SoAoG

Let's talk about boys.

A popular notion on social media is that "Shinji being a horny teenager is load-bearing for the plot" of Eva. I specifically say, "on social media" because if I recall correctly, this wasn't as much of a thing on forums and imageboards back in the day¹. In the same way that adherents to this view will often fall back onto cinematography to support their view; the medium is the message, I have reason to suspect that this view has gained traction specifically because, social media as a medium rewards being a) concise and b) funny, or, c), arguing by means of images in the case of something like the YouTube video essay², and people optimize.

The other reason for this, I suspect, is that it lends an air of dignity to that "unedifying aspect": Fanservice. The camera is an extension of Shinji's gaze, that's why it's constantly up girls' asses, and that's why it's okay for me to be watching this, you see. And you really need to argue it this way, because we could just follow Shinji, the character's, actual gaze and take inventory:

Category A: Looking past

Toji and Kensuke are our contrast characters here. They're working themselves up checking out the assets ("boobs", "thighs" and, oddly enough, "calves"), but Shinji doesn't care. He's interested in, bear with me, Rei Ayanami, the person. Toji and Kensuke will repeatedly tell Shinji how jealous they are of him for living with Misato, and he repeatedly tells them that, actually, it's mostly about doing household chores because she can't be arsed to. Shinji was on The Way of the House-Husband twenty years before that manga was written, take note. Disinterest is Shinji's default mode. Misato's polaroid (Ep. 01)? Nothing. Ritsuko wearing nothing but a one-piece under her labcoat (Ibid.)? Nothing. Asuka's breasts hanging straight down (Ep. 09)? Nothing. Okay, something, but only after she falls asleep.

Not the last time, either. Wonder if that means anything. He stays receptive to Asuka's advances for a little while longer after Ep. 09, yes, but, the adults did just smush them together like dolls for a week. He should be: That was the point of that exercise. They're literally in sync.

Category B: Embarrassment

This should probably be split into two: Seeing (B1) and being seen (B2). B1 is something like Shinji seeing Misato's underwear (Ep. 02) ...

... but B2 is really the main thing here:

More than anything, Shinji hates being seen as a person that could be sexual. There's any number of reasons why this might be the case: The discovery of sexuality marks the passage from child- to adulthood. In terms of the women in his life; Shinji is mostly hung up on the one that's gone: His mother. He's not ready to be an adult, he wants to remain a child, preferably an infant, forever. He feels comfortable inside Shogoki, to the extent that he does, because he perceives being back in the womb. He's comfortable around Rei, to the extent that he is, because she reminds him of his mother.

He's only comfortable around Asuka when she's asleep, because it's the only time in his life after she enters his life when she's not judging him. When Asuka reminds Shinji that she's a person by whispering in her sleep, the spell instantly breaks.

Adulthood means: The passage of time, the foreclosure of possibilities, the necessity of making irreversible decisions, the inevitability of hurting people and being hurt, taking responsibility for the consequences of our actions, and perhaps more relevantly, our inactions: Shinji doesn't want any of this, and he thinks that, if he just isolates himself hard enough, he'll never have to face any of it.

Sexual attraction intrudes on this, which is why Misato never manages to actually become a surrogate maternal figure, but Rei does: Genealogically speaking, after all, she's half Lilith, half Yui: The mother of mankind, the mother of Shinji Ikari, God-in-becoming. Being seen naked, being seen as a potential sexual object does not faze Rei at all, but being seen as a maternal, a domestic figure? That's poka poka:

Category C: Disgust

Shinji watching Misato and Kaji have sex in Antediluvian Introspection Space was one of the few things that was translated from the TV anime to End of, so, presumably, it must be pretty important. What do we think is being expressed here? Jealousy? That's one possibility, but it'd be the first and last time Shinji is jealous — of Kaji: He's jealous of his father because Rei smiles at his father and not him. That's Freudian. But moreover, being jealous regarding Kaji is Asuka's thing.

Shinji is disgusted. This alone stands testament to how, or rather, how little³, Shinji actually thinks about sex: His introduction to Misato was as a sexual object. His introduction to Kaji was as a shameless flirt. He knows they used to be a couple. If he was really as horny, as hung up on this as people like to claim he is, you'd think it would have occurred to him that such a thing has happened. And yet, when he's confronted with it, he doesn't enjoy, he doesn't recoil, he judges: Death to this, death to mankind.

Category D: Kaworu

Shinji is not gay, he likes Kaworu because Kaworu doesn't expect anything from him whatsoever. Kaworu scoops Shinji up when he's almost at rock bottom socially and emotionally and is nice to him. It's in this way that Kaworu and Rei are "the same": Shinji's relationship to Rei, at least Rei II., is safe because until the very end, Rei lacks sufficient personhood to formulate her wants, and when she does, her want is to make Shinji happy.

Shinji's day-long freakout about having seen, having touched Rei naked (Ep. 05) is not about him getting horny, it's about him being ashamed to have, potentially, been seen as expressing sexual attraction. That would change the nature of their relationship: Away from something Shinji can expect unconditional love from, which is the thing he really wants, to something that comes with mutual expectations. But those, a) are difficult to decipher, and, b) would limit his ability to act or not act however he wants at a given moment. When Shinji is confronted with Kaworu's one wish, he immediately slides back into despondency.

Becoming okay with the inevitability of bad things happening because that is the price to pay for the possibility of anything good happening was the point of the finale. The TV anime represents that conclusion as having come from everywhere and nowhere, End of cuts that circle down to the sole sources of unconditional love in Shinji's life:

Sitting in his throne of souls, capable of reshaping the world any way he wants, Shinji doesn't wish himself to be isekai'd into a different genre of anime, something more "slice of life", "healing-type" or "harem". What he wishes himself is to be loved, and actually feel it. Just this once.

¹ The hospital scene at the beginning of End of reached its memetic status specifically because the forums posters of old still had the capacity to correctly identify it as the shocking turn out of left field that it is.

²After all, it used to be way more of a pain in the ass to upload images anywhere.

Let's talk about women.

It's very easy to wave away all the unedifying aspects of Eva (and there are many) by going, well, it was the nineties. There are a couple problems with that. One: We don't usually let this fly anymore. Past works of literature and film increasingly tend to come with content and/or trigger warnings for aspects of the narrative and/or the presentation that have been passed by change in public morality. For example: Just because you could put the N-word with the hard "R" in the text in 1900 doesn't mean we need to reprint it now. Two: It presupposes a change in the medium. It was the nineties implies that we don't have, say, fanservice anymore. Or less fanservice. Or more elegant fanservice. Coincidentally, I watched the first episode of Yani Neko (2026) the other day:

this happens before the opening, even

So, I think it's safe to reject this particular hypothesis. Three: What makes you think the fanservice is merely a concession to audience appeal? Who says it's even "service"?

Here's a litmus test: When you watch Misato kiss Shinji during End of Evangelion, what do you see? The obvious answer is: An adult forcing herself onto a young boy. We can react to this either with disgust or as South Park instructed us in Miss Teacher Bangs a Boy (2006):

That is to say; men (13 and up) are pigs; a man forcing himself on a girl is a child rapist, but a woman forcing herself on a boy? That's the dream. And Anno has given you every reason to think that that is what's happening here. Think back to Episode 23:

It's not even the first time Misato has tried to force herself onto Shinji! Case closed. Rip her stripes off, throw her in the brig with Ritsuko. Except, we've failed to account for motive. Why did Misato kiss Shinji in front of the elevator?

I think at this point, it might be good to remind ourselves of what it is that makes Misato tick. Luckily for us, Anno wasn't exactly shy about telling us.

Her's is a small set of tightly interlocked problems: She hates her father for dying in the Second Impact he caused, but she also wants to avenge his death by defeating the Angels. She's afraid of being alone and/or in the dark, presumably because, confined in a small escape pod, that was her experience of living through Second Impact and concomitant death of her father. To avoid thinking too, too much about this and the obvious contradiction, her preferred way of avoiding being alone in the dark is hooking up with some pretty obviously morally dubious men.

Kaji is a rare triple agent: He spies on NERV for the Japanese Ministry of the Interior, he spies on NERV for SEELE and he spies on NERV and SEELE for himself. The anime never ordained to give him a motive, so it fell to Yoshiyuki Sadamato to fill in the blank:

Complaints about the canonicity of the manga will not be accepted.

He's a snitch, he's a playboy, he's a turncoat, he's selfish — objectively an awful guy. This makes him the perfect mirror for Misato.

Kaji and Misato both see sex as an entirely transactional activity, because, when the chips are down, Kaji and Misato both see other people entirely as means to ends. They see each other as a means to the end of getting closure for their personal losses. She sees him as a means to not ripping her hair out in a PTSD flashback at four in the morning. She sees the Children as means in her crusade against the Angels, Kaji asks Shinji to protect Misato in his stead. Occasionally, they reflect, sometimes with each other, on how morally bankrupt it is for them to do so, but then they assuage each other's concerns. They're perfect for each other.

Back to the elevator. Here's another thing: Misato knows she's a dead woman walking when she kisses Shinji. And Shinji realizes that she's dead immediately after getting on the elevator. There's not going to be a "continuation when [Shinji] gets back". But this is, a), the language Misato is comfortable speaking, and b), the language that she assumes Shinji is comfortable speaking, because "a)".

