PLF Advisor Fan

On the very first page of Kagurabachi, readers are introduced to a key aspect of Japanese swordsmithing, one visually demonstrated later in the same chapter: the way that the metal of a traditionally crafted katana is hammered and folded repeatedly as part of its forging.  This same pattern can be found in the way Chihiro is continuously, in steady rotation, faced with antagonists who fall broadly into two camps.

The first camp is composed of antagonists who allow him to assert the validity and worth of his ideals as they stand.  Continuing the forging metaphor, we might call these encounters “foldings.”  As with fold-forged steel being doubled over on itself, increasing its thickness and evening out impurities, when Chihiro is faced with these antagonists, he doubles down, reinforcing his values with determination (or pure obstinance) in order to triumph.

The second camp, then, the “hammerings,” are encounters with antagonists who challenge Chihiro’s ideals and force him to change.  As with a blade’s steel being hammered into shape, Chihiro must adapt to the forces being applied to him, altering the shape of his beliefs to incorporate new information without breaking.[1]

1: As a note, which group of antagonists get called the fold-type and which get called the hammer-type is somewhat arbitrary on my part.  You could change the metaphors and reverse the labels – saying that the ones that force Chihiro to change are the ones he “folds” to, for example – but I have written it the way it fits best in my mind.  The name each camp gets is less important than the two camps a) existing as distinguishable types based on Chihiro’s respective responses to them, and b) alternating in prominence in the narrative.

As this process is repeated, fold-forging a katana reduces the amount of impurities and inconsistencies in the metal; so too does Kagurabachi’s fold-forging of Chihiro via this alternation between two different types of antagonist ultimately allow him to strengthen himself (as a character and as a person!) by exposing and correcting patterns of thought that are simplistic, reactionary, or based on false assumptions.

This meta will examine the process primarily as it is applied through Kagurabachi’s major antagonists.  While the same analysis – folding or hammering – could likely be applied to more intermediate antagonists, the rotation pattern is most evident with the more arc-defining threats.  I will also be examining Rokuhira Kunishige’s ethos of swordsmanship, as its recurrence throughout the manga turns it into a sort of mantra that Chihiro and others invoke as their moral guideline.  Through these invocations, the mantra itself is subjected to significant testing.  While we can assume that the protagonist will be, at least in some way, validated and victorious in the end, the same is much less clear for the mantra!     

Preparing the Forge -Kunishige Rokuhira-

The opening chapter of the story establishes not only the forging process, but also, in Rokuhira Kunishige’s stated ethos of a proper swordsman, a key mantra.  Katana, Kunishige says, have the ability to save lives and open the way to new futures, but they’re still weapons for killing, and those who make them are complicit in the deaths they cause.  Therefore, swordsmiths must have principles and accountability: it’s their responsibility to ensure their weapons are wielded by people dedicated to “vanquishing evil and protecting the weak.”

Kunishige’s specific phrasing is echoed by numerous parties throughout the manga.  Unfortunately, the Viz translation, which I quoted above, varies significantly more than the Japanese, making it easy to miss how fervent and faithful those echoes are!  The specificity of those repetitions are really what transform Kunishige’s words from a moral guideline into a mantra.  Thus, I want to look at that phrase in Japanese for a moment, to flesh out specifically what he’s saying that will be so repeatedly invoked.

It says something about Kunishige’s characterization that he maintains this wording as-is despite knowing what it was used to justify.

In its original language, Kunishige’s line is as follows: 悪を滅し弱者を救う.  This can be romanized as, “Aku o messhi, jakusha o sukuu.”  The connecting bits are grammatical,[2] but the key terms and their broad meanings are as follows:

悪 aku: evil, false, wrong, bad, vice.

滅 mee: destroy, ruin, overthrow.

弱者 jakusha: the weak, weak/vulnerable/disadvantaged person(s); this is a compound word formed from its two kanji, which respectively mean weak/frail and person/someone.

救 suku: salvation, save, help, rescue.

2: By which I mean that they indicate things like conjugation of verbs or subject/object relationships.

Viz’s translations across the different invocations of this term are inconsistent.  Out of the five instances I’ll be examining, they universally use “evil” and “protect” for 悪 aku and 救 suku, but use three different terms for 弱者 jakusha and a whopping four different terms for 滅 mee.  Some of these choices work better than others.  For example, “evil” is perfectly fine, and while “the vulnerable” is a bit more descriptive and specific, “the weak” is poetic and evocative in a way that works for the simple (dare I say simplistic) nature of the mantra.

On the other hand, I don’t love “protect” used for 救 suku.  Protect, to me, implies something more constant, more present – a guard, a vigil, a preventative measure always in place to help counter danger.  The usual Japanese word that’s translated as “protect” is mamoru (either 護 or 守, both read the same way and have similar meanings of guarding or protecting).  Someone who’s protecting the weak should ideally prevent them from ever being in danger to begin with!  Conversely, saving or rescuing someone implies that the person is actively indanger and the helper is jumping in to intervene rather than having been there from the start.  There’s nuance and overlap in the terms, to be sure, but the emotional potency of “saving” is made stronger by the immediacy of the threat of harm.  “Salvation” gets at the intensity of the feelings involved, the urgent need and heightened terror in the face of a danger that’s tangible and present rather than hypothetical or distant; the spiritual dimension of “salvation” likewise better suggests the profound feelings of relief and gratitude that follow from being saved.  Given the heightened meaning Kunishige and all the rest are assigning these words, then, I would much rather see “save” used than “protect.”

Finally, there’s 滅 mee.  For Kunishige’s initial invocation, Viz uses “vanquish,” and while that’s a good word for sacred missions, it is also a little noble-sounding as a translation for a word with the meanings I listed above!  A later translation of “eradicate” is definitely more in the tonal zone, but also quite charged to the English ear – which, I assume, is why that word choice is only assigned to villains.  In keeping with the broad absolutism of the rest of the language, then, I’d probably go with “destroy.”

So: “To destroy evil and save the weak.”  That’s the purpose of katana as Kunishige imparts it to his son.  Keep the phrase firmly in mind for the rest of this piece.

There’s one other crucially important thing that Kunishige impresses on Chihiro, however, this time found in Chapter 2.  When he first shows Chihiro the enchanted blades (or at least their containers), Chihiro’s response is to observe that these are the kinds of swords he should also strive to make – and why shouldn’t he think so, when he’s had people like Shiba telling him his whole life that the swords his father made saved Japan back during the war, and his father is a hero for making them?

Kunishige, though, has always been uncharacteristically morose on the topic of his alleged heroism, and while he doesn’t look as harrowed in this scene as he does in some others, he’s still markedly more serious than his goofy norm as he tells Chihiro firmly, “These aren’t necessarily the right answer.  You can’t just strive to make strong enchanted blades.  You’re gonna have to look at the world through your own eyes and think carefully about what kind of katana it needs, and why.”

This admonition will prove to be the other key to Chihiro’s development.  Principles and accountability, yes, but also deliberation: these are the virtues Kunishige imparts alongside the mantra, frontloaded in the story to set the themes and narrative demands going forward.

Shortly after all this, of course, Kunishige gets summarily assassinated, the enchanted blades stolen, and the story jumps to three years later.     

Folding and Hammering in the Versus Sojo Arc -Madoka Norisaku and Sojo Genichi-

Madoka, aka Daruma, is the biggest departure this piece will make from analyzing major antagonists.  Clearly, he isn’t one in any sense of the word!  Nonetheless, he and the other low-rung yakuza and yakuza-employed sorcerers are an important establishment of Chihiro's status quo as of when the story exits its establishment phase and really gets underway.  Through Madoka, readers get an opportunity to see how much of his father’s teachings Chihiro internalized, how much he retained after a three-year whirl of pursuing bloody revenge.

In that sense, Madoka offers Chihiro no moral challenges or reasons to rethink his path whatsoever.  While Madoka does have a human dimension,[3] it’s shown solely to the readers via Shiba’s interrogation and subsequent act of mercy towards him.  To Chihiro, he’s simply a maniac screaming about how a little girl should watch and see what gruesome fates befall anyone she tries to ask for help, aggravating an obvious emotional wound about that girl’s dead mother, on top of killing a completely innocent restaurant worker and making light of enchanted blades.  The little girl pleads to be saved from him; Chihiro immediately complies.  Further, given how ruthlessly Chihiro dealt with the yakuza in the first chapter, Madoka surviving this fight is entirely down to him having information Chihiro wants.  Our protagonist is established, then, as someone who’s very ready to go all-in on destroying evil, but not so zealous about it that he can’t leave a survivor to question, nor so dogmatic that he demands those evil people be slain in cold blood after being neutralized and giving him the answers he seeks.[4]

3: And a gratifying one to see; Kagurabachi is often pretty quick to use rando sorcerers-for-hire as mobs with no internal life or survival instinct, there simply to die in droves as Chihiro or his allies stylishly slaughter them en masse.  I really have no idea how people can make jokes about the Hishaku being perpetually broke when they can somehow always afford so many goons willing to fight to the death for them!  There’ve been a few questions of brainwashing or magic as an explanation for this, and given the Hishaku’s tactics during the Kamunabi invasion, blackmail is also possible, but I’m hoping it’s something the story will deign to clarify eventually.

4: This is not conclusively demonstrated in these early conflicts, with the first yakuza boss dying as a result of an implanted Hishaku seed and Madoka at Sojo’s instigation, but it tracks with Chihiro’s later behavior, and with the fact that Shiba – despite being a considerably more jaded and experienced adult, and Chihiro’s presumed mentor in learning the ropes of the violent world in which he now finds himself – is similarly merciful.

 “Seeking answers” is part of the framework of a lot of this initial mini-arc.  Not just Madoka, but Char also nominally has information Chihiro wants: a lead on one of the stolen enchanted blades and thus, presumably, a lead on the people who stole them.  Indeed, Chihiro engages in a degree of pretense about protecting Char solely for this reason, that helping her advances his own goals, not that he’s protecting her because it’s what his beliefs tell him is right.  However, it’s fairly clear from the get-go that the pretense is just that, and he would have helped anyone he found in that situation regardless of how involved he was or wasn’t initially.  As we see in the subsequent confrontation with the mud doll and trauma sorcerers,[5] Chihiro continues to help Char even after Shiba’s gotten information from Madoka that would render any knowledge Char still has largely redundant – if Chihiro were really so heartless that he was only helping her to advance his own ends, he could easily have given her up then and there.  But that’s not the kind of protagonist you’re going to find much of in Shonen Jump!

5: The latter another helpfully illustrative antagonist, who gives Chihiro the opportunity to respond to a grueling psychic PTSD bomb with the words, “You just made [my] reason clearer.”  No faltering, no adapting, just doubling down on what he came into the fight already believing.

All the same, let’s not disregard the pretense entirely.  It does signal some of Chihiro’s other motivations, which will be articulated at greater length during the material with Sojo and the Rakuzaichi arc: his feelings about his father’s murder and the possible consequences of the blades going unreclaimed.  More on that later, then, but for now we’re left with this: Chihiro deals with Char, Madoka and the rest in exactly the way his father’s mantra dictates: he destroys (the threat of) evil and saves the weak, emerging through a degree of mild introductory peril triumphant in upholding that ethic.

Love the cornerpiece darumas.  Put two more on the bottom and you’d have a nice little wildly out of place Utena reference!

