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can't be him. he's not yapping.
i kinda wonder if dolmenic cognitive reconstruction therapy was given such a mouthful of a name to get people to come up with a closest equivalent shorthand (usually lobotomy) to encourage players to think about the legacy of procedures like it and the people they were historically inflicted on. especially since—even though everybody in the sdu gets put in the chair—the characters who are most visibly the victims of it a lot of the time are eva (an enemy combatant / colonized person / prisoner of war) and eito (a person with a disability / disobedient soldier). because both would be considered inconveniences to the state. idk if eva also being a woman and eito also being very obviously queer have intentional implications, but they're still there either way.
(tbh at the end of the day it doesn't really matter whether or not any of it is intentional. it's all still pretty evocative imo. course this just applies to the localization. i'm really curious about the terminology used in the japanese and whether it has a similar effect.)
got the parallels / contrasts between nozomi and eito increasingly on the brain since i've been seeing a lot of neat posts about them.
one thing i think is really interesting in terms of their respective relationships with takumi that I don't think i've seen talked about is how nozomi and takumi's dynamic is like... all support, no challenge? meanwhile eito and takumi's dynamic is all challenge, no support. (importantly: support, not understanding. takumi projects like a mfer, especially with nozomi... most of the time he kinda doesn't really see her but rather the afterimage of karua / previous versions of her / the role she's so dutifully playing. which. honestly is true of him with eito too, but anyway).
(this can change in specific routes obviously, but i'm just talking about their baselines. also this is just my own reading of the characters, i don't expect everybody to agree with it and it's constantly evolving. more rambling under the cut).
hey you know i think the game about colonialism and genocide where the main characters frequently rationalize committing war crimes with the idea that they have no other options might have some political themes.
...wait. wait no please wait don't hurt me i have a family wait—

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nozomi will always always forever be the character i list first in the tags of any post with her in it. idec if she's not the main focus, if shes never gonna put herself first i fucking will. it's a matter of principle now. get up there at the front of the line you precious disaster.
i think there's something of value in every route in thllda. even in the ones i like the least / don't like at all, i think it's possible to find something to appreciate. i kinda wanna pick out some of the less popular ones and talk about what i think their strengths are (or at least what i appreciate about them) some time. discussing the flaws in a piece of media (or really anything) is obviously necessary but you can get real bogged down by it if you only ever look at things in terms of what they do wrong or where they don't measure up. and sometimes it's just...nice to celebrate things, y'know? or idk maybe i'll get distracted in the next ten minutes and forget i even had this thought. who can say.
so there's a lot of metaphorical and thematic weight to eito blinding himself in 2nd scenario, right? like it's not just a thing that happens in the story, in the same way that his condition and how it manifests arguably have a metaphorical layer relating to the effects of ableism and alienation, etc. (i'll have more to say on that...eventually. maybe.)
in 2nd scenario, the cast is collectively turning a blind eye to the genuine atrocity of what they're doing for the sake of their own perceived comfort and safety. they are committing a colonialist genocide because they believe (incorrectly) that it's the safer bet. one of the key points the game is making, i think, is how complacency and unwillingness to question or challenge authority contribute far more to the actual occurrence of atrocities than active desire or malice.
"i was just following orders," and all that. "if we just do what we're told, we won't get hurt. those people will, but we won't."