anyways, i also always thought it was kinda funny/telling in it's implications? the way dr nitta was just kind of disposed of in the end. they actually emphasize this point, that his life was irrelevant in the end even despite his huge contributions and i guess relative importance in his role. slight implication then that he has by now outlived his usefulness, given aogami production has ended. so his role may have only had to do with aogami specifically and not tsuku himself. it's notable that in CoV hayao specifically says something like 'i downloaded the fusion program from aogami when he got back' so i assume he didn't have that ability previously either, but they weren't focused on developing that technology for him specifically at least and only for aogami it feels like. i also wondered before wtf the difference was in creating a 'proto-human' when humans already have the ability to Reproduce which creates 'a living being with a human heart', but i guess it makes more sense if 'proto-human' refers to something more like a nahobino specifically and not just like a human baby lmao.

it seems like the goal of the sidequest was to bring dr nitta back alive, but bethel's supposed true goal seems to have been avoiding the 'worst-case scenario' of protofiend technology being leaked. but even this sounds a little off. can't really state why but i just question if anyone could even use or exploit that technology at this point. the average demon probably can't do shit with it. either way, i just felt like the real true motive behind this sidequest was to dispose of dr nitta and neutralize the threat from mephisto in the process. how much hayao knew of all this or planned it idk, but even if it weren't some convoluted scheme on his part i would assume he knew full well the intricacies hidden in this situation. he must have known at least that dr nitta had not been aging and thus likely knew as well that it was due to demonic influence or something. going off this, he should have known as well then that once the pact with mephisto was fulfilled, dr nitta would die regardless. of course they can't have mephisto obtaining dr nitta's soul nor potentially leaking protofiend tech to him i guess? so he had to be stopped in the end. but mephisto's involvement may have been something that was known and considered in all this, however much of a scheme it was on hayao's part.

so perhaps the real goal of the sidequest was indeed to just finish the job by defeating mephisto, and then all the secrets that might have been involved in aogami's creation would be safe forever with likely hayao alone. i'm always curious of all the secrets he must know of all of bethel jp's operations in the shadows, like tell usss. so i guess dr nitta had to be silenced so that he doesn't fall into mephisto's hands at the end of their contract with all of bethel jp's secrets, but also so their secrets are never found out by the angels either.

during the quest they do also talk about how attaining the power to create 'life' through this creation of a 'proto-human' is basically like humans gaining the power of gods. humans gaining the powers of creation and all. if a 'proto-human' is essentially equivalent to nahobino, complete gods with souls, then being able to create them would be akin to the power izanagi and the 3 amatsu had held. so i have a suspicion then that hayao might have considered humans attaining this power to be blasphemous, and it's hubris on dr nitta's part to seek out this power, so maybe hayao felt he deserved to die as judgment for his transgressions against the gods or something. but also to take away this power from humanity in the end as it's something that should only belong to the gods.

dr nitta really did just outlive his usefulness in the end, i guess, and hayao's personal feelings towards him as a person with those ambitions may not have been pleasant lmao. hayao as tsukuyomi certainly does seem to be the type who feels as if he's had to endure far too much humiliation as a result of his 'fallen' status with being stripped of Knowledge and forced to submit to the Creator and his angels. and also someone very arrogant with a lot of pride. given all this i feel like he would also be the type to find it offensive if humans were to seek out the power of gods, so he likely only tolerated dr nitta out of necessity and convenience as a means to an end. also disclaimer i'm not considering this quest from the perspective of if you do the quest fused with tsuku in CoV instead, just because it doesn't seem like they really updated the quest to reflect that difference so i don't feel like it's very reliable. tsuku being like 'well time to report back to our superiors' at the end of the quest like bitch that's YOU……just tell me the secrets already!! i wish we could shake him down for all the sordid secrets he must be hiding.

anyways hayao's been playing some sort of 4D chess all this time i just don't know to what extent lmao. he's the most competent and intelligent incompetent dumbass somehow, man's full of contradictions seriously.

