My Meta - Tumblr Posts

I want to talk about the specific Dany’s theme that plays while Viserys I reveals to Rhaenyra about Aegon’s dream. For those who might be wondering which exactly of Dany’s themes it is, it’s “Breaker of Chains”. Here are the two videos for comparison. The “Breaker of Chains” theme starts playing at the exact moment Viserys starts to talk about Aegon’s dream (from 2:29 to 3:56). Listen to the Breaker of Chains theme from 1:40 to 3:00:

As you can see, it’s pretty much the same theme. Dany’s theme even intensifies in the exact moment that Viserys says that a Targaryen must be seated on the Iron Throne if the world is to survive, a king or queen (notice how the show makes sure to not forget to mention that it can be a queen) strong enough to unite the realm, and that Aegon called his dream “the song of ice and fire”.

So, to sum up what we’ve learned:

Aegon called his dream “the song of ice and fire” and “the song of ice and fire” is exactly the name of the prophecy Dany learns about in the House of the Undying (and Dany is the only character to ever hear about the song of ice and fire), and of course, “A Song of Ice and Fire” is the title of the books;

The theme that plays during the scene that Viserys tells this secret to Rhaenyra is called “The Prince That Was Promised”, once again confirming the idea that Aegon’s dream, which he called “the song of ice and fire”, is about the prophecy we’ve been hearing about in the books, the Prince That Was Promised/Azor Ahai prophecy (yes, they ARE the same);

The part of “The Prince that was promised” theme that plays during the moment in which Viserys talks about the song of ice and fire and the prince that was promised is DANY’S THEME, “Breaker of Chains”;

GRRM is way more involved in House of the Dragon than he ever was in Game of Thrones, and he already said in interview that he was the one who told the showrunners about Aegon’s dream. So all of this came from GRRM, meaning it’s no coincidence that Dany’s theme is there at that exact moment.

To me, this CONFIRMS, without a shadow of doubt, that DANY is the princess that was promised/Azor Ahai, and that HERS is the song of ice and fire (and it also confirms that the Game of Thrones ending is bullshit, and Dany is actually destined to save the world).

Additional Thoughts on 89-2

Lately, I revisited my 89-2 meta on Father (you can check that out in my pinned post because Tumblr hates links) while reading “The Halo of Golden Light: Imperial Authority and Buddhist Ritual in Heian Japan” by Asuka Sango and...

I have been completely bamboolzed. Things totally just went over my head. Things have been realized.

Dated: 02/28/21

------------------------------------------------------

If you haven’t read the meta or need a small refresher, here are the important points for this post:

Onryo: any vengeful spirit (though they tend to be women) that returns to haunt the living; they are born out of strong emotions at death - hatred, jealousy, a grudge, and even love - or early, tragic, or unnatural deaths. Strong onryo are believed to cause natural disasters and plagues.

Goryo (goryoujin seems to be regional or historical variant of this word): literally “honorable ghost”; they are onryo who have been deified and pacified by people to avoid or put a stop to natural disasters. While the word has evolved to mean any onryo that has been distinguished, in the Heian period, they were specifically the onryo of aristocrats and politicians who were martyred, disgraced, or murdered in their lifetimes, like Tenjin.

Ebisu asserted that Father is a goryo/goryoujin - a human who died with a grudge around 1100 years ago, in the Heian era- and his grave must still exist. 

Judging by his clothing in the Sakura flashbacks and the terminology associated with him (karma, Liberation, etc), Father was a Buddhist monk.

While I was writing my initial Goryoujin meta, I was working on two assumptions:

That what Ebisu meant by “goryoujin”/goryo was its evolved definition - the goryo who could be born out of any vengeful spirit as opposed to Heian era goryo who were figures with higher social standing;

That Father had been an “ordinary” Buddhist priest with no connections to the court of Heian.

To explain why my assumption on the first one was wrong, we need to first tackle the second.

Any info we have on Father in canon right now is either vague at best and purely speculative at worst. However, I will go out on a limb here and present a theory I’ve had for... quite a while but only fleshed out further while doing my research for a Twitte thread on astrology and divination in the Heian period in the context of Father.

I was sorely disappointed and disheartened by the time I was through with reading a paper on Buddhist divination and astrology in the Heian period. To my dismay, esoteric astral magic and, later, the more advanced sukuyodo mainly dealt with the divination of auspicious dates for events and ceremonies. Nothing to do with influencing or divining the fate of the world of men, as Father so cryptically put it.

But in all that reading, I found a most interesting term: tenmondo. Tenmondo was the art of recording and interpreting unusual/rare astronomical events, which were thought to significantly influence nations on Earth and their rulers. The phenomena that was looked out for included lunar and solar eclipses, comets, unusual closeness between the moon and stars, and... shooting stars. Interesting. (thinking face emoji)

The problem with the practice of tenmon is that it was done pretty much exclusively for the Heian court and it wasn't part of Buddhist tradition - this practice had more in common with onmyodo ("The Way of the Yin and Yang") than it did with Buddhist astrology at the time.

In fact, tenmondo was put under the supervision of Onmyoryo bureau of the government which oversaw divination, astronomy, time, and calendar. The Onmyoryo was headed by onmyoji, practitioners of onmyodo. This definitely posed a few questions:

1. If Father's comment really is alluding to something similar to the tenmondo way of divination, how could he have known about it? He's a Buddhist priest, clearly. Which gave rise to:

2. Is it possible that Father was, at one point, involved with the Heian court?

Why, yes. It’s certainly a possibility that I am now entertaining quite seriously - and not based only on some outsourced, non-manga speculation but on a line from the manga that has struck me as significant for a long time:

(Official trans.: The beautiful court ladies, the great warriors and noble men. They all carry that inside them.)

“The beautiful court ladies, the great warriors and noble men”...? The court of Heian was a highly insulated community whose members rarely showed themselves to the public, if ever. The reality was that the common person had no concept of these court ladies, great warriors, and noble men or their workings - so why is it that Father, who I had originally speculated to be an “ordinary” Buddhist monk, specifically pointed out these three groups to also have that same karma within them? (Let’s not mention Father demonstrates extensive knowledge of Chinese astrology in an era where common people were illiterate.)

Unlike today - where religion and state/government are usually seen as two separate entities - religious authority and civil authority were often overlapped in the court of Heian. The Buddhist community at the time had direct ties to the imperial court, a sort of “antagonistic symbiotic relationship” as it is described in Sango’s book: the number of ordinations were limited by the state, records of all ordained nuns and monks were kept by certain offices, yet the imperial court also needed Buddhist monks and the religious authority they held to legitimize their rule and later, solidify imperial authority through ritual. The highest ranking Buddhist monks held office positions in a division known as Sōgō and an annual ritual known as the Misai-e Assembly gathered many monks, officials, and even the emperor himself to listen to lectures on the Golden Light Sutra and participate in repentance rites.

(Bonus: some Buddhist monks also made masks for a type of now-extinct Buddhist drama known as gigaku. Though it was starting to decline in popularity during the 10th century, it was still around and kicking.)

The bottom line: Heian period monks were involved with the court and could (and did) accumulate political power to become figures of higher social standing.

Which brings me to my second probably wrong assumption: “What Ebisu meant by “goryoujin”/goryo was its evolved definition - the goryo who could be born out of any vengeful spirit as opposed to Heian era goryo who were figures with higher social standing.”

It’s... a possible subtle implication that I didn’t notice until very recently:

Ebisu mentions the oldest mask is from around 1100 years ago (around 910) as estimated by carbon dating; “right around the time when Tenjin showed up.”

Everyone turns to Tenjin. Tenjin (or, Sugawara no Michizane) is a Heian period goryo -  he died in exile and various calamities & natural disasters were attributed to his onryo. He was commemorated as a goryo and later deified as Tenjin, the god of learning.

From that, Ebisu concludes the Sorcerer must have been a human who died with a grudge - a goryoujin - and his grave must still exist.*

Kofuku immediately jumps to ask Tenjin whether he knew the Sorcerer since they’re from the same era. Tenjin, who was a court official.

