#yoji shono

(MAJOR JUDGEMENT SPOILERS)

I gotta say, between Mitsuru Kuroiwa and Yoji Shono, I think the scariest villain in all of Judgment has to be Shono. Like, yeah, Kuroiwa was pretty damn scary in that he reminded me of the Terminator at times, but Shono is more terrifying on a completely different level.

At first glance, he seems like a harmless pushover; someone who is bossed around by his superiors all the time. But what makes Shono truly scary is that his meek demeanour hides a more unhinged and cruel personality that enables him to go to extreme lengths and cross every single moral line for the sake of AD-9, like murdering an innocent woman, framing her boyfriend for the crime, and engaging in human experimentation on yakuza thugs (criminal or not, even they don’t deserve to be experimented on). And that’s not even getting into the fact that Shono set up his creepy secret lab in an abandoned love hotel, of all places...

Ultimately, Shono is the literal definition of “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”, except he lost sight of his original motives along the way, and despite knowing that AD-9 was impossible to develop any further, he just kept on testing it out of some kind of need to be right. And look where ignoring the reality of the drug’s side effects got him.