i have written a post to encompass every thought i have had about the golden kamuy character ogata hyakunosuke. i couldn't help writing it, and here it is. it includes analysis, interpretation, confusion, thoughts about shipping, and spoilers all the way to the end of the manga.
the post is incredibly long because i wanted it all in one place... i'm sure that much of this has been said by other people, but i haven't read anything anyone else has said. this is purely between me and canon. i have now read golden kamuy through twice and watched the anime once. i missed a lot on the first read, and i probably missed some things on the second read too.
i can't help but love the character ogata hyakunosuke. i know a lot of it is the character design: sneaky eyes with built-in eyeliner, greasy all-back hairstyle with a powerful ahoge (and don't try to tell me an ahoge is not what it is), little beard that somehow skirts past my strong dislike for nasty little beards. he's so crafty… he's sorta weak in close combat… he's completely wrong about things such as killing one's parents and the nature of guilt… he's confident right up until he isn't…
normally if a character captures my interest like this, i want to ship them with another character so i can be satisfied by looking at amusing fanart of them outside of canon. but there honestly isn't anyone i want to pair him with… the fact of his eventual death notwithstanding. (i don't ship dead characters. too sad.) he's great as a cruel and calculating loner who thinks he knows what he wants but doesn't. i don't feel a need to see fun and exciting shipping antics with this character in particular. i will to look at some fanart to see what i can get out of it, but i'm really satisfied by just what happens in canon. and yet i still feel like i have to make sense of these feelings, so i'm writing a post that nobody asked for (just like all my other posts).
i'm annoyed with myself because as i was first reading golden kamuy, it took a long, long time to dawn on me that there MUST be people who think of ogata hyakunosuke as their favorite silly little cinnamon roll and make obnoxiously cute posts about what he would do in domestic situations and stuff. as we learned more about him, i became certain that some people must feel that way, Despite Everything. and i was so very annoyed by the thought of it that i decided to make it a point to dislike ogata… to buck the trend. to avoid biting the fandom bait. BUT IT DIDN'T WORK………… he grew on me… ugh. i still really, really don't want to see fluffy fics with him or anything like that though. god. i have less patience than ever for fandom content that cutesifies every character. especially fucked up weird horrible men like him <3
it's an incredibly audacious move to create a merciless sniper character who killed three (3) members of his closest family (and who knows how many soldiers) and then also give him explicitly catlike characteristics and behaviors, all the while knowing that everyone loves cats!!! (slams table.) fuck off! noda-sensei had to have been trying to induce brain-melting levels of cognitive dissonance in the minds of horny readers who desperately want catboy hyakunosuke to be their poor little meow meow but also want to cancel him for being a bad dude. i'm not immune
i like ogata in kind of the same way i like crocodile one piece. they're weird and smug and fun to watch. and of course, they're similar in some ways. the greasy all-back hair with pieces falling down, and the facial stitches, and the excessive confidence, and their voice actors being perfect. and, you know, the being villains who are eventually defeated. crocodile lets out his slow laugh whenever he feels things are going his way, and ogata just does a little shit-eating grin, and they're both perfect. key difference: ogata gets naked
i have been made aware that a non-zero amount of people ship ogata with asirpa, and those people might benefit from being run over by a car. asirpa is excluded from shipping of any sort, no exceptions, because she is 13 years old and 95% of the other characters are (bizarre, horrible) adult men. the fact that she has a one-sided crush on sugimoto for some amount of time is perfectly natural and reasonable given the circumstances (i believe that anyone would fall in love with sugimoto if they were in her place). the relationship between sugimoto and asirpa is that of a wonderful, wholesome, and strong found family.