The implication here is that Ebisu was more likely than not talking about Heian era goryo - from specifically mentioning 1100 years, to associating it with Tenjin, to Kofuku herself asking whether they knew each other - which feeds into the theory that Father was a figure of some social standing to have become what would be considered a goryo in the Heian period specifically.

*I was originally bewildered by the suggestion that his grave might still exist, looking at it from the perspective of Father being an ordinary monk who probably wouldn’t have gotten much ado. But if Father was involved with the court, I would say it is much less far-fetched to say that his grave still exists in some capacity - and if not his grave, then some record of his existence. A division of the Heian court kept records of all ordained nuns and monks. Still, why would he have a grave if he explicitly recalls having been called a god, Buddha, and monster by people after his return from Yomi/resurrection? Maybe that’s why he hides his face in the flashbacks. Either way, Adachitoka explain.

That about wraps up my additions to the goryoujin meta. There’s not too much concrete evidence to go on except implications but in the end, I do at least hope this is more or less on the right track...?

I hope that, at least, it gives people something to think about!

Noragami Meta Masterpost

Outdated: This post contains content that has since been disproven by the manga, or better info has been found. Obsolete: This theory/meta/analysis does not hold up to scrutiny and is no longer deemed plausible by me.

The Loophole(TM) [OUTDATED]

So, what’s the deal with Nora?

Goryoujin: what’s the deal with Father? (89-2 edition) (Part 1) (Part 2) [PARTLY OUTDATED - See “Additional Thoughts on 89-2″]

Additional Thoughts on 89-2

Father: true desires, projection theory, and related thoughts (Part 1-1) (Part 1-2) (Part 2 - TBA)

(Mini) thread on some thoughts about Father's "separateness" and isolation as a person (Twitter)

Chapter 95-1 Thoughts

On Magatsukami: A Few Noragami Thoughts [CURRENT]

The Raiden Shogun's/Baal's Buddhist Influences, a very small thoughts thread (Twitter) (Not Noragami but still relevant)

Chapter 97-1 Thoughts (Part 1) (Part 2)

Chapter 51 "Salvation" (救 Sukui) vs. Chapter 97 "Savior" (救主 Sukuinushi) (Twitter)

黄泉帰る(yomigaeru) "to return from Yomi" vs. 蘇る (yomigaeru) "to return from Yomi" (Twitter)

Chapter 97-2 Thoughts (Part 1) (Part 2)

On Father and Yato

Chapter 100 Thoughts (Part 1) (Part 2)

So, let’s talk Father and Yato in Chapter 102-1

Father: true desires, projection theory, and related thoughts (Part 1-1)

[Part 1-1] [Part 1-2]

Wow, another Father theory/thoughts post from yours truly. Who could’ve predicted that???? /s

Huge manga spoilers ahead, obviously.

In this post, I will be expanding on some concepts I touched on in my two-parter Goryoujin thoughts from way back in August (god, it’s been a hot minute) - specifically the parts about the nature of Father’s wish and Father’s “double meaning” lines, as I had described them in the post. If you haven’t read the Goryoujin thoughts post and Additional Thoughts on 89-2 (both of which can be found in my pinned), I strongly urge you to do so as I build a little on my previous words and concepts introduced in those posts.

This theory/thoughts post will be divided into two sections:

Part 1: True Wish theory, leading into

Part 2: Projection theory

I will be making several references and taking quotations from the book Matsuri: Festivals of Japan by Herbert E. Plutschow as it was very informative for some of the subjects I will be touching on.

Special thanks to Raelin and Jowi for helping me make this post happen - both with editing and helping me cohesively formulate my ideas!

Without much further ado, let’s begin.

Dated: April 11, 2021 || Part 1 Wordcount: 4250~

Part 1: “True Wish” theory 

The baseline of the theory: Although Father’s wish is indeed to “cull the herd”, the desire Yato was born from - and which manifests in his inherent kind and caring nature that we see in the Sakura flashbacks - was an entirely different one from the wish Father is vocalizing. This theory assumes that Yato is exactly what we have been told so far: a small god born from Father’s one powerful wish.

(This concept was originally brought up by Noragami theory god @echodrops​ in their “A Lot of Thoughts on Yato and Father” analysis. I’m simply expanding on the ideas proposed by them.)

Before we go any further, I want to talk about the two main “aspects” of Japanese deities and spirits:

Aramitama (lit. “wild soul”): the chaotic, malevolent, violent aspect of a spirit, which must be pacified and worshiped in order to give rise to the nigimitama. When the aramitama emerges, natural disasters and social disorder follow.

Nigimitama (lit. “tranquil soul”): the orderly, civilized aspect of a spirit when they are properly worshiped and placated, the “normal” state of deities. Deities in their nigimitama state bring good harvests and protection from disasters.

(Side note: This is exemplary of what Amaterasu meant when she said “Harmony has been held in the highest regard since ancient times. Which is also to say that discord is wickedness.” in Chapter 70.)

To quote Matsuri: 

“Generally speaking, deities seem to be, in most cases, ethically indifferent. Their beneficent and maleficent potential seems to derive from their contacts with the living. If people fail to worship them in a way pleasing to the deities, then they will turn malevolent and cause natural disasters and social disharmony. Once malevolent, the deities will not change unless people ritually change their nature. There seems to be no absolutely evil deities in Japan.” (Pg. 20 - Kindle edition)

There are two points of importance in this passage to the two theories of this post: (1) it falls to the people to pacify the raging spirits which cause disaster in a way that is pleasing to the deities, and (2) there are no inherently evil deities in Japan as all spirits have a dynamic ara- and orderly nigi- aspect. For now, I want to focus on the first point. 

➞ Father’s grudge

In a chapter titled “The Man-Deity Totality”, Plutschow provides an interesting insight into the relationship between man and deity in pre-modern Japan: 

“Deities relate intimately both to the land and to the human community upon it. [...] Natural calamities and social disruption are believed to result from a deity’s evil or from a vengeful deity that comes out of its dynamic aspect. Men and deities are therefore reflections of the other, each partaking of the nature of the other. Man and deities form a whole, by which a person’s ontic self and his behavior are linked to the deity.” (Pg 25 - Kindle edition)

It asserts that the state of the deity reflects the state of the community, and the state of the community reflects on the deity; that is to say, when the deity is orderly, the community prospers and is also orderly, and when the deity takes on the dynamic ara- aspect, everything else does as well. 

 If we look back to Chapter 60:

“Your ilk get off scot-free for everything you do. But who do you think forgives the debt? People do. No matter how much you take from them, how much you walk all over them. They just accept it without a word of complaint. I can’t forgive any of you - not the gods or any of the idiots who forgive them.  [People are] like little children who do nothing but cry and cling to their parents… no matter how much of a beating those parents give them. You say this is the world that men and gods all wanted… and that makes me… want to shake things up!”

Father’s grudge has two aspects to it: 

- The gods: Emboldened and made arrogant by humanity's continued "forgiveness" of their actions, the gods can do whatever they want to the Near Shore without much consequence; natural disasters and calamities seem to have the opposite effect - they further deepen humanity's faith, no doubt in an effort to placate the raging spirits in times of strife.

(Chapter 87)

(Chapter 70)

Without the faith of the people, gods would not exist, as gods are sustained through human wishes and desires. 

- The people: Humanity is directly complicit in allowing gods to do whatever they please and crawling back to them “like little children.” The burden of making sure the deity’s nigimitama is worshiped, disaster is avoided, and order is maintained falls mostly to the people. Yet, if the deity and the people are reflections of each other and form a cohesive whole, "each partaking in the nature of the other", then the system is the way it is because humanity - much like gods - are slaves to their nature, which is inherently "ugly" according to Father.

[”But it is not long past that [Tenjin] became a god, and his attachment to the world of men remains strong. He is a slave to his divine nature; he cannot fight against it.” - Tsuyu (Chapter 47, official trans.)]

[”No matter how well you cover it up, once you expose their true selves... well, you know what happens then very well. Human nature is an ugly thing.” - Father (Chapter 49, official trans.)]

