#seeing something thought provoking that makes me hone my skill in a completely unrelated subject?

[cominyern]

frankly im sure joining the yakuza wasnt even nishikis idea. theres reason to believe he was literally just following kiryu. in the cutscene where theyre 17 in the orphanage kiryu is begging and screaming and nishiki is literally like "kiryu...." as if to say "man this matters THIS much to you?"

so hes just like in the dojima family having a ball. get some hostess girlfriends, a nice car and suit, drinking with kiryu. and then when kiryu goes to jail and his family gets thrust onto nishiki, seemingly just because they didn't want to waste all the preparation that had gone into making a new family, he was completely out of his depth. he was getting run around, insulted, manipulated. he got used to the life he was living and couldnt adequately change within the constraints of his own personality to accomodate his circumstances.

all he could do was fully change his personality because there was just no way he could be a leader otherwise, because His Personality was non-combative and unpunishing. and from there that prosthetic ambition caused him to bring the tojo clan right to the edge of collapse. reap what you sow and all that.

i love how the yakuza is always a self-defeating force. its riffed on that the plot of every single game is just "there is a traitor in the tojo clan" but for real what do you expect from an organization that forces such ruthlessness and competition. to even be successful in the yakuza you have to prey on the civilian population, so when you're a powerful yakuza figure already where else can you turn to bite and slash than your surroundings indiscriminately?

which also means that kiryu is prolonging his own suffering by acting as the guardian dragon. the yakuza, both tojo and omi, are constantly splintering and turning on themselves, so if he just sat it out, there would have been nothing for him to worry about by like 2007. he could have been on the orphanage minding his own business and nothing bad would ever have happened to him again. but he just keeps going, essentially because of daigo.

daigo is like the inverse of nishiki. hes a non-leader type as well if we're being honest, but he just didn't change. he keeps his kind-hearted stature and trust the whole time, and fails to "lay down the law" as would be required for a good yakuza chairman, and thats why kiryu keeps having to come in. in yakuza 3, all the families have little underhanded plots to get a hold of the orphanage's land because daigo on top refused to make a move on it for kiryus sake, so kiryu had to pay back that favour by sustaining a ridiculous amount of pain and suffering and more or less dismantling the entire tojo clan. in yakuza 4, daigo just allows the ueno seiwa clan to take him for a ride because he has ideals of cooperation and completely misses the blatant scam thats being run on him, so once again kiryu has to pick up his slack. kiryu actually gets mad at daigo and fights him this time in hopes of waking him up to the necessities and struggles involved in running the yakuza.

and by yakuza 5 daigo has changed into a true and pretty good leader. hes still recognizably himself, cooperative and trusting, but with more capacity to assert his own space and put his foot down. he didn't have to change His Personality the way nishiki did, because kiryu was there to pick up all his dirty laundry. daigo could have easily imploded on himself if kiryu wasnt present.

so in conclusion, kiryu's continued patronage of daigo mirrors his lack of patronage of nishiki, possibly due to his own guilt that he "allowed" nishiki to fall while he was in prison. in yakuza 7, kiryu has been absolutely torn from everything ever in his entire life, but he STILL steps in and helps daigo out one last time to disband the tojo and omi, most likely because he never forgave himself for being absent to prevent nishiki from falling from grace. he acts a solar panel to take all the "heat" of the yakuza while they can have the "energy" for themselves. this can be interpreted as him unnaturally keeping the yakuza on life support, and bearing the brunt of the karmic revenge that entails.