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mitternacht · 3 months ago

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Hi I spend way too much time thinking about Fuuta Kajiyama and really wanted an excuse to throw out a full breakdown of his character and why I think he’s so well written.

The long and short of it is that Fuuta’s character was built to represent social isolation and the effects it has on the psyche. And the direction his character has taken in T3 was always going to be the natural progression of his character, especially based on his T1 verdict and the consequences of that, it did not come out of nowhere and is not a questionable writing decision.

(The rest under the cut for really long winded meta and dissection of Fuuta’s character and how we got here)

To start, I want to talk about Fuuta’s life before Milgram.

He’s a 20 year old university student, with no strong ties to family and no real group of friends or social circle to speak of. Already, he’s very isolated and has shown that he’s quite directionless. He doesn’t have any dreams or aspirations, because he thinks things like that are “childish” and “worthless”. He’s also never felt a real sense of protection or authority from the adult figures in his life, based on the way he talks about his parents. I’m inclined to believe they weren’t really present while he was growing up as well based on what we know of them, which caused further isolation and left him devoid of a sense of purpose. (Getting slightly ahead of myself here, but guess which type of people are most susceptible to falling into cults?)

So, what does he have to cling to? What does he have to keep him going? We all have a deep innate need for human connection and community, so where can he get that?

Online, of course.

So, he turns to the internet. He finds a community of people who enjoy the same things he does that he can connect with, and this serves as a lifeline for him. Now, he’s also been shown to have a strong sense of justice, which is perhaps one of the only other defining characteristics he can claim for himself and one of the only things he believes in. He feels a sense of empowerment and pride when he’s “carrying out justice” in his eyes, and it gives him a sense of purpose and duty that he’s lacking elsewhere in his life. It also brings him validation from his community, who further enable him and fan the flames, so to speak. He’s part of a group, he’s part of something for the first time in his life, and he has no way of stopping at this point. And then, it goes too far.

(I don’t feel like I should need to say this, but for the sake of posterity, yes, what Fuuta did was very, very bad and should never be condoned or excused. But again, it’s a very real problem and is caused by social isolation which is very common in today’s world and is worth having a discussion about. Fuuta’s character is an excellent showcase of how easily this can lead people to do terrible things by turning to online validation and praise for their sole source of connection with others.)

Now Fuuta is a person that doesn’t know how to deal with heavy negative emotions. He’s not very mentally strong, and being so isolated for most of his life with no real sense of purpose has left him with not a lot of ways to properly process or cope. When we first meet him in Milgram, he’s leaning very heavily on denial. He’s convinced himself that he did nothing wrong, and can’t even entertain the thought that his actions had killed someone. He’s also the type of person that can’t stand showing any signs of weakness. He acts big, and angry, and tough, because that’s the easiest way to deflect from any other “weak” emotions he may be feeling.

But, the side effect of this inability to process his negative emotions and acting out like this, is that he can’t make any real connections with the other prisoners in Milgram. (I’m not counting minigram as canon in this breakdown as an fyi, I’m basing this solely on interactions from timelines and voice dramas)

He’s lost the only community he had, completely cut off from it, and is experiencing the social isolation that drove him to this in the first place all over again. He sees the older prisoners as unreliable and not anyone he can lean on in this situation, and at this point doesn’t seem to have any particular feelings about the other prisoners. He mentions looking out for Haruka in particular, but (as much as it pains me to say this since I do love the 0103 dynamic) it’s unlikely that this was a significant enough connection to keep him from feeling socially isolated in Milgram. He states that he’s not looking to make friends with the other prisoners, but that was likely just big talk and hiding the fact that he couldn’t make that connection with anyone.

With all of these negative emotions he can’t process or cope with, the fear and uncertainty of his environment, the loss of community he once had, and without anybody or anything to rely on for guidance or protection, it’s already a recipe for a shattered mental state.

Now let’s throw a guilty verdict, some horrible physical trauma, voices that you can’t escape, heavy sleep deprivation and paranoid hypervigilance into the mix!

