Cho Hakkai (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
reformedsinner) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
thefarshore2018-01-24 01:23 pm
reformedsinner) wrote in thefarshore2018-01-24 01:23 pm
BBS/Video
From: Li Tieguai
Posted: Oct 7, 2:49 PM
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[Hakkai's sitting at what looks like his kitchen table, hands folded and phone carefully propped up facing him and the wooden wall behind him. For once, he's not smiling. His expression is very neutral. He sounds slightly rehearsed.]
Good afternoon. Due to certain events, I've come to believe that there is something I need to share with you all, in the interests of honesty and transparency. I'm going to talk about some things that may be frightening or upsetting, so if you are under the age of fifteen, please ask a grown-up who you trust to watch this video first and explain it to you.
[He pauses, his eyes dropping from the camera to the screen for several seconds of silence before he looks back up.]
Still watching? Goten, Nanako, I especially mean you.
[He pauses again, for a few more seconds, and his fingers twitch slightly together.]
I have a serious criminal history. Some years ago, my lover was kidnapped by a clan of youkai known for their brutality towards captives. I pursued and attacked them in an attempt to rescue her, and, in the process, was responsible for the deaths of a majority of the clan, not limited to combatants. She did not survive.
The blood I shed was sufficient to transform me from human into youkai. [He reaches up, freeing each of three small silver cuffs from the curve of his ear in turn. His face shifts, ears lengthening and developing sharp points, green vine patterns spreading across his skin, teeth sharpening, and left eye shifting from green to a slit-pupiled yellow. His nails are long, sharp claws. He sets the jewelry down gently on the table between himself and the phone.]
After recovering from my own injuries, I turned myself in to the appropriate authorities, and received sentencing. I regret my actions, and I do not pose any public danger. However, I understand that my past crimes may cause others to be uncomfortable in my presence, and should you wish to withdraw yourself or any child for whom you are responsible from my classes, I can recommend either Lavi or Kusanagi Izumo as a substitute instructor. I will transfer any records to the instructor of your choice.
If you have any questions, I will do my best to answer them.
[He reaches for the cuffs again and fixes them back in place on his ear, appearance swiftly returning to a simulacrum of humanity, before he reaches out to shut down the video.]
Posted: Oct 7, 2:49 PM
---
[Hakkai's sitting at what looks like his kitchen table, hands folded and phone carefully propped up facing him and the wooden wall behind him. For once, he's not smiling. His expression is very neutral. He sounds slightly rehearsed.]
Good afternoon. Due to certain events, I've come to believe that there is something I need to share with you all, in the interests of honesty and transparency. I'm going to talk about some things that may be frightening or upsetting, so if you are under the age of fifteen, please ask a grown-up who you trust to watch this video first and explain it to you.
[He pauses, his eyes dropping from the camera to the screen for several seconds of silence before he looks back up.]
Still watching? Goten, Nanako, I especially mean you.
[He pauses again, for a few more seconds, and his fingers twitch slightly together.]
I have a serious criminal history. Some years ago, my lover was kidnapped by a clan of youkai known for their brutality towards captives. I pursued and attacked them in an attempt to rescue her, and, in the process, was responsible for the deaths of a majority of the clan, not limited to combatants. She did not survive.
The blood I shed was sufficient to transform me from human into youkai. [He reaches up, freeing each of three small silver cuffs from the curve of his ear in turn. His face shifts, ears lengthening and developing sharp points, green vine patterns spreading across his skin, teeth sharpening, and left eye shifting from green to a slit-pupiled yellow. His nails are long, sharp claws. He sets the jewelry down gently on the table between himself and the phone.]
After recovering from my own injuries, I turned myself in to the appropriate authorities, and received sentencing. I regret my actions, and I do not pose any public danger. However, I understand that my past crimes may cause others to be uncomfortable in my presence, and should you wish to withdraw yourself or any child for whom you are responsible from my classes, I can recommend either Lavi or Kusanagi Izumo as a substitute instructor. I will transfer any records to the instructor of your choice.
If you have any questions, I will do my best to answer them.
[He reaches for the cuffs again and fixes them back in place on his ear, appearance swiftly returning to a simulacrum of humanity, before he reaches out to shut down the video.]
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Of course, it's not a fight that anyone can win.
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But then you've proven that youkai can die quite easily too, haven't you?
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It's strange to insist that you're living for pride when you don't seem to have anything to actually be proud of.
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Since we each seem to have our own cause.
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I don't know if I'd call being too proud to die a cause. You have self-preservation, but no purpose...a life, but no reason to be living it. That's why hope is stronger. As long as you have something to hope for, you have something to look forward to. Pride might be worth not dying, but hope is why it's worth living.