back to ogata. i liked that during his first appearance, he gets his arm broken, gets beaned on the back of the head with his own gun, falls into a ravine, hits his face on a cliff, and bounces off the cliff into the icy river. that was so early in the story that his character design wasn't even nailed down yet, and that scene can be easy to forget, but it should be remembered. i like when ogata gets shot in the chest and the shoulder. i like when we get just a little snapshot of ogata knocked out cold at the stenka. i like the flashback of masked ogata getting his face bloodied by teen koito and then having to pretend like it never happened even though he's pissed. i like when ogata gets the snot beat out of him by usami. this is not a toga-himiko-like aesthetic preference for a man's bloody and beat-up body. rather, i love how he has strong (and justified) confidence in his one skill (sniping) and therefore seems confident overall but keeps getting busted up anyway because he's weak in close combat. it's a good dissonance.
i love seeing ogata smugly perched on things… it's like, "ah, there he is…!"
i love ogata feeling guilty about only the worst murder he committed and none of the others… he was testing his limits, and he found them. it didn't stop him from killing again, but he never got over it either.
i love ogata being the only one who chose not to hold hands and jump at the beach scene… doesn't want to make a fool of himself… but he made a funny face when he got beaned in the back of the head, didn't he. i like the ogata who gets made a fool out of.
after the ordeal with anehata shiton, ogata said that all men feel regretful and disgusted after they shoot their load. probably that's all he's ever felt, doing it with prostitutes and such, if at all. makes a little note in my notebook
ogata does terribly cruel things, and he must recognize to some degree that people will see his actions as cruel, but he doesn't do it for the sake of being cruel. he is heartless, but only when he feels he has a reason. everything is analyzed based purely on how it will affect him, and he acts that way consistently throughout the entire story. he can mime kindness if he has to, but clumsily. he cultivates a trusting relationship with asirpa purely because he understands that nopperabou is her father. he goes along with what sugimoto wants purely for convenience and because he understands how strong/dangerous sugimoto is. he shoots wilk, despite knowing that he is asirpa's father and that she will be very upset, purely because he wants to limit the spread of whatever information wilk has about the gold. he shoots sugimoto, his ally for months, not to be cruel, not as revenge for almost killing him that one time, but to eliminate a potential complication to his plan. the only one he really needs in his party is asirpa, and all asirpa is to him is the key to the gold, and all the gold is to him is a path to climb the ranks to prove that his father was worthless. his behavior is unpredictable on first read, but when rereading, it's incredibly consistent. his lack of guilt is entirely premised on what he can justify to himself, and he's great at justifying anything in his own mind. but there is a limit, and yuusaku was that limit; what haunts him most about yuusaku's death is that this time, he can't justify it. he didn't have a good reason. that causes a crack in the foundation of his entire personality, and when he gets acute aconite poisoning from asirpa's arrow, the anxiety it brings is what causes that crack to spread and his entire ego to collapse.
can someone count how many panels feature ogata's face and then also count how many of those panels show him smoothing back his greasy hair and give me some kind of ratio? i think it's high. i think the ratio is high. though i didn't notice until a couple hundred chapters in. but on reread it's like yeah, every other ogata panel, he's got his hand on his head. i do like when an author commits to a tic. no one else in the story has such an obvious repeating tic, i think. he even gets a nade nade (pet pet) sound effect when he's smoothing his hair repeatedly out of nervousness (after he shot the reindeer by accident).
have i mentioned i hate nasty little beards but ogata's slides right in under the gate? that's another cognitive dissonance for me, and it's tough. hard to get over this one.
"daily affirmations i Can be normal about that man"
~quote from deleted post by a tumblr user who maybe doesn't want credit bc they deleted their post
he dishes out smug grins when things are going his way, but he dishes out WRY grins when things AREN'T going his way! hoargh! (throwing up hands)
it's worth noting, to defend my honor, that ogata is not the only one who grew on me. everyone grew on me. another important one is tsukishima, who i admit i wasn't paying very much attention to until they started heading toward karafuto (during the first reading) and then i was like, that was the guy in the coal mine... right? oh, he's been there The Whole Time. and his design didn't change very much. he grew on me a lot. first you think snake nose, but then you think bunny nose. (someone on pixiv said gorilla nose? i don't like that…) his little beard doesn't strike me as nasty either (why not?? i don't know.) of course, koito was the boy of the hour as soon as he first appeared, and i paid a normal amount of attention to him. (the only part of his design that changed is that his eyebrows got stronger and his parted hair got fixed. actually his part seems to fluctuate between messy and neat.) i really like the dynamic of koito being a needy younger pain-in-the-ass to tsukishima while outranking him and being taller than him. in japanese, tsukishima always addresses him with polite speech, and koito rarely even addresses tsukishima with an honorific. tsukikoi seems to be a good and semi-wholesome ship… you know, semi-wholesome. listen, they end up together forever at the end, so it's fine. you guys can make obnoxiously cute posts about what they would do in domestic situations if you want. so anyway, it's not just ogata who got my attention. but it is ogata who this post is about, so let's end this paragraph and leave room for more notes.