Where Madoka presents no upsets to Chihiro’s worldview at all, Sojo is quite the opposite.  He impacts Chihiro in ways that are felt and remembered well into the arcs to come!  He doesn’t, however, do this by being sympathetic by any means – indeed, he’s a much worse person than Madoka!  Rather, he has that all-important shonen character quality, conviction.  Worse luck for Chihiro, the sword Sojo carries responds in kind.

(Briefly on the topic of that sword, by far the most aggravating of the Viz translation’s inconsistencies for Kagurabachi is the howling inconsistency about translating or simply romanizing the enchanted blades’ names and abilities.  Given that literally every other blade in the English translation has its name left in Japanese, I’m inclined to do the same with Cloud Gouger.  Accordingly, I’ll be referring to it as Kuregumo.)

Sojo is a weapons dealer and would-be manufacturer, a man who’s not just callously but casually violent, not merely to people who’ve failed or betrayed him in some way, but just for fun, just for a warm-up, just for practice.[6]  He shows up in front of Chihiro with Kuregumo drawn, blood already on the blade, and shrugs off Chihiro’s question – whether the blood is that of an evildoer – as irrelevant.[7]

6: You can understand why he’d kill Madoka, and even Madoka’s family – that’s pretty par for the course for a crime lord in a story like this one!  But the trauma sorcerer’s younger brother is the one that really paints the picture of Sojo’s lackadaisical attitude towards bloodshed.

7: It probably is, in fact, given that the younger brother was, if not already engaged in the same sort of business as the trauma sorcerer, then certainly watching eagerly from the periphery and cheering his older brother on!  But of course that’s immaterial in Sojo’s eyes.

After expounding on his love for Rokuhira Kunishige, Sojo returns Chihiro’s question with some of his own, and from basically the same motivations: why are you wielding that blade; I want to know if you’re worthy of it.  Chihiro hits him with the mantra, clearly a young man who believes the words he’s saying are obviously logical, the only sensible conclusion anyone could possibly come to.  It’s therefore a shock to him when Sojo’s demeanor abruptly and sharply shifts: he goes from a man who came out to attack and is honestly having such a good time right now to a man who’s just gotten the same gacha pull for the eighteenth time in a row.  He avows that he’s the only one who understands Rokuhira, that to call him a hero is an insult, and that the only reason to make weapons is so that they can be used to kill – the enchanted blades are “the ultimate weapons of slaughter.”

Continued talk in this vein finally provokes Chihiro – who earlier coldly refused to tell Sojo how he came to have a new enchanted blade no one’s ever heard of – into snapping, “Don’t you dare talk about my father!”  The integrity of Kunishige and his legacy is already prominent in Chihiro’s mind – we saw him thinking of his father earlier, parallel to Shiba and Azami having a conversation about how precarious that legacy might prove to be if Japan starts seeing battles between enchanted blades happening in highly populated areas – and in that way, Chihiro and Sojo both reflexively reject the other’s perspective on the man they both revere.

Interestingly, though, Sojo, for as terrible as he is, proves to be the more open-minded of the two!

Their initial fight is broken up by Chihiro being pushed into making a choice between continuing the fight with Sojo or jumping to save an apparently recaptured Char – quite literally choosing which half of the mantra he prioritizes, the injunction to destroy evil or the one to save the weak.  Unsurprisingly for a kid with so much baggage bound up in the heroism and nobility of these weapons, he chooses the latter.  Sojo, meanwhile, is left in a contemplative state of mind – Chihiro being the son of Rokuhira Kunishige, after all, would put him in a pretty well-informed position vis a vis understanding the man’s motivations!  That bodes thinking about; it bodes follow-up.  Thus, when Sojo retreats, he does so already thinking about how he wants to talk with Chihiro more, while Chihiro (having been led astray by a decoy and thus failed to successfully enact the part of the mantra he chose) is left stewing in resentment and the other half of the mantra.

Everyone’s discovering new emotional needs today!

The prioritization – which we see again in the hospital, when Chihiro has the choice of either agreeing to focus on rescuing Char or pushing to be included with Hagiwara’s group in their attack on Sojo – is an important tell about Chihiro’s characterization.  It’s not something his father gave him specific guidance on!  The mantra, after all, says that those who wield swords have to do both – destroy evil and save the weak.  It gives no priority to one over the other, nor does it dictate doing one as a means to achieving the other, e.g. “Save the weak by destroying evil.”  Perhaps someone stronger than Chihiro could do both at once, or both equally well; perhaps there would always be circumstances in which any swordsman, no matter how strong, would have to prioritize one aim, and the mantra can’t always be perfectly fulfilled.  Whichever is the case, our main character will often find himself having to choose one or the other, and so it’s important to note which one he picks.

Consider, though, how that whole fight goes for him: when he tries to face Sojo while stubbornly clinging to his preexisting mindset, he spectacularly fails, unable to destroy evil or save the weak!  Clearly, a different approach is required.

When they next meet, it’s after an interval fight for both of them – Sojo against Hagiwara’s unit and Chihiro against Sojo’s goonsquad – in which each discovers a new way to apply one of their swords’ abilities.  Notably, Sojo reached his by doubling down on what he believes in, that the blades are sublime weapons of slaughter – his belief led to increasing his harmonization with Kurogemo and unlocking the ability to “ride the lightning” of its Mei ability.  Chihiro, meanwhile, in developing the Shred variation on Kuro, gets there by remembering his father telling him that he should be more open-minded and flexible when he’s struggling with something, that he shouldn’t be trying to walk precisely in Kunishige’s path, but rather trying to find his own!  (This is something he’s still sometimes backsliding on, but we’ll get there.)

As he and Sojo set to, we start cutting between the actual fight and a really wonderful allegorical conceit – the mochi sequence.  The two sit on tatami mats across from each other at opposite ends of a finely lacquered table in a traditional Japanese dining room.  It’s the first setting of its sort we’ve seen so far – the other kitchens and dining spaces have been much more Western in style – which works to signal how much of himself Sojo is putting into this conversation; he’s the one who’s gotten the more traditional Japanese surroundings, after all, despite not much looking the part at all![8]  He offers Chihiro food and drink, protests when the other declines that he wants to have a heart-to-heart here, and if they just fight to the death without that, it’s too big a waste.  Despite Chihiro’s initial refusal to engage, as Sojo himself begins to eat and talk, the purpose of this visual metaphor emerges: correlating sharing food with communication and compromise.

8: Sojo’s got sleeve and back tattoos like any proper yakuza, sure, but the style is wildly different from the stereotypical yakuza irezumi. In those, you typically see a central animal or folkloric figure framed by decorative elements like flowers, clouds, or waves. They're ornate artworks, scenes in miniature, colorful and highly detailed. Sojo's tattoo, on the other hand, is heavily, darkly mottled, an overarching silhouette containing obscure, only vaguely discernable internal patterns. It took me until the first bonus chapter to realize it was a huge butterfly (one of many hints that Sojo had some kind of formative run-in with the shinuchi when he was younger), because rather than featuring a butterfly as an accented central element surrounded by traditional motifs, the butterfly is the only element, its wing patterns barely visible in the darkness that defines its overall form. His outfit, meanwhile, is not remotely traditionally Japanese, but I trust that's visible even without me rambling on about it!

Sojo acknowledges Chihiro’s belief – he says he accepts it, though it’s nauseating.  The blades can be used to destroy evil and save the weak: Chihiro just proved it by, with virtually no assistance, taking out Sojo’s whole base to rescue Char.  Nonetheless, Sojo still holds his own belief, as well, that the blades can just as well be used as weapons of mass destruction.  He proved that, when Kuregumo harmonized with his own goals and desires, helping him achieve the slaughter of the Kamunabi team sent to take him out.  He has taken his own message from the swords’ existence and abilities, and he isn’t obligated to cede that message to anyone, even Rokuhira’s own son, who claims to speak for him – it’s Death of the Author, but for the ethics of weapons manufacture!  Their battle is, in Sojo’s telling, a battle for who can win the right to claim a more definitive interpretation.

In response to this and the events of the ongoing battle, Chihiro finally picks up his own mochi.  With an expression like he’s chewing cement, he eats every ball of chewy dough off the stick.  It’s an implicit acknowledgement of Sojo’s own perspective that quickly becomes an explicit one; he says it aloud, but we see the reason he bows to it in his flashback to Kunishige telling him solemnly that swords are tools for killing people.  If his own father espoused that, how can he deny Sojo’s belief in it?  The only difference is in the motivation behind the killing.  And so, as he swallows the last bite, he tells a very smug Sojo that he accepts Sojo’s claim that both of them speak for Rokuhira – but he still won’t pay Sojo respect, intending only to cut him down even harder.

And as the fight reaches its final blows, we get a flashback to father and son at the forge, crafting blades, before we see the pain in Chihiro’s eyes as he cleaves Kuregumo in twain. 

It’s gonna look real boss in the anime, yeah.

Chihiro has acknowledged a truth he didn’t previously wish to examine, incorporating that truth into a new and slightly but critically altered worldview: the noble swords that define his father’s legacy contain within them a darker potential, one that can be tapped into by someone who only sees them as tools for slaughter rather than protection.  That, too, is a truth about swords.

Note how Chihiro’s response to that acceptance is still filtered through his respect for his father and his avowed refusal to put Sojo – however valid a point Sojo may have – above his father.  He still holds true to the mantra: destroy evil.  He’ll do that, even if, as he has now seen with his own eyes (which Kunishige told him he had to use!) that that evil is one of the precious blades he originally sought to redeem.  This is not a fundamental shift in Chihiro’s morality – he’s still basing it wholly on what his father taught him!  But it is still a change that his encounter with Sojo has wrought in him, a new openness to the possibility that his father’s legacy can mean different things to different people.

And boy oh boy, is he going to need to remember that!     

Folding and Hammering in the Rakuzaichi Arc -Sazanami Kyora and Kagari Hiyuki-

The Rakuzaichi arc introduces a somewhat different structure for its major antagonistic figures, at least for the purposes of this piece.  Sazanami Kyora is the obvious arc villain, but the one Chihiro actually winds up adapting to is Hiyuki.  Rather than being sequentially placed like Madoka and Sojo, however, the two trade off, with Chihiro encountering both of them repeatedly before reaching an ultimate outcome.  The arc’s climax is also entwined with the ominous influence of the shinuchi, which we can’t really call an antagonist as of yet, but which still has a major impact on Chihiro’s final decisions in this portion of the story.

One of the first things this arc establishes is Chihiro’s terror that an enchanted blade could be used to take innocent lives.[9]  This particular dimension of concern for his father’s legacy was present in the material with Sojo, but less clearly articulated.  At that time, Chihiro seemed to feel more possessive of Kunishige’s life and works, more concerned with what they meant to him personally – it was Shiba and Azami’s conversation that highlighted the danger to Kunishige’s reputation with the broader public.  But Sojo’s ability to utilize Kuregumo to such dangerous effect haunts Chihiro – a specific visual motif of ocean waves, one that’s repeatedly associated with this fear and that we’ll see several times in this arc, makes its first appearance in Chihiro’s elevator conversation with Hakuri.  He has an idea, now, of what it really means for evil men to take hold of the blades.

9: It is interesting that Chihiro doesn’t apparently consider the Kamunabi squad Sojo massacred to be “innocent.”  The Japanese term is romanized as “tsumi no nai hito,” literally “people without sin” or “the sinless.”  While Hagiwara’s team didn’t deserve to get cut down by Sojo, and judging by the beach motif Chihiro does find their deaths harrowing, it’s perhaps also hard to say that combat-trained government employees who knew exactly what they were getting into are “innocent,” especially if any of them are old enough to, like Azami, also have fought in the war!  One suspects, in any case, that Chihiro is more fearful of uninvolved innocents being slain than people who are already in the muck like him.

