(no subject)
Three hours on the bus is good thinking time. =)
Here's an interesting question. What do you do when the person to whom you trusted your entire future and resigned to ever see again (and for some strange, mad reason, the thought fluttered something slightly uncomfortable and -- and -- and -- terrifyingly depressing in that shriveled black hole of a heart) suddenly waltzes back into your life via sentient castle?
Easy. You bug him.
Vis a vis those wonderful, maddening Secret Reports for context. Please keep in mind that I'm going to dip into a lot of my own head-fanon for this analysis, so watch your step for reckless conjecture.
Joshua chose Neku as his proxy for a reason. Oh yes, Kitaniji was going to give him a run for his money in the Game to end all Games, and Joshua welcomed the challenge; even evened up the odds in his Conductor's favor. However, Joshua Kiryu has never and will never be a loser. Even those words make him ill: "loser", "crash", "lost cause", "collapse", "fold." Fail. It's what kept Shibuya safe for a while, actually. Joshua never wanted his pet project, his entertainment, his Game, to fail, because had his power and ego riding on its success. If there's a "most optimal parallel", there must be a worst possible that Joshua was trying to guard against. Didn't he even say that the warp of his Shibuya was so out of hand that he had to terminate it to save the other dimensions? Shibuya was failing, and fast, despite Joshua's best, 100% efforts to resuscitate it, and it could've ended the other realities as we know it. Was it Joshua's fault? A resounding yes, and a tentative no. To a point, Joshua could be blamed for the distortion of his Shibuya, with manifold rationales. Shibuya's creative (and resulting physical sprawl; after all, the capacity for life grows proportionally to the amount of directions it is allowed to grow) growth depends entirely on the competence of the GM at the helm of the weekly games, the watchful eye of the Conductor, and the construction of the Game itself, which is formed by the Composer. The Producer is the watcher who watches the watchers, and, coming right down to it, has control of the entire dimension, having more power (yet more restrictions) than anyone allowed on the UG realm. However, the power of judge, jury, and executioner belongs to the Composer. If his Game is flawed; too harsh, too lenient, too morally unstable, too morally rigid, the health of his territory suffers. Far be it for me to dictate what might be going on his head (what I am doing, RPing as him?), but from the lax security on the Reaper's actions to the challenges that the GM was allowed to impose upon the Players, it seems to me that the Game under Joshua's rules was a harsh, unforgiving one, quite often taking a running leap past the bounds of impartiality and deep into the realm of cruelty. Joshua's Game was crippling, tortuous, and heavily flawed from an architect's point of view. None but the very strongest and luckiest could return to life, not even the Players with untapped potential and little training and just a little bit of hesitance. It's a Game of chance -- if you didn't figure that out, sorry, you die -- and it's arduous, impossible. Taking away little luxuries like security and attention, stripping things like identity and memory... This Game is not for the weak, or even the slightly unprepared. And just to make it even more unfair, remember all of those Reapers? Everyone, from the GM to the Wall Reapers, even the Conductor and the Composer himself, were Players. And they all won. And they opted to keep playing; for power, of course, but also for their lives. They're as desperate as the Players, but are infinitely more dangerous (they know the Game, they know how to use their power), and every single one of them wants to see their point count climb higher, because that many more points means a step towards power and immortality, and that much more of a buffer between them and a quick Erasure. And Joshua knows people, deeply and intimately enough to make any hardened stoic squirm (See: Neku). He knew that everyone, from the Players to the Reapers, would be fighting for their lives. He knew how that would affect their minds, their attitudes, their choices. And then he made those rules anyway. This is not a healthy Game. In fact, this was the quickest way to run Shibuya into the ground. The ratio of those who died to those who opted for reincarnation to those who chose to return to the Game to those who chose to become Reapers would be, statistically... ridiculous. Keep in mind that Joshua knows the limits of his power (which are pretty... inconsequential, but they're there), so he probably wanted to organize a Game that wouldn't drain him from too many resurrections, but then... how do you drain a being who can raise the dead on a weekly basis? Joshua didn't make the rules to be easy on him. He made them to be impossible on the players, killing them off at an alarming rate and intensifying the competition to a burning point.