Noda-sensei will use any and every opportunity to show you the silhouette of a dick and balls swinging around during an action scene where people happen to be naked. However, he doesn't do that with Ogata. The reason is that he wants you to remember that Ogata is a serious bad guy character and doesn't want you laughing at his dick and balls. For the same reason, he also precludes Ogata from partaking in the horny otter sumo wrestling. In this essay, I will-- ok just kidding, they showed his dick and balls when he kicked koito in the face. and then they showed that exact panel again a few chapters later. with his dick and balls again.
i bet the hyaku in hyakunosuke is obviously referring to getting a 100% hit rate. (hyaku means 100, same kanji and everything. -nosuke is a common ending for a boy's name.) or to put it in sogeking terms, 100 shots, 100 hits, lu lu la la lu
it's interesting that out of the 4 people we see tsurumi gratuitously manipulate into loyalty, ogata is the only one where it doesn't stick very well. to be fair, tsurumi played his game with ogata a bit differently than with the others. he helped ogata kill his father and promised to help him rise through the ranks, but ogata didn't understand at first that tsurumi had an ulterior motive that would make hanazawa's death a win-win for him. it was usami who brought up mantetsu and made ogata understand he was being manipulated. but even knowing that, he thought tsurumi might uphold the other part of his end of the deal by helping ogata get into the army academy, so he was willing to play along. of course, tsurumi's time was split between everyone he was trying to manipulate (as well as pursuing his main goals), so everything couldn't happen at once. another problem was that each of them wanted to be daddy's only special little boy, and ogata was no exception, so he got impatient upon seeing him pay attention to the others and thought tsurumi wasn't working to help him fast enough. it was only when ogata decided that tsurumi wasn't holding up his end of the deal that he decided to betray him by working for central (in the hopes that central could uphold a similar deal instead). i think i'm getting that right. compared to what tsurumi did for tsukishima, he didn't do that much for ogata. but tsukishima was his masterpiece of manipulation-- look how much he got out of him. in the end, tsurumi wanted to cultivate soldiers who are dogs among sheep, but of course, ogata is a cat in that metaphor…
i didn't read the manga well enough the first time and was thinking that ogata's failure to advance in the ranks was because he just wasn't really good at anything but sniping, and sniping wasn't properly appreciated by the higher-ups. while those two things are basically true, i now understand that he couldn't get promoted because he didn't attend the necessary school and was ineligible for any promotion above his current rank, regardless of his skills. and that's why his roundabout desire to climb in the ranks was hinged on his going back to school, which he couldn't do without the help of either tsurumi or central. so complicated…
people ship ogata and sugimoto, and i'm really torn about that. they do look kinda good together, but first and foremost, sugimoto deserves better (and he deserves a character who doesn't die at the end). i also think that the dynamic between those two is not that fun or interesting-- yeah, they almost kill each other and then save each other, etc., and that's fun, but i mean all the other interactions. i think there's not that much potential between them. plus ogata shoots him in the head. maybe that part should have come first and foremost. he does shoot the man in the head. that being said, of course, there's not a lot of great options for sugimoto to begin with, so i understand when people want to put him with ogata-- they need someone for sugimoto to be horny with, and they need someone for ogata to be horny with. like, who else do we have for sugimoto? shiraishi? you could argue for it… tanigaki? but what he has with inkarmat is pretty good, and i hate to sully canon romances by shipping against them. kiroranke? dies. anyone in the army? they're living in different worlds at the end of the story… just not a lot of great options for sugimoto, who deserves the best. also, if ogata and sugimoto had anything between them, ogata's death would make sugimoto sad, and i wouldn't like that.
