#public judgment

[cryptidwithaninternetconnection]

Look???? At how my brother writes low case As????

Mf that’s a fancy 2????

[stuckinapril]

friend wanted to see my tumblr, and when i told him i can’t show it to him bc it’s basically my personal diary he went “oh so I can’t see it but a bunch of strangers on tumblr can??” he literally does not get me. no one will get me like the people in my phone get me

[monachopsis-11]

I will never understand how judgmental people are, from the annoyed and confused looks I get when ordering food (I am a very selective eater and order things without sauce and vegetables most of the time) to the comments I hear my mom make about my sisters friends “oh yeah she would barely talk to me and froze when I asked her about food so I kept asking it was really weird” Okay and?

It’s not hurting them, it’s barely even affecting them so I have no idea why they care.

Let people eat what they want or not eat, a lot of people have complex relationships with food and pushing or judging them isn’t going to help. And this is just one example but there are so many, especially with disability related things (or at least things that could be disability related) that I see in my life, often they’re things that I have done to people as well.

“They didn’t even say hi or make eye contact!” about a stranger “So what? I do that” “no you’re different” etc.

But I’m not different you just don’t see that side of me or know me well enough to excuse it.

It’s the same kind of energy I get when I sit in an accessible seat as an eighteen year old who doesn’t appear disabled.

Like if I see someone behaving ‘weirdly’ in public I don’t wonder what’s wrong with them or try to avoid them I wonder if they’re overstimulated or have some kind of trauma or something that makes the environment difficult for them.

If someone is short to me or not overly talkative in a customer service situation as long as they’re not actually rude I just assume they’re having a bad day and I don’t understand why this is so hard for other people. It’s like they forget that everyone else has a life and experience as complex and challenging as their own.

And maybe a majority of the people I am kind toward or who I give the benefit of the doubt to are actually just being rude or judgmental or generally not being very nice/respectful but that’s not who I want to be.

I’d rather give the benefit of the doubt to 99 people that didn’t deserve it than judge or harass one person who did because when you’re the one struggling that does so much harm.

Honestly just be kind and leave people alone, they probably don’t deserve the intention and harassment you’re assigning to them and even if they do that’s not your place to decide if they haven’t done anything to you.

You aren’t doing anyone a service you’re wasting energy judging and harassing people who are just trying to live their lives.

I just really wish more people could be kind.

[thenewgirl76]

You know what I have yet to see in any fics where Danny is biologically related to either Bruce and Damian or one of the other batboys? The Mansons attempting to use that to their advantage and enhance their public image.

Either by spouting false praises and lying about being in Danny's corner while interacting with Bruce and his sons, or after discovering Danny's true heritage being the ones to take him in after a bad reveal in the hopes of getting into Bruce's inner circle.

Many usually gravitate towards Vlad as the abusive foster or guardian Danny needs to be rescued from, but his best friend's snooty parents that regularly look down on him just because of the elder Fenton's antics and reputation would do just as nicely.

Just imagine the comedy gold of Jeremy and Pamela barely masking their disdain for their daughter's "troubled friend" by pretending to dote on him while in Bruce's presence during a gala. Not realizing that Bruce along with every other Wayne in attendance can see right through them and is simply humoring them as well as biding his time.

Or if angst (hopefully followed by some comfort) is more your thing maybe have Danny, still reeling from Jack and Maddy's rejection latch on to the Mansons out of desperation for an adult he can trust and start believing they've had a genuine change of heart and come to care for him despite both Sam and Ida continually telling him otherwise. Only to feel the sting of betrayal a second time when while at a gathering Bruce or one of his boys approaches and tells him the Mansons are just using him to get in their good graces then show proof when Danny tries to deny it.

[jichanxo]

if you're going to feed your friends a fake story, it's important to be on the same page (the exciting follow up to turtleneck yagami)

[rabbits-of-negative-euphoria]

anyone else find the lyric

If you let me I will catch fire To let your glory and mercy shine

extremely sobering considering the direction Paramore has gone in?

[joyce-stick]

Lost Judgment's Lost Plot | joyce-stick

Didn't like the "detective boys punch school bullying revenge janitor" plot.

Previous video essay/transcript: Suzume Isn't Gay, But We Liked It Anyway

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Essay transcript:

All right, before we get started, here's the plot of Lost Judgment without all the twists. Oops, all spoilers! Oh, and also, quick note that this story deals with… or rather, invokes, the topics of bullying, suicide, bereavement, sexual assault, and of course, murder. We're gonna talk about some tropes, some themes, some ethics, and of course some casual sexism, too. Fun stuff! So. Here we go.

It’s 2008, and a student, Mitsuru Kusumoto, is being bullied at Kurokawa Academy, a Japanese private high school. His bullying is reported to his homeroom teacher, Yu Kitakata, by a classmate, Yoko Sawa. Kitakata, in order to collect evidence of the bullying, places a hidden camera in the classroom, and from this, obtains footage of several of his students bullying Mitsuru. The same day as this footage is recorded, Mitsuru attempts suicide. The suicide attempt fails and he falls into a coma which goes on to last thirteen years. Kitakata is fired as a result of this incident and later goes off the grid, changing his name and identity to “Jin Kuwana,” and branding himself as a local Yokohama handyman. Feeling guilty about having neglected to intervene in time, Kuwana subsequently plots to go about exacting his idea of justice on all the bullies who pushed their classmates to suicide. He approaches the parents asking if they’d like to get some real justice for their children, and then goes and kidnaps the former bully, and encourages the parent of the bullied child to murder them. The first such murder victim is Shinya Kawai, the one who bullied Mitsuru, and the first such murderer is Reiko Kusumoto, his mother and the Vice Minister of Health in Japan. He continues doing this for five years, amassing seven victims. To do this, Kuwana enlists the criminal accompliceship of Mitsuru’s other former bullies using the video that he recorded as blackmail material, and preserves Kawai’s body on ice to use as further leverage over them. In 2018, Akihiro Ehara sues Seiryo High School over the suicide of his son, Toshiro, who was bullied by Hiro Mikoshiba, a classmate of his. No substantive evidence turns up on account of tampering and obfuscation by the school board, and the perjurious testimony of Yoko Sawa, now a teacher at Seiryo, who is pressured into keeping quiet about the truth. As such, the case is dismissed. In 2021, Kuwana helps Ehara exact revenge on Mikoshiba. Ehara and Kuwana hatch a plot to make a public mockery of the Japanese justice system’s failures, which involves Kuwana posing as Ehara and staging a sexual harassment incident with the help of Yui Mamiya, one of Kuwana’s blackmailed ex-students, in order to furnish Ehara with an alibi for the murder of Mikoshiba. Ehara’s sexual assault case is taken on by defense attorney Saori Shirosaki, and two months later, the court declares Ehara guilty and gives him a six month sentence. As he receives his sentence, Ehara cryptically reveals the identity and location of Mikoshiba’s corpse. Shirosaki finds this suspicious, and contacts Takayuki Yagami, the protagonist of the Judgment games, asking him to sus out what in the heck is going on. Yagami and his colleagues deduce and uncover all this, with their detective skills. There is a conspiracy with a gang, Reiko Kusumoto’s political rivals, and a bunch of other people who they confront, indict, and/or beat up.