Full title: The Pike: Gabriele d’Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War

There is a renewed interest in fascism, both in the sense that, there seems to be a lot more fascists around than there have been for a long, long time, and, in the sense that, this resurgence creates an urgent need for explanation: What is fascism? What does it claim, what does it want? Why is this happening to us? A lot of the time, the questions are actually more specific: Is Trump a fascist? Is Trump-ism, such as it is, fascist? Are his voters, his followers, fascists?

It's worth debating, but the problem is that the two sides of the debate are talking past one another. Team "Yes, it is fascism" equips itself with a checklist of the mindset and language of fascism — Umberto Eco's fourteen points, Klemperer's lingua tertii imperii — and engage in a kind of box-ticking exercise: Syncretism, action for action's sake, fear of difference, social frustration, confused identities, feelings of humilation, struggle, bombast, heroism, machismo! and, of course, if you approach the problem like this, you look at Trump and other leaders like him and you must conclude —

SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI yes, oui, ja, jawohl, this is fascism SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI SI

Team "No, it is not", however, scoffs at this very way of thinking. Their focus is on the historical conditions that led to fascism, and to its specific organisational form: Rapid scientific and technological progress, the economic, social, cultural and intellectual dislocations caused by it, empire, colonies, war, the emergence of mass media, mass culture, mass unemployment, mass organisations, nationalism, endemic anti-semitism, war, defeat, depression, revanchism — and, of course, if you approach the problem like this, you look at Trump and other leaders like him and you must conclude, well, DoorDash got more expensive, but nobody's going to proclaim a Fourth Reich over that. Was America just forced to cede Texas to Mexico? No? Are there Sturmtrumppen, armed gangs of PTSD-ridden veterans, bashing skulls in the streets? I mean, ICE's occupation of Minneapolis got close, but, not quite, I guess? Yeah.

Thing is; you could say that about the contemporary incarnation of nearly every ideology. Liberalism first found its expression at the tip of the bayonet and is now reduced to questions of procedure and expertise. Socialism was once carried by masses of impoverished farmers and their recently proletarianized cousins, now it is an umbrella beneath which various minorities huddle for shelter. Things, it turns out, change. Politics may not be downstream from culture exclusively, but it is certainly downstream from historical circumstances. If you need the Freikorps for there to be fascism, then, yes, there is no fascism, but, equally, there is also nothing else, then we need an entirely new dictionary to describe political thought and action in this century.

I enjoyed Mussolini: Son of the Century (2025) a little bit too much, I'm a little bit too ready to use it as a repertoire of reaction images for all sorts of occasions, even mahjong, and because of this, I was asked: What's that "better world" Gabriele d'Annunzio dreamed of and thought would die with him? And, to be honest, I kind of sputtered. It's hard to tell, I stammered, because Fiume only lasted for about a year, because, while he may have been a forerider for Italian fascism, he certainly didn't see eye to eye with Mussolini, and because futurism was, anyway, soon sidelined by Mussolini ... and I get pretty embarrassed, when, on the few occasions when someone actually does ask me something like this, I cannot immediately produce a satisfying answer. This had to rectified immediately.

However, the Pike makes this question easier and more difficult to answer at the same time. It seemed, that, for a long time, d'Annunzio wanted nothing but a bottomless fount of inspiration and a limitless credit card, like he'd have been quite content to collect ideas, trinkets and people forever and endlessly recombine them as he pleased. He was a poet, but also a novelist and a playwright. His medium was the written word, but he was also a hypnotic orator, appreciated the visual arts, musical performance and saw the potential in the moving picture. The classics and the cutting edge. Longform and newspaper columns. Philosophy and gossip. Asceticism and excess, the horse and the motor car, always "yes, and", never "but not".

His programme? Whatever's good for the figure of The Artist. Which artist, you might ask? Why, Gabriele d'Annunzio, of course. If there were throughlines to his activity, it's that he did not recognize, understand or accept limitations on his activity or his work, be they personal or political, social or financial. And people loved him for it. It's difficult to blame somebody for becoming a raging egomaniac when he staggers from success to success, led only by his base instincts. It's difficult to blame somebody for becoming spendthrift when, after his third bankruptcy, people still lent him money. It's difficult to blame somebody for his conduct with women when women did line themselves up to let their selves be obliterated by him in one highly-public, highly-scandalous affair after another. Everyone knew what they were getting themselves into. But they did it anyway. Eagerly. Enthusiastically. Gladly.

It's difficult to wrap your head around this sort of hero worship. We, well, we kind of don't do that sort of thing anymore. The culture is, at the same time, too monolithic and too fragmented, to enable it. There are still transnationally famous personalities. They don't get there by being syncretic trailblazers, but by being designed by committee. BTS was the culmination of a multi-generational project to optimize pop music production, those Bangtan Boys were purpose-bred in a chaebol's underground laboratory to be hyperpalatable. We've also run out of "firsts": There are no more Wright brothers to sit us down in machines of rod and canvas like Ikaros, such that we can describe what it is like to fly, albeit for only eight minutes, to a curious public. And, anyway, haven't you seen Hbomberguy's review of Deus Ex: Human Revolution (2011)? Ikaros is a cliché now! He's a dumb guy's idea of something a smart person might reference. Idiot. Stupid. Away with you.

I jokingly suggested: Maybe iShowSpeed is the 21st century Gabriele d'Annunzio, simply by merit of representing a certain breadth of experience at a certain scale. We should shudder at the thought of what influencers' future political projects might look like. In some sense, d'Annunzio was an influencer of his time. He influenced fashion, language, aesthetics, he influenced the psyches of millions. Mind you, probably pretty much universally influenced them for the worse, given that he was obsessed with morbidity even by the standards of an era that reveled in it.

Sometimes, people will refer to fascism as a death cult, and use that as a base for comparisons to contemporary phenomena, but that's putting the horse behind the cart. No, the death cult was a preëxisting condition: Fascism is its political expression. I'll hand this to Team "No": The planetary monoculture is perhaps simply too life-affirming to give rise to fascism. You might say: "There's plenty of people who want other people to die." And this is true. But there are precious few people who seek to die a beautiful death themselves when the turn from the 19th to the 20th century was replete with them.

War as hygiene and redemption, mass death as a rejuvenation, like a forest fire, blood as fertilizer for the soil, an industrial-scale murder-suicide just because: That's another thing we don't really do anymore. It's not that people now do not sacrifice, do not get sacrificed, but: This is instrumental. D'Annunzio's counterpart is not the pacifist — although pacifists were dismayed by his militarist turn — but Clausewitz, the patron saint of military rationalism.

He approved of governments that went around picking fights regardless of who the enemy was or what the casus belli was because he believed fighting was good for the nation in and of itself and disapproved of governments that carefully shepherded what they believed to be "the national interest".

D'Annunzio claimed to "advance towards "life"", he embodied and championed what his contemporaries dubbed élan vital, but he only really perceived it by way of contrast; he loved to see his romantic partners fall ill, he loved his comrades dead more than he loved them alive. He did not think little of death, he thought it was the culmination of "life", which is why he had no compunction in shelling his own troops lest they be captured by the enemy and actively courted death for himself at every turn. D'Annunzio would read, definitely has read, Matthew 26:52 and thought, hell yeah, dying by the sword is rad as hell, I hope an Austrian anti-aircraft gun ventilates me, let me fly three sorties a day.

If this is suicidality, it's not any kind we would recognize today. He did not seek death as an end to suffering, he did not want to die for fear of death, he was not simply okay with dying, he did not try to accomplish in death what he couldn't in life, he didn't expect an afterlife, no continuity of experience beyond the demise of the physical form, certainly no paradise, no reward for service in death for anything other than the idea of himself, for others to rally around, he had a voracious appetite for life, even without the quotation marks.

Fiume or "The Italian Regency of Carnaro" was not itself "the better world". For many of its new temporary residents it was not so much a laboratory as a sensory deprivation chamber in which they could more or less safely hallucinate better, different worlds. They came from everywhere, bringing with them notions some of which would not be rediscovered and repopularized for decades. Fiumans practiced Yoga, preached free love, gave women the vote and retvrned, in practice albeit not in writing, to male homosexuality as a soldierly virtue.

What Fiume could have been, though, was a springboard from which d'Annunzio might have seized power over Italy. It had the men, the ideas and the chance. And from there, who knows? In 1919 and 1920, the final boundaries of Europe hadn't yet been determined. The Russian Civil War raged on, plebiscites were being held all over Germany's border regions. Lenin still lived. It was not a foregone conclusion that Europe would settle as a heap of impoverished, exhausted but furious nation-statelets. There was still plenty of energy going around, people in the mood to experiment, and an old order lying shattered at everyone's feet.

Despite his adoration of Napoleon, Gabriele d'Annunzio was not the man to harness that energy. There was a window of opportunity, and he let it fall shut. Fiume is the farce to the French Revolution's tragedy: All the imagination and zeal of the high point of Committee rule, none of the work ethic. And unlike the Emperor, d'Annunzio simply did not care for governance: He liked the trappings of power, LARP'd il comandante, but that's it. He turned the Charter into a dead letter. He was offered much of terre irredente on a silver platter. He did not take it, but he also did not violently seize it, as he claimed would have been proper. He shouted that the liquidation of Fiume at the hands of the Italian military would be a glorious baptism of blood, then departed after 33 casualties, three days of fighting and one miraculously well-placed naval artillery shell. The politics of poetry turned out to be vulgar anarchy. We're making our own Italy, with blackjack and hookers.

