#granted i could've worded this better but y'know what i mean

[cure-stars]

thinking about how star twinkle precure, once you put aside all it's other more obvious themes, is about like. how we act with outsiders and how it's okay to set aside biases and understand them regardless

[hopeymchope]

There were so many ways that Juzo could've prevented Hajime from getting caught in something that he shouldn't be in and he could've and should've handled it a lot better than say, verbally abusing him and beating him. It's not his fault that he didn't know Hajime struggled with his self esteem since he had no talent but he has as much responsibility for his actions as much as the minors in the series and that shit pushed Hajime to become Izuru. You don't know what your words + actions will do.

Note: This post contains three asks, all of which relate to Juzo Sakakura and were sent in response to this very lengthy post.

Surely the Main Building is locked in some way, right? There's got to be something besides just Juzo and some security guards keeping people away. Maybe the building doesn't open from the outside with a key card or something? Y'know — like every damn college dorm, at least? If that's the case, Juzo needed to do very little. He could've just watched Hajime get frustrated and let him go.

But okay, sure — maybe he wanted to scare Hajime off from pursuing the matter farther, or maybe security guards really are the only line of defense for the building. In either case, he could just yell at Hajime and threaten to lock him up. Screaming at students is a time-honored punishment for bad behavior in Japan, and it is plenty effective in shaming them and belittling them all by itself - attention is drawn to them as the teacher loudly tells them how disappointing they've been and so on. And even if it was an idle threat, I think it'd be easy to convince this teenager that'd never been in the main building that Hope's Peak is so special and so protective of its "talented" students that it actually has some kind of brig/detention cells for people it deems to be a threat. And again, sure — it's the heat of the moment, Juzo couldn't think that creatively in time, blah blah whatever. He STILL didn't need to go that hard on Hajime. He could've beaten him and tackled him to the ground and told him that the building is strictly off-limits to outsiders and that SURELY would be enough!

It's pretty clear that his main reason for "hating" Makoto is because Makoto took down Enoshima, the person he was unable to stop. Naegi is a reminder of his biggest failure. So, sure — you could easily extrapolate and imagine the above to be the case.

If that'd happened, it would've had to have been before we ever got to the Future Arc part of the timeline, and I think that'd lose us a lot. Granted - if we had Kamukura kill Juzo, it could've happened as part of his efforts to protect Junko. So if we do that, we could excise the entire "Juzo let Junko go free to keep his gay feelings a secret" chestnut, and I believe that'd be an improvement overall.

On tlip side, though, with him dying that early, we'd never see Juzo display his unwavering loyalty for Munakata in action, he'd never come within moments of finally confessing the truth, and there are all kinds of smaller moments we'd have to replace with something else. For example: Does Asahina risk being punched by someone who is less likely to employ their hands in the first place? Or does she get a different Forbidden Action entirely? Besides, isn't it worse that he was eventually run through by the person he loved most, who did it out of a misunderstanding? I mean... that's almost too brutal.