unpopular opinion but I pity kotarou, he just gives me so many feelings because he’s so damn tragic. He’s a repressed wreck of an asshole, but my god, he tried. he really tried.
like, after his mom relinquished him, he must have sworn to do everything right - that is to be, in his eyes, a better family man than Nana. Kotarou’s literally like the Confucian Ideal. He studied and worked hard, enough to leave the foster care system to go to college and got a job that allowed him to become wealthy. I bet you anything Kotarou chose whatever job he had specifically to make lots of money in order to make sure his family would never want for anything. He’s an orphan turned wealthy professional. he’s a success story.
Kotarou married, built a house big enough to allow his wife’s parents to move in with them because he wanted to be the perfect son-in-law. Traditionally the eldest son have his parents move in with him when they get old. Lacking parents, he basically decided to adopt Nao’s parents as his own. He had kids - a girl and a boy, perfect balance - and he gave the kids a dog. Does Kotarou seem like the type of guy to want pets? No. I bet you anything again that he got the kids the corgi when they asked for a pet, just like that. His profile wasn’t wrong - the thing he liked was actually his family (yes, including Tenko).
Kotarou tried and nearly did everything right, all except the most important thing - being an actual dad, a emotionally supportive parent. Man was internally an complete angry traumatized grieving disaster obsessed with getting everything perfect. Had no idea how to do healthy feelings. All that emotional damage suffocated the entire household, everyone wilting in that toxicity. Even if it was inadvertently, he ended up emotionally neglectful/abusive and it caused his wife and in-laws to tolerate/comply with it, leaving the kids unprotected. Hana learned to lie as a survival skill, and Tenko got to be the main target of all that dysfunction.
I truly believe the day Kotarou slapped Tenko was the first time he physically hit his son. His usual method of punishment was putting Tenko outside - traditional method of punishment in Japan - and he did this with a cool, stoic demeanor. Once the Nana picture entered the picture tho, he snapped. Just two slaps and that was all it took to ensure his demise.
For all that Confucianism extols filial piety, it also demands reciprocity. The parent behaves well, then so will the child. If the parent sucks, don’t be surprise when the child rebels.
Kotarou fostered a toxic environment, and Tenko developed that itch of his, the physical manifestation of that poison. It built up, slowly, darker and deeper, until that itch became the Decay that would ultimately destroy the family, the house, and especially Kotarou. Too easy of a metaphor. He fed the rot (or perhaps rather, he let the rot fester as he ignored it) and eventually the decay consumed him too.
Plus. The manga doesn’t even really frame Tenko killing his dad as bad. Horrifying, yeah, but there’s not quite any condemnation. Shigaraki doesn’t forgive him, and he’s the only person left in the Shimura tragedy whose judgment matters, so there’s just no forgiveness.
Kotarou tried so hard, but he was his own undoing. He worked so hard to create the perfect family, and completely failed. What a disaster of a guy.
eddie is about to be loved and taken care of so hard like he is not going to know what to do with the utter unconditional devotion buck is going to wrap him up in
truly dont understand people who find history boring. there were people here before us!!! and they did so much stuff!! they took up space and left their mark!!! and now they dont exist anymore!! how does that not blow your mind???
going to the shops and seeing everyone go about their lives when you know what’s in the latest ipcc report honestly feels like being sarah connor in terminator 2 a little bit
rant time
it’s bizarre to see the amounts of denial in peoples responses, even those that are accepting the collapse… many people are talking about it in that very detached, “nature is over there” kinda way, as if we’re seperate from the environment, as if it’s very tragic and heartbreaking that we’ll all go on living our modern lives with cities and cars and power grids and running water, but oh so sad how “the environment” will collapse…
like, no. I’m sorry if you don’t wanna think about it, but life as normal won’t go on. there’s no “let the poor and disabled die and learn to live with the virus climate collapse” response here. it’s like, civilisation level collapse. like bronze age collapse collapse. which is ironic, considering the causes of that were resource hoarding, escalating warfare, pandemic, and environmental disaster.