He would never look back. Not on politics, not really. He continued to commemorate the impresa in his own way, he made some uncautious remarks at the behest of the Blackshirts. Many people tried to get d'Annunzio to lend his name, pen and voice to this or that cause, but the poet could not be made to serve. Of all his disciples and suitors, it'd be Benito Mussolini who finally realized that you could just take his stuff. The d'Annunzian inheritance, the fashions, the slogans, the gestures, the performances, an imaginarium of glory in death and speed and Empire, fell into his lap. D'Annunzio was sometimes called il duce, but Mussolini went down in history as the duce.

For better or for worse, they don't make 'em like this anymore. We don't know how. D'Annunzio's power was his command of the written word. But nobody reads anymore, a little less so with every passing year. You can't have sexy murder poets in illiterate societies. When d'Annunzio was born, Italy's birth rate was 5. After the Great War, it was 3. Now, it is 1. Youth — giovinezza — is dwindling as a demographic and political force. Given that this is so, that the Pike is a study of a type of guy, Gabriele d'Annunzio being the poster boy for not one but several movements of such guys, which have gone extinct in the meantime, what are we to make of all this? I've recently seen a writer try to square the circle:

"By “hyperfascism,” I don’t mean “superfascism” or anything like that. Instead, I’m using the hyper- prefix in a way similar to how Baudrillard deploys it in his definition of hyperreality as a sort of representation that is more “real” than whatever it was originally meant to represent. (He uses Disneyland as an example of the paradigmatic hyperreal space.) I’m also influenced by Anton Jäger’s suggestion that “hyperpolitics”—or constant and frenetic political activity in the absence of any structures that might convert this activity into real institutional change—is the dominant political register in 21st-century Western democracies. So what is hyperfascism? It is hyperreal, hyperpolitical fascism. It’s a dramatic reenactment of totalitarian domination in a time and place where the infrastructure for real totalitarianism is nowhere to be found. It’s the signs and symbols of fascism detached from the machinery of the Nazi war economy or the large-scale, organized street violence of the Italian blackshirts."

What we seem to have, then, is a fascism without fascists confronting democracies without democrats. There are a lot of pseudo-d'Annunzios out there, posting feverishly about Rhodesia and Agartha, past beauties to be reclaimed and future glories to be won. Don't get me wrong, I'm not ridiculing them. D'Annunzio was essentially a LARPer and a poster himself, and he did it very well. But I'm not holding my breath for a rebirth.

Here are some thoughts about Slow Damage that I could not fit into the other posts or occurred to me post-game, in no particular order or claim to thematic coherence.

Family: 95% of the time, the game extols the virtue of 'found family': Think the Taku-Towa-Rei triad, Rei and the girlies, Roost, its blog and the small art scene that treat it as their third place more generally; hell, if you want to stretch the concept a little, the Takasato-gumi are a type of found family, at least for Igarashi. Sakaki tries to coax Towa into treating them as such, though he's not as successful at it as Madarame was. Kaga doesn't count since he literally is family. The remaining 5% of the time, it's weirdly insistent that you must maintain some sort of connection to your biological family, and especially your parents, at literally any cost: Taku and his mother, Rei and his father, Fujieda and his sister, hell, even Towa gets beaten over the head with his mother's diary at the very, very end. That last one in particular is patently insane: I don't care how lonely Maya felt during and after what she did and what she ordered Sakaki to do, and it's basically out-of-character that Towa seems to.

Gender: The other hard line the game draws is that you will respect the gender you were assigned at birth. Side characters get to skirt this rule a little because they're, well, on the side, but it's in full effect for Rei. I already spoke my piece about that, but then I listened to the post-game Rei drama CD, and they have Rei do to a 15 year old what Towa does to Rei, that is, to, for all intents and purposes, detransition her. This is such an odd artistic choice to me because a) it simply rehashes Rei's character arc and b) it crowds out every other potential consideration besides the two obligatory sex scenes. It's clearly very important to repeat and perpetuate this concept. But why?

Between these two points; one could level the same kind of accusation at Slow Damage that people quite regularly lob at Personas 4 and 5 - beneath the veneer of youthful radicalism and rebellion hides a surprisingly conservative world view. Slow Damage is filled to the brim with behaviors either frowned upon by society or actively corrosive to the very concept of having a society: It is incomprehensible to me that you can have a game with and in large parts about smoking, alcoholism, self-harm, unprotected casual sex on a scale that would make a committed nymphomaniac blush, organized crime, improvised explosive devices, literal human trafficking, but somebody transing their gender? That's just a step too far, man. That's probably overstating it, but when most of the dissonant moments in the text can be led back to this aspect, well ...

The Drama CDs: I think the nicest thing you can say about these is that they exist. They're there for you when you're done reading, but you're not yet quite done scratching that itch just yet. I'll go through these in the other I read the routes in:

Taku: Arguably the best one of the lot. Taku's route sort of trailed out on a minor cliffhanger as he's uncertain whether he wants to return to medicine. Luckily, Taku's version of Towa is virtually unreconstructed and manspreads, mansplains and manipulates his man into giving the right answer (yes) by means of such gambits as: Cutting his hand open in front of Taku to prove a point about Taku to Taku and pretending like he's going to go have transient, meaningless sex with some stranger after saving himself for Taku for the duration of his jail time. Mwah, bellissima. Despite everything, it's still you. Taku is the luckiest, albeit also the most indecisive, man on earth.

Rei: Pointless. Does not add anything to Rei, to Towa, to the setting, not even to the character it introduces. Huge waste of everybody's time. The only redeeming factor is that it hints in the direction of the girlies collectively adopting Igarashi (a leftover of the canned plot line in which he was meant to fall in love with Arata, I'm sure) and that Honami and Junko seriously tear into other at some point, which is fun to listen to.

Madarame: Kind of jarring in that it dispenses entirely with Shinkoumi (albeit not with all of its denizens) and changes the genre from ... what's Slow Damage's genre, anyway? Psychological horror? to a relatively straightforward story about organized crime in faraway, exotic Brazil. Has the odd distinction of being the only drama CD on which euphoria comes out to play. Great for people who are invested in the Takasato-gumi as a social group, as it provides further context and backstory, particularly into Kaga. Sadly, I'm not really one of those people. Pointlessly also gives Madarame a backstory, and then recommits to him not caring and being a committed nihilist.

Fujieda: This one's weird. Have you read the Colour of Dusk, the short story from the artbook? It turns Towa into Fujieda's neglected little housewife who cooks his meals, starches his shirts, goes almost suspiciously unsexed, tosses and turns her way through the nights because, yeah, that's certainly an interesting set of memories you dug up there, guys ... as far as the drama CD is concerned, it's like none of that stuff happened. It's almost like nothing happened at all. Towa gets kidnapped and held for ransom by a group of Fujieda's "victims" in his function as Sakaki's lawyer, and you'd think that that would severely fuck up Towa after he remembered what the first, I dunno, 10 years of his life were like, but, no, in every way, he leans right back into the nonchalant, playfully masochistic victim persona; he either does not care or will push his cheeks into his captor's blade willingly. That works for me, but how did this happen? This CD was released almost two years after the game, maybe something slipped someone's mind? Or did they realize the same thing I did at the end of Fujieda's route, namely, that the Towa it creates is not almost not really worth having anymore?

Comparing Toono and Sakaki on the basis of their guns:

Toono: Glock (21?): The Glock became the standard handgun of the 21st century by merit of having a large magazine and shooting an incredibly common caliber at just the right time for U.S. law enforcement to start prizing these qualities. It's a no-nonsense choice; light, cheap and abundant. If you need a cost-effective way to shoot somebody and you don't have to worry about something like kevlar, you can hardly do better. It suits Toono very well in that regard, given that he is presented to us as an amoral schemer who does not care for the Takasato-gumi's rules and traditions. He does whatever he thinks is practical to him at any given time with little flair or fanfare. Personally, I lowkey despise him for all of these qualities. Every single choice Toono makes, practically, economically, aesthetically, is maximally rizzless, with the sole exception of forcing Towa into drag. So it is with the Glock - its silhouette approaches a six-year old's pencil drawing of a gun.

Sakaki: Walther P.38: So, imagine my shock when Sakaki broke out the museum piece. The P.38 was originally designed to be the successor to the iconic Luger as the side arm of the German military and served in that capacity from 1939 all the way to 1992. I didn't immediately recognize it, assuming there was a Japanese pistol with a similar design, but, no. And when I realized, I got to wondering: How did this get here? Given that Slow Damage is supposed to be set slightly in the indeterminate future from time of writing, that thing is possibly decades old, but even at the very least still 20 years. However, it also makes perfect sense for Sakaki to wield it because he's everything Toono is not: He's a nostalgic, an aesthete and very self-consciously a villain. At the end of Fujieda's route, after Sakaki's reveal, Towa asks him if he's ever slept with Maya, and Sakaki doesn't just say "no", he's actually offended at the notion, as if he would have sullied Maya in doing so. These are two beautiful insights into his character: Here's a man who will sacrifice almost anything in pursuit of an aesthetic, a spiritual project.

"Every nation gets the government it deserves." -Joseph de Maistre

birgitte nyborg: miracle worker

There are three ways to make a television show about politics. Let's call them "Yes, Minister", "House of Cards" and "The West Wing".

Yes, Minister might be an odd choice of title because I am about to suggest that it is the foundation for the whole Armando Iannucci lineage of political satires — the Thick of It, In The Loop, Veep, Death of Stalin — despite Iannucci not being credited on it, not being credited on anything for like a decade after it stopped airing still. He did champion it on a BBC programme looking for Britain's Best Sitcom, so there's that connection, at least. But it's more about outlook, anyway: Yes, Minister — famously Margaret Thatcher's favorite — took the position that politics is silly because its practitioners are silly.

