Savsspace

Suguru has always been the emotional intelligence between him and Satoru.

He was the one noticing things.

He checked in on people, like when Satoru was running on fumes after using his technique, Suguru was the one saying “hey, you must be tired.” When they got back from the mission, he told him “you did a great job.”

And this didn’t apply just to Satoru, this is also the guy who looked at Riko and actually considered how she must have felt about the whole situation.

Remember that moment when Satoru asked if they should kill those cult members?

Satoru was ready to do it and it was Suguru who stopped him, saying there was no point to it.

The awful irony is that they processed the same trauma in completely opposite ways. Satoru, who initially wanted to kill the non-sorcerers, threw himself into training to become the strongest. He doubled down on being a weapon.

Suguru, who had been the empathetic one, spiraled.

Part of Satoru’s sense of betrayal comes from the fact that he’d always looked up to Suguru as the moral center between them. He was the one who understood people, who cared about how others felt and then that same person turned around and decided an entire category of humans didn’t deserve to exist.

It’s exactly his empathy, his ability to feel too much, to absorb too much of other people’s pain—that destroyed him. He cared so much about sorcerers, about the suffering he witnessed, his friends, that it rotted into something unrecognizable.

Meanwhile Satoru, who’d always seen himself and others as tools, who had that emotional distance built in, didn’t go down that path. Maybe because he never had as far to fall.

So yeah, I’m tired of the fanon characterization that acts like Suguru is cold or detached.

ac: mossbun_