That brings us to the next question that one would ask: Why the hell would Joshua want to sabotage his own Game? Answer: he likes a challenge, and wanted to make very, very sure he could play the Game for a very, very long time. I assume that the Game that he won was far too easy for his taste. Disdainful. He bit his thumb at it. He wanted to make it difficult for both the Players and himself to play and challenging enough to satisfy his convoluted sense of fun, along with satisfying his twisted sense of justice. His view of the world is the farthest from rose-tinted as it could be: unrealistically, grotesquely skewed until hyper-clear. His sense of justice runs right up against it, curved and kinked to something completely unrecognizable, namely, his sadism.
He screwed Shibuya over using two distinct, very effective ways. The first was a critical structural flaw. He structured the Game to be wrong. How? The immense emotional pressure that his game placed upon the Players, the Reapers, and himself, channeled mental stress on the Game, which is a subset of Shibuya's Oversoul, to use Frost's term. The Soul of Shibuya is in the passion that drives a city, its music. Who makes that music? The Composer. And what is a city but the passion of its people? That is what gives a city its its pulse, its life, its music. And, in turn, the passion of Shibuya is made by the Composer. Shibuya's directly connected to the psyche of its Composer, if I've interpreted Secret Report 22 correctly (""As the Composer has changed, so Shibuya itself has metamorphosed"). Following this path of logic, Joshua, the people of Shibuya, and Shibuya as a concrete object are, to an extent, one and the same. That means he must, as the creator, embodiment, and product of Shibuya, represent the best and worst qualities of our species; our senseless cycle of chaos, our vicious will to survive (or end), our boundless capacity for intelligence and growth, our cutting sense of humor, and our endless quest for perfection. The funny thing is that, since Joshua determines the quality of the humans who get to stay, and he, in turn, represents that quality, he's actually defining himself through those he deems fit to live. He's in charge of his own personality, but only indirectly, through his Game. And, as we've already stated, his Game was flawed. Which means, of course, that Joshua himself was deteriorating, and Shibuya along with him. And here's the killer: after a while, he didn't even care. He only let the most vicious survive, and those people, their sheer will to live, compounded and compressed with each other and squeezed into Joshua's caricature of a personality. Being that concerned with survival comes with a certain degree of self-absorption. Really, why trust someone else when you can save your own skin? Now, imagine that feeling multiplied by every shy, guarded, private, frightened, aloof, superficial Soul in Shibuya, and compress it into one single mind. And this came in handy for Joshua. He was already paranoid from his reign as the number one target for any ambitious Reaper, and every Player, by extension. Who 2 trust, indeed. So, you have a sociopath times the population of Shibuya, too horribly arrogant to see any reason besides his own, and his reason, as selfish as he was, were focused on his wants. What did he want? To win his Game. How was he to do that? By pushing the participants of his Game to their highest potential. That meant that he needed to push himself to keep focused on playing his Game, to the point where he wasn't playing the Game anymore; he was the Game and all of its components, complexities, and cruelty. And it was ugly. He hated the sight of people wasting their lives (how dare they, in his city?) the rashes of conflict spread all over Shibuya wherever two people met and opened their worlds to each other and in the process smashed up each other's fingers and toes. Oh, and in case you forgot, he embodied all of that rage too. He got to the point where he no longer saw that borderline between growth and pain between the Game and Shibuya. He used to enjoy seeing the struggle of others bettering themselves, but that turned to mere pleasure at seeing them bleed. As a result of the constant growth of cynicism in Shibuya, under his mask of cold, calm rationale, he was quickly driving himself insane. And if he finally snapped, took that leap into complete and utter lunacy, so Shibuya would end. At least Los Angeles had a good team of Reapers running back-up.