Generaloberst Kurt Gebhard Adolf Philipp, Freiherr von Hammerstein-Equord suggested military officers fall into four buckets along two axes: Smart to stupid and driven to lazy. He further suggested what to do with each combination of traits: Smart/driven? General staffer. Stupid/lazy? Routine tasks. Smart/lazy? Leadership positions. Despite having — relative to his Reichswehr peers, anyway — something resembling a conscience, he did not account for morality.

Kurt's nightmare was the man who is stupid, but driven, and Yes, Minister is full of these. Our protagonist, James "Jim" Hacker, is one. He knows he wants to climb the greasy pole, but he does not know why ("because it's there!"). He wants his time in Number Ten to be a success, but he's almost completely agnostic as to what that would entail. Hacker is surrounded by a coterie of civil servants, party men and lobbyists, most of whom are not just every bit as stupid and driven as he is, but also completely and utterly self-serving, and they all bob around like corks in champagne for a while not getting very much done and all at great expense to the British taxpayer.

Enter House of Cards. When the American, the Netflix version, the one that lent the company the iconic dun-dun noise at the start of every episode of every show they ever ran, run and presumably ever will run, the sound of Frank Underwood knocking on wood, aired, some people made hay of the perception that this was the dumbed-down, Yankee Doodle Dandy version of the more sophisticated, British original. I mean, my God, Urquhart quotes Shakespeare, how much more sophistication could you want? But don't let the anglophiles fool you: The original is every bit as sleazy, phantastical and murderous as the American adaptation.

People mistook British self-consciousness about late stage imperial decline for subtlety: American means simply exceed British means so far that whereas Francis thinks in terms of Falklandses and Cypruses, Frank can and must think in terms of cyberwarfare, anthrax, great power competition, war in the Middle East et cetera. The bombast comes with the terrain. A German equivalent would be very small potatoes indeed.

If the cast of Yes, Minister was basically too blinkered to be described as "evil", House of Cards did not impose any such limitation on itself. Its central characters are undeniably smart/driven/evil. Yes, Minister thinks politicians are stuck in a self-referential bubble only occasionally penetrated by the light of facts, rationality, reason and genuine public scrutiny. House of Cards conceives of politics as predatory, in more ways than one. It does not confine itself to thinking of politicians as merely hunting each other out of ambition, but also as a pack that makes a prey out of the body politic itself.

And then there's The West Wing. A lot of ink has been spilled about it already, so, suffice it to say, it's the antithesis to the British œuvre. It asks, simply: What if politics was serious and politicians were intelligent and well-meaning? It's a brave little theory. Unfortunately, it has been rejected at the ballot box.

Each of these approaches makes a certain amount of sense given the context. Yes, Minister was informed by public choice theory and written at the precise moment when Britain's post-war consensus fell apart for good: The Great British Public looked at its managed democracy, its managed economy and jobs for the boys! and threw them out in favor of two decades of unbroken Conservative rule, privatizing social housing, smashing the trade unions and the Single European Act. In that sense, it is actually one last look back at a way of doing politics that was about to be overcome forever.

House of Cards, the novel, was written by a dyed in the wool Thatcherite, someone who inhabited the world that was built on the ruins. Baron Dobbs was at pains to stress that it was not intended to be commentary on contemporary politics, not a "book of revenge", but also that it was, in a lot of ways, documentary of politics as he experienced it. If not revenge, then, maybe a book of reflection? Perhaps even something resembling mourning? At any rate, the American adaptation cannot claim any such thing for itself: Beau Willimon has a lifetime of experience of writing about politics, but a lot less experience of doing politics, certainly not congressional politics.

The Labour Party spent almost 20 years in the wilderness, as they say. The Democrats only suffered for 12, assuming you count from Carter and not LBJ. But the shorter interval was felt no less acutely. The reason why the third way, triangulation, "I'm socially liberal, but fiscally conservative" held and still kind of does hold such a stranglehold on the imagination of so many people is that politics in a two-party system is a zero-sum game, the other guy's loss is your gain, and winning is per se good. That's how you can perceive the Clinton era as a rejuvenation and engage in post-purchase rationalization: Reaching across the aisle, making compromises, getting things done, tacking to the center, persuasion over turnout strategies — this is good and proper and necessary. You make a virtue out of necessity.

The fact is that most of these shows dispensed with the personal dimension of politics in favor of a caricature of ambition, regardless of whether it was drawn in ridicule or in awe. Which is a shame, because that's the deadest of dead horses. You've heard the truisms: Bla, bla, test of character, bla, bla, give him power, bla bla, corrupts absolutely. That's so 1500 A.D., bro. It might be a liability for our conception of politics and of politicians that the overwhelming majority of the species has been, for the overwhelming majority of history, been ruled by overwhelmingly despotic regimes: Modernity, mass democracy, representative and participatory government are tiny blips at the very tail end of long lineages of oppressed dirt-farmers.

Borgen was, usually favorably, compared to the West Wing a lot in print. It's not difficult to see why: Birgitte Nyborg is the chairwoman of a party literally called "the Moderates" (Moderaterne). Its base is self-consciously centrist and intellectual. Kasper Juul, Birgitte's spin doctor, will, in a later season, say about delegates to a party congress that they don't like to clap for too long because it's pedestrian. The Moderates are a special bunch: They actually go in for good governance, evidence-based policy and proper parliamentary procedure. Their arch-nemesis is the far right, not just because the Moderates think human rights are good, actually, but because the far right is championed by country bumpkins and they don't really understand that you don't get what you want by standing outside the room shouting profanities.

For all of these reasons, Borgen was the hot shit on the European undergraduate political science circuit when it aired, which is coincidentally when I was making my rounds on that circuit. Borgen is set in a world where the right speech at the right time makes a difference. A world in which a well-researched, well-argued policy brief can actually inform a law. A world in which people think in terms of options and the trade-offs between them and lesser evils and engage in horse trading and settle for compromises and second-bests. It's my kind of world. I would, actually, also kind of like it if we could strip the personal dimension out of politics. You see, I'm a bit of a technocrat at heart. Obviously, I don't think I'm qualified myself, but society should probably be run by people who know facts and things, not people.

However, Borgen is a show that is ruthlessly committed to reminding us that politics is a thing done by people, with people, for people, to people. Birgitte is married, she has children and they are decidedly not props. When she becomes Prime Minister of Denmark via freak accident, it might be the greatest day of her life, but it's also the last unambiguously great day of her life. Her husband and her children are asked to sacrifice for their wife and mother's career. Eventually, her husband will be sick of sacrificing his time, his career, his sex life and his portfolio. Eventually, her daughter will develop an anxiety disorder requiring inpatient psychiatric care. No matter how much Birgitte struggles to separate the personal and the political dimension, they keep reverberating onto one another, with catastrophic consequences.

The cast comprises some of the most powerful people of their country, and you'll quickly notice that almost none of them are happy and well-adjusted: All of them are struggling with personal baggage. Their families are dysfunctional because they spend more time at work than they do at home. They're usually unfaithful on account of being around people at work more than they are around their actual partners. Work/life balance? Not for us, thank you. We want influence, we want power, but we kind of also want to be able to look at ourselves in the mirror. Tendency is, unfortunately, that you can't seem to have both. Scandal is an occupational hazard under such circumstances the same way black lung is for a coal miner.

Here's the problem: We expect politicians to be better, more moral than the average person. And yet, you can plausibly argue that our elite recruitment mechanisms select for psychopathy. We have — hey, don't abrogate responsibility, this is a democracy, you don't get to take credit for the successes and the benefits without also taking blame for the failures and the pathologies — we have built a machine that produces broken power-seekers, but still we are surprised about its outputs.

We shouldn't be. You may not think much of it, you may point at their, honestly, compared to leadership positions in the real economy, sort of piddling salaries, but we make these people work 70-hour weeks, we expect them to perform interest in our little lives, in policy fields that they are assigned not necessarily according to competence but to seat distribution and coalition arithmetic, we expect command of the brief, command of their emotions. It's a testament to human resilience that there isn't more sleaze, more scandal, more sex in broom closets.

Social media has turned a lot of us into politicians in this way, always performing one thing or the other, always pretending to be more knowledgeable about more things than we really are, "microdosing hell by staying informed and educated", or whatever passes for it, always feeling obliged to comment on what's happening in the world. "I'm not usually political ..." — maybe that's a good thing. Information by itself is not power.

Borgen aired at a peculiar time, during an an interregnum between two paradigms. Cable news and kleptocratic liberalism, the dominant political technologies of the 90s and 2000s, had hit their best before date by then: Hillary was rejected in favor of Obama, Blair in favor of Cameron, Schröder in favor of Merkel, Italy was about to exit the era of bunga bunga. But the new age had not yet fully emerged. It was brewing in the background, to be sure, in Zuccotti Park, on the Tahrir, in the shape of the Tea Party, during the European sovereign debt crisis — but the orange man had not yet descended the escalator.

Because of this, some of the show's appeals to its audience ended up lost in time: Yeah, political discourse certainly has been dumbed down by various efforts to liberalize television, but we were about to enter an era completely untethered to anything resembling physical reality or even the written word. Yeah, boiling parliamentary politics down to large, multi-party, loosely ideological blocks was not ideal, but they were about to get busted down by the only thing that might be even worse; the populist right, the arrival of which made compromise practically, almost mathematically, impossible and condemned entire continents to previously unimaginable levels of gridlock.