Father cites his motivations to "cull the herd" as a way to get rid of the gods but also as a motivation - because all people have that ugly human nature within them, their karma. ("That's why I told you to cull the herd.")

(Chapter 48)

Karma is a Buddhist concept: to put it simply, it is the sum of one's conscious actions. Negative karma - like we see in the revealing of God's Greatest Secret - arises from the Three Poisons (greed - craving/desire, hatred - aversion/ aggression, and delusion - ignorance about the Buddhist concept of reality, which asserts that everything is ever-changing and the self is an illusion; attachment to the physical world and desire are the cause of all suffering and the thing that keeps all beings trapped within samsara, the cycle of death and rebirth caused by karma).

To summarize: the gods and humans, in Father's eyes, are equally complicit in perpetuating this endless cycle - because the people and the deities are reflections of each other, the inherent "ugliness" of human nature reflects on gods to give rise to their ara- aspect. This creates a need for the constant pacification which, within the context of Noragami, is the "forgiveness" of humanity, the thing which enables the gods to do as they please - painting people as both the perpetrators (being slaves to their "ugly" human nature) and the victims. 

Father's solution to this constant, continued loop is to "cull the herd": to get rid of the people whose faith sustains the existence of gods and, at the same time, enables their destructive behavior due to their own human nature as Father perceives it. He describes his wish like so:

"Yaboku, you are a tiny god born from only one wish. But it's a very powerful wish, the only wish I've been able to wish in my entire life. My wish is this: a cull." 

(Chapter 47, official trans.)

Yato supplements this statement with the following in the Heaven arc: 

"The culling of humanity is the Sorcerer’s wish. [...] Because gods are immortal. As long as people exist, so, too, will the gods.”

(Chapter 70)

(Side note: "culling" the herd implies the selective slaughter of “inferior” livestock, not total annihilation, so I have no idea why it's implied that Father wants to get rid of all people several times yet his wish is described as “culling” the herd.)

➞ The catch

“Those who learn from successes grow prideful. On the contrary… those who learn from failures run to extremes. You can’t learn anything from total affirmation or total denial.” - Tenjin, Chapter 66 (official trans.)

As I've discussed briefly in Part 2 of the Goryoujin post, the exact wording of Father's description of his wish strikes me as very odd: 

"The only wish I've been able to wish in my entire life."

It's a small detail, easily overlooked, but the more you think about it, the stranger it becomes. The only thing Father has been able to wish in his entire life: the annihilation of humanity and thus, the gods?

 If “cull the herd” is indeed Father’s one true, constant wish throughout his entire life, then that implies Father has felt that way since he was very young in some capacity. I have a very hard time visualizing a, say, ten year old Father sitting there and wishing for mass murder. “People have an inherent ugly human nature which manifests in their bad deeds and karma” and “the gods are destructive, their destructive-ness being further enabled by people’s forgiveness of their actions” to “obviously, killing everyone (or almost everyone) to get rid of the gods is a Viable Solution” is a very, very big leap to make, and definitely not a very realistic or rational one. Is it theoretically possible? Yes. Likely? Probably not. So what happened?

Father very likely (99%-sure kind of “likely”) had a very religiously-involved past. As mentioned earlier, karma is a Buddhist concept, the very core of Buddhist ethics and what drives the cycle of reincarnation and rebirth (samsara) and thus, suffering - and it’s far from being the only Buddhist association with Father. Everything from his clothes in the Sakura flashback (the black Buddhist motsuke koromo over a white kosode, the basic attire of a monk) to the terminology he uses (“karma”, “Liberation” for Chiki’s powers, which alludes to the Buddhist concept of freeing oneself from samsara) to even Chiki herself, who becomes a staff known as a khakkhara or shakujo (JP), Father’s having six rings to represent the Six Realms in which someone can be reborn into, depending on their karma.

(A khakkhara/shakujo)

Although our concept of “Shinto” and “Buddhism” today might be that they are two totally separate religions, this wasn’t the case for much of Japanese history since Buddhism was introduced to Japan in the Asuka period (538 - 710). Although they do have many distinctions between them in both mythological tradition, beliefs, and structural practice, the imported Buddhism blended and merged with the native Shinto faith so much that it’s difficult to tell where one begins and the other ends: temples (tera) were often built alongside shrines (jinja) and Shinto & Buddhist deities were many times enshrined together at the same places.  One such example is Kyoto’s Gion shrine - today known as Yasaka shrine - which enshrines the Shinto deity Susanoo and, in the past, Gozu Tenno, a deity of Buddhist origin. Both are believed to cause plagues but can also protect against them if worshiped properly.

(Yasaka shrine)

This blending of Shinto and Buddhism was called shinbutsu shuugo, “the syncretism of kami and buddha”, and was definitely true of Father’s time around 1000 - 1100 years ago (middle Heian period, around 900). 

Now, it isn’t necessarily required to pray to any Buddhist divinity in the conventional sense besides chanting mantras and sutras (it does depend on the school, though), the focus is more on liberation from samsara (and the means to achieve it are many, again depending on the school) and seeing the world as it really is, in accordance with Buddhist thought. Yet it’s very strange to me how - with these close ties that Buddhism has to Shinto and vice versa - Father claims to have only ever had this one wish to cull the herd, despite probably living for some chunk of time in this highly religious environment as a monk and having Buddhist teachings drilled into his head.

Buddhism generally doesn’t view human nature as inherently “ugly” (in fact, there is no concept of “human nature” in Buddhism because the self - and therefore everything that makes up the self - is an illusion and temporary; the only thing that remains is one’s karma, the sum of one’s actions); in fact, it’s the exact opposite. Sentient beings are thought to have “buddha-nature” and therefore are inherently good, thus the taboo on taking lives, which causes harm. Doing any amount of research into basic Buddhist concepts - the Four Noble Truths, Three Poisons, the Eightfold Path, the Six Perfections - will reveal that the avoidance of harm and the active doing of good is a central theme in Buddhism, a theme Father doesn’t adhere to (at all), among a plethora of other Buddhist concepts he is the very opposite of. Yet it’s clear that Buddhist thought informed very strongly what Father believes and how he sees the world, given the visual cues, the way he talks, and the terms he throws around.

I am hesitant to believe Father has always rejected these concepts, taking into consideration how extreme Father’s views are. It seems he has spent quite a while as a monk, given the glimpse we got into his thorough knowledge of astrology as based on the Chinese system - knowledge that was certainly limited only to literate and educated men, a privilege most people did not have. 

(To quote from Volume 16 notes: “Kanoto to Tori, page 98

“Yato’s father is demonstrating his knowledge of astronomy as based on the Chinese system. Kanoto is the Japanese for xin, the eight of the ten Heavenly Stems, and Tori is the tenth of the twelve Earthly Branches (the Rooster or Bird of the zodiac). These stems and branches were used in the Chinese (and subsequently Japanese) calendar to count years in a cycle of 60. The 58th year in the cycle, Kanoto-Tori year, was known to be one of revolutionary change, so when little Yaboku reached out to a star connecting Kanoto and Tori, his father took that as a sign.”)

This would indicate a process of turning away from these beliefs, a gradual corruption - an increasingly jaded view of the world, not a constant and unchanging belief. The existence of a jaded train of thought implies the existence of an unjaded, untarnished one in the past - and, in Father’s case - this unjaded, untarnished desire gave rise to “cull the herd”, a wish arising from Father’s cynical worldviews, shaped by his experiences of gods and, likely, people as well over some period of time.

A pure and sincere desire transformed and twisted into something monstrous is certainly not something we haven’t seen in Noragami before:

In Bishamon’s love for her shinki and her desire for a family, which turned into blind and irrational hatred towards Yato and created a destructive, painful, and lonely environment for her shinki family, respectively;

(Chapter 19)

(Chapter 21)

In Kazuma’s desire to protect and stay with Bishamon, which led him to more and more desperate lengths; 

(Chapter 67)

(Chapter 55)

Even in Kugaha’s scheming - his desire for Bishamon’s love and affection gave rise to his plans to replace her, under the guise of “righteousness”. 