Ultimately, Yagami brings the truth about these murders to light, confronts Kuwana and beats him in a fight, and the story ends.

*cough cough cough*

Okay, um, now I don’t have to play along with this fucking Like an Ace Dragon Attorney twisty ass bullshit. I can now talk about the game without recapping the important stuff. That’s great. I think.

So, if you couldn’t tell, Lost Judgment’s plot is a tad unhinged.

Okay so one minor note before we start: Lost Judgment has a little story DLC, called The Kaito Files, which could be very quite good, but it doesn’t look worth fifty (actually thirty) dollars. This video is not about that DLC. If I ever play the DLC, maybe I’ll make a follow-up video. If you think you might want that, back the Patreon, and maybe I’ll do it. Now then…

The first Judgment, developed by Yakuza series creators Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio and released in Japan in 2018 and elsewhere in the world in 2019, is a game that I quite enjoyed. It’s a Yakuza game, meaning it has the various trappings of Yakuza games that you might’ve heard about, from the distinctive free roam town slash real time action combat random battle gameplay to the wealth of activities and diversions you can do speckled all about, and also the plot, which is still at its core the sort of wildly implausible thrilling criminal conspiracy that you’ll be used to if you’ve seen any of these games to the credits.

But it’s also a detective-themed game and a sendup of the mystery genre, meaning that its story is structured as a murder mystery, and there’s also some more detective-like flourishes in the gameplay loop, like interrogating witnesses or snooping around for clues. The story is fun, the detective stuff is fun, the game is fun. It’s also, quite notably for our purposes today, reasonably thematically cohesive.

If you’ve played any Ace Attorney game, you’ve seen this game’s basic thematic thrust: the justice system turns out skewed and often unjust results by imperfect people who make mistakes despite the best of intentions, as well as those in power trying to protect their good name, and it’s up to the law-dealing, truth-seeking protagonists to apply the law fairly and bring the truth to light. It’s Ace Attorney through a Yakuza lens, and that’s just a hell of a lot of fun. While there are some clumsily executed minor story beats, and some fumbled talking points, those don’t drag the game down significantly, and it is, nonetheless, a good time.

While I would overall recommend Lost Judgment to RGG veterans and anyone who really liked the first Judgment, I’d say that recommendation comes with reservations, because, oh gosh, that plot. It is much clumsier than the first game’s, much more thematically complicated, and rhetorically baffling. It’s also probably the most messed up scenario I’ve ever encountered in an RGG game, and that’s unfortunately not to its benefit, because the game really isn’t interested in engaging fully with the implications of this plot, and I think that’s pretty disappointing.

But before this story gets into the weeds, we do a cold open on a run-of-the-mill case for Yagami and his colleagues where you do a regular old Yakuza games tutorial, get to meet the characters, the parkour and stealth mechanics that this game introduces, and of course, the cats. This game is full of cats. Then we’re whisked away by the plot to do a first chapter case, where Yagami and Kaito are enlisted to help by their buds up in Yokohama who’ve been contracted to deal with a case of alleged bullying. Obviously the bullying is real, they help stop it, they all pat themselves on the back— and then the chapter ends with Yagami getting that call from friendly lawyer girl Shirosaki.

Before I continue, it’s important to note that the bullying of which this game’s story speaks is very much a real problem that plagues real life Japanese schools, and also that I don’t know shit about it. I am not Japanese, I have never been a student in a Japanese school, and I have no connections to anyone who ever has been. I’m a 24 year old transgender plural lesbian otaku failwoman from the US of A. I wasn’t even a student in any American schools, bar a few specific limited circumstances, as I was homeschooled. As such I’m pretty far removed from the cultural context and life experiences that might make this game’s story ring very differently to a Japanese player, or to anyone who’s been a victim of school bullying. So, I can only authoritatively comment on the topic of school bullying insofar as how much its invocation affected my enjoyment of this video game. In short, do your own research! Or, if you don’t, then just, assume that everything I say is true and don’t fact check any of it.

School bullying in Japan is infamously traumatizing, and often has tragically violent outcomes, the most well-known and oft-discussed of which is suicide. This is often chalked up to a few specific factors, namely the stifling routine and workload of school life, the cultural pressure to achieve harmony and not rock the boat, and school boards who have a vested interest in sweeping potential scandals under the rug.

sources: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

It’s a pretty serious social issue, to put it mildly, and one that, like all social issues, has naturally come to attract satire. My favorite examples of such satire are the erotic horror visual novel Wonderful Everyday, or Subahibi, and the manga/anime series Sangatsu no Lion (March Comes in Like a Lion in English, but let’s just call it Sangatsu), each of which have a bullying arc.

Subahibi’s bullying arc is oriented as a revenge fantasy where the victims fight back against the bullies, presenting this violent resistance as a necessary and natural outcome of the cruelty of the antagonists and the impotency of the teachers (although, to avoid misrepresenting Subahibi, I should clarify that this subplot is a relatively short section of the game, and there is a lot more going on in it that is far beyond the scope of this video).

