rye

The last 1.5 chapters of the Kamen Rider Gotchard University novel reveal that Nobi's authority figure, the elusive leader of the Fractal organization and the mastermind behind the whole Neo Malgam and HOPE operation is none other than Cole Marcus. ...Sort of? As it happens, Cole is also possessed by a semi-divine being from the edge of the universe called F and is the actual mastermind behind the Neo Malgams. ...Sort of?

The whole situation with Cole's possession has been really confusing me since I finished the novel, and it was made really apparent when I was doing my Nobi ranting and had to reckon with Cole being F but also not F. Cole and F are distinctly separate beings, but it's also very not clear which action belongs to whom. It's really easy to liken F to Evolt from KR Build, but it's kind of not the same thing at all. In fact the only similar thing about the two is the fact that a possession occurs at some point. Evolt's case is pretty straightforward in that he possessed the first random guy that stumbled across him, and also the original guy was actually sweet IRL, which is an obvious contrast with Evolt being really evil. F (Cole...?) is more complicated than that.

As far as the novel's own timeline goes, Cole is possessed by F before the start of the novel, but not at the very beginning of its internal timeline whenever Nobi is born and raised a little bit and then his parents die. The possession actually happens quite close to the novel's events, I'd say about a year prior..? So there is a significant period of time when Cole was just Cole. This is important because Cole (not F) does several really important things:

Gets a major interest in "stealing" things from people,

Kills the Asugawa family sans Nobi,

Adopts Nobi himself and raises him for a number of years.

...Huh? That sounds pretty evil to me. So you're saying it's not a clear-cut case of a nice guy getting possessed by an evil monster? I thought every possession was either Evolt or Mutsuki! (- strawman)

Nope! In fact, F says it chose Cole specifically because he was already evil. Could have picked anyone else, but it picked him because he liked to take things from people. This serves the novel's overall idea of the "fusion" being "stealing" people's lives and individuality, but also gives an idea of what sort of creature F is. It's not necessarily driven by morals, because it's an extraterrestrial deity and doesn't really know or care what morals are, but if it did have morals, they would be leaning towards bad. Which is, of course, all the more reason for Gotchard to kick its ass.

But it is not so simple with regards to Cole, and the part that confuses me most. When Nobi confronts Cole (F) in the penultimate chapter and yells about the burnt-down orphanage and his trust being wholly betrayed, Cole (F?) lols and reveals the fact that he (Cole, not yet F) killed Nobi's parents all those years ago. He also gives all this exposition that explains Cole's love for taking things from people and that time he starved a homeless person. Wait, what? If at this point F is wholly in possession of Cole's mind and body, why would it pretend to be Cole? Of course, the confession was meant to get a rise out of Nobi and turn him into a Neo Malgam, but at this point F could have revealed its own true colours as well. I found this odd. F insists on pretending to be Cole until the very last possible moment, either because it likes to be him, or because it is him to some extent? Herein lies the Cole question. How much of what is seen on screen is Cole, and how much of it is F? Not counting the part where F turns into a scary monster and swallows the world. Though F possesses every fiber of his being, it seems that Cole's presence is perchance equally corrupting to F. Or is it?

I've had this thought linger with me for a long-long time since I've finished reading the University novel (shoutout to notolayer for translating it so quickly!), and I find it similar to the way that Hotaro is also the Chemies to some extent. If University was a full season it would have been made clearer that Nobi is meant to be a narrative foil sort of rival, so this checks out.

I think the most obvious way in which Nobi and the HOPEs parallel each other is the whole idea of the birdcage. HOPEs are seen by Cole (F) as pets without agency and/or identity -> this same view is then applied by Cole (F) to Nobi in Chapter 4/Episode 49, where Nobi is called a guinea pig/experiment/pet/etc. Nobi is also someone who was raised in "captivity" or, to be really trite about it, a birdcage, himself. The entire progression of his life was carefully orchestrated by Cole (not F) to eventually place him in the latter's hands. I doubt that his maturing with Cole was great either, given Cole's clear proneness to manipulation and a lot of other toxic bullshit. He then places the HOPEs in Nobi's hands and has him continue perpetrating control and denying them agency and placing this great responsibility on him to distract him from pondering his own existence (and to make him feel needed, of course).

Both Nobi and the HOPEs experience the same arc of starting out as free and happy, to being essentially kidnapped by one means or another, having their autonomy stripped from them (whether they are aware of it or not), leading a generally miserable existence until the Easy-Breezy Boy Ichinose Hotaro discovers them and has a fit of his incurable "I can fix them" syndrome, and being invariably fixed through the power of hope and love and friendship and also Gotchard reducing the big bad to rubble. Throughout this last phase of the arc they both lend their strength to Gotchard in one way or another: more obviously with the HOPEs turning into Chemy cards (how did they do that?), but also with Nobi allowing access into the Fractal HQ in the first place, and also in the end where his teleportation device is used to make a stable door to the New Earth.