The imagery refers back to the slaughter of Hagiwara’s team – we saw Kazane kneeling on this same beach in the aftermath of that massacre.

This points to an interesting dimension of Chihiro as a character and a conflict that is still evolving in the story as of this writing: while Chihiro’s a good person who wants to help others, he is also profoundly driven by his desire to preserve his father’s image as a hero, both in his own mind and to the public eye.  He frequently cites the mantra as something he’s responsible to as a sword wielder, but his personal motivations are less about being a force for good in the world than they are protecting his father’s legacy.  The two goals coincide in the early portions of the story, but begin to diverge as Chihiro learns more and more about the war and the world outside of his fishbowl.  That will become a particular issue in the third arc, but the Rakuzaichi arc is laying plenty of groundwork!

So, as I said, Kyora is obviously the principal antagonist for the arc, but he doesn’t fire Chihiro’s personal motivations in anything like the same way Sojo did.  Chihiro’s response to him is far more measured, more akin to his response to Madoka; the places where he does get more wound up are not about any threat Kyora poses to Kunishige, but rather about Kyora’s callousness as a father.

Consider:

Chihiro faces a fanatically devoted son in Tenri, unquestioning and unswerving in his loyalty to his father.  The resonance is obvious for Chihiro, leaving him extra vulnerable to the back-to-back cruelties of Kyora dropping a death sentence on Tenri via that datenseki shard and the reveal that the emergency door Tenri and the others were staking their lives on protecting has already been destroyed, serving as nothing more than a bit of bait to expose Rokuhira and company’s hand that it might be better countered.[10]

10: The implication here is that the door was real, and would have been a valid way to access the storehouse, but that it would normally have been more hidden in Kyora’s subspace.  He chose to expose it, anticipating the conclusions his enemies would draw, not to fake it entirely.  Just like a swordsman, he left an intentional opening in order to draw the enemy into overreaching.

Hakuri, meanwhile, alternates between a person for Chihiro to save, a person who saved Chihiro, and a personal role model throughout the arc.  Across those various roles, he intersects with the mantra in all sorts of ways!

For example, when he takes Hiyuki’s blow in her and Chihiro’s first encounter, his defiant proclamation that Chihiro saved him uses the same kanji the mantra does; so too does Tafuku calling Hakuri weak when explaining to Hiyuki why the subspace fell apart early.  When they finally make it to Kyora, Chihiro reflects that Hakuri was better able to live up to Chihiro’s own ethic of destroying evil than he himself has been able to do during this whole misadventure – he killed his own brother, while Chihiro faltered, both against Soya (hesitant to kill Hakuri’s kin, no matter how evil he might be – and I wonder if hesitation to be a kinslayer might prove relevant down the line!) and against Tenri (aching with empathy towards Tenri’s filial piety[11]).

11: I’m not going to get into a whole diversion about Chihiro, Hakuri’s conception of him as a cool samurai, and the Bushido code(s) of samurai ethics, but just know that it’s definitely an essay someone could write.

Even Soya, awful as he is, is not entirely exempt from Chihiro’s pity - when Chihiro remarks on Kyora getting emotional about the Rakuzaichi and what he thinks Kyora should be getting emotional about instead, he specifies sonS’ deaths, plural, which you have to go a little out of your way to do in Japanese!  He uses “musuko-tachi”when, from my understanding, the more common thing to do would be to just say “musuko” and leave it ambiguous whether he meant one or both sons.

None of this, however, forces Chihiro to doubt his goals or his truth.  Kyora’s got nothing that could rattle him more than an earlier unexpected encounter with Yura, not even how close to home Tenri’s death cut.   Kyora’s withholding the shinuchi from him, yes, but he doesn’t threaten it ideologically like Sojo did.  All told, then, if Chihiro were only fighting Kyora this arc, we’d be well on our way to a proper folding, with Chihiro doubling down on everything he entered the arc already believing.

On which note, let’s circle back and talk about Hiyuki.

Hiyuki is a running antagonist/ally through this arc, and her contention, in her introduction and elsewhere, is that the enchanted blades are far too powerful to be controlled by individuals, who are prone to base selfishness; that they should all be under the control of the Kamunabi for the betterment of the nation.  This sets her directly at odds with Chihiro, who believes that the swords belong to/with his family (i.e. just him), as they were crafted by his father and maintained by him likewise after the war.

Luckily for Chihiro, the Kamunabi is a lot grubbier and more practical than Hiyuki much cares for – when she returns to HQ after their first encounter, she’s greeted by a face-full of bureaucratic moral compromise that gets right up her nose.  It’s doubtlessly annoying to talk about how super-weapons should be in the hands of the state for the national welfare only to report back and find your bosses gearing up to perpetuate a monstrously harmful system with gobs and gobs of government dosh!

Chihiro has got another round with her in mind when he makes the deal to trade Enten for Hakuri.  His eternal contract with the blade makes his life valuable to the Kamunabi in that he is self-evidently a less dangerous person to have control over Enten than literally anyone who might buy it at the annual underworld human trafficking festival, and if the person trying to buy it is a government agent, they’ll have to spend less government money on it if its contract is still intact than if it’s available to be pacted to a new wielder.  Also, he got a decent enough bead on Hiyuki in their first fight to wager that she won’t like the “government tacitly endorses major human trafficking event” plan.

This maneuvering, in combination with an appeal to her better nature (a guilt trip, really, about financially backing human trafficking), makes a temporary ally out of Hiyuki, in that it gets her to resolve to cut lose on everything aggravating her about the situation but save Chihiro for last.  For Chihiro, this is mainly a matter of staggering out his fights so that he doesn’t have to face the Kamunabi’s best combatant and the might of one of Japan’s oldest sorcerous lineages at the same time.

But does this mean Hiyuki actually changes his mind, forces him to adapt?  Well, at this point, no, not really.  While the specter of Sojo was definitely on his mind when Hiyuki was first rebuking him about the dangers of independent agents wielding the blades, that in and of itself wasn’t enough to change his mind, and certainly the Kamunabi deciding to throw money at the problem rather than actually confront it didn’t improve his opinion!  Absent any other factors, Chihiro would just have killed Kyora and then had to turn around and fight Hiyuki; whatever the result, his mind wouldn’t have been changed.

Pictured: The other factor.

The shinuchi, however, overturns everyone’s composure, and it does it in impeccably terrifying style!  Witnessing just a fraction of its power unsettles Chihiro deeply, giving him fresh context for his father’s reluctance to talk about the blade and likewise his insistence that it never be used by anyone again.  It becomes the tipping point of Chihiro’s development in this arc, as we can see in how it informs his final responses to Kyora and Hiyuki respectively.

Kyora, like Sojo, concedes to Chihiro in his last moments, but the difference in Chihiro’s response to them is telling for the purposes of this piece: Chihiro demurred Sojo’s concession, saying that Sojo wasn’t wrong about his beliefs – the blades did choose both of them, not Chihiro alone – an admission of his changed perspective.  When Kyora concedes that Chihiro was right, Chihiro makes no attempt at all to contradict him!  Thus we can see that Chihiro does not change his perspective to align more closely with Kyora’s; he simply “folds” – wins through by doubling-down on his beliefs and using them to motivate himself through the rigors of the battle.

Conversely, however, he does change his perspective to align more closely with Hiyuki’s.  Not entirely, to be sure, but he sees that they have similar enough ideals that he opens up to her about the way his mind has been changed by what he saw of the shinuchi’s power, his belief that it does need to be sealed again rather than just taken back to his basement[12] as-is.  That means it has to go to the Kamunabi, but he fears that this is exactly what the Hishaku wants, and while he’s unwilling to risk the blades by keeping them solely under his own power, he’s also unwilling to cede oversight of them completely.  And so he does what he would never have considered prior to this arc: asks to join the Kamunabi.  Thus has the combination of Hiyuki’s strength of character with the realization of just how dangerously ignorant he is about the shinuchi served as the hammering accompanying Kyora’s folding, and once again, Chihiro adapts.

12: Or wherever he was planning to take any blades he managed to get back, given that Hatshaku’s pine tree sorcery did a real number on Chez Rokuhira.  It’s unknown to what extent Chihiro and Shiba tried to repair the buildings and barrier in expectation of Chihiro returning one day, let everything stand as-is for the time being, or finished the job of razing it to conceal evidence of who lived there once it was decided that Chihiro would be accompanying Shiba long-term.

Folding and Hammering in the Sword Bearer Assassination Arc (Part 1) -Hiruhiko and Samura Seiichi-

The Sword Bearer Assassination arc is the series’ longest thus far, so I’ll be covering it in two parts, for reasons that should readily become apparent.  To wit, the arc can be divided pretty neatly into three sub-arcs – we might call them the (titular) Sword Bearer Assassination sub-arc, the Kyoto Bloodshed Hotel sub-arc, and the Kamunabi HQ Invasion sub-arc – all three of which feature a climactic battle encounter with a quickly sequential pair of antagonists.  This part covers the first two sub-arcs because they feature the same pair of antagonists, while I’ll use the second part to cover the final sub-arc and its different antagonist duo.

That established, where Madoka and Sojo were sequential but firmly separated, and Kyora and Hiyuki intertwined, here we have Hiruhiko and Samura, who are paired together in rapid succession for the two sub-arc climaxes.  I say “paired” here not because Hiruhiko and Samura are fighting together(they certainly aren't!) but because both times Chihiro faces the former, the battle flows without pause into facing the latter, with the overall outcome following the fold-forge rotation.

Here, that rotation reverses!  It shows us the consequences of Chihiro failing to adapt quickly enough to pull out a victory in a hammering phase.  Against Sojo, Chihiro is shielded from the consequences of his initial rigidity by Sojo choosing to retreat in the face of the Kamunabi’s arrival rather than press his advantage.  Chihiro comes to their second encounter still resistant to change, but ultimately capable of making it during the battle and thereby winning the day.  His confrontation with Hiyuki follows a similar pattern: an inconclusive initial encounter followed by one that forces Chihiro to adapt on the fly, mid-battle.  Samura, conversely, affords no such opportunities for withdrawal, nor does Chihiro reach a new equilibrium mid-fight, and so Chihiro simply loses, quite conclusively, and is left with a bunch of unresolved nastiness courtesy of Hiruhiko, to boot.  Accordingly, he has to do all his equilibration afterward, and it’s thanks to the changes he forges in himself as a result of the hammering he takes in the first sub-arc climax that he’s in a place where he can fold in the second.

That all claimed here in the intro, let’s take a closer look at how it plays out in the reading.

Hiruhiko and Samura, Round One – The Hammering

So, it’s important to note for the purposes of this first sub-arc’s outcome in particular that, while Hiruhiko and Samura don’t fight together, flashbacks to Chihiro’s early encounters with Samura are scattered liberally throughout the first encounter with Hiruhiko.  Samura’s example underlines a huge part of Chihiro’s response to Hiruhiko’s “You and I are the same because we both kill people!” rhetoric.  See, Chihiro has folded the bearers into his grievance with the Hishaku to a degree – he wants to protect them because to him they’re a part of his father’s legacy, and because he failed to protect his father before.  He was observant enough even back when he first met Samura to have noted that everyone who was connected to the war says everyone else is the hero but doesn’t want to claim heroism for themselves.  He understood, too, that, yeah, it probably doesn’t feel great to be praised for being awesome at killing people.