Meanwhile, Sangatsu takes a more down-to-earth approach that frankly discusses the nuances of the issue and has everyone involved more peacefully (and probably more realistically) confront the social causes at play. Both these works each focus effectively on one of these two angles, and do them well in their own ways, but Lost Judgment sort of awkwardly marries the realistic social commentary and the revenge plot, to the murder mystery, legal drama, to what I feel results in the detriment of both. Sangatsu and Subahibi, along with numerous other examples, are in my opinion far better at discussing this topic than Lost Judgment- though, once again, it bears reminding that I am saying this as a media critic, and not a sociologist. Do not believe me!

So, anyway, the first chapter of this game is a pretty straightforward case of solving bullying, and I have to say, I don’t really like it. If I had to put it in about a sentence, this opening chapter plot feels like all the parts of Persona 5 that people claimed to like, albeit forced into the framework of a Yakuza game.

If you’re wondering why I think this, well, RGG Studio and Atlus are both divisions of the game development branch of our beloved SEGA, itself a subsidiary of Sega Sammy Holdings, their friendly megacorp pachinko-churning parent company that they merged with in 2003, shortly after discontinuing the Dreamcast and leaving the console market, a thing no one mentions because it obviously didn’t affect anything because everyone still likes the video games! Mostly.

I’d hazard a guess that the different people making these games probably talk to each other. (I’m very certain that there was, at some point, an interview with an RGG developer that said this, but I cannot find this interview anymore (gosh damn, did I try), because advertising has gone on to make search engines worse. Or maybe I dreamed that interview up.) And given how Sega frequently boasts at the end of each fiscal period that their sales figures have been bolstered by both Yakuza and Persona, whose audiences definitely overlap (at least internationally), it only stands to reason that they would think that Yakuza can make some more of that Persona money by borrowing elements from the latter. 

Whatever the case may be, this first chapter doesn’t work very well for me.

Firstly, it just makes me feel really uncomfortable, what with how Yagami and company go about placing hidden cameras and listening devices to spy on teenagers, something I find ethically suspect. The story never stops to consider if this is the most correct or appropriate thing to do, because we’re supposed to be on Yagami’s side since we know he’s got a good reason for it! There’s a girl who confronts him about it, Kyoko Amasawa the schoolgirl detective— literally the best character in the game, voiced by Xanthe Huynh, literally the best dub actress, in English. Amasawa is great, it's wonderful to hear Xanthe say such lines as

"This is your Reichenbach Falls Moment!"

But this conversation is just, she thinks Yagami is doing something malicious or perverted, she's wrong, he proves she's wrong, and the game never asks the question of, "okay, but, is it really fine to spy on teenagers even if one does truly have good and pure intentions in doing so?" I don't think it is, so, yeah, this whole plot point just makes me really uneasy. Like, I would not trust any adult with technology designed to invade the private lives of the children under their charge in the name of ensuring their safety. More often than not, that sort of practice is used to rob children of their personal freedoms, a thing that we as a society really like doing to children in the name of protecting them! In general! But that’s a whole other video.

Anyway, that’s ultimately only a minor issue I have with the story, it doesn’t matter that much, and it’s done and over with quickly, so we can ignore it. Mostly. The bigger and more enduring issue is how the story goes about talking about bullying.

There’s two things that this game attributes bullying to, and those two things are hormone fluctuations and the bystander effect. Early on in chapter one, we get this dialogue about the hormones thing:

Tsukumo: Research shows that boys at that age experience a sudden spike in testosterone. This leads to outbursts to assert dominance, compounded by the irrationality of an immature brain. Scientifically, this potent mix of impulses often manifests as bullying. Kaito: Yeah, I call that puberty. Yagami: But that would apply specifically to boys, right? You're getting cases with girls involved too, aren't you? Tsukumo: Ah. With girls it's more likely rooted in oxytocin, a brain hormone that also has links to bullying.

So, I don’t know if this is true, and if so, to what extent. I did try to do some cursory research, but didn’t find any definitive answers. However, I am fairly suspicious of how this dialogue uses the scientific argument of the impact of oxytocin and testosterone on social behaviors to suggest that bullying is basically human nature, and especially in how it genders the two. “Oxytocin and testosterone make girls and boys, respectively, be mean” sounds like a rationale that is at best very reductive and at worst outright pseudo-scientific.

But, let’s just assume for the sake of argument, that it’s true. Alright, well, what about all the other reasons why bullying happens? Like, I don’t know, social and cultural pressures? For example, one character who appears in this game is Akane, y’know, the girl, who is in on the bullying for…

I don’t know why, actually. I don’t really know why any of these kids are bullying Koda. I mean, I do know why, they do tell Yagami what started the bullying, but I feel that that's a thing that's explained to further the plot, rather than a part of the story that is told. I don't have a great sense of what their social dynamic is, or why they all decided to bully Koda together, or, that they have any individuality really, beyond just... "Mean Kids 1 through 4."

But, given that Akane is like, the one girl in this group, I feel like there must be an interesting reason for that. Maybe she’s the leader of this clique who rallied all these guys to her cause, or maybe she joined them because she used to be Koda’s friend but felt like if she didn’t bully Koda with them, she might become a potential target. Maybe there’s some other reason! Maybe there’s other external reasons for all these kids to be bullying this girl. Maybe they just want her money, maybe they have a petty grudge against her, maybe they have an abusive home life, or maybe they’re just stressed and lookin' for someone to take it out on. Maybe it's all of these things between all of these kids. There could be all sorts of issues at play here, and I think it’s a huge missed opportunity that basically all the game has to say about it is:

Kaito: Hormones are f**ked up, huh?

This isn’t a strict requirement for me to enjoy this plot, or find its perspective worthwhile. Like, you don’t need to empathize with antagonists. Sometimes you just want people to be mean so that you can feel good about them getting kicked in the face. That is basically the point of Subahibi’s bullying subplot, particularly the branch where Zakuro and Kimika fight back against Megu and Satoko and their, um, bullying friends—

Kimika: Looking at it from afar, I had to think... why should the person who's suffering die while they get to go on with their lives like nothing happened? I couldn't stand it. If it's so bad that I would kill myself, I might as well kill them instead... that's the conclusion I came to.

