tight-lipped even when someone wants to know his hobbies. I don’t think he’d tell anyone that a mistake was made with one of the etched names on the memorial stone until he had hard proof.

However it played out, or whatever your headcanons about these two may be, the moment they faced each other from opposite sides of the battlefield was heartbreaking.

I think that when Kakashi finally saw him again, he was less surprised that Obito was alive and more surprised that he had become an enemy. *Sob*

XOXO

P.S. I actually touched upon this headcanon in a drabble that I wrote for my latest Tumblr milestone:

The Impossible 

Summary: “No one is more surprised than Kakashi when he returns from apparent death. He confides his extraordinary experience and the new mystery that has come of it at his next visit to Konoha's memorial stone.”

Pairings: Gen, none

Rated: T, no warnings apply

[pop-punklouis]

highkey really dislike melanie martinez && how she uses the trauma of people for ~shock factor aesthetic~ when she hasn't experienced it herself??? dollhouse is honestly really disgusting lmao

i’m….. very conflicted about this because i know people have mixed feelings on the whole album Crybaby, but I enjoyed it. I don’t think Melanie was using anything that many others artists don’t when they write lyrics. Not everything happens to the lyricist personally. It’s like writers. Many are inspired by those they know or stories they’ve heard. I’ve written my fair share of things from experiences I never had but heard from others or seen secondhand. I don’t understand what you think is disgusting about Dollhouse when the song is generally about a dysfunctional family that puts on a painted face when the curtains open. Yes, she might not have experienced this dysfunction and i can see where some could be uncomfortable who have experienced those things, but it’s not something foreign that people write about or sing about or even draw about. There’s songs, there’s movies, there’s drawings that depict what Dollhouse says. And if you think all those people experienced it firsthand, then that’s a bit naive yeah? I just don’t think it’s exploiting a situation for “shock value” on her end when her whole album is a concept album about a child growing up in a dysfunctional family home.

Crybaby opens the album with introducing the character which is crybaby herself. She is teased for her constant tears. Then Dollhouse is next where it depicts how her mom is an alcoholic, her dad is seeing a mistress, and her brother smokes weed in his room. They paint on their perfect faces for the public but when the curtains are closed they aren’t the perfect dolls everyone thinks they are. Sippy Cup talks about her mom finding her dad with the mistress and she murders them both. She drugs crybaby to help her lose the memory of it happening. Then as crybaby grows older she falls in love with a boy in the song Carousel. He always seems too distant from her and their relationship never connects because it keeps going around and around. Alphabet boy is about a boyfriend up and leaving her to get his music degree. He comes back to teach Crybaby how to write real music which offends her and she basically screams “fuck that i know how to write music. just because you have a degree doesn’t mean you can tell me how to write my ABCs (music).” Soap talks about Crybaby finding another boy to fall in love with. She wants to confess that she’s in love with him but overanalyzes it to the point where she keeps her mouth shut instead and says she would rather wash her mouth out with soap then confess. Training Wheels is the one real love song of the album. Crybaby finally finds a boy to settle down with and love. The training wheels is symbolism for not being afraid to fall and being ready to take that next step with someone. Pity Party piggybacks onto Training Wheels. Crybaby gets up the nerve to ask the boy she wants to take her training wheels off for to her party. He ends up not showing up. Crybaby keeps the party up for herself only since no one else came. Tag, You’re It is a very dark song that teeters on the edge of rape. When the predators see that crybaby is single they try to take advantage of her. The way Melanie sings this track gives crybaby a personification of fear. Milk & Cookies is a tale about her poisoning her abuser with milk & cookies- leaving him for dead. Pacify Her is the part of Crybaby’s story where she is so numb to love and pain that nothing fazes her anymore. She doesn’t think too much about things and the next man she wants to fall in love with, she ups and does it. She “pacifies” his girlfriend and steals him away. She seems to not care what anyone thinks about her anymore. Mrs. Potato Head is a song of realization for Crybaby. Mrs. Potato Head depicts a woman with many plastic surgeries. After crybaby has been in pain so many times she wonders if pain is beauty. She realizes it isn’t worth the money for those to give her compliments and maybe there is beauty in the darkness and pain of crybaby’s life experiences. And the album rounds out with Mad Hatter. Throughout Crybaby’s emotional rollercoaster of a life she accepts that being called Crybaby isn’t an insult to her. She loves who she is no matter if others deem her crazy. She might find love one day or maybe she doesn’t. Maybe crying a few hours a night is her thing. but all in all she’s done trying to chase that picture perfect image of alice everyone wants her to be and accepts that she is the mad hatter.

((this got super long jesus but tbh i really thought the concept behind the album was great but i know why it makes some uncomfortable. I just don’t think it should be as controversial and venomously hated as i’ve seen it be.))