#how to help izuru combat his bone deep depression while not having his relationship with hiko like. fix him. yknow

[alstroemerian-dragon]

izuru is so interesting to me conceptually. like i know in canon he’s kind of nothing unfortunately. at least in game canon, he shows up right at the end, says some eugenics-y shit, voices hajimes intrusive thoughts, and then hes gone, but. the concept of him, as hajime, but with everything that made him Hajime Hinata stripped away and buried under so much conditioning and bullshit that he cant reach it, is so. its SO. yknow.

its the whole argument about what makes us the people we are, right? if you take a person, and then erase literally all the memories they have of their own identity, are they still that person? have you taken away everything that makes them Them and made them a completely different one? how does that change, and pardon the philosophical question, their soul?

and the thing about izuru is that you can not tell me the memory repression was perfect. you can not tell me that hopes peak academy perfected the art of lobotomy so well that they completely erased every speck of hajime hinata that existed inside izuru kamukura. that boy felt what was missing he knew there was a hole the size of the fucking ocean in his head and he felt every centimeter of it. did he care? up for debate. izuru didnt seem to care about anything, really (which… i have some thoughts about his eugenics conditioning by the academy in regards to that but thats maybe another post). but i definitely think given enough time, some of that would have started to come back. maybe even after the events of the first game, when the school was open again, and junko was dead, and izuru was able to actually explore the place he was held and experimented in and look at the files, and discover his old name. something like that would definitely trigger some memory recovery, or at least a moderate breakdown of some kind.

i dont know. people have said before that izuru is kind of an interesting metaphor for depression if you think about it, and theyre right, he is. he doesnt care enough about anything in life, he doesnt care about hygiene, nothing is going to catch and hold his attention because he thinks he knows how everything in the world works so whats the point in even trying? but he isnt just a metaphor. thats who hajime was during that time. now im definitely one of the people who thinks hajime was a pretty depressed kid anyway, unable to fulfill what he thought he needed to be, constantly pressured to be something he wasnt and couldnt be. but izuru was so much worse. they gave that boy fucking. ultimate depression. super high school level depression. i definitely think the only reason izuru didnt ever do anything drastic about how utterly miserable he was is because. a lot of it was background noise to him? his brain was just blocked off so those triggers were unable to fire? and because. to be honest. thats truly so much work. especially with the reflexes and instincts and empowerment the experiments gave him. and junko’s despair was just intriguing enough to keep him moving

its just something i think about. if someone had been willing or able to just. talk to izuru and offer him a hand. understand that he was hurting and that he didnt have to be. that just because there were holes in his identity didnt mean he couldnt create his own pieces to fit into them. i truly think that if he’d had that kind of presence during the tragedy his brain would have unlocked itself. maybe not all the memories would come back, but he’d be able to feel stuff again at least. and thats… something.