(they do A LOT WORSE than bullying in the other branch. I can’t show you, it’s YouTube illegal and kinda disgusting)

I think that plot works precisely because it doesn’t justify the actions of their bullies. It doesn’t say that they’ve got the bullying hormones, it doesn’t try to make them sympathetic in any way, they’re just a bunch of mean bitches and we’re supposed to be happy when Kimika fights back against them. Similarly, in Lost Judgment, if they wanted to make these characters just mean, they could’ve just not said anything about the hormones! They could’ve just said these people are bullies, and left it at that! I mean, the Yakuza games up till this point have been doing just fine letting you kick random gangbangers in the face without telling you they’ve got the criminal hormones, and that was fun and we all had a good time!

But, because this game doesn’t go into any further detail about why bullies are bullies, it comes off pretty much like that. These kids have the bullying hormone. Is that their fault? I don’t know, but they’re pulling a knife on Yagami, so it’s fine to beat them up, I guess. The story does come back around to make the bullies sympathetic, when they decide to stop being bullies, apologize to Koda, and help Yagami, and that’s nice and cool and everything, and something that can also work without the hormones thing— like, for example, how it works in Sangatsu! Hinata’s bullies apologize, there’s a mutually amicable and peaceful resolution, and the story discusses and sympathizes with the broader social circumstances that pushed them to bullying, without condoning or excusing their actions. Like, maybe teenagers are just dumbasses who don’t always foresee their actions having consequences, or are afraid to change even if they do, and most people are just trying to do good at heart and will come around when they realize that their bad actions have negative consequences. I don’t know. It’s just a thought that there is!

Anyway, the story hasn’t got anything to say about the social conditions that might have led these kids to start bullying. It does, however, have a bit to say about the conditions that lead others to allow bullying to continue, and in this, the bystander syndrome is cited.

And this isn’t wrong! Although, I feel they don’t adequately address the potential social causes of this phenomenon. Like, for example, the cultural pressures to not do anything when you, y’know, have a life, and standing up to bullies might get you in actual trouble beyond just being embarrassed. Everyone we’ve talked to who’s either stood up to bullies in their time, or known someone who has, has spoken of being met with discipline or even expulsion even though they were the ones being aggressed. And in other contexts, standing up and speaking when you see a wrong being done could be met with violence or losing employment or legal repercussions or what have you.

So, it goes beyond simple embarrassment, to say the least. We could probably, as a society, I imagine, be doing more to encourage people to not ignore injustices beyond just appealing to their moral sense. But that’s, also, a different video. Overall, I feel like this entire plot ignores the bulk of the actual systemic problems at play in favor of armchair psychology, which, hey, I guess I’m doing armchair sociology about a social issue that, while obviously not unheard of in my country, is very different from how it is in Japan. So it’s not as if I’m not guilty of talking shit about something I know nothing about.

Ultimately, this first chapter is just, like. Fine. It has a weird bit with spying on teenagers. It has a cheesy feel-good Hallmark Channel drama ending. There’s not much of a message to take from it, besides “well, it sure is good to stand up for others” which is very true, but also a rather shallow moral. With regards to how much it seems to borrow from Persona 5, I’d say that Persona 5 was at least very specific in explaining the social ills at play, how it affected the teachers, the students, the parents, the concrete reasons why it's easier for all these groups to stand by and do nothing, and was by no means above naming and shaming the individuals in power responsible for allowing the crimes to proceed. Sure, it goes about it in a very straightforward and teenage manner, without offering much more meaningful systemic analysis to speak of, but it does do it!

Conversely, Lost Judgment acknowledges the systemic issues: the students and their clique behaviors, the teachers who turn a blind eye at best and actively contribute to the bullying at worst, the school boards who try to hush up potential scandals, and makes someone stop in the middle of grieving to say DID YOU KNOW THAT IN OUR COUNTRY THIS HAPPENS THIS OFTEN,

Sawa: In Japan, 300 children commit suicide every year, across all grades. Less than three percent are proven to be linked to bullying.

But while it points all of this out, it doesn’t analyze any of it beyond the most superficial of observations, and it certainly doesn’t take anyone to task. The tone it takes with all of that is more like, “well, who can blame them? Folks gotta keep their jobs.” It feels like it just doesn’t have the guts to blame anyone in specific, besides just “the system” and “human nature”, both things that are hard to get mad at, because, those things are the way they are! It doesn’t really have much of anything to say about why they are the way they are, or suggest those things could be changed, and thus no coherent solution is presented, besides encouraging individuals to lean into their better senses and just sorta going, “well, hopefully good people will make the system good.” …Which I suppose is, the same, thing that Persona 5 does… but… anyway… um, Sangatsu also does this part better

added interlude

Hi, editing Audrey here, and um. There’s one other probably sorta really significant critical difference I forgot to mention, and it’s that Lost Judgment’s plot focuses on the perspectives of adults.

Subahibi, Sangatsu, and Persona, in all their various plots about bullying and harassment, focus on the perspectives of victims. That is to say, the kids who are affected.

And, in what I originally wrote for this video, I spent a lot of time discussing how Lost Judgment is missing the perspective of the bullies, which it is, but I overlooked the perhaps even greater and more damning sidelining of the perspectives of the bullying victims. Like, we have Koda, who does get to say a small piece about how she just sorta put up with the bullying and then Yagami and company helped her realize how bad she had it, but then just talks about how she wants to play basketball, which is not something we care about, and then... is never really ever relevant, ever, again. Then we have Toshiro... who is already dead, and Mitsuru... who is also already dead (in a coma). And then we have seven other unknown bullying victims... five? Right. Yeah, five other unknown bullying victims... who Kuwana at some point took revenge for.

They're already dead!

And their voices are just not relevant, to the story, at all. Instead the story chooses to prioritize the voices of the people who, let’s not mince words, weren’t there for the kids when they should have been.

