#offgame musing

Essentially, he's a person whose 'programming went faulty'. Namely, the issue of 'Karua', and how she's at once both a propaganda piece projected into his brain [ETA: 'the propaganda piece' was the pod program but, not the point], and also Nozomi's words filtering in.

I don't think he's able to fully separate those things with conviction, as much as he wants to. He doesn't get how projection works, that's already something difficult for a sheltered and clueless teenager to unpack but... this is a whole other level of 'challenge: impossible' mind-fuckery. If the group have ever had some disconnect between their sense of identity and their 'memory', Takumi's is soup.

But what especially gets me, is his 'younger teen self' dismisses 'Karua's' studies in the most incurious way- 'what's this, the outside world? Why bother with all of that? Why do you care? Conspiracy theorist', etc. which I imagine is what he was 'supposed' to do with anything 'weird' like any potential new information. Until the programming got funny at odd moments when Nozomi's interest would seep through, and then, you'd catch Takumi responding to 'Karua's' interest... with more interest for once.

(Now the brain doesn't know what to do. Oh sure, you want to take charge of your destiny, but actually it's better to just sleep and forget it all. Not like you ever cared about learning anything, right?)

I'd say Takumi's avoidance mechanisms later, are a response to Nozomi's existence as if she was a virus. Which... says a lot about the fascist state of the Artificial Satellite, and how Takumi was designed for the 'most ordinary kind of life' that wasn't meant to know it.

It's kind of unclear how the programming works- whether it takes the subject's base personality and uses it to run an 'AI scenario' based upon whatever Kamukura wanted to project into them, or if it doesn't bother matching personality at all and just shoves scenes into their head regardless if it's something they'd do. Either way, it feels that something went especially wrong with Takumi, even if his personality matched the 'memories' he was given, because for the first time one of the pod-programs was actually adapting to outside stimuli.

The symbolism about that moon is especially interesting. Because Eito - the 'moon' - learns the truth about the world and its wars, and remains a significant challenge for Takumi to grapple with- only for him to kill him and redo everything at the end of the first scenario, suggesting he had kind of failed that (basically undoing the work that Eito had done to stop the weapon without knowing that they're not on Earth, for one...). The moon also represents 'illusion'- what the SDU look up at from Futurum is actually the Artificial Satellite where they've spent their whole lives in a pod, Eito's major trauma deals with illusions that physically warp what humans are (the glitch also doesn't even fully distinguish between 'Human' and 'Futuran' in the first place which makes it even less of an objective judgement)...

...on that note, this here from the Casual route continues to haunt me, and it's been hard to put into words exactly why. Because it might very well have come from Eito's mouth if he were there, since he's trapped in some terrible stuff too. But Eito's not there- that's a dream state that Takumi is in, so those words came from Takumi.

Karua's existence wasn't planned. At all. She's an accident caused by Nozomi's data affecting pod-Takumi's early development, apparently to the degree of making him and his mother latch onto her.

(I do believe that Takumi was supposed to be the boring normie protagonist with the most bogstandard mental stability [ETA: relatively, at least] but, when Nozomi got involved and introduced a 'wild card'... ohhhhh boy.)

But more importantly, Takumi and Eito share this in common- both of their pods were altered in some way, to profound extents. In Eito's case the intrusion screwed with the brain itself, giving him a kind of psychosis disorder. As for Takumi, something appeared in his world that shouldn't have been there, and his own brain was highly implied to be responsible for projecting a whole person.

In one Box of Calamity path, Takumi winds up experiencing a state of psychosis that causes the world to become horribly distorted. So maybe uh, Takumi already experiences something like this, if only under a very particular kind of distress. It would go a long way to explain why he experiences hallucinations at those times- like god damn, Karua's existence itself is like a drawn-out hallucination.