shiraishi/ogata might be funny though. i like that scene when shiraishi is like "boy am i hungry!" to the man with a gun who likes to hunt and ogata doesn't say anything or look at him. (other good options for shiraishi include kiroranke [who dies] and boutarou [who dies]. that's 3 for 3 dead. unfortunate.)
i saw some ogata fanart. some artists like to give him Sneaky Squints and Crafty Grin all the time. he is sneaky, and he has distinctive eyes, but i think canon makes it clear that Sneaky Squints and Crafty Grin is a very rare special occasion thing, and a huge majority of the time he only has Glassy Eyes and nothing at all going on with the mouth. and that is the righteous truth. in a manga, facial expressions are a very important part of characterization, especially for characters who are always around but not always involved, so i prefer fanart where people try to emulate (and exaggerate) the faces a character makes in canon instead of assigning their preferred faces to a given character. (an unrelated example of this assigning of preferences would be taking two complex characters and turning one into Stoic Seme and the other into Weepy Uke. it is shocking how thoroughly and audaciously people will squish characters into those two molds. what a waste of time.) i get that i'm probably in the top 1% of sticklerism when it comes to wanting characters to adhere strictly to canon in certain ways, but it's because i strongly feel that canon ogata who is making a neutral Ogata Face 95% of the time and a rare Other Face 5% of the time is true and beautiful. to sully that by tailoring his character to your preferences is your prerogative, but to hate that is also my prerogative. not that i would ever leave negative comments or anything along those lines, ever. because that's stupid and a waste of time. the most time i will waste in that way is the time it takes to write what i've been writing here.
ogata dakimakura is permitted but it has to be ogata laid up on a stretcher, wrapped up, splinted arm, with his face all puffy after getting dumped in the river by sugimoto. or it has to be ogata standing up wearing his uniform complete with little cape and his gun on his back and looking through his binoculars into the distance. or it has to be a watchtower spanning the length of the pillow and ogata is perched in it, looking through his binoculars into the distance.
i hate the relationship between ogata and usami. usami is the ultimate slimy little dog (derogatory). nasty little freak usami. ogata is wrong about almost everything, but he was right about usami being the cheapest piece on tsurumi's gameboard. nasty little wannabe sexual predator usami. that scene where ogata's like "i'm normal, right?" and usami is affirming all the things he's wrong about, it's like, the man is fucked up enough already! i can't believe i'm saying this, but you're a corrupting influence on him! i don't like how usami calls ogata "hyakunosuke" like they're friends… tsurumi calls him that because he's manipulating him and a cool dad calls his special little boy by his given name, but usami fucking hates him, and yet he calls him that anyway. something gross about it. usami's death was perfect. nasty little death. and i liked how ogata kept quiet due to bullet in mouth while usami was going on and on saying whatever he wanted while he beat the shit out of him, and then usami left after getting shot, and ogata felt compelled to say his one-liner to himself. fuckin nerd
i like the ogata who is seriously, seriously wondering if he's being haunted by his brother's ghost.