All the same, he still did admire them, all those war heroes he grew up around, so he justified his hero worship as being about respect rather than admiration, respect for the burdens Samura and the rest chose to bear so that others wouldn’t have to.

In the present day, then, when Hiruhiko posits that he and Chihiro are the same because they’re both 18 with bloodstained hands, Chihiro takes it very poorly.  The very idea that the killing he’s done makes him the same as one of the group that killed his father triggers him with the memory of that death; he’s not thinking rationally in his response to that moment, just lashing out angrily, very much the same way he lashed out at Sojo.

At the theatre, Hiruhiko’s aim is to engineer a scenario where Chihiro has no choice but to hurt someone – not willfully or maliciously, but to accept that it’s unavoidable if he doesn’t want to get slowly bled to death by Hiruhiko’s cranes.  He does this by controlling the battlefield to make himself impossible to pinpoint while pinning down all three of Chihiro’s movement, attack, anddefense by surrounding him with innocents who’ll get hurt if he tries to do any of those things too freely.  And the innocents are terrified of him the whole time, looking at him like a monster, which is exactly what Hiruhiko wants him to be.[13]

13: This is because Hiruhiko wants a friend and doesn’t have a clear idea how to go about making friends, so is trying a variant of the good old “fight to understand each other” trope: attempt murder to understand each other.

Note the intrusive heartbeat sound effect, a sure indicator of a stab of sudden emotion.

This does have some effect on Chihiro!  He’s gotten his initial upset back under control, but as in the picture above, you can see the flares of vulnerability and pain when people look at him like a monster.  It eats at him, now, and continuing into the next sub-arc.  He calms himself down in the moment by rationalizing that he’s a “monster” only in the same sense that Samura claimed to be: someone who kills in order to protect innocents from having to partake in, or be victimized by, that violence.  But Samura is still one of Chihiro’s heroes, someone he thinks of as a good person – not really a monster-monster, just someone willing to be taken as one for the sake of protecting others.

In so many words, this is a mantra invocation, and the thought process, while not exactly wrong, is still setting Chihiro up to fall into two really hideous logical traps.  The especially nasty one is towards the end of the arc, but the other is nigh-unto immediate, because Hiruhiko has one last kick in the groin for the road!

My favorite Chihiro character beat: so overwhelmed that he goes incoherent and has trouble processing plot-relevant dialogue.

He asks Chihiro about “school,” implying very strongly that it’s a nice cozy place for learning nice cozy state propaganda about the heroes of the war.  Chihiro picks up on what Hiruhiko’s laying down because he saw the shinuchi in action at the Rakuzaichi, where it planted its insidious seeds in him: grave doubts that such a blade could ever have been made with “saving the weak” in mind.  Further, from the feeling of someone “else” inside Kyora, the fear that maybe the problem isn’t the sword at all, but rather the sword master, i.e. one of those sword bearers he’s determined to protect because they’re all heroes and part of his father’s legacy.

He asks Hiruhiko directly if that’s what he’s implying – that the sword master is not a hero who needs to be protected – but his brain is too fried from the events of the day[14] to catch Hiruhiko’s reply of, “That’s what Samura thinks, anyway.  That’s why he made a pact with Yura three years ago.”  He tries to double down, telling himself that it doesn’t matter what the truth is about the sword master because the status quo is still safer than what he fears could come of the Hishaku getting access to a useable shinuchi.  So Hiruhiko has to poke him again about Samura being allied with Team Kill All The Sword Bearers, which is the note the fight ends on, with Hiruhiko drawing the apparently suddenly useable Kumeyuri just as Hakuri teleports Chihiro out of that mess and right into the next one.

14: Remember that this is still the literal day Chihiro regained consciousness after passing out at the Rakuzaichi.  As he says, it really has been nonstop!

Chihiro's a little too late to catch Samura invoking the mantra word for word, but the audience is not, so let’s double back and talk about Samura.  The arc’s been building him up, too, crosscutting as it has been between Chihiro’s fight with Hiruhiko and the Hishaku-planned assaults on Senkutsuji Temple! 

See, Samura knows a very key thing that Chihiro (and the audience too, at this point) has been kept in the dark about[15] – Akemura Soga’s hideous act of genocide against an enemy who had already surrendered.  His whole thing, then, is that he was willing to barely tolerate the Kamunabi burying the truth and praising the sword bearers as heroes if and only if it meant a lasting peace.[16]  He absolutely will not, however, tolerate innocent children dying to preserve the lives of old war criminals.  The Hishaku are not going to give up, which means children who had nothing to do with the war are going to continue to die saving the worthless hides of people like Samura himself and the sword master.  Well, not if this black blade has anything to say about it!

15: Most recently by one Uruha Yoji disapprovingly noting that some of the Kamunabi turned on Rokuhira Kunishige and his swords after the war, glazing entirely over the elephant in the Kamunabi basement in favor of acting like this betrayal of poor innocent Rokuhira came wholly out of nowhere.

16: Exactly why Akemura was willing to be arrested for said act of genocide too, of course – and isn’t it interesting that Yura is the one to convince both of them that lasting peace was never in the cards?

And so we see that Samura’s dedication to Rokuhira Kunishige is such that once he has Tobimune in his hands, he’s obligated to resume saving the weak and destroying evil.  Unfortunately for Team Don’t Let Any Sword Bearers Die, Samura’s opinion is that the sword bearers (or at least their public images) are a bigger evil and a bigger threat than even the Hishaku.  That means they have to be dealt with, even if it takes colluding with the Hishaku to do it!

English translation notwithstanding, Samura’s wording continues to echo the mantra of “aku o messhi,” destroy evil.

A very key difference between Chihiro and Samura emerges here: where Chihiro tells himself he is a “monster,” yes, but one fighting for good and therefore still better than the Hishaku, Samura tells himself he’s a monster andis therefore worse.  Chihiro claims the label to reinforce his self-esteem; Samura claims it to reinforce his self-loathing.  No wonder, then, what happens next!

Samura’s betrayal on top of everything else that day sends Chihiro into full-tilt meltdown.  He can barely string words together, he’s got crazy eyes, he’s clearly not going to listen to a single thing Samura has to say because all he’s seeing is one of his heroes – one he was clinging to the image of not five minutes prior to deny that his killings are anything like Hiruhiko’s! – has allied with the murderers of his father.  Samura, who has probably seen this kind of full-throttle hysteria before, back in the war, clearly recognizes that he’s going to get nowhere trying to explain himself to this kid, surmises that this is all about revenge for him, and gives him exactly one chance to lay down Enten.

That goes about the way you would guess, and Samura only doesn’t vanish into the sunset with two enchanted blades because Shiba finally makes his designated appearance for the arc.  Chihiro, then, wakes up in the hospital with his contract to Enten severed and a broken worldview he doesn’t know how to make any sense of.

If this was a hammering, it hammered him nearly in half.

In this house, we love protagonists who lose on a regular basis.

And so he does what he did against Sojo in their second fight: reminds himself of his father’s words.  Not the mantra, because it couldn’t help him understand Sojo then nor Samura now, but rather the words about seeing and understanding the world with his own eyes.  He knows he has to adapt to some horrible truth, something so awful that everyone has hidden it from him for his entire life.

In order to do that, though, he first has to convince someone to spill.  Luckily for him, Shiba is a man who doesn’t know how to say no to him.  What, then, does Shiba tell him?

Well, it must be said that the following sub-arc is a little unfair in how it doles information out to the reader.  There are still some things Chihiro is struggling with as the next sub-arc gets underway, but the worst of his uncertainty is pretty much resolved right there in the hospital room!  Shiba tells Chihiro both the truth about the Malediction and his theory as to what Kunishige’s intention was in forging Enten, so by the time Chihiro meets Samura again, he’s already finished the hammering Samura began!  The reader, however, isn’t let in on this right away, with the specifics of  what Shiba told Chihiro and Chihiro’s response to it being spread out across several flashbacks more to underline drama of any given event in the narrative than to let the audience have a clear view of where Chihiro’s head is at from the outset.

As I said, though, even though Chihiro integrates the truths behind Samura’s betrayal quite quickly, he’s still not completely calm and collected for the length of this sub-arc.  He may have already acclimated to Samura’s hammering, but what he has not resolved is all the lesser psychological prodding from Hiruhiko about normalcy and monsterhood.  Adjusting to that is the stuff of his interactions with the Masumi and Iori.

Hiruhiko and Samura, Round Two – The Folding

Chihiro spends the first portion of this sub-arc tangling with Kuguri, but not in a deeply involved way.  What the aborted fight with Kuguri displays is Chihiro’s need to improve his swordsmanship rather than  a need to change his values or mindset towards his opponents.  Otherwise, it mostly just provides, in its opening scene at the school, an opportunity to show that Chihiro was not as untouched by Hiruhiko’s prodding about school and normalcy as he made himself out to be.  You can see in the class scene how distracted and unsettled he is by the whispers about him being the murderer from the theatre!

Kuguri can see it too, and Kuguri does not like it.

Notably, the classroom scene also shows just how unsettled he is because he gets very close to a significant shift in his usual prioritization of the two parts of the mantra!  His grudge against the Hishaku means he’s itching to chase after Kuguri, ready to abandon a plan that’s built with the protection of an ordinary, innocent girl as its highest priority.[17]  I imagine that his desire for revenge and unbalanced emotions grate somewhat against the Masumi trio’s trained practicality and composure!

17: In fairness, though, even in wanting to bail on the plan and pursue Kuguri, Chihiro knows he’d not be leaving Iori totally vulnerable, as she’s still accompanied by the Masumi, and taking out her attacker would at least temporarily save her as well – we can imagine he might do something different if he was flying solo while trying to protect her!

Notably, we saw him wrestling with this same conflict when presented with the choice between backing up Hagiwara’s team taking on Sojo or focusing on Char, and likewise when Yura tried to goad him into wasting time and Kuregumo’s firepower at the Rakuzaichi when Hakuri was getting his ass kicked on the other side of the pine tree barrier.  In both of those instances, though, Chihiro managed to get himself back under control; here, he outright declares that he’s abandoning the plan to go after Kuguri instead!

It takes an outside voice, Moku, to calm him down and get him back on task.  To both their credit, this is accomplished without a great deal of fuss.  We see via flashback that Ro has stressed that this is a team mission and Chihiro has others to rely on, people he can share his burden with.  This goes some way to addressing Hiruhiko’s prodding about normalcy, in that, sure, Chihiro doesn’t have any kind of normal life, but he’s not alone in that, and he doesn’t have to be!  Not once he can make himself believe it, anyway, and the plan going off without a hitch surely does ease his mind somewhat in that regard.

As the group settles in at the hotel, we see that Iori’s situation cuts Chihiro deeply.   He’s got a particular resonance with her feelings for her father and her willingness to risk danger to regain that relationship.  He thinks about the normal life he could have had if he hadn’t lived with his father – the life Hiruhiko prodded him about, which he saw in passing at Iori’s school – and while he does understand the draw of it, he still thinks he wouldn’t trade his time with his father for anything, no matter what he’s lost because of it.  He gets a bit emotive about it, even!  There’s an understated but clear vehemence to his assertion that Iori should be told everything and then allowed to choose for herself whether she’s better off forgetting it all.