Not to say that the feelings of the teachers and parents aren’t worthwhile perspectives to include, but it does kind of brush aside their part of the fault for ignoring the bullying in the first place, and also doesn’t deign to inquire how the victims would feel, about an ex-teacher inciting their parents to Murderous Violent on their behalf. Unlike in Subahibi, where, the revenge is exacted by the actual victims of the bullying in direct self-defense against their immediate aggressors and then they stop once the bullies back off, in Lost Judgment it’s done long after the fact, by people who weren’t even the primary victims, and who really bear a lot more fault for not helping when they should have, and… really, that line of thinking puts this story in a really, really dark light.

Anyway I’m gonna just, stop now

end interlude

I appreciate the earnestness of this arc, the hopeful note that this concludes on. I think that the confidence and strength of this writing elevates this ending scene to the point where I at least don’t find it outwardly cringe. But overall, I genuinely just do not think that the Yakuza formula is equipped to deal with this kind of nuanced social issue where there’s specific problems and sides. We’ve seen this kind of fumbling before, in Yakuza 7 with illegal immigrants and sex work, in Yakuza 5 with idols, and now here, with bullying. The writers of these games seem to like gesturing at these sorts of things, and making a few genuinely salient statements, but ultimately their attempts to comment on these issues don’t work when they have to be crowbarred into the fantastic conspiracy plot in this manner. They just don’t have the sensitivity or sense or interest to write this sensibly with an eye towards actually acknowledging what the real issues and their causes are.

The events of the first chapter are relatively segregated from the main story, almost making it so that we’ve now had to play two prologues, and I’d imagine that it’s almost representative of this game trying to tell two completely different stories; the bullying drama, and the conspiracy drama, and the former doesn’t really get a chance to play out to its fullest and best, because it’s forcibly truncated by the game’s need to move onto the latter. Which I guess we may as well start doing ourselves, because gosh I’ve said entirely too much about this game’s first few hours. I hope y’all are prepared for me to list off everything that I do not like about this game that I do not like! Or, don’t like as much as I want to, at least. Maybe we’ll talk about that.

I think the role of Yoko Sawa, the teacher, in this game’s plot, is casually sexist to an exhausting degree. Big surprise, right? This is an RGG game, after all. Well, yeah, but more so than usual.

Sawa first meets Yagami when he's investigating Koda's bullying, and then gets to see a lot more of him when he keeps showing up at the school to investigate the main case. All throughout, she’s constantly telling Yagami to please stop talking to her.

I get that Yagami is a private detective and all, and he cares a fair bit more about solving this case and finding the truth than people liking him. He’s not a stalker or a criminal, he is a lawyer and he does to a point care about the law, but he’s also not the most straight-laced of characters, either, and he is willing to and does break a little law to achieve his goals, sometimes. To a certain point with him, the end justifies the means, so it makes logical sense that he would keep trying to get to Sawa-sensei, despite being told to fuck off, because Sawa-sensei is so frequently a lynchpin of the case. And, y’know, he does this with everyone! Yagami sure does do a lot of pressuring people into letting him interrogate them! So it’s not, like, out of character or anything.

With all that said— it really gets to me that Sawa is the person who Yagami ends up interrogating the most frequently, and thus the one who tells him to fuck off the most. At first, because she really doesn’t want to talk to him, and later because even though she’d maybe like to talk to him, she fears for her safety. And I’m just kind of like… okay… plot… why must Yagami go bother this poor woman again. She’s been through enough. Gosh.

It super doesn’t help that one of the first things said about Sawa is that she’s hot? Like, Kaito says that she's hot, makes a pass at her, and Yagami’s like, “bro shut up” but, oh boy, they really wanted you to know she’s hot. And unlike Kiryu, who is a remarkably sexless protagonist throughout most of the series, Yagami fucks. Or seems to anyway. So that first impression of being told that this woman is hot, gives an entirely different texture to these later meetings with Yagami, where he, y’know, a guy, is repeatedly showing up like “hey please talk to me” and she, a woman, is like, “uh, no.” Oh boy, I love gender~

Yagami: I think you have the key to that answer, even if you don't know that you're the one holding it. It's like a lock. And until I figure out how to get through it, I'm going to keep picking at it. Sawa: I told you. I'm late for a meeting. Yagami: I'll be here when you get back. Have a good meeting.

And then Sawa dies!

It’s a pointless, cruel, and meaningless death committed by a gang boss to send a message. And that’s the point of it, yeah. It’s a death of an innocent to raise the stakes and show the villains mean business and all. I get it. I also fucking hate it. Like, it’s obviously fridging, yeah, but y’know, I’ve seen fridging. What I’ve also seen is a pretty recurring trope in the Yakuza formula, where RGG Studio just needs to kill off a woman to advance their plot. And that wouldn’t be such a bad thing, if not for the fact that women aren’t allowed to do anything cool or interesting in these games! I could make a video talking about that. I did make a video talking about that, and I got rid of it because it was bad.

Anyway. This worked better in Yakuza 4, 5, and 6, because at least there, the dead women had, y’know, relationships with the relevant playable characters that I found believable and credible and were built up enough to make it hit hard when they get killed off. And 6 gets points for revealing that the woman being killed off was a fakeout, and she's fine, because the goon that was supposed to kill her had a conscience, that's funny~

But like, Yasuko, in 4, for example! Or Lily. Whatever. Yasuko gets killed off in a similar way for a similar purpose, but it kinda worked there because they at least gave us reasons to care. Yasuko gets to move the plot and have some interactions with Akiyama, Saejima, Kiryu, and Tanimura. It feels justified when they all pray together at her wake. And, like, Akiyama has a thing for Yasuko, but it fits his character and he’s not weird about it, and it seems like Yasuko might reciprocate if not for the criminal underworld at her back, so, yeah. It’s still not great, and it’s kind of egregiously uncomfortable that Yasuko isn’t actually physically shown doing any of the interesting things she’s said to have done that got the yakuza after her, before she dies. Still, it makes sense. It’s, y’know, good, so long as you accept the fridge and its chilly embrace.