The attempt at humanizing politicians, at depicting them as people with families and hopes and aspirations, both personal and political, some good, some not so much, has only become more urgent since, given how fluent we've all become, been made to be, at thinking of them only as members of the political class, la casta, the Swamp, (((them))), the elites et cetera. If there's a way out of populism (big if), it probably leads through re-acknowledging that, no, ours is a species two members of which can barely agree on what to order for dinner, genuine conspiracies are probably few and far between. Most of the really bad ideas about how the world works were created, in their entirety, by a couple eccentrics: Lyndon LaRouche, William Engdahl, Andrew Wakefield, some of the most successful policy enterpreneurs of all time, and yet so oddly underappreciated and underpaid. The rest, we do to ourselves.

oh, do not look at me so. a smile better suits a hero

I've started drafting this post in my head from basically the moment I started playing. When I first beheld Towa — all 100 pounds of scar tissue, cold blood and bones — something shook itself loose at the back of my mind. I usually keep things on a pretty even keel these days, but it wasn't and isn't always thus, and Towa really got to me.

Obviously, I realize the irony in saying this after chewing Fujieda out for it, but there's no way to talk about how I feel about Towa without talking about myself at least a little. Towa is a mirror held up to the player; do you regard this man with respect, or disgust? Don't answer "pity", it's the one thing he can't work with.

Meeting him was like meeting a dear friend from a phase of life I believed to be over for good. It was also like finally finding someone that I somehow always already knew I loved, conceptually, in the abstract. And it was like looking at a life, or at least a period of a life, that I dearly wish I could have led, and, honestly, still kind of do. I'm 34, and I'm supposed to pull a 1 Corinthians 13:11; but I can turn that on its head: I'm 34 — officially too old to keep pretending that I don't still enjoy seeing the angles and the scars and the bruises and the blood, like I don't want to stick my fingers into wounds and behind collarbones and into the spaces between plainly visible ribs and pull and see what's on the inside and bury myself in there, and to be torn to shreds in turn, like I do not want to constantly negotiate the middle ground between the highest level of emotional intensity and the lowest level of emotional numbness. I have to be deranged about this, there's no normal way to put it. I figured this would go away at some point, but maybe it never will.

I brought Dramatical Murder up in the beginning and I'm a sucker for symmetry, so let me return to it in the end: I like Aoba, I'll sing his praises, I'd be his wingman, I hope he's happy, but I didn't click with him. He doesn't trigger the traditional dilemma: I could want him, but I could never want to be him. Aoba should be the poster child for shit life syndrome: He's a part-timer living with his grandmother in a slum on an island. But he's too much of a happy-go-lucky kinda guy to let that faze him, or to let it faze him that bad things just kind of keep happening to him from entirely outside of his own control. I'm just not like that: I'm very much fazed. I seem to not so much heal as hope that eventually the world will indulge me and let me enjoy my symptom. Hence: Towa.

Towa is the polar opposite of Aoba: He causes problems on purpose. You know why: It's the only way he can get off, he needs the inspiration for his art and, when you think about it, given that he doesn't truly care whether he lives or dies, why not? The level of comfort he expects from life is not zero, but it's not far off: He's basically fine as long as he is not physically chained to a location, and even that's negotiable if you apply enough force. Towa wants to be treated as a fully autonomous, adult human being, even when he's anything but. This is a parsimonious description of a teenager. And that checks out. After all, Towa hit the pause button on life when he got shot, and that wasn't even the first time. He's boy, interrupted. And I love that for him.

Maybe I don't want Towa to get better. Or, at least, not in the way Fujieda does it. If "getting better" means stripping him of all the most interesting parts of him, if it means he stops seeing people and the world the way he did, if it means he stops creating art, if it means declawing him and turning him into a little kitten that impotently paws at a big, strong man for uppies, then, sign me up for being anti-recovery, I suppose. I first had that thought — I don't want Towa to get better — when it became obvious that that was going to be Taku's endgame, and I knew then already that it was a kind of mean-spirited thought. It only got more morally dubious after that, but I can't shake it off. I despised being made to see the wholesome 💯 domestic version of Towa, this neutered thing with all the edges filed off.

I'm instinctively suspicious of any concept of self-actualization that terminates in wood grain, pastel colors and cooking eggs just right. All that advanced cognition, such depth of experience, so much potential for pleasure and pain, just so people can spend it counting down the hours until they're off work, days to their next vacation, years to retirement. Life as merely a journey to the grave. My other beat is Final Fantasy XIV, and I'm always astonished at the sheer amount of people who think their character, their Warrior of Light, their globe-bestriding colossus' highest aspiration should be retiring to spend more time in the rose garden.

I can tell you what the exact moment was when the thought that 'Slow Damage might not stick the landing' crept into the back of my mind and there made a nest for itself: When Towa opened that first package of artefacts from his past and therein found photographs of Ikuina, Asakura and Kirihara and it was revealed that they actually had a preëxisting connection. As it turns out, meeting them in the previous routes was not some chance encounter between spontaneously occurring, if you will, organic perverts, but they were actually connected by the red string of fate all along. This isn't stated explicitly, but at least to me it strongly implies that these were previously normal people who were bent and crooked when they first met Towa and were thus destined to bump back into him at a future point in time.

If you ask me, this cheapens them as characters, cheapens the interactions you have with them and therefore cheapens the narrative as a whole. This was a, not totally but still pretty surprising and unwelcome retreat from my conception of the ethos of this game, and as the route continued, so did that retreat, until it turned into a complete rout. I'll try to push back on that, a little: I think it would be good if we could admit to ourselves and to each other that a) we want and b) not everything we want is nice and soft and positive and virtuous and conducive to self-improvement. We can see incelism and other types of neuroticism about interpersonal connections: The sexlessness, the teetotalism, the endemic loneliness, but only phenotypically. Why they're there eludes us.

Society is individual behavior, multiplied, and while there are material factors at play, as far as I'm concerned, the basic problem is mental: A lot of people have adopted a sort of pseudobuddhist mindset within which desire itself is a toxin imposed from without that needs to be identified, isolated and extracted. You need to cultivate constant self-awareness to purge from yourself the thought of anything but furthering your education, your career, your physical and mental health; mens sana in corpore sano, so measure your being against your past and the curated social media self-portrayals of everybody else. Oops, now the 19 year olds think they're falling behind in the big rat race.

cleverly, this clock is not ticking: the hours are not going by. the past does not increase, the future does not recede. take that, murakami

Towa looks at Fujieda's scars and thinks "you're like me!", but I look at Fujieda's life trajectory and say; "you're nothing like him". Towa doesn't differentiate between means and ends; he'd prostitute himself on a street corner because he thinks the act itself is thrilling. If he gets paid, that's just a bonus. Fujieda carefully calculated how many dicks he'd have to suck to fund his education and then went and did that. He's utilitarian and self-examined, he's the anti-Madarame: Fujieda knows exactly what he wants, why he wants it, how he's going to get it and what price he is willing to pay to get it. I like contrast — size difference, age difference, different styles, power differentials, sunshine top and grumpy bottom — and Towa and Fujieda could have been perfect for one another.

Alas, Fujieda is also the mechanism by which the apparent randomness of life at the end of history is subjugated beneath the demands of characterization, narrativization and lore production. The arcana is the means by which all is revealed: Towa's every sensory experience, intrusive thought, errant impulse, every dream, every twitch and twinge explained, categorized, put in its proper context — sanitized. "At the end of this, you might be a different person", he says. To me, that's a threat, not a promise: Taku domesticated Towa, and I internally hissed and screamed my way through that. Rei adopted Towa because he thinks he doesn't deserve better. Madarame dragged Towa back down to his level. It's not nice, but I can live with that. Fujieda is going to annihilate Towa and leave standing in his place ... what, exactly? Something fit only for a coffee shop AU, maybe.

The most upsetting thing in a route full of very upsetting things, to me, is Fujieda interrupting Towa's suicide attempt. I know from personal experience that it is bad enough to be made to live for the sake of other, living people when you don't particularly care to, but I'd argue being made to live for the sake of a dead person is an order of magnitude worse still. Dying will not bring Mei back, but living won't bring her back, either. Moreover, living out of sheer spite for "Maya" is not going to do anything. Is Towa supposed to spend the rest of his life comparing everything he thinks, feels and does against the mental image of his mother and always do the opposite of what he thinks she might have done, might have wanted? He's going to need an entire, second suite of mechanisms to cope with the fact that he's been made to believe that his previous suite of coping mechanisms was him self-perpetuating her abuse. As far as I'm concerned, it would be better to burn.

But the game takes this flimsy concept and sprints off with it like it's the Olympics. Fujieda apparently fucks so good that it instantly waters Towa's crops, hydrates his skin and improves his complexion. He's so skilled at providing first aid that Taku is impressed by his work; my God, what can't he do? This already raised an eyebrow when Taku did it. It's just barely plausible that Towa could simply resolve to leave all of this behind himself and start over before he opened Pandora's Box of memories, but after? With, no, for this man? Fujieda didn't give a shit about Towa 12 hours earlier. He left him in a puddle of his own sweat and vomit in the dark on the site of Towa's traumatization because he was too dazed from realizing his own loss to care.