He will later admit that he had the idea that living with the truth was better, but that assuming Iori would make the same choice as him was arrogant – he was comparing his fishbowl life with his father to her peaceful and fun school life, but he’s never experienced the kind of peace that comes from having freedom to leave his own house without an adult chaperone, nor did he ever have friends his own age, so he can’t really evaluate the value of her life fairly.  Even admitting that, however, he does retain his belief that she should have the agency to choose for herself whether she prefers to prioritize her school life or her life as Samura Seiichi’s daughter.

That decision – to focus on protecting Iori[18] and her choice, whatever it might be – as well as the ability to rely on the Masumi brings Chihiro back to a place of stability for his second round against Hiruhiko and Samura.

18: Notably, Hiruhiko calls Iori “Samura’s weakness,” using a word that includes the same 弱 jaku kanji that’s in the mantra.  Chihiro has come back around, then, to saving the weak, per his usual priorities.

He mostly winds up holding Hiruhiko off in this second engagement; he doesn’t question or doubt himself this time, doesn’t have to realign himself to seek victory.  He folds – doubles down on his beliefs and what he already knows, using examples he’s seen in the past (Samura) or which are available to him because of his renewed dedication to the mantra (Iori).  His absolute lack of interest or investment in Hiruhiko this time around is what obliterates the rest of Hiruhiko’s fighting spirit after Samura brings down the hammer on the kid’s heart.

(Incidentally, we also get the ugly detail of Hiruhiko’s first killing in this sequence, that the man he killed at three years old was trying to “assault” him – a word that can have but does not insist upon sexual implications in English used to translate a phrase in Japanese that is archaic and uses metaphorical language but is much less up for interpretation about denoting sexual assault.[19]  Chihiro neither knows nor cares about this history – at no point in either of their confrontations or at any time in between them did he pause to consider why and how Hiruhiko killed someone when he was only three years old!  But it does position Hiruhiko as someone who was weak and in need of salvation from evil but who had to save himself instead.  We will eventually find Yura at that same intersection, with Chihiro’s unconcern reiterated to far more disastrous effect.)

19: A similar English word might be something like “ravish” or particularly “deflower,” and while I understand that those would see wildly out of the story’s usual tone, I do wonder if the Japanese read the same way, and thus the translation should have embraced that jarring note.

Now facing Samura, Chihiro reveals (to him and to the audience) that he’s been told everything about the sword master and the Malediction.[20]  Samura tries to reassure him that the crime was only the sword master’s, not Kunishige’s; that Kunishige remains a national hero.  Chihiro, with noted ambivalence, says that Shiba told him the same thing, to which Samura reflects, “He’s not swallowing it.”  As well he shouldn’t!  One of the most important lessons Kunishige taught Chihiro was, after all, those words in Chapter 2, about the responsibility of a swordsmith for all the lives taken by the swords he makes.  Throwing out that belief would require Chihiro to throw out every other word his father ever said to him.  Whatever else he may think of his father now, Chihiro has to hold Kunishige responsible at least in part for the islanders’ genocide because that’s so clearly what Kunishige imparted to him – indeed, when we see Shiba telling Chihiro about the Malediction at the hospital, Chihiro thinks directly back to his father telling him about a swordsmith’s complicity with death!

20: BIG MAYBE.  There are some pretty glaring gaps and discrepancies to the story of the war as we have it so far, mostly revolving around the established timeline of the island’s appearance, the invasion, how long the war lasted, and how long the sword bearers were active.  At the very least, though, the story seems to be true as far as it’s known by people like Samura (who doesn’t contest any of Yura’s version of it) and Iori (who hears the version Chihiro got from Shiba).

The realization that stopping the blades from taking innocent lives is a lost cause and has been from the very beginning.

Here, then, we have a change that Chihiro has incorporated into himself: Kunishige is someone whose memory Chihiro still treasures, but is no longer his sole guiding light and inviolable hero.  That change is reflected in the circumstances in which Chihiro thinks about his father during this sub-arc: as his father who he loved his life with in spite of that life being so cut off from “normal,” but much less as a moral bellwether for the purposes of wielding swords than we saw in previous arcs.  As we see in that same hospital flashback, Chihiro has a new context, now, for his father’s creation of the enchanted blades, and most especially Enten.

“To face the past and connect to the future.”  That, Shiba supposes, is Enten’s purpose, and it’s with that purpose newly forged into his heart that Chihiro faces Samura.  Then, because this is the folding and not the hammering, this time he doesn’t flinch, doesn’t change, doesn’t alter—just redoubles his determination to save Samura from the despair that keeps him from looking to the future, metaphorically and literally blinded.

That works out for him well here, but it’s got some concerning undercurrents that will resurface in a big way before the day, or indeed even the hour, is out.     

Folding and Hammering in the Sword Bearer Assassination Arc (PART 2) -Yura and Soga Akemura-

As discussed in the lead-in for the last section, our antagonist duo for this final sub-arc of the Sword Bearer Assassination arc follows the same pattern as Hiruhiko and Samura in the first two: a rapid-fire confrontation in which a battle with one antagonist immediately transitions into a battle with a second.  As we also saw with Hiruhiko and Samura, Chihiro is ultimately successful against the first antagonist!  Unfortunately for him, there’s one final way that this sub-arc echoes the structure of its predecessors: Chihiro gets hammered to fuck in the fold-forge rotation pattern and does not have the opportunity to withdraw and adapt.  So while he might “win” against Yura, he does it exactly the same way he did against Hiruhiko the first time – a nominal victory that comes with a boatload of unprocessed baggage immediately preceding a catastrophic loss.  And this time the arc will leave him there because it’s ending and he has got way too much adaptation he’s going to need to do before he’ll be in a place where he can fold himself against this pair of antagonists.

In the opening exchanges before the fight begins, Yura exposes the lie that is the sword master’s madness and says he plans to bring him back.  He talks about bringing order to chaos, says (quite neutrally compared to how he’ll say the same thing in a few chapters!) that Rokuhira Kunishige made the wrong choice, and that the shinuchi is the power the world needs.

Chihiro doesn’t immediately rise to this provocation; he’s in locked-in, not-acknowledging-my-opponent’s-viewpoint mode again, determined to end all this business with the Hishaku with this confrontation.  Chihiro contends that “the whole point” of the enchanted blades is to save lives – clearly words coming from a young man who has not yet grasped the enormity of just how fully dedicated to slaughter the Magatsumi is[21]– and, as he gets more fired up, accuses Yura of lying about wanting to bring order to the world.

21: For real, that is a sword that has zero cloaking, zero teleporting, zero ability to affect the mind or inanimate objects – the closest is gets is Spider, which immobilizes people, the better to hit them with its damaging attacks.  Even the vitality boost to the wielder isn’t a specific effect powered by the wielder’s own magnified spiritual energy (compare to Enten’s Nishiki or Tobimune’s Suzaku) but rather is an “always-on” power fueled by draining the life force of the world and people around it.

Two things here:

First, note how Chihiro’s contention willfully ignores the lessons he’s spent the entire series up to this point learning.  He disregards the lesson he learned from Sojo about how the blades can be attuned to the purpose of slaughter.  He disregards the horror he witnessed at the Rakuzaichi and the fear it struck in him that at least this one blade could not possibly have been intended to save lives.  He disregards learning about the Malediction and how it led the blades’ maker to try to destroy his own creations.  He even disregards Shiba’s testimony from only a few days ago that the initial six enchanted blades were forged to defeat enemies at war.  While he doesn’t have as obvious a meltdown upon facing Yura as he did the first time they met, Chihiro nonetheless backslides here into old, comforting bedtime stories about his father’s noble and heroic legacy.

Second, Chihiro knows good and well that the current world is a dangerous mess. 

Note how he thinks about the Rakuzaichi even though it long, long precedes the war?  Hold that thought for, like, two paragraphs.

Back near the beginning of this arc, he opened Chapter 50 by directly acknowledging that the enchanted blades protected the country during the war, but that Japan is now in “a state of chaos.”  Because of his hatred for the Hishaku, however, he can’t contemplate for even a moment that Yura could have suffered from that chaos in a way that radicalized him.  Yura and the rest of the Hishaku are monsters – the real kind, not the secretly noble kind – and there’s nothing they could have endured that would even explain their actions, much less justify them!

Underscoring all this self-righteousness, Chihiro flashes to the dead protesters from the very first chapter as well as the Rakuzaichi (the same things he thinks about in that opening to Chapter 50!) and makes the frankly absurd claim that the Hishaku were “behind” all of this, that it’s all their fault, that there’s nothing greater good about any of this, and finally yells a demand for Yura to release the enchanted blade.

I call his claim absurd, of course, because of the two examples Chihiro specifically thinks about, only one of them is even semi-credible while the other is sheer bias.  Fair’s fair; the Hishaku weren’t personally stringing up anti-yakuza protesters, but they were – or at least Hatshaku was – backing that yakuza group in some vague way, seemingly lending them some magical support and help with managing local officials in exchange for money.  The Rakuzaichi, though?  That’s been running for over two hundred years, presided over by a rich, established, powerful sorcerous family clan!  The absolute worst the Hishaku, a group in veritable infancy compared to the Sazanami, did regarding the Rakuzaichi is submit an item to it once, but Chihiro himself, even as he makes this accusation of Yura,[22] is working under the auspices of people who fully planned to participate as buyers!

22: And you can tell Chihiro is thinking about the evil of the auction’s existence rather than the dozens if not hundreds of people killed that day because his flashback panel is not to any of the scenes of floral carnage but rather to the auditorium full of would-be buyers waiting calmly for proceedings to start.

That’s all to say, Chihiro is right back to where he was when he first encountered Sojo, shouting accusations rooted in his trauma without even pausing to consider that his opponent might have valid reasoning behind their stance.  Well, the pattern of the story is clear on what’s going to come of acting like that!

So, in amidst all this roused temper, Chihiro’s gambit is revealed: use Suzaku’s flames to sever Yura’s connection to the shinuchi via healing while simultaneously burning him to death.  And, you know, it’s super-effective!  It’s also so grueling that it finally pushes Yura hard enough to reveal himself, and what he reveals is devastating.

Yura’s flashback establishes him as a once-normal young man, one half of a pair of newlyweds[23] who have recently managed to survive the ordeal of living in an area the war occupied.[24] It stands out somewhat that Yura seems to have been a civilian here, not a recently returned soldier, though going into that in too much detail rather begs the question of whether Hokazono’s Japan has been through World War II and subsequently had to restructure the Japanese Imperial Army as the JSDF.  Yura’s young and able-bodied, though, so you’d expect he’d face social pressure to march off to defend his country even if there wasn’t active conscription going on, on top of being targeted as a potential combatant if an enemy army came marching through – or especially occupied – his town.

23: The woman could possibly be his fiancée rather than his wife – conflicting evidence mostly revolves around the ring we see her wearing – but I’m confident that, whatever they are to each other, it’s a recent change, and that’s also because of the ring, specifically the POV shot of her admiring it on her finger.  In any case, for simplicity’s sake in referring to her in this piece, I’m assuming they’re married.

24: The Viz translation seems to conflict a little here with the language in the Japanese, in ways that make it difficult to say exactly what Yura and his wife have just recently gotten through.  Viz uses the terms “war-torn” and “area ravaged by the war” (the radio announcer and Akemura, respectively), while the Japanese term, used by the radio and Akemura alike, translates literally to “formerly occupied territory(/ies).”  While I can’t speak to the actual usage of the Japanese term, at least in English there’s a big difference between e.g. a town that got shelled by repeated air raids and a town that was living under occupation!  That’s especially the case given the differences we might expect to see between people who only saw the islanders on the battlefield versus those who lived for a time under occupied control.