Sawa and Yagami in Lost Judgment don’t have this factor for me. When Yagami later continuously brings her up, saying that the killing of bullies needs to stop lest more innocents come into the crossfire, I can’t help but think “bro. you didn’t know her. she kept telling you to go away. why are you being weird about this woman you didn’t have a relationship with. she wasn’t going to fuck you!”

*laughs* yeah. Yeah, okay, I realize this isn’t funny. But like, that’s all I can really think! I know that’s not textually why he was talking to her, but it really does feel like that! I don’t know, it just feels like that! I do not like it!

So, yeah, that’s that thing. Another thing that’s stupid about this game! Y’know how earlier I mentioned that the antagonists stage a groping to fabricate a murder alibi? Yeah, that’s a twist. We go through a huge chunk of this game thinking that Ehara, an ex-cop, harassed some poor woman on a train. Then it turns out that the sexual harassment was fake. That the woman who was supposedly victimized was in fact in on it. I don't have another word for it. That's just stupid!

They could’ve salvaged that if, perhaps, they’d wanted to explore how Yui Mamiya was victimized in the course of being forced to play a part in a murder alibi. Then maybe they could’ve swung it, made the throughline about her being victimized, like, cohesive, somehow. But they don’t do that, and in fact, Mamiya just kinda, does nothing, for most of the rest of the game, after the fakeness of her sexual harassment is exposed. She tells them about the conspiracy and its motive, and how they staged the incident, and that’s kind of it. It’s kinda made way worse by that before they find out, Saori and Yagami go to interrogate Mamiya about the supposed harassment, and Saori mostly says a bunch of platitudes about how good it is that she came forward.

Saori: No, what you did was both brave and inspirational. Many victims are afraid to come forward for any number of reasons. Your voice might give them courage to find their own.

“You’re such an inspiration! -oh, you were faking it, to cover up a murder.” This just feels deeply ill-advised, and, I imagine, like this particular game really wanted to work sexual assault into its plot to feel like it’s tuned into the zeitgeist, to make that Persona money, again. But Lost Judgment has nothing to say about the topic of sexual assault. It’s simply a prop in the murder mystery. This plot twist could’ve worked just as well with anything; Ehara and Kuwana could’ve faked any number of petty crimes to furnish him with an alibi, like, mugging, or shoplifting, or vandalism, or pulling a knife, or whatever else, and the writers chose this one.

And, adding to the absurdity of this plot twist is that Ehara is said to have been a cop, which, is never really relevant besides explaining away why he got such a slap on the wrist for the sexual harassment charge. But that's just hilarious, also, that the story exchanged "cop sexually assaults woman on train," a curiously specific and highly plausible chain of events, for "woman faked sexual assault to help cover up a murder," which is, of course, far less likely.

I’ve got a funny anecdote about this one, actually. In the mystery solving dialogue where Yagami draws this conclusion, you’re asked to select it from a dialogue wheel, and I looked at that and was like, “no. no. no. fuck noooo” and selected every other option. A friend of ours, who watched us play most of this game, commented that the various dialogues about the wrong answers made it feel like Yagami really didn’t want that to be the answer, to which I said, “yeah, I don’t want that to be the answer either!”

Another thing that bothers me about this part is that, when Yagami and company deduce that Mamiya is an accomplice, they also deduce the thing with Kuwana using the bullying footage to blackmail her. When they learn of this particular means by which Mamiya was victimized, they… use the bullying footage to blackmail her. This in itself wouldn’t be a bad thing, if it didn’t feel like the game twisting the knife on that they really don’t care how she’s been victimized.

I can’t help but feel a little sorry for Yui Mamiya, overall. This reads like an absolute nightmare scenario to me. You were mean to some other kids in high school, like a lot of kids are. Maybe you were pressured into the bullying, maybe you had a difficult life, maybe your parents abused or neglected you, maybe whatever. Your actions have some unforeseen negative consequences, but you get on with your life because you can’t let that guilt destroy you, and then almost a decade later, long after you’ve moved on, your old teacher shows up at your doorstep and blackmails you into becoming an accessory to murder.

There’s a lot of people in the past who we were mean to as a kid, as a teen, even, once or a time another, when we didn’t yet know any better, and like, the thought of something from that long ago, coming back to bite us? Someone showing up at our door to say they hate us for that, let alone trying to blackmail us over it? That’s fucking terrifying.

And the fact that the game doesn’t consider this entire plot development through the lens of Mamiya being a victim, and being retraumatized by Yagami making her go through this all over again, it’s… it feels like a pretty big narrative oversight.

The same can be said for her other classmates, as well, who are also being blackmailed by Kuwana in the same way, and similarly thrown under the bus by the story, albeit without the sexual assault thing. But, they have much less screen time than Mamiya— and they're all guys, so I naturally have less to say about them.

It just bugs me, in general, that like, the story never questions the notion that these people deserve some kind of comeuppance for bullying a child to suicide over a decade ago. Is encouraging a suicide tantamount to murder? Especially when the ones doing it are a bunch of teenage dumbasses? I don’t have any definitive answer to that question. Your own opinion will depends on your sense of ethics and perspective on the issues of bullying and suicide, and those could be radically different from mine. Legally, it’s a very muddled question that would be answered very differently in different courts at different times with different case contexts.

source: [7]

But personally, if I had to draw a line, I would say, no, bullying someone to suicide isn’t tantamount to murder. And the reason why is because, I think, if we were to say that that was the case, then where does that stop? How do we measure what actions caused someone’s suicide, and whomst of the actors are more guilty than others? Is the teacher responsible for their death, not having noticed or taken action on the bullying? Are the students who stood by and did nothing responsible? Does being a bit mean to someone who later kills themselves mean that you might’ve pushed them over the edge and could therefore be culpable? Or are we to say, no, none of that makes you guilty, and take the other extreme position, being that no one can be guilty of causing their suicide unless they physically coerced the victim to jump off of the roof? But even in that case, how do we decide that they really meant it?

