#you all should have voted mikoto innocent too because it would have been funny

[epros]

hey guys do you remember when i first got into milgram and made a crazy post about haruka? im about to ramble a bit because i dont feel like making something more in depth but remember when in that post i talked about how my first impression of the girl hes with as a child was not his sister 9or friend???) but his idealized self? well i decided afterwards that both of those things can be true and the release of “all knowing all-agony” solidified that for me hey. dont walk away. let me explain. (deckard cain voice) stay a while and listen... its obvious that harukas relationship with his parents (particularly his mother) is very fraught. they clearly dont care for him. when they have a daughter who is “normal” (not an effeminate ‘son’ who is developing differently than other children) (because haruka is autistic) (if you get it you get it) they stop pretending to care about haruka and focus on the daughter instead and haruka is like what the fuck 😐... haruka killed her for 2 reasons: 1. because he was sick of being neglected by their parents who favored her, particularly their mother because idk the dad has to be absent or a serial killer considering haruka didnt even attempt to latch onto him for approval in the absence of his mothers love (dad does not want a girly “son” even if said son will join the serial killer business) (i cannot explain this further at the moment but it makes sense if youre me or tshirt) (to be brief the fact haruka had been previous validated for killing someone/something and thinks killing Again will totally earn more love and validation is so strange and makes no sense even in the context of if the death was because of his parents taxidermy hobby because theres a stark difference in killing an animal and killing a person and most taxidermied animals are already dead not killed For The Sake Of Taxidermy in this the year of 2022 so someone is a serial killer) and 2. because he was like well there can only be one girl here and youre a REAL girl which is not fair . But if youre gone i will be the girl again. #win the fact all knowing all agony starts with lines like “why was i born like this / why does it hurt so much?” and “you kept calling me ‘hopeless’, you never called me by my name / you were always comparing me to someone else / you were always generous, except towards me / i will definitely make you love me again” and him going into his mothers(?) jewelry drawer and taking a necklace (that might have been his sisters 🤨✍????) is like. there is something happening here. the insistence that “i wasnt wrong, i wasnt wrong” (which was also present weakness) during the chorus, along with pleas for someone to “hug me again as you once did” and “dont leave me alone, dont leave me” and, like the beginning of the song, “why was i born like this? why does it hurt so much?” just makes the soup in my brain start bubbling the real meat of what im trying to talk about comes from lines like “i just wanted to be your good boy. why am i crying again?” and “i will keep on killing to be a good boy”. near the end we also get “why was i born to be me? why does it hurt so much?” like, his mother only validated him when he was a “boy”, and he was killing. apparently. but doing this is painful for him. existing as a boy and also killing people(?) (things?) for attention isnt something haruka particularly wants to do but its what gets the attention he needs. i havent forgotten that in weakness he asked “how many more times do i have to do this so i can be human?” implying if he does not kill he is not human enough. but also his mother was clearly distraught at the end of the video when haruka was on a pile of animal corpses (which was an awesome visual just btw) theres something going on anyway the point im winding to is haruka is a girl actually and maybe her dad is a serial killer (who knows) her mom sucked and maybe she killed her sister out of frustration and neglect and also because she wanted to steal her gender (but haruka was a girl before her sister came into the picture make no mistake she did not decide to become a girl because her sister got more attention and love than she did. but it did prove to her in her mind that oh well if im a girl then 🤨... like do you get it?)

tshirt put it thusly after we watched all knowing all agony: “i'm just like. narrativizing this in my head like "oh and haruka self consciously models himself after specific women in order to gain their approval and also disavow the femininity as emerging intrinsically from him-- btw also his dad is killing people" which i think sums up what im trying to say because ive just kind of been on a stream of consciousness ramble because i fell asleep thinking about harukaisms last night truly i cant get over the repetition of lines like “why was i born like this why does it hurt so much” “i wanted to be your good boy / why am i crying again” like im sorry but there is something so gender about taking on the habits of the women around you and being agonized by the fact you are not physically like them and crying over being a boy but wanting to be a boy because its what you “are” and the only thing your parents will see you as and they are the only source of love and validation you have in your life even though they are not validating or loving you and resent you the more you try to gain their affections. LIKE MAKE IT MAKE SENSE ? also i think its really funny if harukas dad IS a serial killer because we have someone like kotoko who is gungho for vigilante justice so much so she beat the shit out of an 11 year old cult survivor (i wont forgive milgram fandom for voting amane guilty btw) and mikoto who is so stressed by familial responsibility and work that he started disassociating and beat a guy to death with a baseball bat and also shidou botched surgeries for reasons currently unclear (finger paresthesia? moving a loved one up on the organ donor list? both?) and its just like. haruka with the actual lucid serial killer dad. who also kills people because she feels like she has to. i dont know its just really funny to think about... (theres also futas whole thing and kazuis and yunos but they arent killers. probably. futa wasnt a willfully malicious murderer he just accidentally doxxed a woman alongside the guy who was sexually harassing her and social pressure drove her to suicide. kazui is a closeted gay man with a wife who may or may not have killed herself. i wrote a whole thing about it remember? and yuno had an abortion. which like, is against the law, especially if she didnt have the ‘fathers’ consent to do it, and depending on the method of abortion. mahiru has something going on idfk if shes a stalker or what. and then theres haruka and muu. muu is so funny spoiled rich lesbian schoolgirl who is feeling super validated that her murder was justified because she was being bullied and now she has haruka to yank around. falling back on her old ojou-sama hobbies. good for her) milgram is so funny.... anyway tl;dr i do think haruka displayed girl power when she murdered her sister(?) and whoever or whatever else she might have killed for attention and voting her innocent/forgiven is the best option (because its the funniest option for her future development)