I hope we get more details on this eventually, but the important point here is that the loss of his wife hit Yura all the harder because of the expectation of peace, and the peace was all the more welcome because of the likely quite harrowing situation the two of them had only just managed to survive.

Back in the present, Yura rejects the responsibility Chihiro is trying to pin on him, and – critically – he does it by invoking the mantra.  He doesn’t do it intentionally!  It’s spread out over a few different talk bubbles, for one thing, and for another, unless Kunishige or one of the sword bearers told a journalist the mantra during an interview circa the war or something, Yura’s probably never heard the phrase in his life.  All the same, in his language, in his rage so rooted in betrayal, he uses the same words, expresses the same expectation: Destroy evil and save the weak.

He brings up the weak – Viz translates it as “the defenseless,” but it’s the same 弱者 jakusha as always – in the line, “The Rakuzaichi was at the forefront of numerous illicit organizations that preyed on the defenseless.”  Destroying evil, likewise, is word for word in the question Viz renders as, “Who held the means of eradicating evil…and just disappeared?!”  All Yura wanted or expected was for the sword bearers to do exactly what Kunishige’s mantra said they should do.  His life went off-track precisely because, after the Malediction, Kunishige himself took that option away from the bearers.  Like someone with power hiding from responsibility, he locked the swords in his basement and lived a quiet, happy and small life with his son while, outside of the protective wards he enjoyed, what should have been a newly peaceful era instead spiraled ever further into chaos and disorder.

Yura as an antagonist is a response to so much of what Kagurabachi spent its first hundred chapters having its protagonist and other heroic allies profess.  He drags to the forefront all the failings they haven’t let themselves dwell on or admit.

“The swords should be in the hands of the state to ensure the public good,” said Hiyuki.  “Yes,” agrees Yura, “So why did they let Kunishige seal them?”

“Because our resources are limited, the Kamunabi sometimes has to compromise with evil for the greater good,” reasoned Ichiki.  “Yes,” agrees Yura, “and that’s why the country needs something stronger.”

“People who make katana have a duty to ensure they’re used to destroy evil and save the weak,” said Kunishige.  “People who wield katana have a duty to ensure the same,” said Chihiro, and Samura likewise.  “Yes,” agrees Yura, and demands to know, “So where the fuck were they?”

Chihiro in Chapter 50 merely leaves it implicit that the country’s current disorder is a direct result of the blades’ influence being removed from it – he says the swords protected the country during the war but, when he jumps to talking about the current state of things, he elides an out-loud articulation of the Point B that connects his Points A and C: “Because after my father sealed them, the swords weren’t there to protect people anymore.”  Yura, however, makes this connection explicit and he lays blame.  He may not be eviscerating Rokuhira Kunishige and his devotees for the specific crime of abandoning the mantra they claim to follow, but his existence stands as accusation of that all the same.

Another particularly telling thing we see here – again not something I think Yura is consciously aware of – is that, while Chihiro’s flashback to the Rakuzaichi is a panel of all the evil men participating in it, Yura’smention of it is instead underscored by a panel of Mr. Inazuma, one of those weak people who needed to be saved from the evil running rampant after the war.

It would have been so easy to have Chihiro’s panel feature Mr. Inazuma’s sister, too, paralleling his and Yura's grievances, but instead…

In this way, Yura and Mr. Inazuma – real name Yuu[25] – are narratively paralleled: nobodies who stood up to try and fight back against impossible odds after their worlds broke in half.  Yura is, functionally, a Yuu who lost the important woman in his life to some bastard group of sorcerers and wasn’t able to get her back.  A Yuu whose loved one was simply killed rather than kidnapped, leaving no chance for rescue, no matter how brash or bold.  A Yuu, in short, who Chihiro never came for.

25: The similarity in the names could be more pronounced – they don’t have, for example, any shared radicals in the kanji of their names (and Yura even has two to choose from!) – but there’s no shortage of single kanji given names for boys Hokazono could have chosen that wouldn’t have had a first syllable in common with Yura.  Might be coincidence, especially if Hokazono hadn't settled on Yura's name yet at the time. But it also might not be.

(The person who does finally come for Yura is a darker figure by far than Chihiro was in saving Yuu, but we’ll get there.)

So, that all said, it’s no wonder that Chihiro’s eyes go so wide and shocked as Yura, in a direct visual callback to Chapter 31, and having spat the words of the mantra right into his face, gives the distraught answer to Chihiro’s distraught question from back then:

“Why did you kill my father?!”

“Your father made the world like this!”

This is an even sharper rebuke in the original language, too.  The verb “made” isn’t saying Rokuhira transformed the world or caused it to become the way it is from a preexisting state; it’s “made” in the sense of manufacture or the creation of art.  He didn’t make it “like this”; he simply made it, whole and entire.  Rokuhira, creator of the miraculous blades, who had all the raw material of a Japan newly at peace after the war at his fingertips, used his twin tools of cowardice and negligence to craft a world in which evil flourishes, a world in which the weak can do nothing but suffer.  That’s what Yura means by, “Your father made this world!”[26]

26: Note that Chapter 112’s flashback to this exact panel has a different, more direct translation of the line: “Your father created this world!!”  I’d love to see the translation in 104 get revised to this when it comes out in volume-form in English, but given that the English release of Volume 6 didn’t even manage to correct “Makizumi” to “Masumi” the way the Japanese release did, I’m not getting my hopes up.

(…Okay.  Okay, I think I’m done waxing poetic about my favorite character.)

Throughout the rest of the sequence, Chihiro remains visibly struck by this burst of emotions from the previously unfailingly collected Yura, but he stays the course, watching Yura burn with an air of resigned sorrow that nonetheless isn’t enough to break his clear-eyed determination.

Note the eyeshine; it does a lot to code this expression as more “positive” than it would be otherwise.

One gets the impression that if he and Samura had succeeded in killing Yura here, Chihiro would have had a fair amount to reflect on and regret, if only in a fairly academic “sad that it came to this” way, but he ultimately wouldn’t have had to change to win – another folding on the heels of the one he just pulled out against Hiruhiko and Samura.

Just as with Hiruhiko and Samura, though, the fight with Yura flows organically[27] into the next confrontation.  Because while Chihiro wasn’t convinced by Yura’s words, he wasn’t really the one who needed to be – Yura opened the battle reflecting on how it would “demonstrate his beliefs” to the quietly observing presence of the sword master.

27: Quite horrifyingly so.

And the sword master, unlike Chihiro, is convinced.

As Yura’s body fails him, he thinks, “We were nobody.  But we needed a hero,” and Akemura Soga responds, “I understand.  I’ll be the hero.”[28]  It can’t help but feel like a direct echo of Chihiro agreeing to become the samurai Hakuri needed, as will indeed soon be underscored by Akemura identifying both himself and Chihiro as such samurai.  In the meantime, though, Akemura is exactly what Yura asked for in that moment of collapse: someone who holds to the mantra, someone willing to make great sacrifices to enact even greater deeds, someone who isn’t ethically timorous about killing on a broad scale for the sake of bringing peace and stability to the country at large.

28: He uses the word “eiyuu” (英雄) rather than the newer, more pop culture loanword “hiiro” or the very JRPG fantasy “yuusha” – Yura didn’t need a superhero in a spandex suit or an up-and-coming brave; he needed someone larger than life, someone who’d already done great things, a war hero, a legend.  There’s a lot of nuance there and the one Yura asks for – and that Akemura answers as – is telling.

To Chihiro, however, as indeed to any reasonably well-adjusted person with qualms about mass murder, Akemura is a nightmare, an embodiment of every secret his father kept, every cloud that ever crossed that sunny man’s face, made all the more horrifying by his invocation of the same mantra that guides Chihiro.

Akemura is unbothered by having carried out a genocide – his rhetoric justifying the slaughter of children is cold, utilitarian, and skin-crawlingly identical to real-life justifications for the same action – and likewise unbothered that some people object to it.  Of course they would, he says, it’s not a decision that’s compatible with “mainstream ethics.”  That’s fine; he did it so none of them had to live with doing it – or the consequences of failing to – themselves.

What does bother him is Kunishige seeming to have turned away from his own ethos.  Akemura espouses Kunishige’s mantra just as readily as Kunishige, Chihiro, or Samura ever did, and he can’t square it with Kunishige’s actions.  He expects proactiveness, not reactiveness – the swords were made with a purpose and a failure to pursue that purpose is in itself a betrayal of it.  Nowhere does that sting Akemura harder than in finding out that Kunishige’s repudiation of the mantra is so total that the newest enchanted blade’s purpose, as given by its wielder, is to destroy the other enchanted blades.

This is a rather profound verbal error by Chihiro – he inherited the mantra from Kunishige too, after all!  But he’s been so thrown by the reveal of the Malediction and the changes he had to adopt as a result of his first battle with Samura that he neglects to mention that his father very much still believed that the purpose of a sword is to destroy evil and save the weak!  Instead, he focuses on something wholly unrelated to the mantra his father taught him because he’s come to believe that Enten is basically an expression of his father’s regrets – not a sword to save or protect anyone, but simply a sword meant to destroy other swords.[29]

29: Another misstep: he says Enten is intended to meant to destroy the enchanted blades when the only one he’s ever come into battle intending to destroy is Magatsumi.  Destroying Kuregumo is a calculation of necessity, not desire, and indeed, he openly asks Samura to continue using Tobimune to help him.  Likewise against Hiruhiko, his thoughts are entirely focused on victory through draw-speed, not breaking Kumeyuri.

Mind you, the narrative has mostly backed that up so far, in that there’s been no doubt cast on Shiba’s – and accordingly Chihiro’s – reevaluation of Enten’s purpose, and indeed that reevaluation did help him win over Samura!  The omniscient narration in Chapter 107, too, specifies that defying the Magatsumi is the Enten’s mission and true realm.  It’s also worth remembering that Kunishige imparted the mantra to Chihiro before they even started making Enten,[30] so it’s possible Kunishige’s own ideal for swords became somewhat compromised by him suddenly seeing a path to rectifying his past mistakes.

30: Presumably, anyway.  Chihiro in the second chapter’s flashback doesn’t even seem to know they have swords in the basement before Kunishige tells him so, nor does Kunishige seem to have had any previous conversations with him about the gravity of making and bearing swords.  Shiba will also attest, much later on, that Kunishige “struggled in the darkness with the knowledge of what he’d created” for nearly fifteen years – in other words, right up until the story begins and he has this exact conversation with Chihiro!  So, it’s not 100% clear, and there is art reuse that could point in the opposite direction, but Hokazono reuses art all the time, so until we hear otherwise, my assumption is that it’s seeing Chihiro’s sincerity, conscientiousness and resolve that gives his father the final push he needs to start work on Enten.

Even so, I very much doubt it’s a coincidence that Enten becomes defined solely as a weapon meant to destroy Kunishige’s own flawed legacy all of two chapters before Akemura breaks “that” Enten clean in half!

I love the positioning of Akemura’s off-hand here.  It feels like such a samurai-by-way-of-kabuki thing.

The strength of the swords is often a stand-in for the resolve of their bearers – we saw that in Chihiro’s fight with Sojo, but especially his second fight with Samura, where cracking Tobimune is a direct reflection of cracking Samura’s resolve.  Akemura is completely sure of himself, has thought through all of his decisions and made them with a clear mind – indeed, this is in large part what makes him so terrifying!

