#shiutpost

Everything about the rooftop scene, from talking about the city, to Shinigami commenting on how ominous he feels to her, to the fact that he's the person who explains the rumor that the rain affects peoples' bodies.

Highlighted text tends to be easy to overlook, but I can't help but feel like there's some significance to his usage of "illusion in the rain". It's like he knows something that nobody else can see (and an obvious foreshadowing of how the rain is one of the main means of covering up Kanai Ward's mystery).

But this segues into the themes of his later chapter which also focuses on Vivia, who mirrors Yakou in a lot of ways, beyond just being another guy who muses on about peace and quiet.

Speaking of, a mirror is what Vivia uses as a metaphor for the benefit of blissful ignorance and the potential catastrophic dangers of the painful truth.

For the purposes of this chapter, he is explaining the type of pain and the effect on Yuma's world view that uncovering Yakou's crime will incur. It also acts as a setup for the development of Yuma's conviction that he will later need to use in the final chapter of the game. But the distorted reality the Vivia explains in the mirror does call me back to Yakou's "illusion in the rain" comment.

Vivia also explains that the truth that Yuma uncovers for truth's sake will lead to the destruction of the world. While he could be referring to the world and humanity in general, in the context of this chapter, world can mean a lot of things though, such as Yuma's innocence in the way he views the world as he knows it.

Or namely, from Makoto's point of view, it could also mean the destruction of the homunculi and the only version of the world that Makoto believes they can exist in.

Did Yakou come to a similar conclusion as Makoto based on what he found out?

Like Vivia in chapter 4, who did not want the culprit to be revealed, it seemed like Yakou had the full intention of not cooperating with investigating the Kanai Ward mystery until he was forced to by a directive from Number One. Even so, he came off as if encouraging the detectives to drag their feet on it for the sake of staying out of trouble.

But we know that he is not lazy, unmotivated, or stupid. In a world where you're competing with people who are fast-tracked into the WDO if they have literal super powers, Yakou was inducted by pure detective skill. He had definitely been spending a lot of his time laying low and investigating Kanai Ward himself, because he didn't trust the UG or the WDO if they turned their attention to the city.

Yakou already knew about the homunculus research in some way.

Even if he didn't know about everyone being a homunculus, he at least knew enough that he believed that the city itself would be shattered by the involvement of the UG and WDO.

And then we get to chapter 5 with the mindless zombie homunculi.

Except, they're not all completely mindless. As a matter of fact, I had come to notice something about all the non-aggressive homunculi: they all seemed to have some degree of awareness about Amaterasu's research.

The fake Zilch, who was one of Yomi's closest advisors and knew about all of Dr Huesca's and Yomi's activity in the lab concerning homunculus research, and was implied to be the one who killed Yakou's wife for whistleblowing. Fink, who was propositioned by Makoto himself to infiltrate the lab, and who was then killed by Makoto for 'knowing too much'. Dr Huesca, who was the head researcher for the homunculi. And the former CEO, who was the prime overseer of the research.

And then there was Yakou, who gives Yuma the video evidence of Dr Huesca's death at the hands of the homunculi as he explained the results of the experiment. The easy explanation is that Makoto planted this video on the zombie Yakou to be given to Yuma in the restricted area.

However, another thing that the non-aggressive zombies had in common is that they seemed to be stuck thinking about what seems to be their final thoughts before their death, barring the former CEO who was unusually lucid compared to all of them.

Considering this, I feel like Yakou's final thoughts were for Yuma to expose the truth about the homunculi for him, and to give him the DVD as the key evidence he needed. Whether Makoto gave Yakou this video, or if Yakou already had this video himself, his final thought before dying was to make sure Yuma got it.

I always thought it was a bit strange for Yakou to go and decide to murder Dr Huesca at the slightest provocation by Yomi, and then had this whole complicated coverup plan. If Kurumi could look into Yakou's background for only a day and come to the conclusion that Amaterasu had killed his wife for whistleblowing, then Yakou himself would've definitely already known and could've tried to kill Dr Huesca a long time ago.

I don't think the provocation was by Yomi's letter. I believe at some point, he had found out that Huesca and Yomi could possibly leak information about the homunculus research. He decided to kill Huesca as a gambit reveal Yomi's involvement with leaking research before it could get out into the public and destroy Kanai Ward, and he entrusted this truth to Yuma and the rest of his detectives. Yakou knew that the lie that they were living, the one that was keeping Kanai Ward together, wasn't going to last much longer.

This conveniently aligned with Makoto's motives to oust Yomi. Makoto, the one who also knew that Yomi would cause the lie holding Kanai Ward together to unravel, and who happened to introduce Fink to Yakou. Fink thought that Yakou did not know about Makoto orchestrating their meeting, and perhaps he was right in that Yakou didn't know that it was Makoto specifically, but maybe Makoto was the one who tipped Yakou off to Amaterasu's homunculus research possibly being leaked and may have even given Yakou the DVD.

Makoto may not have exactly manipulated Yakou. It just simply that both Yakou and Makoto similarly knew that the UG sticking their nose into Kanai Ward about the homunculus research was incredibly dangerous. Makoto simply gave Yakou the ultimatum and means to stop Yomi. The difference is that Makoto's goal was to get rid of Yomi and assume full control of the city in order to further suppress its secret, but Yakou's goal was the provide the truth to his detectives in order to fix things.

And I wrote all this BEFORE the Yakou DLC came out.

Where we find out that Yakou has had the prototype cure for homunculi the whole time. And depending on whether or not his wife here is a ghost or a hallucination, it seems like she had always known that there would be a need to regenerate the zombified brain cells of homunculi. Yakou might've been biding time not only to try and figure out how to reconcile the whole homunculus research issue without the UG destroying Kanai Ward, but maybe also for someone to finish research on this medicine.