(Chapter 22. Not included here is the “All of you kept smiling for me. But deep down I knew that you were weeping.” panel with Kugaha smiling because the scans I’m looking at don’t have it. Grr.)

Father’s case, obviously, is this concept taken to the pinnacles of “extreme.” Yet I would argue that Kugaha’s case is most similar to Father’s in both desperation and motivation: there is a lot to be said about the comparison of gods to parents and to humans as children, even Father makes this comparison himself.

(Chapter 60)

Noragami has certainly made it a point to show how painful it is to be abandoned by one’s parents and community, whether they be god-parents or birth family.

(Chapter 14)

(Chapter 88)

I’m going to go one step further and apply this theme to Father, a being “abandoned by the Heavens”, as he says in his own words:

(Chapter 76)

I won’t delve too much into this application just yet as this has a lot to do with the Projection theory, which I will explore in detail in Part 2; for now, just know this is the viewpoint I’m working with when I talk about this particular theory.

So, to bring it all back to the original point: if Father’s wish to “cull the herd” is the wish arising from his jaded view of the world formed over some period of years, what is the unjaded, true desire it arose from that’s been a constant in his life - the desire that Yato embodies in his divine nature, taking into consideration the pain of abandonment by your (god-)parents and community? 

[Continued in Part 1-2]

Father: true desires, projection theory, and related thoughts (Part 1-2)

[Part 1-1] [Part 1-2 here]

Continued from Part 1-1.

➞ Yato’s divine nature 

"There seems to be no absolutely evil deities in Japan.”

As echodrops pointed out in her short segment about this concept, all other gods we’ve seen so far seem to adhere to their divine natures: Tenjin, as a god of learning, is a scholar, Bishamon is a warrior god who stays focused on combat, Kofuku - as a god of poverty - brings bad luck wherever she goes, no matter what she may do to hide her bad luck as binbougami. So why is it that Yato seems to be the only exception here, the god of calamity who has not a single malicious bone in his body, as we can see in the Sakura flashbacks?

There can be two answers to this: (A) Yato is not the product of Father’s wish at all but another god entirely, per the Tsukuyomi or Susanoo theories, which I reject; or (B) that Yato is the product of Father’s wish but not specifically “cull the herd”, which is his superficial desire for revenge. I’ve laid the groundwork to talk about option B.

If Yato is not the product of a malicious desire, then what kind of desire is he a product of, exactly?

To answer that question, we need to look at one particular aspect of Yato’s main inner driving force in his childhood. That main force is this: making people happy.

This is said as early as the Yomi arc, when Yato meets up with Ebisu in the Underworld:

(Chapter 31)

And indeed, this seems to be a primary motivation for Yato. It permeates the entirety of the Sakura flashbacks, in which we see baby Yato acting most freely on his instincts. 

(Chapter 46)

(Chapter 47)

Even when Yato was killing for Father, it wasn't because he derived any joy from the act of killing itself (besides killing being his way of "playing"), but from making Father happy. The first thing we see Yato do after his first successful “play” session is to run to Father, asking whether he'd seen what they've done, looking for his praise.

(Chapter 46)

Of course, this could also be chalked up to: (A) Yato still being a small god, a child, so his intentions are more "pure" and he is acting as a child would, seeking his parent’s love and praise, or (B) Father wanted to have this kind of subservient god at his beck and call to take his anger out on, reversing the power dynamic of the god-human relationship. I don't think either of those two statements are quite correct - there is another prominent aspect to Yato besides his motivations to make people happy:

The concern for humanity and their wishes.

The purpose of any god, of course, is to hear people's wishes and prayers because they are a product of those wishes and need them to survive. But the gods' effectiveness in answering these prayers is very questionable, from Father's point of view: no matter how much people pray, those prayers go largely unanswered, and are therefore worthless.

(Chapter 87)

When we are shown the gods’ work towards protecting humanity and answering wishes, the bulk of it is slaying ayakashi, which is mostly preventative work (important but ultimately passive and uninvolved). And when we did see active work being put into granting wishes (wishes within the realm of a god’s ability, since they don’t seem to have much control over wishes like “let me pass my exam!” and the such) through Tenjin entrusting Yato with returning Mayu’s daughter’s pocket watch chain to Mayu, he remarks that even though she’s been worshiping at this shrine for so long (implied to be almost her entire life, as she came here with Mayu as a child and kept coming back as an old woman), it took him that long to notice her wish. This is a milder example of the kind of neglect Father talks of.

(Chapter 43)

And Yato seems to be the antithesis of this kind of neglect. The very first thing we see baby Yato say on-screen, even before Sakura is “Is that a prayer?” in response to someone’s plea for help…

(Chapter 45)

...And later, when he does meet Sakura, it’s noted that he’s always wanted to say that someone’s wish has been heard loud and clear. (The unofficial scans I’m looking at say he “wanted to try speaking” but the official says he always wanted to say that line in Chapter 46).

Of course, Yato isn’t a famous god like Tenjin who gets tons and tons of wishes, most of them probably impossible to truly grant. Yato is not overwhelmed by prayers and can’t afford to be picky about listening to them. Again, these instances could very well be chalked up to a god’s reliance on prayers to survive instead of being the result of Father’s “true desire” beyond “cull the herd.”

However.

In Chapter 61, in the scene with Bishamon following immediately after Father’s Chapter 60 speech, Nana says this:

(The official translation reads: “I wouldn’t be surprised if Heaven took someone he loved, like it didn’t even matter. [...] Sometimes, Heaven takes too much.”)

In Chapter 60, Father states that people just put up with whatever the gods do “no matter how much they take from [people]”; in Chapter 70, Father (in Yato’s mind, anyway) questions “how many have been caught in the crossfire of the [gods’] conceit”, showing, again, how little care gods can have for human lives;

In Chapter 87 (appropriately named “The Way to Darkness”), Nora questions whether Hiyori would be able to forgive it if Yukine died at the hands of a god and that calamity bears a face in this world, too, which is why Father can’t forgive it. 

In Father’s perspective, gods take lives and think nothing of it. But in the previous two pages before Nora says what she does…

“At some point, Yato started mourning the death of other people. It’s silly for a god of calamity but that boy loved people.”

Yato mourned the death of the people he killed. If people’s deaths mattered to the gods like they mattered to Yato, would Father’s beloved person have died in the first place? If all gods cared for people as Yato cares for people, would the system Father so loathes be as destructive as it is?

I believe this is the heart of Father’s original desire, the “one wish he’s been able to wish in his entire life”: a world where people are not as rotten as Father now perceives them to be and gods are as dedicated to the well-being of humanity as they are supposed to be.

(There’s a really interesting comparison to be made here between Father and Yukine, especially with recent developments in regards to Yukine - Yukine believes people to be inherently good while Father believes them to be inherently bad, yet Yukine’s desire for a world where people are kind to each other and his thoughts on the judgement of gods may mirror Father’s own in a less cynical time. I’ll expand more on this in Part 2.)

Now, I’m not saying that Father’s wish is not “cull the herd.” This is 100% obviously his wish when we see him in the Sakura flashbacks - even Yato instinctively knows this to be true.

But this wish came from somewhere and wasn’t always about the culling of humanity and the disappearance of the gods - Father’s desire of a better world as the “only wish he’s been able to wish his entire life” became increasingly distorted and twisted as Father became more disillusioned with the world.

Father is absolutely hellbent on Yato being a god of calamity, a “god who can only take.” (Remember quote 2? “There seems to be no absolutely evil deities in Japan.” All deities have an orderly nigi- aspect and a disorderly ara- aspect). It irks Father to no end that Yato is a god that embodies the things that he does, not Father’s superficial and unrealistic desire for revenge - he’s the antithesis of everything Father has become over the years.

The thing about Father is that he’s completely progressed past the belief that things could change, or in the goodness of the world or of humanity. Father doesn’t want healing or goodwill - the things Yato represents - he wants revenge; there is no hope for the system, so the only thing to do is smash it, not try to fix it. This manifests in Father’s quite blatant, almost obsessive desire to not only beat Yato down and make him hurt but also the general impulse to “corrupt” everything that is good and hopeful.