Chihiro, though?  Well, immediately after telling Akemura that the purpose of Enten is to destroy the other enchanted blades, he does exactlythe opposite of what his father told him to do.  Instead of looking at the world with his own two eyes, he willfully shuts his eyes to it: he thinks he’s glad he didn’t know the sword master was related to him and that his own emotional responses to Akemura don’t matter.  His own thoughts and beliefs, his own questions, his own experience: all of them are irrelevant, unnecessary, meaningless to the task at hand.

Just like he used Samura as a mental crutch against Hiruhiko’s overtures, here he leans on his father’s desires, his father’s mission.  But just as Samura did, Akemura claims to be a servant of Kunishige’s mantra – he quotes it word-for-word! – and just as Samura had, Akemura has thought about what the mantra demands of him personally.  Even if Kunishige, as Akemura now believes, abandoned the ethos he imparted to the sword bearers, Akemura has made that ethos his own; he follows it now because he believes it to be correct, not as an expression of his faith in his brother-in-law.  Chihiro, by contrast, in this moment of terror and desperation, uses his father’s will as an excuse not to think for himself.

The result when he tries that tactic is always the same: devastating loss.  Where Chihiro survived Sojo by way of Kamunabi intervention and Samura by Samura’s own mercy, Akemura shows him no such lenience.  When he finally gets serious with Chihiro, he snaps Enten with a single clutched-up sword stroke and then stabs Chihiro right through the heart with Magatsumi.  It’s only Chihiro’s earlier convincing of Samura that means the story doesn’t end in this exact moment, and while his failure here doesn’t cause Samura to have second thoughts and revert back to despair and abnegation, the failure still has a cost.  The price of surviving this defeat is exactly what Chihiro just fought so hard to win: Samura’s future.

In the aftermath of this, the most thorough hammering yet, Chihiro returns to his roots: the forge.  In doing so, he returns yet again to his father’s adjuration to see the world through his own eyes.  This time, though, instead of simply remembering his father saying it, Chihiro thinks the words himself, in his own way and in his own voice.[31]  This is, of course, an important part of the story’s overarching pattern in how it handles Chihiro’s development, but there’s one more thing I want to examine before moving into the conclusion: how Chihiro’s ability to self-reflect contrasts with Akemura.

31: In keeping with the weight of the moment and Chihiro’s general levels of seriousness and formality, he switches kanji for “eye.”  Kunishige uses 目 me, which is a casual, everyday word that means eye in both the literal sense (eye, eyeball, comments about someone having nice eyes, etc.) and the metaphorical one (vision, perception, one’s perspective, insight, etc.).  Chihiro, conversely, uses 眼 me, which is used in medical, scientific, or otherwise technical contexts, but can also be used in a formal register to emphasize the metaphorical aspect of perception and insight.  Shiba uses the latter when talking about The Rokuhira Eyes, for example.

In Chapter 112, in between the scene in the bar and Chihiro returning to the forge, there’s a quick cut-away to Akemura.  He’s still feeling the sting of the wound Samura gave him, and reflecting back on Samura’s last words to him: that the war cursed all of them, but that Chihiro lifted the curse on Samura and will do likewise for Akemura himself.  Akemura didn’t like the line when Samura first delivered it and is no more comfortable with it now!  He rejects the idea that he was cursed by the war; instead, he thinks that it taught him a lesson.

He doesn’t articulate exactly what that lesson was, but the important thing for my purposes here is that this is not the first time he’s rejected something Samura has tried to tell him.  When Samura’s flames went black in their confrontation above the Kamunabi’s headquarters, he told Akemura that countless people who didn’t deserve it would die because of Akemura’s judgement – Akemura returned, coldly, that, no, those people not deserving death was Samura’s judgement.

The word the two use is 裁量 sairyou, which doesn’t mean judgement in the sense of a court’s decision, but rather a more personal deliberation; it can also be translated as “discretion.”  Basically, Samura is saying that Akemura’s intent to kill is discretionary; it’s not an inevitability or a requirement the way Akemura is trying to frame it, but rather a decision Akemura is choosing to make based on his opinion and beliefs – and if he wanted to, he could choose otherwise!  Akemura, with rather less eloquence than he managed against his nephew, basically responds, “no u.”

In this, we see what will almost certainly prove to be the key difference between Akemura and Chihiro: Chihiro is capable of self-reflection, of questioning and correcting his beliefs.  We saw this as far back as Sojo, and indeed, it’s a frequent marker of Chihiro’s victories that he’s able to cause his opponents to reassess themselves as well!  We saw that with Sojo, too, as well as Kyora and most especially Samura.

Akemura is not willing to self-reflect, not willing to budge an inch on his beliefs.  That makes him a terror, certainly, and the Magatsumi along with him, but it also marks him as rigid.   When Chihiro behaves the same way, it inevitably sets him up for a fall!  The same can be said for all of his opponents who, in being unable to bend, wind up breaking instead.  Akemura is (barring some improbably productive personal growth spurred on by his situationship with Yura, anyway!) heading down the same path.

Really, it’s simple metallurgy: the more rigid the material, the more brittle, and the more brittle, the more likely to fracture under stress.     

Conclusion

True to its metallurgic metaphors, in Kagurabachi, flexibility is a sign of strength compared to the rigidity of minds that have become closed to change or correction.  I think a reason Sojo impressed so many readers early on, remaining quite popular even now, is because the way he straddles that divide - and the impact of that duality on Chihiro! – feels so much more nuanced than what many had come to expect from Shonen Jump battle manga.

See, there’s a strain of anti-intellectualism in a lot of classic Shonen Jump manga, and one of the more beguiling ways this manifests is in valorizing unthinking, mule-headed resolve – as I described it in another piece touching on this idea, “young men flipping the bird to a logic that dictates their defeat.”  That’s all well and good, but it bleeds over into a distrust/disdain of characters who are more rational, or more willing to second-guess themselves, in ways that I find troublesome (and certainly tiresome too!) in light of the ascendant anti-intellectualism of the U.S.’s current political situation.  This makes Kagurabachi, with its framing of ideological adaptability as not just a heroic virtue but a moral necessity, quite refreshing!

Certainly the series is not immune to narrative flattery of the strong-willed – its framing of Sazanami Kyora in the moment of his death is a textbook example!  All the same, though, Hokazono treats a strong determination as not inherently morally good, as seen with Samura Seiichi’s stubborn, guilt-driven rejection of the future and the terrifying conviction that led Akemura Soga to commit genocide.  A strong will is important!  That’s the whole point of the folding half of Chihiro’s fold-forge characterization!  But a truly strong and admirable person is one who can hold true to their beliefs while also being open to the possibility that their beliefs are wrong – one who sees the world with clear, open eyes and uses what they see to make active, informed decisions about how best to live.

That is a far better way to live than holding tight, eyes screwed defiantly closed, to a gut instinct or childhood lesson and calling it conviction.

Looking ahead to Kagurabachi’s just-begun Part 2, much of the fallout of Chihiro’s defeat remains to be explored!  He’s had a fresh reminder that he cannot turn his brain off and try to steer himself through his stormy world on filial piety alone, but while an undefeated Sojo simply returned to his base and pre-existing plans and an undefeated Samura enforced a top-down armistice, the undefeated Akemura is being exactly as proactive as his interpretation of Kunishige’s mantra demands.  That being the case, who knows what the new status quo is going to be by the time Chihiro is ready to tackle the problem again?  Who knows how many more times he’ll have to repeat the hammering and folding process before he stands a chance against Akemura?

Personally, my hope is that we’ll see some of the story’s other characters get to partake in this narrative process as well.  Many of them have conflicts and flaws written into their current situations that could provide a tremendous amount of grist for development via the model of alternating between holding to their beliefs and refining them.

For example, how many times will Shiba have to see Chihiro lying dead before he changes his approach?  Will Hakuri ever have a major crisis over people being killed right in front of him given that he resolved to never let a life slip through his hands again?  And will there ever be a conflict between that resolve to save lives and his other motivation of “proving his value” to Chihiro, given how easily Chihiro takes lives?  How will Iori handle the contradictions inherent to her motivations and likely character arc, protecting her normal school life by wielding an enchanted blade, and harmonizing with that blade when she wants nothing more than to see it broken?  How is Hiyuki going to reconcile her belief in the state’s monopoly on legitimized violence[32] when the state has been subordinated by an openly xenophobic mass murderer?

32: See Max Weber’s “Politics as a Vocation,” 1919, or simply look up the phrase “monopoly on violence.”

And what about the villains?  Hiruhiko in particular seems like a strong candidate for introducing to the fold-forge pattern of character development, as Yura obliquely suggested with his comment that experiencing the world and meeting Rokuhira Chihiro would be good for the kid.  Indeed, you could argue that Hiruhiko has been through a round of fold-forging already, given that he doubles down on his beliefs at the theater and gets a useable Kumeyuri for his perseverance, only to be driven to inconsolable waterworks when his “student of freedom” shtick doesn’t pan out at the hotel.  In that light, he ran the fold-forge rotation in opposition to Chihiro, a pattern I’ll be very curious to see if holds in their future encounters!

It also strikes me as no accident that the arc that did so much to establish how crucial Yura was to the Hishaku[33] is the arc that ended with Yura removed from play.  Even if their leader’s possession is at least somewhat willing, it’s anyone’s guess how the rest of the Hishaku are going to settle into or around Akemura’s newly reorganized Kamunabi.  There’s the question, too, of whether getting a flash of insight into Yura’s grudge will change how Chihiro engages with the Hishaku, and while that feels pretty plausible for someone like Hiruhiko – Chihiro might be well-served by asking why Hiruhiko had to kill someone as a toddler! – we still haven’t seen Chihiro face one of his father’s actual attackers.  If he gets PTSD flashbacks just from meeting the Hishaku’s leader and mastermind, I can’t wait to see how he takes meeting their pine tree sorcerer.  I expect it’ll put a pretty severe crimp on any attempts at empathy!

33: Exemplified by Yukisada’s cult-like reverence towards Yura’s words and Hokuto calling Yura the irreplaceable leader the Hishaku all swore allegiance to.

Getting even further afield from Chihiro’s circle of enemies and allies, there are two whole sword bearers we still haven’t met, old compatriots to whom Akemura may not be very kindly inclined if he holds them responsible for their willingness to be retired from blade-wielding.[34]  I wonder likewise about the future dispositions of people like Izaru (antagonistic to Kunishige in the backstory and Chihiro now, yet with clear reservations about helping Akemura murder people over ideological disagreements!) or Kazane (the Anti-Kuregumo unit’s sole survivor, who knelt on the shore and resolved that enchanted blades should not be allowed to exist in the world).

34: Him regarding the eternal contracts as a “loose end” he needs to take care of is a particularly bad sign for them.  Still, while he could theoretically just kill his original body to break those contracts – he’s got a perfectly serviceable new body, after all!  – leaving the other two bearers as a tragically untold story, I don’t see that in the cards for Hiruhiko, much less Iori.

And aaaaall this without the story even hinting about the motivations of the islanders whose appearance triggered this whole story!  I can’t imagine a work that combines a largely unexplained backstory war with themes about facing uncomfortable truths and connecting the past to the future will let that war’s mysteries stay unaddressed forever (as we now see with our new arc being an arc about that war).  Indeed, I will think considerably less of Kagurabachi if it goes the route of creating and burying an entire nation just as the foundation for a story about an all-Japanese cast.  While it wouldn’t surprise me if Part 2 is mostly dedicated to dealing with Akemura’s rise to power and the targets he will surely choose, if we are to have a Part 3, I wonder if Chihiro might turn his eyes to the victims of the past by then?