I genuinely do not know, but I would say at some point after enough time has passed, it’s really not worth punishing anyone. I don’t know if y’all’ve noticed, but I consider myself pretty left-wing, and as a necessary result of that, I don’t particularly believe in punitive justice. I don’t think people should be sentenced to death, and I don’t think people should go to prison. This isn’t to say that I think that someone who bullied a child to suicide is blameless, or that they should face no consequences, but unfortunately our society isn’t particularly equipped to deal with this kind of thing in a healthy way, that would actually be meaningfully reparative. All that the system, and thus most people, can conceive of, is punishing individual wrongdoers.

Sugiura: “well, all you kids tormenting mitsuru looked pretty psychopathic to me” Mamiya: “oh, and YOU’RE so perfect? an angel who never once acted out of line? Never lashed out at someone weaker than you? Or sided with the group to shut someone out? Everyone does it! We were just ‘lucky’ enough to have some creep tape us picking on some kid who couldn’t take it! Why did this have to happen to me…?” Yagami: “I’d say it’s because bad things happen to bad people.”

At this point during my initial playthrough, I paused the cutscene, and let out a beleaguered and tired sigh.

Mamiya is obviously being a little hysterical and all, but like… she has a point. She isn’t wrong. As much as she and her friends did to hurt Mitsuru as teenagers, the chain of events she describes sounds horribly traumatic in itself. Her teacher, lying in wait with the evidence of bullying for nearly a decade, so that he could come around and hold that over her head. That’s legitimately fucked up. Did she deserve this? Does this fix anything? Sure, it doesn’t seem like she or any of the others particularly regret their actions, but even still— Is it worthwhile to punish her for the rest of her life for this, especially so long after the fact?

But the story just dismisses all of those questions with that line. Of course she deserves to get punished. She’s a bad person. And that’s it. The issue that the story ultimately takes is with Kuwana’s methods of blackmail and serial murder, and even then, it doesn’t say that it’s because it’s not effective, but rather because it’s outside of the justice system.

And that’s, y’know, kind of expected, given that this video game is, in part, a murder mystery pastiche, particularly of Ace Attorney. A game series that I like, despite the fact that every episode of that series necessarily ends with the true murderer being exposed in court, arrested, and sent to prison. Things that I necessarily do not agree with, because I disagree with the existence and function of the institutions of the courts, the police, and the prisons, but hey, you get what you sign up for when you wanna have a good time with the detective-lawyer game about exposing the real murderer and sending them to prison.

[https://twitter.com/headfallsoff/status/1051484419251425280]

That Lost Judgment goes so far as to say, whether deliberately or by oversight, that someone is still guilty of something they did thirteen years ago as a dumbass teen who wasn’t mature enough to foresee the consequences of their actions… it bugs me. So.

Anyway, the other thing I have to criticize, is just, Kuwana, or more specifically, the plan he has.

I just think it’s stupid. Both in the sense that obviously it doesn’t actually do anything to stop bullying, and also I don’t think I see what it actually illustrates about, y’know, the thing the game purports to be about. It’s not really bad exactly, I mean, obviously this game was going to revolve around catching a murderer, and Kuwana, sure is a murderer, or murder instigator if you wanna be technical, and he sure is a villain in this pulpy murder mystery conspiracy story.

I just don’t get why that story needed to be about bullying. I don’t get why it needed to be about sexual assault. It isn’t really about bullying or sexual assault, it just uses those topics as props in the murder mystery. By the time we find out what Kuwana’s motive is, the game has stopped being about bullying since about, like, between 15 and 30 hours ago, and it just feels, meh. For all the reasons I’ve kind of already said. I do kind of like how Kuwana is sort of positioned by the story as something of an anti-hero, and got hella charisma, I wanna like him. Given that I think both sides are wrong here, it’s. Y’know.

From then on the stuff that happens is just, yeah, conspiracy, fights, and then exposing the truth in court, and all of that’s entertaining and everything. All the normal things that I come to Yakuza games for. I mean, I also come to them for the thematically rich narrative wrapped around this hokey action crime plot, and that feels pretty thin in this game.

Again and again over the course of its 40 odd hour runtime, Lost Judgment loses the plot. Or rather, gives ultimate precedence to its plot, at great expense to its themes. All of the remotely worthwhile or interesting ideas that it hits on aren’t developed, all just kinda fall by the wayside in favor of these three rather trite, formulaic talking points: That the law isn’t perfect but people need to try their best to do the best they can with the system anyway, that vengeance is hollow, and that you should stand up for others. And, that’s what there was to take away from the first Judgment. And in that game, it was fine, because that story was mostly just a fun time and didn’t exhibit any significant aspirations to say anything else. It might have been fine in Lost Judgment, too, if not for that this story’s subject matter felt like it wanted something else. Something more specific and nuanced. But instead, its purported themes are left feeling like interchangeable plot devices, the fun core of this murder mystery muddled by the question of

“why? and what was the point?”

I mean obviously the point was for people to buy the game, but, other than that… who knows. who can say.

So, all the stuff I said is, genuinely, what I figure I probably believe. Probably. But, it bears clarifying, I still like this game. It wasn’t trying, necessarily, to be super deep or thought provoking or politically accurate. I’m sure the creators see it as a nice bonus if it’s seen as such, but its ultimate goal is to, y’know, be a game that’s fun to play with a story that’s fun. And I think it is! I think there’s a lot of things in it that are fun and good. There’s honestly too much that’s interesting and good about the optional content of this game, which, is the case with every Yakuza game, but that’d require a whole entire separate video, and, maybe we’ll make that video. I don’t know.

I don’t think borrowing from Persona is necessarily a bad thing. In fact, I think there’s a hell of a lot of potential for good in doing that! Like, Persona’s appeal, to a lot of people, is the exaggerated school life mystery thing, but it’s somewhat stymied by its need to be an SMT game, because it is. I’ve heard a lot of people say that they really don’t like how Persona 5 ends with them fighting the huge anime god, because that’s just such an absurd and nonsensical escalation of a plot that starts really serious and realistic.