He shows up at Towa's atelier previously content with having the following conversation over the phone, because, yes, he would be, because all he talks about is himself, his sister, how he feels, what it means to him, not one syllable about or for the man standing in front of him who is about to not just immolate his body, but also his body of work. Is nothing sacred? I'm not going to elevate chain smoking, alcoholism, self-injury and nymphomania into virtues, at least not with my whole chest, but it actually, morally, offends me that the art must go, too, and I am not offended by much. It is fantastically narcissistic.

But that's a side aspect in the characterization of Fujieda, to me. I don't begrudge him that he has contradictory feelings about and impulses towards Towa. For the characterization of Towa, it's a declaration of bankruptcy. Towa didn't invest himself in Taku, in Rei, in any of his friends or his many, many sexual partners or the people he's gone through euphoric episodes with. When the people from his past are snuffed out by the Takasato-gumi, he thinks about it in terms of it complicating his investigation, but, having flung himself into the abyss, he's going to invest himself in this guy?

No. Pass me the lighter. Shinkoumi must burn.

I'm going to put the nicest possible gloss on Madarame's route: It's a cute little piece of meta-fiction. Like a black hole, Madarame's presence bends the world around itself, sucking it inwards. The impact can be measured before the object itself can be perceived: Ikuina's post-euphoric suicide heralds the fact that the second half of Slow Damage is going to be Darker and Edgier™️. People start tiptoeing around Towa and he starts behaving weirdly, even by his standards, as if in preparation for turning on the little life that was built for him and returning to being a feral creature.

The advantage of the first-person perspective — I'm told it's not entirely uncontroversial among the English-speaking audience that SloDa is told in first person — is fully realized here: The experience of Towa and the experience of the reader become one and the same. Life is now "nasty, brutish and short"; days full of nothing between searing bursts of abuse. None of it is titillating. It's not meant to be enjoyed, it's meant to be endured. Towa is deconditioned, and so is the reader: There's going to be a reward at the end of this. There has to be.

disregard what i write below; this is my reward

For the reader, the reward is the Towa lore. Deprived of all of his (deeply maladaptive, don't get me wrong) coping mechanisms, Towa can no longer distract himself from his past. Forced to remember and to relive, he regresses. This route is good in the sense that it's difficult to imagine a different mechanism by which this information could be delivered. To do it any other way would have unsuspended disbelief. Well, for the most part, anyway. Towa forgetting that it was Toono who shot him seems sort of implausible to me: It's a conclusion he could have independently re-arrived at at any time by applying the most basic "means, motivation, opportunity" type of thinking.

But I guess that's the point: Towa is so ruthlessly committed to not thinking that even the most glaringly obvious conclusions do not occur to him. Hence, Madarame: The unstoppable force that knocks the immovable object off course.

As you can see, it's difficult to think of Madarame as a man rather than a force of nature. At the bifurcation point of the route; you have the option to keep pressing him for his desire, and when you do, two things happen: For one, you're heading for the bad mad ending, because, two: There's nothing there, and Madarame is disappointed in Towa for trying. He's correct to be: That was not the Towa that Madarame remembers talking — that's euphoria. Taku's masterpiece, if you will.

By the way, remember when I wrote that it'd be difficult to incorporate information from latter routes into past posts? The reveal that Taku has filled Towa's head with false memories after Towa got shot is a prime example of the sort of thing that recontextualizes what happened in Taku's route. I'm not so mad about the chipping anymore because Taku delivered an even more screwed up thing he did to Towa that overwrites it. Another example is the fact that black is Towa's natural hair color and the bleached tips are a leftover from yesteryear. You can extrapolate that, when Towa grows his hair out even longer in Taku's good euphoric ending, the hair puts a physical capstone on this segment of Towa's life. That might be a stretch, though, because it'd be bad news for Rei: Towa keeps the tips in his endings. Oops.

Towa chides himself for 'screwing up' the interrogation of Madarame, but I can alleviate his concerns: You didn't fail because there was no way to succeed. Madarame is on record to want two things: Towa and the destruction of the Takasato-gumi. When he expresses these wants, Towa suggests the former sounds like a declaration of love. Madarame rejects that framing. When Towa suggests the latter sounds like an intent to get revenge, Madarame rejects that framing, too.

It's possible to imagine what Taku and Rei would be like in a world without Towa because they are fully realized, if flawed, human beings. They have proximate desires, that is, things they say they want, and ultimate desires, that is, the thing that they eventually, if you press them hard enough, confess is the driving psychological force that enshrined the proximate desire in the first place. Using the former as a stirrup to get to the latter is Towa's interrogation technique, and it doesn't work on Madarame.

I'm a cautious man and I recognize that I am not as super duper equipped to talk about this as other people might be, so, if I wrote something stupid, just yell at me so I can make a correction. Changing pronouns every sentence is not an attempt at whimsy or to make light of what happened and more of a capitulation before the decisive indecisiveness of the narrative.

That could probably have been handled better. What, specifically? I don't know - take your pick. Kirihara's identity was telegraphed long in advance. Rei's father should have been scrapped for parts years ago. And then there's the Gender thing.

Look, even if I, for whatever stupid reason, wanted to take the most rigid, hung up on definitions, "well, it's a BLVN, so they should be boys, right?" stance on this, I think I'd still find it a little underwhelming that Rei yeets 15-20 years' worth of thoughts and feelings about gender out of the window just so. Even just as a lame performance critique, that just isn't a particularly satisfying payoff. It doesn't even take, apparently. Not really. When he* attains post-nut clarity and Towa asks 'well, how'd that feel?', he replies that something is still off, and, yeah, of course it is. So, no matter what happens after that, that probably wasn't the final word on the topic.

As I usually do in a situation like this, I'm thinking it might have been better to just commit a little bit more into either direction. Rei could have just been a somewhat gender non-conforming - am I even using that correctly? - guy. Believe me, you can just be a guy with a sweet tooth and a domestic side and an almost suspiciously queer social circle who hates his body, nobody is going to arrest you for that. Conversely, she* could have just been a trans woman. I guess there was an implicit, secret, hidden third option where he is, like, I dunno, an AFAB trans man who heard his father wish that he had a son and heir loud and clear but was pushed out of his life anyway because, 'no, not like that', and that could also have worked and satisfied whatever formal, 'boys only in my boys' love work, no cooties, please', criteria. Probably.

Same, Rei, same.

But, no. They chose a half measure when they should have gone all the way. Me, personally, I'd have been okay with whatever as long as it felt sufficiently ... complete. Rei had me at 'sweet tooth', an increasingly rare character trait in the orthorexic century. I don't mean; feels guilty over a Sunday slice of cake, but, like, eats a box of Ferrero Rocher and kinda wishes there were seconds. And if it hadn't been for that, they* would have had me at being a body modder, and if not that, the murderous glint in their eyes while fistfighting, utterly dysfunctional parental relationship and childhood bullying victimhood would have gotten me. Almost forgot the motorcycle. You're preaching to the choir here. I'm primed in six different ways to like this guy gal person, you just had to stumble the ball into the net somehow.

Honestly have half a mind to throw my hands in the air and just declare I prefer the bad mad ending Rei because at least some of that one's character traits come to full fruition. That guy has good taste.

It has been suggested to me that there are two ways to look at a given route: For one, in terms of what we learn about the respective love interest, and for two, in terms of what we learn about Towa while he's pursuing that love interest. I'll tell you one thing I learned on this route: I may be transforming into a corncob Towa shill, but even I can see that Rei cuts Towa a hell of a lot of slack and consistently interprets his actions in the best possible light for, kind of, no reason other than that he's there, Rei wants and needs companionship and Towa's, 'I don't really care that much either way' outlook is the closest thing Rei has found to a trustworthy relationship, one that can not collapse because it never bore loads to begin with. Not that kind of load, anyway.

That is revealingly sad in its own way, because it implies that, despite all the time Rei has spent with Arata, Junko, Honami, people Rei's literally fought side by side with, mind you, Taku, the barkeep, stop me at any time, that nagging thought at the back of the head of "yes, sure, but what if the next time I leave the house, they'll all stand there in a big circle and they'll laugh and point and spit at me" never fully left his head. That just hits a little too close to home.

Alternate Title: "Joe Biden voice: "SLODA!""

Apparently, it's going on three years that a friend recommended this to me. Shouldn't have been a hard sell, to be honest, given that I'm well-disposed to its predecessor. I think part of the problem is that I initially conceived of this as sort of an implicit trade where he reads one of my favorites (Umineko no Naku Koro ni [2007-2010*]) and I read this, that, for one reason or the other, didn't exactly pan out. However, for health reasons I did recently find myself in a peculiar mood and with sufficient spare free time to, very belatedly, pick it up. First (visual) novel on this blog and it's this, go figure. That's basically what my reading habits are like. Biggest influences on my, frankly, laughable prose? Kinoko Nasu and ryukishi07 by a country mile, probably.

Right now, the way I think this is going to go is that this will be the first of a five-part series of posts. The reason for this is simply that at my reading speed and enjoying the voice acting, the first playthrough clocked in at around 20 hours, and I fear the Good Doctor is going to have slipped my mind by hour 80. In this post, I'll make some general remarks including about systems and the shared first chapter before getting to Taku's route, and every subsequent co-protagonist is going to get their own, ideally. The downside of this approach is that information about Taku revealed after the credits roll on his ending can not easily be incorporated. I can already tell that I'm going to be chewing on Towa for quite a while, so, I think he's going to get his own.

Usually, the way I think about visual novels and games with a choose your own adventure quality in general is that you should play them through blind, no take-backsies, and whatever comes out at the bottom is favored to become (head)canon. Subsequent playthroughs of one of these or an open world RPG or other games with a routing system never have quite the same charm as when you blindly grope through somebody else's design on instinct and see what happens.