Here’s hoping, and certainly if the fold-forge pattern of the story holds, we can guess at how Chihiro’s response to them is likely to play out!  Suffice to say, I look forward to continuing the journey with him.

Readers, he IS my favorite Shonen Jump lead of all time.

----------------------

Getting past my gut response there, the pep talk framing is a little strange, given the fact that he’s the second-ranked behind Nimble, so it’s pretty weird for her to be in need of a pep talk from him.  On the other hand, given the way the dialogue flows, I would not have to strain myself to imagine that Nimble is rolling her eyes a bit to herself at Scarecrow reiterating all this stuff they already know and replaying a message they’ve already heard half a dozen times because he likes to hear himself talk and also feel validated by the higher-ups.  XD

(Man, I also still dislike the choice for Skeptic’s voice actor—or if not the actor himself, at least the emotional range they’ve directed him to play the character in.  Needs to be 300% more spastic-sounding.)

As to the colors….yeesh.  Scarecrow’s pretty straightforward—I expect I’ll have more opinions once we see him unmasked and I can check his head-stripes and his scar.  The birds-egg blue for Cementoss’s cousin is at least eye-catching, and probably any color they chose would look pretty strange, given his appearance!  I do like that they maintain his somewhat uncertain, pensive expressions (insomuch as those can be read off of him in the manga).  I'll have one other observation to make about him (his wildly inconsistent height) which I'll cover in the next ask.

Nimble, though.  MAN, if I could sit down and have a chat with whoever in the BNHA production staff is so unbelievably enamored with blue-eyed blonde women……  Why would you look at her strange paper-strip hair and think, “Yeah, obviously yellow-blonde is the right color for this.  And give her purple-gray eyes, which is far enough from blue for plausible deniability.  And the blocky dude can be a shade of blue chiefly associated with blue cotton candy, but The Girl definitely needs to have a skin tone indistinguishable from the palest and most conventionally attractive female characters in the show.  Oh, and of course make her shirt pink.”

Just yeesh.

As to lumping in The Question, it’s a pretty strange choice to make, given the explicit dialogue being played there about how all three of Spinner’s advisors—obvious heteromorphs, the lot of them—were placed in his regiment Because Of Who They Are.  The group shot the anime uses seems to mostly understand that,[1] given the anime-original designs of the rest of the people in the shot, but The Question is not a clear heteromorph; he pretty much just looks like an alternate dimension Mr. Compress.  Kind of feels like the animators just wanted to minimize the amount of designs they had to come up with, so they grabbed the only one of the other Support Regiment advisors who could feasibly be a heteromorph and threw him in there, even though including him kind of misses the point—that it’s only Spinner’s underlings who are specifically and universally heteromorphic, not the entirety of the regiment he co-leads with Mr. C.  Which we know because neither Galvanize, Band Jacket Guy nor even The Question visibly qualify as Obvious Heteromorphs the same way all three of Spinner’s advisors do.

1: Mostly.  There’s a Hero-looking gal whose closest thing resembling a non-baseline feature is an unusually squared-off chin, which mostly comes off as mild cartoony caricature rather than a truly divergent facial structure.  There’s also a bowl cut dude two over from her who would need to have some truly bizarre eyes hiding under that hairline to make him anything other than baseline as all get-out.

Anyway, I see between this and the ask below that the anime’s made a few calls about adding them in where the manga never indicated their presence!  I wonder if that means it will also try to show more of them arrested when the anime inevitably gets to the tiresome scenes of the police talking about how they’re for-sure-definitely wiping things up at their designated battlefields?  Most of that stuff is, I think, just floating talk bubbles in the manga, but the anime will have to kill several seconds of time for voice actors to read those lines, and I think pretty often will try to fill that space with actual illustration of what’s being talked about, which Horikoshi only does when he’s in full montage mode, seldom when he’s in active/ongoing action.  Having more advisors available increases the number of Known Faces the animators can use for such filler shots.

While I forever crave more about them (more on that shortly), I definitely don’t relish the anime’s increased screentime being all A) still-frames of advisors when their group is being talked about in broad terms or B) anime-original shots of them being arrested!

Thanks for the ask, and I should have the other one up before the day's out!

---

Second up!

Also included in the ask were the following screenshots!

I gave my general opinions on the anime-mode advisors in the answer above but ohhhh my heavens, the sizing is so funny.  So, so funny.  A lot of the issue is probably that Horikoshi is not very consistent either, of course, but wow they weren’t even trying to keep #3 consistent there, were they?

For some comparison purposes, here’s Scarecrow’s first panel where you can really, fairly judge his height:

A true short king. Smolest of boys and realest of meowmeows.  Scarecrow they could never make me hate you.

Look at him.  Mentally try to move him back to where he’d be standing directly next to Hose Face.  He’s, what, maybe four feet tall?  No wonder he has to stand on top of a tall building to give his speech. 

Then look at this one, where he’s of a very comparable height to Koda (height: 6’1”):

Then these two, where Horikoshi can't decide whether he's a little shorter or a little taller than Nimble, but certainly over 4’0”!:

   So he’s a bit all over the place—and that’s hardly unique to him; Horikoshi draws pretty wildly inconsistent heights even amongst his main cast.

But man, #3 is on a different level even from that.

Let’s expand the frame on that last picture, shall we?

Now, when I had looked at this shot in the past, I had mainly been focused on the faces of the characters in it, particularly Bindi the Younger because I was so pleased to see she’d escaped her even-more-ignominious-than-Piercings-Dude no-hit wipeout against Edgeshot.  I hadn’t paid a great deal of attention to Not!Cementoss save to note that he was pretty big.  Like, wow, look how tall he is when he’s standing there behind Scarecrow’s shoulder!

But of course, if you look closer, he’s not standing behind Scarecrow’s shoulder.  He’s standing in the background, with probably at least three rows of people standing, roughly, between him and the people in front.  It’s given away by the silhouetted black heads of the people who are actually standing right in front of him:

   Like, not only do those presumably-grown men not quite come all the way up to his shoulder, the width of them compared to him is just cartoonishly shrimpy.  The guy is a giant, clearly built on a scale taller and heavier than any normal human.  Wow!

…And then of course you go back to this shot and just have to shake your head.

   Still, even if his height’s pretty inconsistent, his width is less so.  He’s in profile in the shot above, but compare this one, from the advisors’ introductory spread:

   He’s taller than The Question, if not by a monumental degree, but even if he were facing the camera directly, his cube-shaped head would still be 2-3x wider than The Question’s.

So it’s a shame that, as your screenshots show, on top of his height being much reduced the anime can’t even manage to keep his width intact.  Sad.

She is not alone in thinking that it’s some real BS, let me tell you.  Like, if nothing else, I don’t think the back edges of that mob should have even been able to hear all the dialogue going on at the front.  Anyway, while I definitely don’t think Kurogiri should have left Spinner on the floor when he even bothered to bring Mic along, if he did, maybe Nimble will live up to her fan name I gave her her position as Spinner’s No. 1 and evade capture long enough to get Spinner out of there.

—

Hmmmm.  I assume you meant these two?

I guess they could be.  They’ve got similar silhouettes and broad similarities—short hair that divides in the middle; a white mask with a dark pattern—but there’s just enough different going on that I would probably not assume so without further appearances.

In direct comparison, Big Sis Bindi lacks those over-the-eyes bangs, her hair is a darker shade, and she of course has the big sweater neck thing.  The left figure’s hair lacking the screentone shading could just be because they’re so far in the background, but it doesn’t seem to be an issue for various other tiny background faces, so I don’t see why it would be an issue for this one.  Likewise, the horizontal dash just below the nose could be the outline of the sweater neck, but it looks more like a mouthline to me.

The other figure has the white mask down, but the enormous Kamen Rider-esque eye pattern is quite different from the question mark that should be there.  More subtly, the white mask seems to continue all the way down the neck, cowl-style, while The Question has that high black collar.

But!  That said, I appreciate that I’m not the only one obsessively looking for Advisor Appearances, so I thank you for calling my attention to it.  If anything, I expect we’ll see at least Big Sis Bindi again, probably with Brand, since we haven’t seen where he wound up yet, or possibly Hose Face, though we’ve already seen him once and not, as I recall, with any other pre-established PLF faces.

I do wonder where Spinner’s Number 3 has gotten off to, though…

—

HMMMMM. I wonder if that is his name, or if it's just Horikoshi shorthanding what Scarecrow's whole deal was going to be?

I ran it by friendchat and @codenamesazanka found that the Japanese on the original version of that page is a little unclear; a fan translator took their best guess about it, back when the volume it was in came out, and offered ヴィスガスタス”, visugasutasu, which no one could make any sense of.

However, Nal also noted that if the smudgy first character was di instead of vi, you got disugasutasu—Disgustas, which sounds an awful lot like Disgust, and disgust was a major theme in his speech to the hospital mob, like so:

So is this a reclamation thing? He had the "you're creepy and gross" sentiment thrown at him so much that he decided to take it up as a weapon? Or is it, again, just a shorthand for his general shtick? How does it compare to other examples of Horikoshi's design-phase sketches and notes? And if Horikoshi had the name picked out, why not include it anywhere? Just another example of Horikoshi's ongoing refusal to give plot-significant heteromorphs actual names?[1]

I also initially thought that Disgustas doesn't fit the typical MLA name scheme, but there are enough caveats there that I wouldn't consider it wholly disqualifying. Skeptic, Trumpet, Curious and Sanctum are all well and good English words, but Destro is not the same as Destroy, Re-Destro even less so, and Geten a complete outlier. So "word that resembles a relevant English word but is itself not quite that word" is not completely unprecedented.

It still makes me frowny, though, that the MLA gets shafted, the heteromorph plotline gets shafted, the single most eloquent speaker on the matter of heteromorph oppression gets EXTRA shafted, and also maybe that speaker's name is a reference to how gross the people who oppressed him and scarred him for life thought he was.

Like, for real, I have enough problems with Shouji preaching the moral superiority of passive endurance in the face of discrimination. By contrast, the MLA's whole deal is the violent overthrow of the harmful status quo; they won't even use a term their own founder's martyred mother coined because that term has been too bastardized by society at large. Spinner's #2 specifically decries various aspects of the status quo as phony, a sham, a false and shallow facade that's incapable of providing the "light" that heteromorphs need. He's the last person who should be willing to wear a label foisted off on him by the non-heteromorphic majority.

It all just feels like more of the entirely unnecessary two-faced bent #2 showed at the hospital, and, I suppose, in that regard, it's not entirely unfitting. I even kind of like the way, if his name is Disgustas, he answers his own question with both a verbal answer and a visual one via his dramatic face reveal.

"Take a look beyond the cities! What do they still say there?" In pulling off his hood, he implies the answer is him, his name: disgust. Disgust is what the people beyond the cities say. "'You give me the creeps.'"

It's a powerful moment. Indeed, language reclamation is always powerful. Still, though, that kind of internal calculation runs counter to the true believer zealotry he'd been written with prior to the hospital scene, and I admit I'm still pretty sore about that discrepancy.

But! In any case, thanks very much for bringing it to my attention! Anything about the advisors is a thing I will always want to hear about. For the time being, I'm going to keep on calling #2 Scarecrow, but if he ever turns up being called Disgustas (or Disgastas or Disgustus or however it gets romanized) in a volume extra or databook or something to that effect, I'll make the best of it at that time.[2]

Thanks for the asks, both of you!