The Yakuza games are very similar in structure to a JRPG like SMT or Persona, but their “huge anime god” is just “a regular guy who’s in charge of the conspiracy,” and that’s also an absurd power fantasy and all, but it’s a more realistic one that makes more sense with that kind of story. Y’know, if they want to focus on a high school setting again, maybe have a teenage delinquent as a protagonist— which, I guess they already sorta did in Kurohyou, but, y’know, if they wanna do that again. That could be cool.

So! Yeah! Lost Judgment's not totally wasted time just cause its main story is kinda weird and bad. It's at least hella interesting. And, with that, I want to talk about another way we could possibly look at the main story.

About two thirds or so of the way through the story, Yagami gets an audience with Reiko Kusumoto, the mother of Mitsuru, the bullied child whose suicide attempt started Kuwana’s murder instigation spree. She tells Yagami about the events that led up to her murder of Shinya Kawai, how he didn’t even recognize her or seem to regret anything he’d done, and that pushed her to kill him, a thing she states that she doesn’t regret in the slightest. And I wondered,

… shouldn’t she regret that?

I mean, basically, all the stuff I’ve already said. I’m not sure if this situation warrants murder, or furthermore, if it’s really realistic or interesting to depict the parent of a victim as desiring revenge like this. There’s a significant contingent of friends and families of murder victims whose murderers have been placed on death row who advocate against the death penalty, so I don’t figure it’s unthinkable to suppose maybe some parents of children who died to suicide don’t actually want revenge on the people who pushed them there. And maybe the story could’ve acknowledged that possibility, and that might’ve been something, but also, maybe that wouldn’t have gelled with what it was trying to do.

If someone is placed on death row for murder, the feelings of the victim’s families don’t matter. They can say they would rather not see the murderer killed, and the state will still execute them anyway. So, aren’t they, kind of, in the same position? Where they don’t get to have any meaningful hand in deciding what justice would be, and the state holds a legal monopoly on exacting violence, and choosing when and where it’s appropriate to do so?

I mean, I, as some sort of dumbass anarchist, would say the state is pretty definitionally illegitimate, and that the monopoly on violence they hold over the populace is unjust. As a general rule, I don’t like violence, but I’m also not a pacifist, and I’d say sometimes that violence is maybe necessary… although in a case such as what’s depicted in the game, I’d say that death is a pretty unjustified response, but.

Is that something that matters to the families of the bullying victims? I don’t really know what it’s like to lose someone close to you to suicide. I especially don’t know what it’s like to lose a family member to suicide as a result of bullying this cruel. So, maybe some people who have experienced that would feel that that is justified, or at least fantasize about this sort of revenge. I mean, even despite my stated politics (you can correctly guess I oppose the death penalty), I can’t claim like I’ve never had thoughts like this. Statistically speaking, most people do!

I may not know people who’ve endured bullying specifically in Japan, but I do know people who’ve been bullied. Some of those people know, or knew, others who attempted suicide as a result of bullying and negligence by the school they went to. Some of those people, actually, a lot of those people, scratch that, all of those people, are queer. (Almost everyone in our social circle is queer.) If they’re angry at, and feel vengeful towards, those who’ve bullied them, or their friends, or just people who bully others to the point of suicide in general, then I don’t think I’ve got any right to criticize them for that. I believe their anger is justified, and I don’t think I’d be able to fairly criticize them for acting on that, or, thinking about acting on that.

And if nothing else, this story definitely does focus a lot of attention on the grief and anger that these game’s antagonists feel, and it cares a lot about portraying that effectively. It might be that this game is actually a really emotionally potent picture of that anger that resonates really well with people who’ve been in that situation and felt that way, and I’m just not one of those people.

So maybe in that sense, Lost Judgment is in its own way an emotionally honest depiction of how bullying in Japanese schools affects people that couldn't come from something more considered and careful in how it discusses these issues. And maybe that’s good. And I just don’t see it.

But my eyes aren’t the only ones.

Thanks for watching this, this was really hard to write, but, I guess I did it, so, yeah. I’d appreciate getting thrown a few dollars on patreon or ko-fi. And also subscribe or like or whatever, share the video to whatever social media platform you use. Anyway, the important names are:

Patreon credits: Ada. Just Ada - Anime Omelette - ASabitsukiFlow - Azu - ColorfulCast - dameDiadora - deeso - Duskpixie - Elvenoob - Emma R - Femboy Bebop - Good Civilization - Gwen Starlight - hev - Kaylee Smerbeck - Korin - L Tantivy - LaLaLacuna - Lilly - M - Mira Yeuden - Nik Gothic - Pigeon - Roger C Walker - RukaCollie - Sally - Saoirse Russell - Scimitar - SimplyAero - SleepySlug - Spiderrebelnews - Thijs - Trucy - Vile Lasagna

Aaaand bye.

[eddiekasprzak]

there were a lot of people in the notes of that smoking poll being like "no OP my grandpa literally died of lung cancer" and while i'm usually against traumadumping on strangers i'm also like. well what did you expect when you acted shocked and appalled that most people on here are not interested in a substance that is both very addictive and known carcinogen. did it not occur to you that smoking has ruined a lot of fucking lives.

[cartoon-skeleton]

I’m applying to be a substitute teacher LMAO

[majimemegoro]

everyone must look at the perfect Soma Duck @cryingcow made for my birthday !!!!!!!

[widowshill]

65 / 62 / 71

[animalsandskyyy]

aaaahhhh spotify is evil :/ (not really….but still)

[samyelbanette]

I just randomly remembered this day camp counselor I had when I was like, 8 or 9 years old. We were going swimming, and I noticed he had a nipple piercing.

I got so upset and told him “Mr. Sean, that’s GROSS!”

He was like ?????

And I told him to his face that he “looked like a slut”.

[mybeautifulchristianjourney]

The Lord's Judgment

Flee, save your lives, And be like a tamarisk in the wilderness. — Jeremiah 48:6 | JPS Tanakh 1917 (JPST) The Holy Scriptures according to the Masoretic text; Jewish Publication Society 1917. Cross References: Genesis 19:17; Jeremiah 17:6; Jeremiah 51:6

[raedas]

oh that poll is going to annoy me so bad

[jichanxo]

no context fic art 👍