[sabaramonds]

the thing about mikoto of milgram fame is that hes like. okay. so theres a lot that cant be said about him yet because his 2nd trial hasnt released and wont be for quite a while and his music video and interrogation only tell us so much. but what they DO tell us is um. enough to say some things if he answered his interrogation questions honestly, we know he has a younger sister he brags about, his parents are divorced and his father isnt involved in their lives. in regards to his mother, he says that “she raised me. i cant let her worry.” he downplays his own interests/hobbies a lot. he said he played baseball in high school but that he wasnt good at it; he went to an art school but did so in order to go into business (though design was related to his chosen company) and says that he likes drawing but, again, isnt good at it. he says he hates working late nights but we see him pulling an all nighter at work in ‘undercover’. when asked why hes working his current job, he says he worked incredibly hard to even get hired, so its something to be proud of. finally, when asked if he ever gets angry, he says he doesnt. he says, “i dont think ive ever gotten angry before. isnt it disgraceful to get angry?” theres also the following milgram portal conversation (src):

Yuno: Hey, Mikoto-san. Don’t you get tired being so conscious of others all the time? I mean, you’re free to do what you want though.

Mikoto: Eh…… Aha, what are you talking about? I’m not being conscious or anything. It’s normal to make sure to get along with everyone, right?

I mean, when you put it like that, aren’t you the same, Yun-chan? You’re always smiling and getting on with everyone too.

Yuno: I don’t smile unless I actually want to. But with you, when you’re talking with other people it’s more like you only smile deliberately. So I kept thinking, don’t your cheeks get tired?

Ah, is this just what happens when you become a working adult? ……you see people like that sometimes.

Mikoto: Haha, you don’t mince your words do you.

…….that was never my intention, but now that you mention it, yeah, I guess I do. This might’ve been since I started my job too…… But like, if I was rude to everyone I met, all my efforts would come to nothing, right?

all these little things add up to paint a picture of a stressed and deeply repressed guy working a job he doesnt actually like (but he has to have a successful job he can brag about or his mother will worry) he thinks little of his own interests and hobbies and socializes more out of obligation than out of genuine desire. all of this culminates to um...his present situation... basically what i want to say is that i think its fine. also i think he killed someone and immediately repressed it but that incident is entirely unrelated to his anime brand DID and his alter. who aside from trying to whale on es that one time has only ever really showed up to be like “can you shut the fuck up. and get away from me. im trying to be normal over here and you are RUINING my life” or to pace around in mikotos cell in the middle of the night like a creature. i think mikoto 2 was entirely unrelated to mikotos repression stress induced rage murder but they might have cleaned up after him idk. we will see. mikoto wants to be a normal guy having a normal time and not worrying his family at all ever and never experiencing anything like anger or frustration at all EVER EVER!! because he has to set a good example for his sister and be the perfect son for his mom so she can relax. and he doesnt think he can do the things he enjoys for the sake of doing them. so what im saying is if he killed someone who cares. whatever. also we should all mass vote him forgiven/innocent just to spite kotoko after last nights birthday timeline post. AND because it would be funny as hell and the fandom flopped HARD voting haruka guilty/unforgiven. like god forbid girls have a little fun 🙄 btw its my firm belief that the tarot set we see in his mv (and i could talk a lot about the rest of the imagery used in that video but its almost 2am and ive rambled long enough) was designed by him during college. really funny to think about it like that. he does have one of the card designs (the. hangman, actually. i think) visible on a canvas in his apartment, partially obscured behind his couch at one point. so. lol

[gunsli-01]

Okay, you know what I'm gonna say it- I am personally mad about the Haruka verdict this trial like on a very personal level and I'm gonna explain why. I feel like I need to preface this with I don't really like getting personal that often online, but I feel like people won't understand my point on this without me explaining myself.