But, to be fair, the warp of Shibuya wasn't entirely his fault. If he wanted to, he was free to regulate thought and establish order in his city, ruling over a perfect, peaceful Shibuya. And he didn't. The sum of a system is only as good as the weakest part, after all. True, if he standardized the degree of quality in his city, no one would get worse; but no one could ever surpass that standard, and growth is the key to a truly successful, vibrant city. He put the responsibility of creating identity and the city in the hands of each citizen of Shibuya, entrusting his success to a long, slow Game, testing the ingenuity of the Players (and giving him an endless source of entertainment; he always enjoyed a good game, after all.) And, quite frankly, they blew it. "But it's not fair -- Joshua just made the Game harder and harder to win by giving everyone a destructive attitude." Wrong. An attitude is just that -- an attitude. It's malleable. Joshua is a product of Shibuya, but that doesn't necessarily mean that he is everything Shibuya is limited to (I mean, look at Rhyme; she was probably the best thing that ever happened to Joshua besides Neku and Mr. Hanekoma.) Joshua created the Game to be unfair, true, but only through injustice and studying one's own identity and associating with other people and their values can one find their inner strength. He never meant to hurt anyone. That would only kill his Game, after all. He wanted to push them until they became stronger, better people, because only people like that would help make Shibuya a place of growth and life. However, none did. It would've only taken one person, because often enough, a single person within a vortex of influence can make earth-shaking things happen. He never wanted the Game to run stably, because a stable Game gave stable results, and creativity is anything but stable (see: Minamimoto.) And he found none who could rise to the challenge of beating his Game with the grace and creativity it demanded for full points. Joshua is demonized for being desperately hopeful. All he needed was one person to break his Game. And, for however many years he lived, he never found one.
So, what broke? Surprisingly, it was neither the Game nor Joshua. As sad as it was, it was Joshua who had to rescue himself from himself; he finally, finally figured out that he was driving Shibuya to hell. So. He, being by this time the most shamelessly narcissistic he'd allow, decided to go out the only way he would let himself: magnificently, with the biggest, baddest, loudest collision possible, with no loose ends and no survivors. If it wasn't complete and total annihilation, it was imperfect, a blemish on his track record. And who to defend that track record but the one person in Shibuya with the most raw power, the purest distillation of Shibuya's good and bad qualities with a warm body? Neku, of course. Joshua and Neku share many eerie similarities; in fact, the very same quality in Joshua that infuriated Neku, his absolute refusal to communicate what he was really thinking, is the same flaw that he struggled with himself. Neku, as Joshua's proxy, won his Game. And Joshua won the penultimate Game for the fate of Shibuya over Neku. And Joshua was pleased. Then he spared Shibuya. For the first time, he met someone who embodied everything egotistical and vicious and unfeeling and self-serving about Shibuya (other than himself, of course), and saw him change genuinely, smashing the Game, tearing it down piece by piece, with all the grace and creativity that a proper Game deserved. And that alone gave Joshua a reason to start hoping again.
Of course, Joshua is pissed at the end of the Game, and again, it was Neku's fault. For the first time, Shibuya wasn't Joshua's to fix; nor was it fixed by him, really. That. Ticked. Him. Off. He was so used to watching his pawns fail that he started to enjoy what little control he had over their redemption. It was hands off time now; time to let the cards settle where they would. And by god will he be a pissy little bitch about it. Now that Shibuya has started to change, he's going to change along with it for the better, whether he liked it or not. After all, change comes slowly, and not without a fight. And if a certain castle trips along and effectively sweeps half of that change into the dumpster... well. What is Josh supposed to do but give Neku trouble again? After all, it worked so well last time, and he needs Neku to get back to full potential again. After all, it would be a spot on his own record if he let Neku backslide any more. Neku is much of Josh's as Beat and Shiki and even Minamimoto are. If he isn't up to scratch, it would reflect on Joshua's record. And that is the last thing Joshua wants.
Let the Game begin.
We'll get into precisely how Joshua acts around Neku a little later. =) For right now, we'll just say that everything seems to be going according to plan except for Neku's unexpected crush on him/Sayu, derp.