like we need to be rapidly decentralising and localising our food and clean water everywhere at town infrastructure level, disentangling reliance on global or even national supply chains for basic survival, but instead internet armchair activists are still like “stop the capitalists from killing off the lovely nature, that is over there, seperate from us” and governments are like “we are reducing single use plastics because we aspire to one day be on track to maybe make net zero by 2050”
it’s fucked, and I’m not coping, and it doesn’t help that the last time i talked to a psych about this stress they started running me through the checklist questions for paranoid psychotic delusions… during the time an unprecedented amount of our country was on fire in the largest single bushfire event in history and the SES was telling us all to stockpile water to prepare…
how long will the denial last? so many tipping points of no return have already passed, but i still see “doomerism is the new climate denial”, as if acting like there’s still time to prevent collapse isn’t the biggest denial against the science there is… but i suppose it makes sense. we’re in the deadliest year of the 2019 pandemic yet with corpses piling up and business is back to usual.
maybe the benchmark for accepting collapse will be when toilet paper distribution stops so they can’t even panic buy it?
this election campaign is soul crushing tbh
it feels like, we’re on the titanic. the ship is already taking on water, the engineers are desperately trying to tell everyone how big the gash is and how many compartments are already flooded, we can feel the listing of the ship and we need to be launching lifeboats immediately and filling them to capacity, but if you even mention the lifeboats people think you’re crazy paranoid, and everyone’s just chanting the mantra that if we vote for the right party they’ll “hopefully steer us away from iceberg filled waters”
[Image Description: The illustration is rendered in striking white and black line art over a sea of green. In it Zack Fair carries a shaken Cloud Strife. Zack’s expression is one of deep concern as he easily carries his friend. Cloud’s expression is tense and haunted. He’s gripping Zack’s pauldrons tightly. There are dark circles under his eyes, and raw spots on his ankles from being bound. Sephiroth stands with his back to the viewer, reaching out towards Cloud. He is pictured with just the edge of his face visible. His lips are parted softly in worry. His left hand is clenched in a fist at his side, and with his right he is hovering inches from Cloud’s cheek, not quite touching. End image description.]
The days crawled by. He woke. He dressed. He went to work. He was at every meeting. He was fully present. He observed the troops training. He went out on missions. He went to sleep.
The others sought him out. Zack first. “Have you seen Cloud?” then Angeal “Did Heideggar mention anything in that last meeting?” even Genesis “I thought you knew everything.”
Sephiroth was not a bad liar by any stretch of the imagination. It usually didn’t matter to him what anyone believed or didn’t believe. But it stung, this time. It stung watching Zack fret, doing squats in the middle of his office, muttering “He already nearly died this year…” and hearing Angeal confess to him in worry “all his things are still in my apartment.” and Genesis’s “Pity. He seemed fun.”
Sephiroth slipped up into the labs when he could. Moved like a ghost through familiar halls. Checked the monitors. Second ward, medical bay, block four.
Just three rooms away from the surgical machines where Hojo lobotomized unruly test subjects.
![Close Up. Taron is singing [x]](https://64.media.tumblr.com/aa7989bb6da72feb5c9a20d81fc4fd19/tumblr_pnbohrdaZv1r11p9to1_500.gif "Close Up. Taron is singing [x]")
![Close Up. Taron is singing [x]](https://64.media.tumblr.com/37456c1213432a973671b17ec75a4cae/tumblr_pnbohrdaZv1r11p9to3_500.gif "Close Up. Taron is singing [x]")
![Close Up. Taron is singing [x]](https://64.media.tumblr.com/63139284d8a98064bcafb227a937e111/tumblr_pnbohrdaZv1r11p9to6_500.gif "Close Up. Taron is singing [x]")
![Close Up. Taron is singing [x]](https://64.media.tumblr.com/e48bca3a34af27c36e23ba3c3f35fdda/tumblr_pnbohrdaZv1r11p9to5_500.gif "Close Up. Taron is singing [x]")
![Close Up. Taron is singing [x]](https://64.media.tumblr.com/a4be13ddf38b73d9f658106e06e51d78/tumblr_pnbohrdaZv1r11p9to7_500.gif "Close Up. Taron is singing [x]")
![Close Up. Taron is singing [x]](https://64.media.tumblr.com/8e25443d864d615d2520f95d30f36529/tumblr_pnbohrdaZv1r11p9to4_500.gif "Close Up. Taron is singing [x]")
![Close Up. Taron is singing [x]](https://64.media.tumblr.com/49d9c43b8369cc14ed26397d03f8e419/tumblr_pnbohrdaZv1r11p9to2_500.gif "Close Up. Taron is singing [x]")