i think my one main beef with everyday heroes scans, who did an overall great job scanlating, is that they should have kept honorifics. keeping honorifics is a tough choice to make for a translator because it can be confusing for an english reader, especially when you come across one that's out of the standard few. but i was very surprised to find upon watching the anime that sugimoto calls asirpa "asirpa-san"; i had no way of knowing that in the manga! even though she's so much younger than him, even when their relationship becomes very close, even when yelling out her name in moments of desperation, he keeps the honorific. it might just be out of habit, but i think it indicates how much he respects her. it might be small, but something is lost by omitting the -san. honorifics and the ways people address each other are very important in japanese, and because this story takes place chiefly in japan, chiefly among japanese (and japanese-speaking) characters, i think keeping honorifics would have been perfectly appropriate in this circumstance. i also think it would have clarified some things for the readers rather than confusing them. (for contrast, it would make perfect sense to omit honorifics in a story that doesn't take place in japan but just happens to be written in japanese… though some meaning would still be lost.) (side note: EH scans does in fact keep some honorifics: the ainu word "nispa.") and sometimes, omitting the honorific in a context where it is important can make the translated wording MORE awkward. the example i'm thinking of is when ogata is recovering in the hospital and the scanlation shows him muttering, "yuusaku… sir…" now i'm 98% sure that ogata called yuusaku "yuusaku-dono," even though younger siblings typically get no honorifics, because yuusaku outranked him (and also maybe to show distance between them), and that's what he's muttering in that scene. i think it's less weird to call your younger half-sibling "-dono" in japanese than it would be to call your younger half-sibling "sir" in english. it's an in-between level of respect (and distance) that doesn't exist in english. so it became weirder in english, and leaving the honorific would have preserved that meaning. well, i do respect that EH scans made their decision about honorifics in the very beginning and then stuck with it to the very end. i guess it would have been worse if they selectively added in SOME honorifics when they thought it was important. but my opinion is that they should have made the decision to keep honorifics from the beginning.
in chapter 283, ogata falls asleep on the train and dreams of his mother singing a traditional song to him about how the way there is easy, but the way back is scary. i think the symbolism is clearly that it was easy for him to kill his mother and his brother, but it's not easy (or possible) to take it back. it's a one-way path that he chose. it's another subconscious manifestation of his feelings of guilt.
now here is something i've been puzzling over but which everyone but me has probably already made sense of. i think this is the only part of the manga that has stuck with me BECAUSE i am confused by it. chapter 199, page 6. kidnapped koito otonoshin, whose father just told him over the phone that he cannot be saved, is saying something heartbreaking in reply, and one of his captors is rubbing his back as if to comfort him. what else could that be but a comforting hand? am i mistaken? and it's got to be important because it takes up THREE panels! now, if you're like me and you've decided that tsukikoi is the OTP of golden kamuy, your first thought was to want tsukishima to be the one under the white hat, and ogata is the one watching disapprovingly because he's a jerk. but otonoshin smacks and bloodies the face of man in the white hat with the back of his head, and the wounds we later see (and basically everything else) make it clear that the white hat was ogata. (then of course they put those hats on russian-looking corpses that they obtained… somehow. kidnapped off the street?) (side note: when they take the white hat and mask off one of the corpses, otonoshin should have been suspicious right away, because that guy's nose wasn't bloodied or anything. but i'll let his lack of perception slide given the circumstances. unless he remembers it in a later chapter and i'm the one who forgot.) anyway, so it was clearly ogata who rubbed otonoshin's back, which seems really weird and out of character. i was thinking that it must have been that tsurumi gave them orders along the lines of not completely breaking the kid's will and making sure he isn't too physically or emotionally hurt (or else he and his father wouldn't be usable in the future). this would gel with the fact that tsurumi seems slightly surprised/perturbed when commander koito says he's going to tell otonoshin to die for his country (because of course that's not what tsurumi wants or had planned for). so maybe ogata interpreted those orders, thought otonoshin was giving up on life, and decided that he should make sure the kid's will wasn't completely broken by providing a little comfort. and then the glare from the black hat is tsukishima with a sentiment like, "you're giving the game away, you dumb piece of shit! captors wouldn't do that! ESPECIALLY IF THEY DON'T SPEAK JAPANESE!" but another possibility occurs to me. we heard from ogata when he was pointing his gun at huci that he doesn't want to just kill someone's grandma if he can help it. he's a cold-blooded killer when he thinks he has a reason, but maybe he does have the thinnest sentimental streak when it comes to people he does not perceive as a threat. so maybe that thin streak is showing here? kidnapping some weak kid might have been the dirtiest work tsurumi had ever put him up to at that point. (did he kill his father before or after this? but was that even dirty work to him, when he felt he had a good reason?) maybe he honestly felt emotionally reluctant to traumatize a defenseless 16-year-old like that, so he reached out to comfort him without thinking. i wonder what is the fandom consensus about that page, yet i feel reluctant to look it up… but whichever scenario it is, tsukishima's glare has to be him thinking, "man, you suck at dirty work." (and afterward, ogata glares at otonoshin because he's angry and humiliated that he underestimated how much of a threat a bound 16-year-old posed to him.)