Of course, hope can also be worth dying for, too.
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How would you go about creating such a hope?
[He's not challenging Komaeda's assessment of his own state. It's not wrong, for one thing. For another, arguing nuance would mean revealing too much about his own opinions, and he doesn't quite care enough about Komaeda's opinion of him to take that sort of risk for it.]
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As for how I'd create ultimate hope - despair is actually necessary. Hope can't exist without despair to overcome, any more than you can have a one-sided coin. So only by overcoming obstacles can hope be created...and to create the ultimate hope, you'd need the ultimate despair.
Unfortunately, she disappeared from the heavens before I could destroy her...but that doesn't mean I've given up hope without her. She may have been the Ultimate Despair of my world, but here in the Far Shore, with people from a number of worlds gathered here, there may be other people like her. Besides, what are gods but the ultimate form of hope? Some gods are said to have created existence as we know it...while others are foretold to end it. Ultimate hope and despair can have more than one avatar, I think. It might even be an inherited title...wherever people can be found, whoever spreads the most despair or inspires the most hope there is the ultimate avatar of that force. And if they die or disappear, the title is inherited by the next most hopeful or most despairful person.
So...I'll find ultimate despair, in whatever form it takes. The Ultimate Despair who seeks to spread grief and suffering and meaninglessness like a plague, a person who has given up all hope and seeks to drag others down with them in their own bitterness. I'll use their despair as a stepping stone to create a hope that overwhelms them - and a hope that can overcome their despair will be, by definition, the Ultimate Hope.
So you see, someone who scorns hope and only bothers living to mock the hope of those who'd want them dead, not because they have anything to live for...someone who has no hope for themselves or anything else, who can only take pleasure in the form of spiting and denying hope to others...I'm already familiar with that sort of thinking.
[Unlike Hakkai, Komaeda has no real compunctions about being 100% public with his opinions, no matter how alarming they are. This is a man who flat out admitted he was planning a murder to the first person who asked him. Komaeda has never feared consequences much.]
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You're projecting.
[Only take pleasure in spiting and denying hope to others, indeed. This, from Hakkai's admission that he's not living for anything so fragile as hope.]
I'm afraid neither hope nor despair are anything simple enough to be incarnate in a single human. Nor even, for that matter, a single god.
They live -- or don't, as the case may be -- in the individual heart.
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So using pride and spite as motivation is an approach you wouldn't recommend to anyone else...but you still believe they're better motivators than hope. You treat life and death like a game with winners and losers. And you have no real hope for yourself...those are all things you've said yourself, so how can I be projecting if I find familiar patterns in your words? Perhaps you're just disturbed by the comparison.
As for whether one person can embody hope or despair...I don't expect you to be able to understand that. You've never met Enoshima-chan. But you could at least take the word of someone who's experienced it...
But then, you're quite arrogant.
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To say that pride is stronger than hope is not to say that pride is better than hope, is it? Strength isn't a measure of worthiness. You're the one who wants to measure hope against despair by seeing which can destroy the other, Komaeda-- not me.
And it's not only games that can be won and lost.
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Strength is the measure by which things can be accomplished. If you say pride is stronger than hope, then you believe pride can accomplish more than hope ever could, don't you?
And you're the one who compared the two in the first place. If you weren't insisting one was more worthy than the other, why did you go out of your way to declare one as stronger? There was no reason to, unless you truly believe pride is superior.
For someone says he's done terrible things, who claims to regret them...your pride is very important to you, isn't it? And so is feeling as though you're better than other people because of that pride. All of this makes your entire confession seem rather fundamentally dishonest in its sentiments. How can someone with so much meaningless pride, still sitting on their high horse even after the terrible things they've done, be believed when they make a big public show of their belated awakening of conscience?
'Due to certain events'...you didn't make this announcement because you wanted to, or because you thought people deserved to know. Something forced your hand, didn't it? And of course, if you were going to have to admit to killing hundreds, you'd want to sound as though you were sorry, and you know better now and would never do it again...
But you don't strike me as a man who's particularly ashamed of anything. In fact, you seem to be talking down to me, only a half hour or so after expressing such supposedly heartfelt regrets...for no other reason than because I admire hope, and you scorn it.
Was this entire confession just performative? Because I was giving you the benefit of the doubt, but this kind of attitude is just too suggestive.
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So I suppose it's convenient that it seems to be mutual. Please, don't bother continuing to misinterpret me. I'm afraid I've reached my limit for your games today.
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