#en-qq

What we do know about Kodo, largely through inference, is that he is curious and intelligent enough to have gone abroad and studied in Holland at some point. We also know he started out working for the shogunate before he left for the western domains. I just don’t know why, after having been disguised as a human for more than ten years, he would serve the exact same humans that razed his village. Did the Tokugawa order him to do it due to his foreign education, even without any knowledge of his heritage? If so, I’d really have liked to hear about how that got started, because in a story so fixated on “here’s what everyone is fighting for and why”, I remember being extremely confused about Kodo’s shift in allegiance. To an extent, I still am. Though, perhaps there’s more unlocalized information in Reimeiroku…

At any rate, Kodo’s true motivation almost always boils down to getting revenge on the shogunate and/or expanding the Yukimura clan. That much, at least, is generally consistent (although nationalism is also a factor in Harada’s route for some reason). And his vendetta is understandable, given his status as one of so few surviving demons from the Yukimura village. However, I’ve always had a great deal of trouble getting into Kodo’s head long enough to see exactly how his mind was warped. Was that senseless destruction the immediate source of his decision, or was it more gradual than that? How unstable was he before the massacre? For instance, was he always this willing to let the ends justify the means? When exactly did he take the Water of Life, and for what exact reason—for experimentation, for power, out of necessity? Does he ever look back on the path he chose, and wonder about alternatives? Does he have any regrets that do not relate to Chizuru?

These are the kinds of things I’d like to know about Kodo. Without more background information on who he is rather than simply what he does, I have little choice but to think of him simply as “Chizuru’s evil father”. Much of the narrative tells without showing, because we are looking at this story through Chizuru’s eyes, and she is an unreliable narrator as far as her father is concerned. To say she’s biased is an understatement; until Kodo’s true ambition rears its ugly head, she’s the quintessential Daddy’s Girl. Trouble is, given how little onscreen development time they have together, I’ve never fully grasped exactly how that level of attachment developed in the first place.

You see, the other thing we know about Kodo is that he is a good actor. So good, in fact, that he is somehow capable of fooling Chizuru, over the course of her entire upbringing, into thinking he legitimately cares for her. Whether he actually does depends on the route, since sometimes he doesn’t care at all (to the point of killing her), and other times he really does (to the point of dying for her) but is terribly misguided. The issue I take with that variability in particular is that Chizuru’s childhood obviously takes place in the past, and therefore the difference in how Kodo behaves toward her per route feels almost like a form of retconning. Chizuru’s choice of love interest has literally nothing to do with Kodo’s opinions and actions, yet somehow, his behavior is qualitatively different across routes. I get that this is a function of the game and not the plot, but it makes no sense from an in-universe standpoint. It’s hard for me to understand him as a single character, all parts of him united, because his personality apparently fragmented so many years before the story even began.

And here we come to the heart of the matter: it is very difficult for me to assess Kodo as a person instead of just a plot device, because his personality feels so much dependent on continuity.