Which brings me to my next point: Part 2, the Projection theory.

(Coming soon to my blog near you!)

On Magatsukami: A Few Noragami Thoughts

Dated: August 7, 2021

Imagine being me, minding my own business on a Saturday night and doing absolutely nothing Noragami research-related, when I read the following sentence on a random page on the Fatal Frame wikia:

In Japanese mythology, Magatsuhi-no-kami were kami of disorder and misfortune that were created when Izanagi, returning from the underworld (Yomi), performed Misogi to purify himself.

You mean my efforts to research magatsukami (禍津神 magatsukami) in mythology were unsuccessful because the name is spelled differently (禍津日神 magatsuhi no kami)?! Literally one kanji difference! Adachitoka’s so sneaky!

Anyway, explanation and thoughts ahead.

Magatsukami & Magatsuhi-no-Kami

As we all know by now, the term magatsukami 禍津神 in Noragami carries the meaning of a god of calamity - gods that bring disaster and misfortune to humans by being near them. The word is composed of the following kanji:

禍 meaning “calamity, misfortune, evil, curse”

津 meaning “haven, port, ferry, harbor”

神 meaning kami, a Shinto deity/spirit

Yato has been the deity that’s been most consistently described as a magatsukami in the series so far, mostly by Father; although it should be noted that Kagatsuchi remarked in Chapter 65 that Bishamon has the potential to become a magatsukami herself:

“[Bishamonten] is a great evil. If we allow her to live, she will become a [magatsukami], hunting the head of thousands.”

Most of the perspectives on gods of calamity have come from Father himself, who is obviously a very biased source. He has this to say on Yato’s nature as a god:

You’re one of those ‘necessarily evils’, Yaboku. No, that’s not the right expression. An essential ecological phenomenon... death that promotes life. [...] In other words, you’re the invisible hand of nature. (Chapter 44, Volume 12)

They also seem to be the gods that “take” as Father describes them several times leading up to and after the Sakura flashbacks:

“Yaboku is one of those gods who takes. Just being near him is enough to bring someone disaster.” (Chapter 40, Volume 11)

“Let me make this one thing very clear. Everything that’s about to happen, is happening because you met Yaboku. Remember, he’s one of the gods that takes way.” (Chapter 48, Volume 13)

“He’s one of the gods that takes away. He’ll take your family, your future, all of it. And you... will lose everything.” (Chapter 50, Volume 13)

Like I mentioned above, magatsuhi-no-kami is written in an almost identical way to magatsukami, with the addition of the character 日 hi, usually meaning day but can also mean sun, Japan in general, or divine spirit. Exactly like the magatsukami of Noragami, the magatsuhi-no-kami are spirits which brings about pollution, disaster, and misfortune who belong to the land of Yomi (and we’ll get to that in a second), leading me to believe they are probably the same concept with a slightly different spelling.

Here’s where things get interesting.

In Japanese mythology, the magatsuhi-no-kami were born from Izanagi while he was performing a purification ritual (misogi, which shares a name with shinki ablution in the Noragami series) to cleanse himself of the pollution (kegare) of Yomi. Some sources are a little unclear on how many gods exactly were born from this - some make it seem like it was many gods, while Japanese Wiki Corpus specifies it to be either one or two gods:

In the Kojiki, the magatsuhi-no-kami are two gods, Yasomagatsuhi-no-kami and Omagatsuhi-no-kami.

In the Nihon Shoki, it is just the Yasomagatsuhi-no-kami and possibly Oayatsuhi-no-kami (oaya meaning “great disaster.”).

In either version, after the magatsuhi-no-kami is/are born, Naobi-no-kami and Izunome - deities of purification and removal of calamities, changing misfortune to fortune - are likewise born from Izanagi to fix the disasters caused by the gods of calamity.

Now, wait a damn minute. So the magatsuhi-no-kami and the Naobi-kami were deities born during Izanagi’s purification after coming out of Yomi...? Now, that sure sounds... familiar.

That’s right, dear readers, Noragami is once again a circle: who could it be but Father, the only human character who came out of Yomi to tell the tale? I sure as hell did a double take when I read the words “kami of misfortune” together with “created when Izanagi, returning from the underworld (Yomi), performed Misogi to purify himself.”

Okay, there’s just... no damn way this is a coincidence. No way. Adachitoka must know about the origins of the magatsuhi-no-kami (and the Naobi-kami but more on that in a second), creating Father - specifically someone who came out from Yomi - and Yato, his god-son, in resemblance to the myth.

This opens about twenty cans of worms, and finally established a solid starting point for a question that I have been asking myself for a very long time: How exactly was Yato wished into existence by Father, from a single strong wish? Perhaps, just maybe, the thing that some people argued would make it implausible for Yato to have been born from Father’s wish - the fact that his return from Yomi rendered him no longer fully human - is the very thing that enabled it to happen in the first place?

Could it have been from the purification process after returning from Yomi? Or maybe with the help of the Brush - not Father forcing another name on an already existing, reincarnated god, but by using the Brush as a catalyst for the manifestation of Father’s wish in some way, since Yato was born after Mizuchi had been named with the Brush?

Now, if you are a regular on this blog, you might have read Part 1-1 and Part 1-2 of the “Father: true desires, projection theory, and other related thoughts” meta, in which I discuss Father’s wish:

I believe this is the heart of Father’s original desire, the “one wish he’s been able to wish in his entire life”: a world where people are not as rotten as Father now perceives them to be and gods are as dedicated to the well-being of humanity as they are supposed to be.

Could this conclusion be congruent with this myth? Could Yato be something other than a magatsukami?

Well.

As it has been mentioned earlier, magatsuhi-no-kami were not the only gods born from Izanagi’s purification: immediately following them was the Naobi-kami, a deity that is supposed to reverse misfortunes and calamities, the second side of the coin that were the magatsuhi-no-kami. Here I must point out that Father’s issue with Heaven seems to be exactly that they treat human lives with such carelessness - and the fact that Lady Pockmarks specifically died in a natural disaster, very heavily implied to be the result of the actions of a god.

As I said in the meta, the fact that Yato seems to be a god who specifically cares so much about the lives of humanity feels incredibly important. As much of strife Father undoubtedly saw and experienced by the “gods who take”, perhaps it is possible that Yato is something closer to the Naobi-kami, deities who reverse disasters to balance out the destruction of the magatsuhi-no-kami.

Also, from the Japanese Wiki Corpus:

“Norinaga MOTOORI believed Magatsuhi no kami is an evil god. According to Norinaga, Magatsuhi no kami is the cause of absurdity in life. In this world, people's weals and woes do not necessarily occur reasonably. He claimed that it is the works of Magatsuhi no kami that causes people living in good faith to not necessarily be blessed with happiness. He says, 'Magatsuhi no kami has a harsh spirit, and it is very sad, but there is nothing to be done.' ("Naobinomitama").”

Hmm. Hmmmm.

For now, I have nothing else to add, but I hope you all found this as good food for thought.

In conclusion:

Father and the Near Shore

@milimaaa​ says:

“Obviously [the above page] is a parallel between Yukine and Father, but this specific speech bubbel got me thinking a bit extra. We know Father hates heaven for what happened in his past but until now it seemed like he resented people (near shore) mainly because of them continuing worshiping the gods no matter what, but the near shore may have played a bigger, more active role in what made Father the man he is today…”

I definitely agree with this! I wanted to share a little excerpt from the (scrapped) Part 2 of the Father meta since... that version is not going to see light outside of my drafts for a while, might as well be put to use.

Thoughts below the cut. ↓ 

As far as what we know with more or less certainty, there's only the fact that Father is “outside” the realms of both humans and divinity - as @echodrops​ said, he is the “quintessential stray”: abandoned by the Heavens, rejecting humanity.