somewhat related, i think if i were hayao then my thought process would've been something like 'i've done something utterly unforgivable in butchering susa to try and salvage what we had left BUT. if i can just bring him back through having aogami attain nahobinohood somehow then all our problems are solved because we'll have the power to defeat everyone and reclaim everything we lost yayy'. it's a really convenient ideal scenario where he gets to undo his own 'crime' and be forgiven for it, make amends to susa, AND return everything to the way it was before. i guess it was indeed appealing enough to sacrifice everything into trying to achieve this goal, which probably made it even worse when aoshu came back as a nahobino but NOT as the susanoo who would just do as he's told and follow his plans. hayao really had to do everything himself then in that case.

the irony then is that even in his grief, guilt and remorse, hayao can still only view susa as a convenient pawn to achieve his own ends. even had this plan succeeded he was banking on the fact that susa would just act exactly as hayao wanted him to. another layer of irony here is that i think hayao's inability to view susa as being anything but an accessory and an extension of himself is Because of the love and enmeshment that bound them together. because susa was created in his image, because they were pieces that once came from the same place, tsuku really doesn't distinguish susa as being a separate person of his own, just as he likely doesn't distinguish himself from ammy either. tsuku is content with being an extension of his sister so perhaps this was the only way he could understand his relationship with his brother as well. it's also ironic that for people who were so close and enmeshed, there was still no real understanding between them. i guess you could say that he couldn't truly make amends without letting susa go, and he could not change himself either without letting his sister go. he couldn't atone for anything until he was able to process his grief and define himself as an individual.

miyazu who does try to help a little by tending to sahori's wounds also seems ignorant to what's truly going on, as if she's struggling to conceptualize or unwilling to acknowledge the bullying. most of the kids who do take note of it seem like they don't really know what to do, but perhaps they fear for themselves more than they care about sahori, and they would rather not get involved. you could maybe say this was the case for dazai as well, who expressed wanting to help, but ultimately was discouraged out of it by his own lack of self-esteem. he calls himself 'just some nobody' and admits defeat immediately so he doesn't even try, which was an odd excuse to me. he's certainly not confident in his own abilities, but i also got the sense that he made note of his own 'status' within the school's 'hierarchy' to tell himself that there's no way he could stop the bullies because he didn't have the influence to convince anyone that they were wrong and to stand up against them. so more likely, he would just be outcasted and bullied along with sahori, was probably the scenario he was afraid of. this goes back to my old thread on dazai, his parallels with sahori and the way he saw himself in her i think. i do want to note that MC does not help her either, at least not until it's too late, so idk make of that what you will.

their school does have this oppressive top-down structure to it where the students all seem very caught up in status. they talk about 'famous students', 'school big names', 'no name losers', etc which honestly made me laugh lmao. their bonds with each other seem rather shallow, and they seem willing to backstab each other as necessary, the way sahori's bullies tried to do when confronted by lahmu. none of this is at all unrealistic, especially given the emphasis on jouin being an exceedingly prestigious school. the students are told they're like the cream of the crop, they have their egos inflated and convinced they're better than everyone else. and their vapidness and lack of any true identities, values, beliefs means they have nothing else but their egos and insecurities.

and all of this is very ironic because the idea is jouin is likely a sanctuary/prison of sorts for Knowledge bearers. they're gathered up and kept both under watch and protection in the school by bethel. the fact that they Should be these idk bright pillars of Knowledge who possess the true wills of former gods and shit, and yet they've become so hollowed out of any substance or identity is very ironic. i don't know if you can maybe say it's intentional on the angels' or God's or whoever's part, but it almost feels as if the school is designed to 'destroy their spirit' and trap them within the illusion so that there's even less chance of them reuniting with their demon counterparts to become nahobinos.

either way, hayao certainly talked as if he knew of yuzuru all this time, but he never made any move to actually meet him. there's like really a lot of diff possibilities as to why this may be and it's hard to narrow it down lol. some form of protection? he didn't want to potentially exert influence over yuzuru and mislead him or something knowing he had his Knowledge? or was it more like some fear on hayao's own part, he didn't want to meet a reflection of himself? knowing this guy it's probably some complicated mix of both these possibilities at least tbh 🧍.

