#mo sha

Ghostblade from To Be Hero X is Aplatonic!

look at that Ghostblade, you killed the one healer hero who could've y'know, probably helped your daughter a lot after this latest episode

[Spoilers ep 15]:

Post Ep 15- There's of course the pretty obvious autism coding, like intentional or not he is giving enough of those vibes that people are picking up on it and I think the episode highlights one of the symptoms VERY well, and it's that Ghostblade is, despite his job, extremely conflict avoidant.

He doesn't want to be challenged in his views or his own comfort.

He avoids conflict with his family by not speaking to them. He avoids conflict in his job as a butcher by quieting the animals he kills. He avoids conflict in his assassin job by refusing to learn about his targets and simply accepting them to be bad people in his mind (I find this one particularly interesting. By refusing to accept responsibility for killing possibly innocent people, he can simply avoid grappling with the guilt that might come of it and what it would say about him as a person). He chose a wife who he thought wouldn't challenge him, who would be willing to go with "his" flow. (Though of course I do think he loves/loved her. He wasn't just using her.)

He really does strike me as an undiagnosed man who learned to deal with life in his own way without a social support system and it came crashing down the moment conflict was introduced into the "system" he has made for himself. And of course after he had his own time to settle, he suddenly wanted to be a part of his daughter's life again, and chose the worst (but most "him" way of doing it.) In a way he's still avoiding the conflict that confronting his daughter directly would introduce. Frankly, I really really love that we have a neurodivergent person who is kinda of bad. His awful choices might be compounded by his mental illness, but it's not because of them. Mentally ill people are good people all of the time in spite of their illnesses and Ghostblade has repeatedly made the wrong choices. I do hope to see some character growth from him going forward, as he genuinely does seem to be improving, and I do think some sort of vague support system could help him going forward. Post Ep 16-

I love the theme of a mentally ill man so trapped in his own worldview and comfort having it all suddenly shattered when he finally has something in his life he has to leave his bubble for in order to get. He never could have been a good father to Nuonuo the way he was before. He has to change and yeah, he had to grow out of his narrow (and slightly selfish) worldview in order to do so.

And I might get shit for calling a mentally ill man selfish but like. He was. He was selfish. And he was a bad person in some ways. And neither of these were because of his mental illness but his own choices. And in the end? Ghostblade wasn't "cured" of anything. It's his choices that changed. And it's those choices that changed him.