The view the Japanese have regarding religion (if you can even call the practice that pervaded the spiritual beliefs of pre-modern Japan “religion” in the Western understanding of the word…) has changed significantly within the last 100~ years, the degree of its integration with daily life is no longer the same as it used to be. However, before Japan began Westernizing in the latter half of the 19th century, Shinto-Buddhist beliefs and practices saturated every single aspect of society. As Herbet Plutschow puts it in “Matsuri: The Festivals of Japan”:

“In ancient Japan, religious practice pervaded the daily activities of the people down to the minutest details. The Japanese ‘did’ religion because they lived religion. Particularly in pre-modern Japan, it is difficult to separate the sacred from the profane, because the sacred dominated and guided their daily lives and activities, including professional skills.”

To believe what Father believes is to literally separate himself from not only his immediate community but society as a whole; the fact that he is so “other” from everyone else is already obvious, when he holds people in so much contempt for enabling the destructive behaviors of gods. When we see him in the flashbacks, he is perpetually the only adult around, living in the woods near the capital of Heian. But that begged some questions: Did he have no one besides Pockmarks? No parents, no friends, no mentors or acquaintances? Did he choose to go into self-imposed hermitry? Or perhaps… was he othered by his immediate community as well, as Yukine had been, shunned and isolated?

This is a bit more on the tinfoil hat side of things but hear me out. In Chapter 80-2, Father tells Yukine: 

“I came back to life by chance. I was called everything from a god to a Buddha to a monster…”

The manga very strongly implies that Father physically died and went to Yomi (i.e: “People can come back to life?”, implying that death had to take place first), instead of just walking into there like Yato had done. So we have someone who came back to life, which must have been a huge spectacle, considering the fact that people were calling Father “a god”, “a Buddha”, and/or “a monster.”

By the sounds of it, the way Father was perceived by the people around him drastically changed; he was either put on a pedestal as a god or a Buddha, or derided as a monster - clearly with enough fear and/or respect in the aftermath for people to honor him as a goryo, if Ebisu is to be believed. No matter which way you slice it, this would have put Father into the category of “other” by his immediate community: an isolating experience, to be no longer regarded as human but as a divinity or something worse.

Whichever situation may be the case, it’s clear that when grief came knocking, Father didn’t have the support he needed to come out in a constructive way - if his extreme views on solutions to Heaven's corruption are any indication. Similarly to Bishamon, he might have taken to bed and wept for ages and the grief eventually gave way to hatred - to a desire for revenge against those who had wronged him. It's the same destructive desire for revenge that Bishamon and Yukine share(d) - the cycle of violence only continues when the characters of Noragami allow their anger to lead them. But this anger stems from an incredibly human place of loss and grief - the experience of the protagonists (who are, by the virtue of being protagonists, more sympathetic and understandable to the readers) are the vantage point from which we are set up to understand (and maybe even sympathize with) what led Father to become the person he did and see that it is the exact same thing that drives everyone else in the series: love, and the need to belong and connect.

We see the pain and the long-lasting effects that Yukine’s father’s abuse, abandonment by his sister and mother, and the subsequent abandonment by his community had on him; if this relationship is the one-on-one model of the way Father perceives the larger relationship between Heaven and humanity - especially in the way that he experienced it - then Father must also be affected by its long term effects. 

Hi Anna! Glad to see you on Tumblr - it’s so much easier to share longform thoughts here than on Twitter, lol. Always glad to see your take on things.

As for your thoughts:

I think the fact that perpetrators of domestic violence often experienced it themselves as children is relatively well known. 

Indeed! I was going to bring this up initially but then didn’t, some things just slip the mind. People often reflect the behaviors they see in their family and environments, etc etc. So if someone grows up seeing violent behaviors...

The mere fact that I know of the perpetrator that he himself has been subjected to violence does not make his act less cruel or excusable. [...] As if his own suffering should not only explain his actions, but even legitimize them. As if his campaign against heaven, lined with hundreds of dead, made him righteous.

I do wonder: do you mean that you get the impression that Father’s suffering should not only explain his actions but even legitimize them, making him seem righteous, in regards to my theories or in regards to the story content itself?

If it’s in regards to my own POVs: I said all I had to say in my disclaimer, aka “this viewpoint is not meant to ‘justify’ Father’s actions but explain them in a broader context.’“

If in regards to the story: I would have to disagree, especially on the “making him seem righteous” part. Noragami continually goes out of its way to hammer in the point that fighting fire with fire is a road that just leads to more fires (think Bishamon’s grudge against Yato and how that turned out); moreover, the manga also continually shows the deep, lasting, harmful effects that Father’s behavior has had on people, especially Yato and Mizuchi. In no way is his behavior ever excused or justified in the manga.

But in the same breath, like I explained in my post, Adachitoka also goes out of their way to show that Father isn’t wrong about Heaven and that his anger comes from a deep-seated issue that needs addressing and is not something that should be ignored, either.

...but from a moral point of view, the latter is more acceptable to me.

This is really where we disagree as well, I think, because... Heaven is 100% the obvious bigger villain here, for me. Even if their actions are not “targeted” like Father, they cause infinitely more damage than Father ever could - Heaven is not only individual gods but a whole entire system that perpetually enables toxic views and is capable of causing destruction on a scale much greater than Father could ever hope to aspire to, just as this chapter has already shown. Their ideology encompasses a vast amount of people. It’s systemic violence, as opposed to individual violence.

Besides that, the really insidious thing about Heaven is that, sure, gods may care about the Near Shore (presumably) but... in the end, Heaven is always just and must bow down to no one. It’s one thing to be destructive and be honest about your intentions, which Father has been (”I just want to torment the hell out of them” from 60, and now him admitting his anger has been driving him), and completely another to be destructive and say that it is not wrong, because Heaven can do no wrong.

That absolutely constitutes greater evil to me. Not to mention that almost everyone in this series is suffering from what Heaven(’s ideology) is doing, both gods and humans alike, but that’s a topic for Part 2 of my meta, lol.

I think it is quite ironic that you bring up the Takemikazuchi panel because in that same arc, we see him destroying the forest, frying the power lines, and going berserk near a school. Last chapter, too, showed the same irony: “Heaven’s judgement should only fall on those deserving of it” and yet, the entire town is on fire.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts <33

Villains and victims

https://kanotototori.tumblr.com/post/667575977543647232/chapter-97-1-thoughts-part-2

I considered for a long time whether to engage in this controversy or not, but in the end I decided to try to explain my point of view. Just because someone is a perpetrator of violence does not mean that they cannot be their victim at the same time, and vice versa. I think the fact that perpetrators of domestic violence often experienced it themselves as children is relatively well known. The same is true, for example, of children who bully others. Nora could serve as an example in Noragami. She herself is undoubtedly a victim and at the same time capable of quite cruel acts. 

The mere fact that I know of the perpetrator that he himself has been subjected to violence does not make his act less cruel or excusable. And I have the impression that it happens with  father sometimes. As if his own suffering should not only explain his actions, but even legitimize them. As if his campaign against heaven, lined with hundreds of dead, made him righteous.

 Which brings me to another problem: Father versus heaven, who is the bigger villain? We can talk about conscious and targeted violence, and we can talk about violence, which I try my best to avoid. As a result, there will be no difference, and for the victims the original intention is no consolation, but from a moral point of view, the latter is more acceptable to me.

I certainly do not claim that my interpretation is correct or that another should be wrong. Don’t take it too seriously.

Chapter 97-2 Thoughts (Part 1)

(Part 1 here) (Part 2)

After 6 years and 20 days - aka 72 months, or 2212 days - of me waiting for Father backstory, the wait is finally over.

Holy shit, what a ride it has been.

Not only that, December 5th (or 6th, in Japan) was Noragami's 11th anniversary as well. I just wanted to say thank you, sensei, for all of these wonderful years and all of your hard work. Noragami means so much to me, as it has been not only a source comfort but also the work that made me realize what I was truly passionate about in life. Happy 11 years! I will stick around until the very end!

Without further ado, let's get into it. 

I believe someone already pointed out the litter on the above panel here so I won't talk too much about (I do like the interpretation of this being a symbol of pollution). What I do want to talk about, though, are these stacked stones by the shore of the bottom of the island.

First: there are barnacles (?) growing on the rocks, suggesting that this part of the island might be underwater during high tide.