Slow Damage does not afford me this luxury by making it essentially a coinflip whether you crash into Taku or Rei first. That's fine. Taku is basically my, well, one of my types, anyway: A kind, older, more accomplished man with a bit of scruff and edge to him. Blame Gregory House for that. Most of it. Greg isn't that kind.

So, Shinkoumi is a shithole. That's par for the course for these - Midorijima was a shithole, Togainu no Chi is literally post-apocalyptic and sweet pool's slice of the world is anchored by a Catholic school. Brr. I kind of wonder if this says something about Japanese society Fuchii Kabura, but chances are it's for narrative convenience. A functioning society with happy, prosperous people and a justice system worth its name would just get in the way. I always have some nitpicks about these - about unemployment figures, inflation, credit, the social order - because I can not turn that part of my brain off even if I try, but I understand it.

I will say that I'm glad they dialed it back on the futuristic fashion vibe - I remember it being difficult to take Dramatical Murder seriously at times because half the cast dresses like jackasses. Kotarou and Mayu basically fill that quota here and the rest of the heavy lifting is done by the protagonist being an artist who has a similarly inclined social circle, with out and about queer people in it (mostly queer people, actually), which just plainly makes it a lot more believable that they dress the way they do.

It was a bad sign that the game tutorializes you on its conversation mechanics - and yeah, they are mechanics, we are juggling resources here - and I was proven right about that hunch later in the route. You better go through town with a fine-toothed comb to pick up every scrap of inspiration for later because if you don't have them you can totally get locked out of a particular ending. You could, of course, always use a guide, but I'm already finding that using a guide makes the exploration segments more of a chore than, well, exploration. Does make me wonder though: Maybe someone at Nitro+Chiral has aspirations of making an actual game? Something more than 'Text, yes, text, no, text, yes, yes, no, text, ending', anyway. Slow Damage is in an awkward spot where it's main (sole) gameplay feature befits a full-featured RPG.

love at first slice

One problem with rolling Taku first is that the game puts its best foot forward - I can not easily think of a better way to introduce yourself than taking me from Towa's ratty couch to Ikuina's bloodstained bed in a few, breezy hours - and it's impossible to maintain that energy for the duration. The pacing on Taku's route crashes hard once he and Towa get jailed. Most of that bit is basically redundant. Things get said, then it turns out they didn't actually matter and Towa just gets beaten into yet more of a pulp, but in, like, a not even tangentially erotic, just straight up, non-sexual violence, sort of way. It was maddening.

Taku himself isn't always necessarly helping, either. That man has a weird concept of boundaries: He's almost addicted to withholding information even from the people closest to him, but tossing a GPS tracker into Towa while he's stitching him up anyway? That's totally within his realm of possibilities and he does it long before he cracks under the pressure. Would being more forthcoming have made a big difference in his situation? Maybe, maybe not. But it would have made for a more ... economical narrative. The broad strokes of Taku's problem become legible hours before the finer points are revealed, but the finer points are not actually that important.

Should I lose a few words about Asakura? They loaded one morally dubious doctor in front of the other, in what, now that I'm on Rei's route, I understand to basically be the game's way of signposting where you're going, and if I'm going to be perfectly honest, the twin facts that a) his desire was a lot more literal than I would have guessed and b) the execution of it does unfortunately look sort of slapdash take most of the wind out of his sails. It's also pretty awkward to know that on every other route, when you don't interact with him, he will probably eventually do that to a small, already pretty unhappy child. If it isn't the consequences of my inactions.

Speaking of inappropriate relationships and not helping; if Taku didn't constantly bring up that he basically helped raise Towa, I don't think it would have occurred to me to stop and think about whether there's a problem with this picture:

this picture specifically. nobody's going to out-uke Towa anytime soon

Here's the thing about Taku: He's a very educated, yet emotionally pretty unintelligent man. I can relate to that (look forward to the Towa post!), but it means that a bunch of more deeply-seated, actually emotionally fraught issues, like whether he might actually think of Towa as a surrogate for Towa's mother, like his general possessiveness, like the goddamn chipping, sort of end up getting handwaved in favor of prolonged navel-gazing about Taku's dealings with Toono and repeated variations on 'I could be your dad'. Yeah, you could ... but you're not.

That's a joke. It's not my first time watching them. I'll cop to not sticking with BCS when it first aired because of the dour little interlude after Chicanery, but I did, somewhat recently, finally watch it all the way through. And then I rewatched BB, just to see if that did anything. It does, so I presented them in this order to some friends as a joke.

BCS recontextualizes Walter White's struggles by creating contrast with the struggles of Jimmy, Mike, Gus and Nacho. By way of comparison, Walt has it easier in some ways, thanks to their work. Generally, BB becomes the story of a neophyte expanding into a vacuum left by cartel infighting, destroying everything other people have labored for years to build because the space becomes too small for his personal ambitions.

Or does it? My model of, if you will, media literacy acquisition is that it's hating all the way down. The meta-fiction of BB goes something like this: Because Seasons 4 and 5a of BB end on relatively triumphant notes, the popular reception of BB in the early 2010s casts Heisenberg (Walter White, the man, is a distinct afterthought) as larger than life. Amidst the grinding Long Recession and the debates about the Affordable Care Act (thanks, Obama), Walt's character arc strikes millions of people as plausible and, horror of horrors, appealing. Underachieving, underemployed stoners hang "HAIL TO THE KING" posters in their college dorm rooms. Conventional wisdom among the show's fans at the time is that Skyler was a bitch for not being more enthusiastic about her husband's chosen vocation, his empire, his brilliant plans.

Against this, people staged the critical reading of Breaking Bad, the one that attempted to redeem Skyler's lost honor and cast Walt into the flames of hell once and for all for having been an empty, soulless husk all along. And this notion can be so compelling: Did not Walt immediately blackmail Jesse into cooking meth with him, thus inevitably dooming him to enslavement in the Neo-Nazis' mini-Mittelbau-Dora? Did he not immediately show his innate capacity for murder by gassing Emilio and choking Krazy-8? Is he not solely responsible for the death of 167 people in the crash of Wayfarer 515? Surely, Walt is full of shit about what really happened between him and Gretchen, too.

There is, to be extremely clear, no concept of causality within which Walt does not have at least some responsibility for these things. Obviously. And even if Walt had only cooked one batch of meth, sold the recipe and washed his hands of this entire debacle at the first opportunity, he'd probably still be, in some sense, on the hook for an overdose or some amount of drug-related crime. Legality does not perfectly overlap with morality (obviously), but I will point out that We, the People, through The Law, do recognize a difference between murder and manslaughter, between killing in cold blood, killing in self-defense, crimes of passion, deaths induced inadvertently and, of course, preventable deaths not prevented. You have a duty to rescue, but not answering the call of duty is not the same as pulling the trigger yourself. It's a spectrum. It has to be. We'd all be guilty otherwise: Some effective altruists calculate that saving a human life can cost as little as $3,400, after all.

However, this is not a defense of Walter White. Such a thing can not be mounted. Finding a way to get his fortune to his family, killing the Neo-Nazis, freeing Jesse and engineering the final collapse of his empire - that doesn't make him even steven with the universe. What it does is put a floor under the amount of harm that Walt has done to the world, the people around him and his immortal soul. I get the impression that people don't find that sort of thing as meaningful as they once might have. Harm reduction? No, thank you, I'm waiting for the revolution. Any day now.

Did you notice that Walt finally tells Skyler and Jesse what they wanted, needed to hear all along, hands them Get Out Of Jail Free cards but compels Elliott and Gretchen through fear? They're the only characters in Felina who Walt does not make amends with. Even Skinny Pete and Badger get paid extra. It's now common sense to believe "I did it for me" and "I want this" are perhaps the first true things Walt has said in a long time, so transcendently true that they become the final word on the show's events, so, since we're supposed to take him by his word again, does that mean that the Schwartzes really are guilty since they don't receive an apology? But if they are, Walt actually was wronged to the tune of billions, and if he was, then not accepting alms is not a stupid, prideful act, but …

The problem with the "he's the devil" - Jesse's words, not mine - view of Walt is that it flattens his character arc. Without that, BB becomes a show about an evil man getting away with it until he can no longer. I understand that the creators and The Culture™️ felt the need to overcorrect on the idol worship and to make sure that people "get it", but this doesn't strike me as much of an improvement. The ambiguity drives the show at least as much as the plot does. Without inviting the audience to tell itself that, "well, if I was in these circumstances, I, too, might …", there's no investment, only suffering. I also don't think it makes sense given that Gilligan, Gould et al. went on to make an entire second show about the unintended consequences of our actions.

Jimmy and Walt fundamentally have a very similar character arc, right? At the start of their respective shows, their lives are basically over, failed. Walt's about to die unfulfilled, leaving his family a mountain of debt. Jimmy wasted his youth scamming and partying, but got himself an entire second chance … only to end up practising law for nobody from the back of a nail salon. Through a mixture of wits, luck and very flexible morals, they manage to make something of themselves after all, but, bzzt, wrong answer, fucko, now you've lived long enough to become the villain. The bill is coming due. Unless you believe in the afterlife, Walt at least checks himself out, but Jimmy not only has to dull-ly live in Omaha, Nebraska, he's still looking over his shoulder for the Feds, Lalo and Chuck's ghost despite over 1,000 kilometers of physical distance.

