#me writing starstruck meta like a year after the campaign aired

[thevalleyisjolly]

I think regardless of whether Norman Takamori was a “real” PC or just a set up for Skip to take over, his actual story asks some interesting questions of “Do bad guys deserve to have bad things happen to them” and “Can someone be both perpetrator and victim?”  Because yeah, we all know Norman sucks.  He’s actively complicit in covering up war crimes, he’s a cruel boss to his employees, and he never really shows remorse for his actions.  Does any of that mean that he deserved to be framed and scapegoated by the Brigade for an entirely separate crime?  Does any of that mean that he deserved to have his bodily autonomy violated again and again?

Norman’s story, unpleasant as the character himself is, presents a lot of difficult questions about the meaning of justice and punishment.  Are the two the same thing?  Narratively, it is so very satisfying to see terrible characters get their comeuppance.  Is it comeuppance?  Are the things which happen to Norman punishment for the bad things he did?  If someone “gets away” with one bad thing and later suffers consequences for another bad thing, does the second incident serve as punishment or justice or divine retribution for the first? 

There’s also the element of narrative - fiction is not morality, and in our own enjoyment of the story, we want to see bad people receive the punishment or consequences that we feel they deserve.  That’s not a bad thing, that’s just the basic nature of most stories!  Good deeds render desired outcomes, bad deeds render satisfying consequences, people gets their just deserts.  At the same time, fiction is also a way for us to understand our own perspectives and thinking a little better.  There’s nothing wrong with saying “I’m happy that the fictional war criminal lived a miserable life,” but there is a further opportunity to think, “What is justice to me?  What is the meaning of crime and punishment?  How do I understand the issue of deserts (what people deserve, not the arid water-less biome)?  What values and beliefs are important to me when defining these answers?”

I don’t think the actual answers to whether or not Norman the fictional character deserved all the bad things that happened to him are all that important, nor do people’s personal answers serve as an indicator of moral superiority because this is again a fictional character in a fictional story.  Rather, I’m far more interested in what Norman’s narrative asks us to think about.  What is justice?  What is punishment?  What is consequence?  Are those things one and the same, and if they’re different, how so?  What do people who do bad things deserve, and why do we think that?  How do we understand victimhood?  Again, the answers to any of these are personal and neither an indicator of moral superiority nor degeneracy - what’s valuable is the process of thinking through them.

TL;DR The story of Norman Takamori presents an opportunity to reflect on the way we each think about justice and punishment and crime.  The specific fictional circumstances of the narrative are not meant to be a one-on-one equivalent for our real-life experiences and morality.  They simply provide a starting off point to think about broader concepts of judgment and consequence by presenting them in an extreme, even ridiculous, setting, so that we start to wonder “If this is how something looks in the most outrageous scenario, I wonder what it might look like closer to home.”