Second: the stacked stones themselves. I'm not sure if this applies to the deceased generally but what I do know for sure is that the stacking of stones in this manner is heavily associated with deceased children in Buddhism - specifically, children who died before their parents, including aborted or miscarried fetuses or stillborn children (all considered mizuko).

Because these children have not yet accumulated enough karma (good or bad), they cannot cross the bridge to the afterlife and must stack stones on the shores of the Sai no Kawara. These souls are protected from demons who will try to knock down the stones by the Bodhisattva Jizo, popular protector of children in Japan.

Sai no Kawara does actually also have a physical representation in Japan, on Sado Island. Stacked stones on the left.

Stacked stones are also associated with Mt. Osore, aka the "fear mountain", in the very northern tip of Honshu, Japan's main island - like the Sado Sai no Kawara, it's associated heavily with dead children and there's lots of Jizo statues scattered around. But Mt. Osore is also VERY heavily associated with the Buddhist afterlife - Buddhist hell specifically, due to the mountain's barren volcanic landscape and pungent sulfur smell. It's also the site of a Buddhist temple (currently Soto Zen), Bodai-ji, which was founded in the 9th century.

I feel a little (side eyes) (squints) about this detail, as I actually talked about the Sai no Kawara (mistakenly wrote Sanzu River, though, that was my bad) in my "What's the Deal with Nora?" post in 2019, in which I correctly theorized that Nora was the soul of a stillborn/miscarried/aborted child (mizuko).

The part of the theory that HASN'T been confirmed, however, is the part where I bring up the possibility of Nora actually being Father's biological unborn daughter with Miss Pockmarks.

I did lose faith in this theory since that time BUT. Since I do not think Father died as a child when he was thrown off the cliff (more on that later), those stacked stones would not be for him.

The jury is definitely still out on that theory because that detail is VERY sus. 

That earthquake was definitely caused by Ookuninushi so we know where we are timeline-wise right now: Father is about to bonk the execution squad's shinki while Take and Ebisu explore the island. 

I'M TELLING Y'ALL. This place is off the wall CURSED. I said it in a previous chapter thoughts when we last saw Tamatsuki and I'll say it again: when a place is hidden in a blind spot like this, it is never a good thing, will never be a good thing, and Ebisu & Take should be SUPER careful. Especially considering that Satou (the grave-keeper) does confirm later on that this island is a representation of the Mask-Maker's bottomless rage, and only those who are lost may find it. Bad signs all around.

First thing for this panel: where are these masks coming from? Does Father bring them there? Do the people who worship here find them? How did they get here?? Especially considering that only a few masks seem to be older (the ones with facial details reminiscent of Noh masks) but most of them actually seem to be the modern versions of the masks. Maybe the older ones are from the time when the last Ebisu visited the island? 

Second thing for that panel:

"That person was blind and deaf... he couldn't see you, couldn't hear you, and was loathe to speak."

Unless disabilities of the body such as blindness and deafness do not affect spirits, I can't see how this could be. He's clearly neither blind nor deaf (mute maybe, as children are known to sometimes become mute after witnessing something traumatizing) in the flashbacks with the monk and in the Sakura flashbacks. I'm leaning toward possible mistranslation on that one.

I did read the raws, though, and idk what to make of it myself. It's super confusing, but I guess it is true that we have not seen any disabled shinki in the series yet so perhaps disability does not transfer over after death after all.

If Father was indeed deaf and blind, he likely became that way after falling from that cliff. 

Also: "Dark, cold, suffocating, ravenous feelings"? That does bring some uhh... water and drowning imagery to mind... 

My knee-jerk reaction to this was that, because Satou is the 73rd gravekeeper, this position was something that was passed down through the family and that the person (people?) Father saved must've been their ancestors, who started worshiping him after he had saved them.

But looking at the woman's tearful reaction, it seems like he actually did save them personally? As @nyappytown​ said, this seems to confirm that Father has been targeting people who "the law has failed to judge."

This goes waaaaay back to the Yomi arc, in which Yato  kills two murderers whom "the law has failed to judge" as well: the murderer of a child who was given a light sentence due to the murder being his first offense (Chapter 27) and then a murderer who was actually never caught in the first place and has claimed several victims, the next being his son (Chapter 28). (Which also makes me wonder: did Father himself kill the culprit of the Tamatsuki family, or did Yato...?)

Yato himself said that the reason he does that kind of work because is "your Heavenly justice is full of cracks" (Chapter 31) which aaaaaall comes back around in this arc, with Hagusa's net and again in this chapter, which we'll get to in a second.

"Don't treat me like I'm a god. They never actually punish evildoers, after all." Which is literally why Yato is saying that they need gods like him in the first place in Chapter 31.

The ironic thing is that Hagusa's Righteous Net (Goodness Net in official translation) is a reference to Heaven's Net - we've seen that Hagusa's net is full of holes also, creating more chaos when it aims to correct wrongdoing and protect those who are overlooked.

  (Official translation again because I feel it is a bit more clear dialogue-wise than fast-moon's)

"Hagusa learned that [Heaven is] wrong. What he hasn't learned... is that humanity isn't much better."

And that is the heart of Father's "cull the herd", I think.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think Father is sending Yato out to kill only  bad people purely for vigilante justice. That's clearly not the case. He himself said that if this is the world both gods and humans wanted, then he wants to "shake things up."

Heaven itself and the humans both share the blame in his eyes, so both are worthy of being culled. (Although, it is interesting to note that both of the criminals Yato killed in the Yomi arc involved children, both an actual child-killer and a would-be killer. Looking very nervously at the next few pages of the chapter rn.) If I remember correctly, most of the people we've seen be killed by Yato in the Sakura flashbacks and that one flashback with the shrines were near religious places or were praying?

BEFORE I GET INTO THE FLASHBACK:

Look at him. Look at my little meow meow. He is just a little creature. He cannot change this. He's so tiny. I will wrap him in a blanket and protect him from all the evil in this world. I'm about to become a Boomer Remover.

Anyway. 

Father is an orphan CONFIRMED (parents killed in natural disaster CONFIRMED), raised by Buddhist monk(s) CONFIRMED, dead paternal figure CONFIRMED. Wow. This chapter was an absolute win for me.

(Also was he lying under that carcass all that time? Jfc. Save him)

The raws described the monk as a hijiri (聖).

"Missionary" is a good translation for it as far as choice of English vocabulary goes but it doesn't quite convey everything: hijiri were, essentially, the opposite to temple priests and monks. They lived secluded lives in the mountains or traveled, preaching about Buddhism to the common people (as opposed to those involved with temples, who were heavily involved with the Heian court and affairs of state instead). Some sources also say they served as healers and diviners but I need to read more to confirm. I do think that he was likely a Pure Land monk, however, as "going to meet the Buddha" would line up very well with Pure Land Buddhism. 

To put it simply, Pure Land Buddhism was based on the belief that through great faith in the Amida Buddha, you would be reborn in his Pure Land, where achieving enlightenment was much easier than on the earthly plane. It was popular among the common people as it skipped the complicated beliefs and practices of other branches of Buddhism, such as Shingon and Tendai.

Practitioners of Pure Land are famous for repeatedly chanting "Namu Amida Butsu" (I take refuge in the Amida Buddha), and we do see the monk chanting up on the top of the cliff. I wouldn't be surprised.

Also, it's interesting to note that the architecture of some Shinto shrines is actually based on Pure Land temple architecture. Kasuga-taisha, a shrine dedicated to Takemikazuchi, is one such shrine. 

This scene has got me thinking about all the times we've seen a child and a parent figure share a meal in this series, especially when thinking about what Arahabaki says in Chapter 76.

Children don’t know the difference betweeen right and wrong. And some of 'em still hope fer parents and a home. So I don’t generally make ‘em into my shinki... but I’m always tellin’ the kids.. if they can look after themselves and help out without askin’ for nothin’ they ain’t got, they can stay. But I wanna take in as many kids as I can, and give ‘em somethin’ good to eat.