the feeling i get as well though is that even in CoC, i think he was trying to allow yuzuru his own autonomy to choose what it is he wanted to do at any given time. he didn't involve yuzuru in this mess, but he also didn't go out of his way to prevent him from getting involved in this mess. he probably knew to some extent that yuzuru got involved because he wanted to help protect tokyo or whatever so he didn't stop him if that was his will. this is sorta what he tells miyazu in CoV too but i think it also applied in CoC. that's probably why he stopped to ask yuzuru for his input all the damn time in CoC (all while never extending the same courtesy to us 🙄). they were probably still misled due to a combination of reasons including the fact that they never sorted out their own issues to understand better what it was they really wanted (such as yuzuru saying in CoV that he thought he wanted to protect tokyo, but he was really just doing it for miyazu until she told him to think about protecting others like her too), yuzuru still being a highschooler figuring shit out himself so he wasn't exactly particularly good at leading the way (and hayao is too much of a damn mess to do any of that either), but ALSO the fact that none of the other nahobino pairs really had any guiding figures unlike with aoshu, which is maybe part of the difference as well that set them apart. the goddess was specifically on their side lmao, but they also had some guidance from a number of other charas like idk goko and sophia i guess.

anyways it was just kind of notable that hayao seemed to have gone out of his way to avoid meeting both MC and yuzuru all this time, but it feels like his reasons are different for yuzuru. i guess he met tao probably around when she was born literally just as the result of the investigation into wtf happened to ammy so that was inevitable. i've always wondered what sort of relationship they had given he very likely resented her the same way he resented aoshu. but he couldn't avoid her the same way he avoided MC this whole time.

ANYWAYS, so it is very fascinating then that ne-no-kuni seems to embody all of life, death, rebirth and eternity. AND that it's a land directly connected to susanoo, which then associates these themes with him as well. strictly speaking, within the myths it seems very vague as to where this realm actually is. it's simply referred to as the place to where susanoo was banished by izanagi, so maybe it can be seen as several different possible locations that are just simply neither takamagahara (heaven) nor ashihara-no-nakatsukuni (earth). so i guess the idea then is that ne-no-kuni must be either a subterranean underworld possibly equivalent to yomi (especially with its association to susanoo's mother, izanami), and/or it's an otherworld beyond both heaven and earth, possibly transcending this material reality. note that takamagahara may be more akin to an 'earthly heaven' representing like the sky or something rather than a transcendent realm. nirai kanai of the ryukyuan religion is a land lying beyond the sea or on the seabed, from which all things in the material world originate and return to, it sounds like. note the similarities in nirai kanai and ne-no-kuni both being named as a land of 'roots' or 'origins'.

anyways, a realm beyond the earth and heavens…that starts to sound familiar. that's where lucifer awaited us right? so a transcendent realm beyond our material reality. it's not to say that lucifer himself was in ne-no-kuni necessarily, his realm seemed more associated with outer space, which is i guess also a 'realm beyond the earth and heavens'. but i guess given the similarities between these different transcendent realms, maybe it's just hinting at that higher dimension of sorts the dead gods ascended to, of which susanoo is also closely connected to.

i'm honestly still trying to figure out what to make of lucifer's 'death' & defeat at our hands at the end of the game and what exactly it means for him and us. lucifer who must have defeated the Creator without becoming nahobino, who consumed the Creator's Knowledge and presumably not even his own. also note he does say 'consume' i believe, not 'fuse' or something? this is just a tangent but i guess 'consumption' of Knowledge is indeed a thing in contrast to whatever fusion aoshu had going on lmao. lucifer who told us we'll be free from the mandala system, and yet what does that even represent allegorically? especially if the cycle of life and death and all that isn't necessarily something we strictly want to escape from entirely. lucifer who transcended but still needed to be slain by us anyways, what did that symbolize? was his 'death' there necessary for his own liberation, or ours? or both? anyways idk i guess maybe i'll think about all this another time lol. maybe it has something to do with the genealogical themes and ancestor worship, putting to rest the old gods/ancestors who transcend to an eternity of their own as they watch over the world that now belongs to the new gens in the new world shaped by them. the old gods who have gone through the cycle already and gained their enlightenment can now transcend to an eternity beyond it…lucifer just spares us the necessity of the same grueling cycle with the consumption of his Knowledge, maybe that's what it is? idk i just thought the themes and lore surrounding ne-no-kuni was neat. uh. perhaps this too is like umineko actually 🧍

