#im not really…that interested in exactly what ryukishi was trying to do with his character because its so muddled

[grassoftunnel]

Too Too Abstract Ushiromiya Kinzo Not To Be Respected

Kinzo being the person he was who dgaf about his legal family at all gives so much opportunity for people to project on him. Like because he gives them so little (even if that little is just being terrifying and violent and cruel, when not completely apathetic).

When the series is all said and done he’s less a character and more an abstracted memory (or at least this way of reading the story makes me feel better about the ways that it lets him off very light…or tries to do historical revisionism ijbol 😭 that man dgaf about those people! He had places in his heart for Genji, Nanjo, Lion, the Beatrices and that is IT!).

We don’t get an unambiguous look into his interiority. On the face of it, he was a brilliant man, magnetic, dazzling, romantic and passionate, a genius who achieved the redemption of the Ushiromiya fortune and reached miracles through sheer force of will. He speaks beautifully and projects an impressive aura that drags everyone around him into his own gravity. He is fiercely dedicated to his own philosophy, and completely unknowable to the people under his thrall. The ultimate Byronic hero. He even ends the story, utterly contented, without any regrets, having gotten every single thing that he wanted out of life. But our story doesn’t concern itself with that.

In our story he is nothing more than an illusion, he’s been dead for years, and gone mentally for longer than that, the characters we do get to know never really knew him. But his ghost is present in every shadow, eternally looming over the mansion, the island, and written into the wounds he left on their hearts. But that ghost is no longer him. We have only the damning facts of his life and the distorted, irreconcilable fragments of his memory in the minds of the people he left behind.

Whatever power he held in life, in our game he is a piece to the very last. Existing only as what others wanted and needed him to be, cosigned to the fate he tried to force on the Beatrices.