Yet, Jimmy McGill gets to be the sad clown while Walter White needs to be torn down. But, I hear myself asking, isn't that because Jimmy makes amends, buries Saul Goodman for good in that dinky Albuquerque courtroom and fesses up to his responsibility for Walter White's drug empire and Chuck's death? Yeah, maybe. There are, after all, unbroken chains of events here. But if that actually meaningfully informs your concept of causality, then, really, every bad thing that ever happened is downstream from the first animals deciding to turn their back on our mother, the sea, 400 million years ago.

Jimmy does a good deed in that room - he turns himself into a sin-eater for Walt and Jesse, who are not present to be judged. Nothing about the sentence-minimizing story Saul Goodman tells about his participation in Walt's Empire is objectively incorrect, but for Jimmy's character growth, it's necessary for him to learn to accept guilt, even when there isn't any. Are there any other things we can load onto the shoulders of Saint James, Our Lord of Sorrows? I got the impression that Chuck implicitly blamed Jimmy for their mother's death, he explicitly blamed Jimmy for their father's - why not take him at his word for those, while we're at it?

Howard wasn't wrong to blame himself for Chuck's death - was it really necessary to force Chuck out of HHM? Maybe the firm could have eaten the higher malpractice insurance premiums for a while. Maybe Chuck's lawsuit against the insurer wasn't quite as quixotic as it first appeared. Yeah, Jimmy made Chuck look pretty bad at the bar association hearing, but he really was on the mend in spite of it, and, again, Howard Hamlin of all people should know better than to confuse the result of a legal procedure for an absolute truth. Isn't it a problem that, in the world of New Mexico law, one slip-up invalidates a storied lifetime of service? Chuck was as decorated as they come, and it bought him not one ounce of credit. Is this supposed to be karma? Jimmy being his brother barely earns him any plaudits with Chuck either, after all.

Chuck, for that matter, could have let himself be talked down, could have accepted retirement, could have kept going to therapy and written that book. His therapist, for that matter, could have understood the sudden session cancellation as a sign of a mental health crisis, given that she had previously warned Chuck not to overestimate his own progress. Victory has a hundred fathers, but defeat is an orphan: Gilligan and Gould just kind of decide that, no, none of those things are real, what is real is that Jimmy McGill personally marched into Chuck's home and lit him on fire and only by letting himself be nailed to the cross for that can he be redeemed and win Kim back. Martyrs get all the chicks. Wait, how did BB end again?

I fear that we accept this, demand this, because it flatters the moral instincts of the caveman within: Punishment is good, Grug gets a club to the back of the head for stealing berries, all is right with the world. It's as Hank said: You want to be a man, Walt? Then go to jail and make your family paupers as God intended. Avoiding guilt and responsibility? That's for females. Indeed, Hank pulls strings so that Marie never faces consequences for being a habitual criminal. Mostly, the reason why she enjoys moral high ground vis-à-vis Skyler and Saul is that she lacks the aptitude and constantly gets caught criming: She's morally lucky, as the philosophers say.

The manichean view collapses not just character arcs; it makes it basically impossible to talk about anything that happens in these shows. Consider that Walt was on the money when he predicted in Phoenix that if he gave Jesse his money, he'd be dead inside of a week. Jesse was, in fact, not sober in that classroom and Jane died, would have died, with or without Walt walking in, that very night. Her death allegedly causes the planes to crash into each other, so who we assign blame to in this situation carries a bunch of weight: Since he doesn't know better until Walt tells him in Ozymandias, Jesse blames himself for it. He's not fair on himself for doing so, either. Jane's father blames himself and, yeah, maybe he should not have let himself be hypnotized by his girl's puppy eyes. Walt knows he's guilty, that's why he spins up a bunch of exculpatory fictions about outdated air traffic control software and worse disasters and the indomitability of the human spirit. But those are perfectly acceptable explanations when an engineer asks "how do we prevent future air collisions?" - in the wake of a disaster, you attempt to make the affected system less prone to being affected by human caprice. We'll never get to zero risk, but getting closer is our duty.

Concurrent with the Heisenberg-as-idol view of BB was the joke that the entire plot could have been prevented if the United States had a better health care system, that this simply would not have happened in even just Canada. You don't hear that one so much anymore. It might not get the nuances 100% right, but at least it's actionable. American health care can be improved. Hell, even feminist "toxic masculinity!" narratives have the advantage of implying that maybe a future generation of men won't define itself through their ability to a) provide and b) control anymore. But if this is all down to Walt just being evil, there's nothing to be done. Coincidentally, this is the core of Chuck's world view, later adopted by Howard. Jimmy and Kim were "born that way": "soulless".

Of course, pursuing this idea led Chuck to self-immolate. He internalized the notion of the immutability of people so hard that he concluded that the only way he can truly be free of the pain that filled the holes where his marriage and his family once were is to burn himself alive. And needing to rub Jimmy and Kim's face in this drunken discovery is what led Howard to being buried beneath the Superlab™️. I take this as a sign that Gilligan and Gould do not actually want you to believe that.

And what of Mike? If there's one man perhaps even more guilty than Walter White in the Gilliverse, it's Michael Ehrmantraut. Mike avenged his son's death himself and in so doing deprived a Police Department of a much needed opportunity to improve itself as an institution. This task is left, instead, to the dubious force of generational turnover. Walt turning Hector into a willing suicide bomber to take out Gus with zero collateral damage is one of the things Hank whacks him over the head with in his garage, but Mike gets a pass because, well, we're all corrupt here, lol. The young 'uns will figure it out. The young 'uns probably knelt on somebody's neck at one point or another, but at least they don't take bribes, right?

On a sidenote - BB was lucky to air in a timeframe where it did not have to deal with this, but by the time BCS aired, the "oorah!" view of the DEA, on which the perception of Hank and Gomez hinges, aged. Way back in A No Rough Stuff Type Deal, Hank and Walt have this poolside exchange about drug legalisation and the arc of justice, if you will, definitely bent towards Walt as some States and countries actually went and did decriminalize. The, capital letters, War on Drugs, as Hank waged it, standing on that wall, as Chuck pictured himself, has, at best, nothing to show and, at worst, might actually produce and help all sorts of Walter Whites.

Anyway, Mike, right? After shooting Hoffman and Fensky, Mike becomes a small-time criminal. He gets a civilian killed trying to fuck with Hector. You have to hand it to the writers - this totally unforeseeable, inadvertent death goes on Mike's conscience the same way the plane crash goes on Walt's, so, points for consistency. After that, he becomes a big-time criminal. Jimmy thinks he built Walt's Empire? Well, Mike built two. The Superlab? Never gets finished without Mike keeping the Germans in line. Gus would have gotten killed by Lalo without Mike organizing security. He almost gets killed even with, after all. Without Gus or the lab, Blue Sky peaks as an ABQ curiosity. And even though he really wanted to leave Walt and Jesse to rot in the desert, Mike relents and makes one last deal with the devil to get his guys paid and …

Mike wants to provide. In this, he's like Walt, and they match the haircut and the body count. The circumstances are equal here, so I take it that the reason why we love pop-pop and hate Walt is that Mike has a much better rapport with, well, Kaylee and Stacey than Walt does with Flynn and Skyler, first and foremost. Mike is more likable in general, of course, a more well-rounded person. Mike acts tough and he can be tough, but on a day-to-day basis, he's a big softie. Sure, he'll give back the parking company's jacket. He tips well. He brings his subordinates coffee and makes sure they've eaten. He goes above and beyond to make sure that his guys get paid. Not just so they keep silent, but because they have families that depend on them and it's the right thing to do. Mike is the best bad guy you can hope for. But he is very much a bad guy.

When BB was still on people's minds, it was fashionable to ask what the moment when Walt became Heisenberg was. The antithesis to this question was to reject the premise and claim Walt was always Heisenberg. It has been years, one would expect a synthesis to have developed by now, but not so. We're stuck on "anti". And it was always the wrong question. BCS' creators received that signal and structured that show to provoke you into asking when Jimmy would become Saul. And the answer is pretty obviously that, for most of the show's runtime, Jimmy and Saul take turns. Saul is a persona, a mask, a performance. It's Jimmy for the seniors, but Saul for criminals. Saul takes hits that Jimmy can't bear, from Howard, from Walt, from his own conscience. Jimmy came up with the pre-paid phone hustle - but it's Saul that terrorizes the street thugs into submission. And Saul satisfies Kim in ways Jimmy fears he could not. Heisenberg works the same way. Both Walt and Jimmy eventually become the mask, but the masks are not the totalities of their beings.

They're our - yeah, I'm including you, too - capacities for bad behavior. Not to be too dramatic about it, but I'd personally find it pretty arrogant of myself to say with any degree of certainty that, given circumstances, ability and opportunity, I'd be a better human being than Walt or Jimmy. I think it keeps me grounded to remind myself, from time to time that; everyone has the capacity for evil within them, dipshit, it came free with your sapience. Ordinary men, ordinary organisations. In writing Walt off as irredeemably evil, we might seek to reassure ourselves - couldn't be me. I'm built different. I would have gone to my knees in front of my ex and the man that she married instead of me, even though he leapt off the pages of the Big Book of British Smiles. I'll send my wife back to work while pregnant, I'll send my son to work while disabled, I'll take money from my brother-in-law with no chance of ever repaying him and from random strangers who I know are pretty pressed themselves. I'll gladly demonstrate to myself, my family and the world that you can do everything right and still have your life ruined by a couple quirky coincidences. No matter how bad it gets, I'll just keep taking it.