Edit for further thoughts:

i guess the mandala system is probably just representative of like…samsara basically, cycle of reincarnation and all that. the 'goal' is to eventually break free of the cycle but i think the existence of the cycle itself isn't inherently 'bad'. you essentially get as many tries as needed to try again until you get it 'right', i guess. it kinda sucks but there's a very forgiving aspect to it in that there's always a 'way out' in contrast to concepts of like, eternal damnation and hell and all.

additionally, i think the cycle is only 'broken' for us specifically with lucifer's defeat. i don't remember his exact dialogue anymore but i recall him saying something like 'your world will now surely be everlasting' or something. i don't think this means that the like…objective reality, the world as a whole will be 'everlasting' and unchanging or something. society itself will not remain in stasis and i think there will still be the rise and fall of different societies across time. i think it means something like our 'individual' world, considering each individual person can be a 'world' of their own, will no longer be subject to that cycle because we have been freed from it and understood our true will. we've reached enlightenment so we can now live a true, fulfilling life or whatever and at the end of it, we'll ascend to that same eternal realm to be freed from the cycle of rebirth. but i think there's still value in going back to the earthly realm and living out our lives fully in a brand new world or something, especially with the emphasis on the nahobino being part of the new gen who haven't truly gotten to live yet. it's possible as well then to interpret all this as…in the new world, everyone who died 'prematurely' without achieving enlightenment will now be able to live again fully, in line with their true wills, until they reach the end and attain eternity too. maybe that's also what's meant by each new world being freed from the mandala system with lucifer's defeat, i guess it could apply to everyone within the new world as well. but the world itself and society i think will continue to progress and change cyclically.

and the mandala system itself is not entirely destroyed on an even higher scale across all timelines and multiverses or something. but i think the 'goal' isn't to destroy the system but to like…idek help everyone achieve enlightenment to be free from the system instead. the system i think is just a tool that allows us to reach enlightenment, though through a much longer and more grueling process than the ideal liberation a nahobino could offer. here in the REAL WORLD we don't have such a thing really so having a system like that might be better than eternal damnation or something 🤷. i think it's just a process of progressive learning. it's either that or you return to the womb and never be born, which is also the other option represented in smtv i think, though perhaps overall less ideal.

and considering all this, i guess it's notable especially then that neutral route is the only ending where we never fight lucifer at all, so i guess the implication is uh. nobody is freed lol, not even us. we figure nothing out at all. i would argue all the CoC endings are too far from ideal for enlightenment and liberation to make sense as a result but i dunno. i think both neutral routes especially though we don't actually attain liberation at all. even in true neutral where we defeat lucifer i don't think we actually achieve enlightenment and liberation from the cycle. the MC who has given up the chance to live again also doesn't seem to ascend to that paradisiacal eternity For The Free And Enlightened or whatever and instead remains in the world itself, albeit not actually living within it. i do still wonder what it means that we see two different MCs at the end of true neutral so maybe i'll get back to that another time 🧍.

i guess in a way it's like an ending where you don't actually reach the 'journey's end' that's marked by an eventual transcendence to eternity. it's possible lucifer's defeat in itself isn't enough to guarantee our liberation and there needs to be further efforts from us as well. which could mean something similar for the other far from ideal endings. i guess it's apt thematically that lucifer isn't the one who saves us, it still has to be our own will that saves us, he merely gives us the chance to do so. true neutral does feel very much like an 'inner' world of MC's that we're looking at instead, where we've returned to the familiarity of his previous life right before everything (literally) went to hell lmao. and that life was illusory and empty.

i guess maybe you could potentially break down 'the steps to the ultimate goal of enlightenment and liberation' as:

find and understand your true will through the trials and tribulations of daat

attain the freedom to live and learn how to live through overcoming fear of death

?? achieve awareness of the cycle (through lucifer's defeat)

put all this together in the new world and fully live out a fulfilling life

??? profit. die at the end of life and ascend to eternity