(I also want to point out… Fuuta’s second voice drama is titled “Baptism of Fire”. Yes, it’s a turn of phrase involving fire because that’s Fuuta’s motif, but knowing what we do now this was completely intentional foreshadowing)

The attack Fuuta sustained from Kotoko would be traumatic for anyone, and I feel that the effect this attack had on him is frequently dismissed because he wasn’t on the brink of death like Mahiru was. In Shidou’s T2 voice drama, he lists Fuuta’s injuries as: an orbital floor fracture, traumatic retinal detachment, bruising, lacerations, and a partial fracture of the thorax. This is going to cause some very severe chronic pain for him, particularly in his head and chest, especially considering they don’t have access to proper treatment and from what Fuuta has said they likely don’t have access to any sort of painkillers either. Even the act of just breathing is going to exacerbate his pain, and there’s just nothing that can be done for it. Speaking as someone with chronic pain myself, it definitely has a severe impact on your mental state and ability to do quite literally anything.

Regarding the “voices and eyes” of the audience, Fuuta has always been a special case, because out of the characters that have mentioned the voices in particular he has been the most severely and negatively affected by them. He states that he can’t sleep because he feels that he’s being watched, and he’s mentioned several times how badly the voices affect him and how badly he wants them to stop. And this sleep deprivation just aggravates quite literally everything else that he’s currently dealing with, physically and mentally, making everything worse by tenfold.

The fact that he even admits to being scared and shows weakness to Es, considering the fact that he has an innate need to hide any sort of weakness, should be very telling. We are also told so many times during T2 that Fuuta is at his breaking point and is a complete mess.

Although it’s not directly stated in canon, Fuuta very heavily showcases symptoms of psychosis that have seemed to become progressively worse through and after T2. (I made a post about this not too long ago, trying not to repeat too much here but I broke this down a little more in that other post)

And what’s a common symptom of psychosis? Religious delusion.

To start with, Fuuta's character even before entering Milgram is a prime example of someone who is extremely susceptible to falling in with a cult. Someone who is socially isolated, craves human connection and belonging, and who is searching for a sense of purpose/duty. You add onto that his murder and the need for someone to forgive him for it, the desperation for something to cling to, the worsening symptoms of psychosis and need for something to cure his pain? How in the world was he supposed to do anything but turn to religious delusion? If he hadn’t, it’s very likely the only other possible option he saw for himself was to end his life, which he mentions doing in Backdraft (and passively in his T2 voice drama).

There was a glimmer of hope when Fuuta mentions that he was grateful to Kazui and Shidou in the aftermath of Kotoko attacking him and what they did to help him, but it’s likely that he saw himself not able to continue relying on them considering Shidou had been so busy with Mahiru and Kazui may not have continued to be as present as Fuuta would have preferred. Which is heartbreaking, considering Fuuta seems to so desperately need an authority/protective adult figure to look up to. Mind you, 20 is not that old and especially if he never had that growing up, it’s natural to still want that at this age.

I would like to reiterate again that Amane did not “brainwash” nor “indoctrinate” Fuuta, she just ended up being the outlet for the only thing Fuuta has become convinced will save him. And now they’re stuck in a very sad cycle of enabling each other through their trauma.

All in all, looking at the pieces of Fuuta’s character I feel that this was always the plan, even from the beginning of T1. We were conditioned from the start to view Fuuta as guilty: by making his character theme red, by introducing him as foul mouthed, angry, arrogant, and unapologetic, and even from Jackalope’s comments in Es’ voice drama. We were conditioned to dislike him from the start, and since that guilty verdict in T1 was made Fuuta’s fate was sealed and this was always going to be the natural progression of his character. It was a slow build up, but was very well thought out and didn’t come out of nowhere.

This is the fulfillment of what happens when you put a socially isolated person through extreme stress and trauma with nothing to hold on to, and again is an excellent showcase of what it can look like to fall in with a cult even with no religious background. And how it’s even easier with individuals who have pre-existing mental illnesses/disorders.

We’ve come full circle and I’m very interested to see where his character goes from here.

#fuuta kajiyama #milgram #me: I’m too tired to work on fics #also me: writes 2k words of Fuuta meta #if I see one more bad Fuuta take I may explode #mostly about posts I’ve seen on Twitter but some of you… should do more research on how trauma and stress affects the brain before posting #there have been a concerning amount of ableist posts I’ve seen #getting through t3 as a fuuta fan is a challenge god gives only his strongest soldiers #and I may not be one of them #anyways! love Fuuta or else #I will love him through his weird little freak phase even if nobody else will #if this has typos or weird grammar please pretend you do not see I’m too lazy to re-read and edit this

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