As no one may know, because I don't get personal often on my blog outside of rare occasions, I had a somewhat similar circumstance to Haruka coming up. During my upbringing I was basically treated as defective from the start. However, even though I recognized this within his first trial song I wasn't like oh vote him innocent. In fact, when I saw Weakness, I believed he should've been voted Guilty, but he was already Innocent at that time. Just because of what Weakness centered around. So, this isn't just a case of oh I relate so I won't be critical. Because the more I relate to something the more critical I am likely to be. Eh-hem Mikoto sorry weird cough there.

So, tragic anime-esque backstory time I suppose which is not tragic or anime-esque since things like this happen all the time and continue to. So, I believe people should really stop this weird belief that abuse such as this can only happen in fiction then balking when they find out oh people just really be out here like this. I'm the youngest and last daughter of an incredibly self-centered woman. Since she had a daughter one year before me, she did not want a second one. She would tell me multiple times in my life that she really wanted a son not another girl. Stating the reason behind that desire was because sons tend to be more loyal to their moms (momma boys) and girls their dads (daddy girls).

Even went out of her way to give me my legal name just to later give me the nickname Lee. This was a failure of a plan because in the US you don't plan a nickname, it either chooses you when you come to age like a rite of passage, people just randomly start calling you something in your family and it sticks, or you actively pick one for yourself. What this did do is actively fuck me over in small social ways repeatedly since my legal name is still not even considered a real name due to its spelling and has zero meaning since if you go back to point one it is not a recognized name. If I looked it up right now google might tell me to fuck myself. I looked it up and Google told me I spelled it wrong. Been alive 27 years and still can't spell my own fucking name right I suppose.

This has caused some of my documents to be wrong cause she just didn't bother to tell me or anyone else for that matter how it was legally spelt until I was out of high school. Don't worry there's a great excuse for this in her own words, she was just taking a "hiatus" from parenting that included dropping off the face of the earth and popping back up randomly to force me to get braces because my teeth were just too crooked, missing every birthday I had but at least calling my sister on most of hers even showing up unannounced a few times for my sister's. Her birthday is a month before mine by the way. So, that was super fun, no way one could take that personally at all. Just to then reemerge when I was sixteen to be a parent again and explain it like she was taking a break from writing a manga. It's incredibly funny cause she just assumed I wouldn't know the meaning of that word, but I'd seen it a lot by that point so lol.

All that to say when I saw Haruka's second trial video it recontextualized a lot. Again, I already thought he should be voted Guilty on Weakness alone. Him being weak didn't really explain to me why he was killing any of the things he clearly did in that video. I just thought he was doing it just because fuck it's Tuesday why not. Like his first mv made it pretty clear he was killing animals and people. Also, that the person could have been a sibling. Like I'd been talking to friends about how he did that for a year now.

So, seeing it shown more blatantly was not like a oh whoa that's horrible because I'd gathered that already. There was nothing new to me in Haruka and Yuno's videos to be honest. I was actually very annoyed with Yuno's mv in a "Okay, tell me something I don't know way!" Like all of this is old news come on. So, really didn't rattle me in my core. I don't really think Mu's will shock me at all either but I'm dying when I love you comes out. I can feel it in my bones Mahiru is gonna be on some shit.

So, with Haruka I was like ah okay yeah, no innocent that's a failure in parenting. He killed a lot of things though hm unfortunate where was his caretaker when he was doing that? Also why is there an isolation room in his home? Like bro I can recognize someone's individual behavior is wrong and then consider the circumstances/environmental factors that may have led to that course of action. That is kind of something everyone is very much capable of doing. I can even just detach myself from my emotional sentiments on the issue as a whole and go, "Well wrong is wrong so not a big deal if he's voted Guilty he did kill someone after all."

However, even doing that I was just like this is still a stupid way to vote. Not just because having Haruka undergo something like this could very well be retraumatizing but as I've said before if his mom using negative reinforcement did not work why would it work here? He seems to actively respond better to positive reinforcement given his protectiveness of Mu and how he's been picking up words more through being patiently taught within Milgram.

However, Milgram isn't about rehabilitation, that's not the purpose but if I have a choice between rehabilitating and demonizing, I think the former should be chosen. Of course, for any progress to be made there are times when people must be told their actions were wrong. I think given Futa's second trial a Guilty verdict the first one was a good choice. I just don't think that sort of firm punishment is necessary in Haruka's case. Since we've gotten a great illustration of how he responds to negative reinforcement in general.

I feel like people greatly underestimate what being in an accepting, positive environment can do for someone mentally and the damage that being in a place the exact opposite of that can cause a person. How it affects their confidence, impacts the lengths they'll go to get attention, and how they view positive and negative attention overall. I hope this verdict doesn't negatively impact Haruka too much but as someone with those sorts of experiences I can see how this might just cause him to regress.

Well, didn't think I'd say this when the second trials started but at least he has Mu still hopefully...