EDIT: regarding the above paragraph, i think i've realized the correct interpretation. it's not that the situation of kidnapping a kid has activated ogata's thin sentimental streak. it's the specific circumstances of the lines that were just said: commander koito saying he could not save otonoshin, and otonoshin apologizing to his father and asking him to pretend he had never been born. that combination of circumstances was maybe the only thing that could flip ogata's empathy switch enough to make him reach out a comforting hand. he probably feels with great certainty that if he himself had ever been kidnapped and held for ransom, his own father would have told him to die for his country as well, and he might even have said a similar line in response. the pain otonoshin felt in that moment was so clear to ogata that he couldn't help but comfort him... it's a key emotional character development moment for ogata... with his face covered... but of course he misinterpreted otonoshin's resilience and that's how he got his nose bashed.
i cried a lot when i first read ogata's death chapter, and i cried a lot the second time too. i think noda-sensei might be a genius… one thing that didn't register on first reading was that ogata must have enjoyed the time he spent traveling with asirpa and the others in a way, even if he didn't exactly realize it. asirpa reminded him of yuusaku, not just in her innocence, but in the way she trusted him and ate with him and joked with him and treated him as if he were "normal" (when he believes he isn't normal). ogata was yearning for familial love his whole life; he just fixated on getting it only from his father, which wasn't going to happen, and ignored what he got from his mother and his brother. yuusaku was the only one who loved him, but he got some of that warm familial feeling from asirpa and the others as well, even though he usually acted cold. (i think he said "hinna" primarily to manipulate asirpa... but maybe after saying it, he felt happy.) and now, not only did he have to deal with his mistake of killing yuusaku, but here he was trying to kill asirpa too! not only that, but he was corrupting her into killing HIM, and he thought he wanted that, but he didn't! he couldn't even accept his old guilt, and now he was foolishly inflicting new guilt, as if by compulsion! it's so painful! as he breaks down, we see him realizing his mistake in real time, how his goal of proving his father worthless was itself worthless all along, how he didn't actually need to kill any of his family, how he was following the wrong path based on his delusions and misunderstandings his whole life, and it hurts him so much… and he tries to deny it, but he's having it explained to him by himself, and he can only trust himself… whenever he felt conflicted about anything, he would just find some way stamp out the opposing view and believe in himself, but now, both sides were him, so he couldn't do that, and as a result, he was defeated. the chapter was very emotionally powerful… he died a coward's death because, never having confronted his guilt before, he couldn't imagine being able to live with it… and vasily found his body by the railroad tracks and painted his fursona.
you could ship ogata with vasily but the fact remains that they spend vasily's entire span of appearance in the manga in a fight to the death and then one of them dies. also he shot vasily in the mouth. you can't shoot a mouth with your gun and then try to kiss it later. that's inappropriate
the last time ogata shoots sugimoto, he doesn't aim for the head. it's as though he learned his lesson. but it still didn't work, did it?
i saw the ogata nendoroid and took damage from it. hate it. i don't want any more chibis...
it seems that some things are changed in the volume releases of golden kamuy. i have only read the scanlated magazine releases. i wonder if i can be content to decide that this is the end of my ogata post when i don't know if any important ogata details were changed in the volumes. i would also like to read and compare the official translation. one thing i want to see in the volume releases is if noda-sensei ever goes back and adds teeth to the white voids of characters' mouths. it is incredibly clear to me that noda-sensei truly, viscerally hates drawing teeth. that's fair, but i do prefer even the vaguest semblance of teeth to a white void of a mouth. when he does draw teeth, they usually look perfectly passable. anyway, my next project will be deciding how to get my hands on the official translated volumes and then rereading again.
i think that might be all i have to say about ogata hyakunosuke right now.
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