"Some of em still hope fer parents, and a home." (Not me thinking about how Baby Father is an orphan without a home right now... Oh god it hurts)

Eating is as much an action necessary for survival as it is a bonding activity. It's both a sign that a child is being taken care of as Arahabaki highlights by saying that, and a sign of a child's dependence on their parent. 

Let's see... we've got this scene, Yato and Yukine (Ch 4, although Hiyori is treating them here)... 

Nana and Bishamon (Ch 60)... 

And finally, Father, Mizuchi, and Yato. Twice, actually, because there is this scene from Chapter 78 and we also see food set out for Yato in Chapter 28 (the fact that Yato is eating alone, however, is a sure sign of distance). 

When Yukine imagines his "perfect" family life, he pictures them all around the dinner table (Ch 86).

Interestingly enough, Haruki and Tajima seem to be the only family pair that isn't seen eating together - only Tajima is eating, in front of Yukine, in Chapter 95.

Hell, even after Father says the only home Hagusa will ever have is with him (official trans.), the first thing he does after he wakes up is offer him food. That feels pretty significant in context. (Trashjima #1 worst Noragami dad confirmed, seriously)

Which brings me to my next point!

Father's outburst in Chapter 95. I talked a little about it in my Chapter 95 thoughts when it came out and... yeah, it seems like my tinfoil hat was right on the money.

So yeah, on one hand, I can see where Father is coming from. Not like he was #1   Dad in the world (obviously) but he did spend over a millennia providing for Yato and, in his mind, protecting him and caring for him. Emotions are running high, I imagine he feels quite slighted.

On an even more tin foil hat-y note: this makes me wonder about   Father's own material situation when he was younger. Heian period Japan wasn't exactly kind to people who weren't nobility. It would make sense why Father would place providing materially as pretty high on the "why the hell are you being ungrateful" list.

The common impression of this scene was that those are the bare necessities and that to act like giving Yato those things was great parenting is narcissistic. Which, yeah, those are the bare necessities but I feel like that's the wrong angle to look at this with.

Disclaimer: I'm not saying Father was a good parent because it is 100% clear and obvious that he was not and is not.  

However. 

To say that those are the bare necessities IS true, yes, but it is also a very modern lens to look at this with. As demonstrated by Father himself, food and a home was something that hung in the precipice constantly.

And in a time where the common people led lives with the threat of starvation over their head during bad harvests or the threat of losing their homes in natural disasters or fires, the fact that you had a home and food at all, that you were taken care of in that sense, is absolutely a privilege. It was a sign that the child was taken care of. It was something to be indeed grateful for.

The fact that Father provided him a home - which he himself did not have - and food - something the monk did for him as well - was absolutely a sign that Father was, in his mind, taking care of Yato. As one would his own child.

(bangs pots and pans) FATHER CARED FOR YATO GODDAMMIT

How ironic indeed that a grown-up Father should look so much like the man who threw him off a cliff - victims becoming the abusers, something something... (cries)

"In anger we sometimes forget that which we should not. We must always remember that which is important...!”

Also, I want to point out Father's clothes progression. Baby Father is seen wearing all white (or light-colored) clothes, then black koromo with white sleeves, and finally a koromo with black sleeves, the white peeking out only at the bottom and collars (Sakura flashbacks).

If that is meant to be a visual representation of Father's journey as a person... absolutely brilliant. 

Miss Adachitoka did it again.

In the same vein, Baby Yato is seen wearing all white save for a black tie around his waist, while Mizuchi is wearing a grey one ("someone who doesn't know right from wrong"). Argh. Insanity hours. 

With that being said, the fact that Adachitoka's choice of first Father backstory flashback was of Father as a child - and not just a child, but a vulnerable orphan - feels VERY significant indeed.

Even I, the biggest Father sympathizer in the fandom, was expecting the first flashback to be of an adult or a teenage Father, with me bending over backwards picking apart hints about his Tragic Life. But that image of him is something we associate with the Sakura flashbacks - inherently negative associations.

Adachitoka absolutely goes straight for the "portray them as a child" when they want to punch you emotionally and shift your views of the character. They did it with Ebisu, Takemikazuchi, Yato, and they are absolutely doing it with Father right now.  Children are innocent and vulnerable, dependent on the adults in their lives. And we just saw a holy man throw himself and a child Father off a cliff.

I think chose the perfect timing for my bit about Father's role as victim in Chapter 97-1 thoughts.

Father (humanity) as the powerless victim, gods as the perpetrators; in the same breath, Yato (gods) as the powerless victim, Father (humanity) as the perpetrator.  Father's role as the perpetrator of violence should absolutely not be forgotten, but neither should his role as a victim of Heaven's  cycle of violence. What Father does out of anger absolutely makes the cycle go round, but the anger itself is a testament to pain that shouldn't be ignored, because it comes out something much bigger - and it's not as simple as "someone he loved died."

Also I wanna point out the motion blur going from the swirling, crashing waters into a high shot of the sky as Father faces Amaterasu. AUGHHHHH. So good.

"Truly... this world is hell..."

(Continued in Part 2)

Chapter 97-2 Thoughts (Part 2)

(Continued from Part 1.)

I'm surprised at how these pages were not mentioned by anyone on the TL at ALL, considering how we got the revelation that Amaterasu's eyes are the sun and she sees almost EVERYTHING, apparently. "You don't care, do you, Amaterasu?!" "Evil deeds may never escape your eyes..."

The fact that "evil deeds may never escape [her] eyes" but Father accuses her of not caring implies that Amaterasu DOES see all this fucked up shit going on and apparently does nothing about it at all?? Again going back to the notion that Heaven does not punish evildoers, like Hagusa himself said, and that Heaven's justice has serious holes. This point is really getting hammered in.

I wonder if Amaterasu saw him being yeeted off the cliff. I wonder if she saw him come back from Yomi and has just been playing dumb. WHAT'S THE TEA, SPILL IT FATHER. EXPOSE HER ASS!!

All this time we were saying feral Father would happen in the Yato vs. Father fight but THIS is feral Father!!!

"It's been to your own good fortune that you've failed to catch me all this time..."

This may be controversial but this fight feels extremely cathartic, at least for me. This fight is for Father what Yato's fight with Father was for him; it's finally confronting those whose thumb he's been living under, out of the shadows, directly.

And it. is. INCREDIBLE. Go feral, you awful little man. Expose their ass. I know he's got ALL the dirt and we're now going to see the true extent of how fucked up Heaven as a system is.

I am ready. Drop them truth bombs.

"It seems you've been forgotten, Hagusa. You'll just have to meet up with her and jog her memory. I'm sure you'd love to ask her what was going through her mind when she abandoned you and why she didn't save you..."

I wonder WHO will be jogging whose memory here...?!! :DDD

From the Chapter 97-1 Thoughts:

Is it possible - considering Father's constant monologuing about abandonment (himself being a creature abandoned by the Heavens, like he said in 76) and the act of saving/being saved - that Father not only feels bitter that his loved one could not/would not be saved, but also that he was not  saved from his fate by the gods?

🗣️ PROJECTION THEORY NEVER MISSES, BABY 🗣️

I love me some... mcparallels..... (tries not to start bawling like a baby) 

It's almost 2 AM so I think that will be it for now!

Thanks for coming to my longest ever chapters thought if you've made it this far.

ADDENDUM: I did finish writing this at 2 AM and I forgot to clarify why I think Father survived the fall.

Two reasons: one, we see him looking older in the Yomi flashbacks, which is when he is confirmed to have died and come back from the dead, which means he cannot have died there. Also, where’s Pockmarks??

Two, Father was deified in fear of his wrath. A child would definitely NOT be deified in fear of their wrath - if anyone knew about his death, they’d erect a memorial, maybe, but fears of retaliation due to the wrath of a deceased person was firmly in the realm of adults who have been wronged somehow.

On Father and Yato

(Mostly about Father because y’all know how I roll.)

Been sitting on some thoughts about Father, Yato, and their relationship and respective childhoods for a long while now.

I didn’t draft this beforehand because I’m not really in the headspace for super structured meta at the moment but I wanted to share some Thoughts(TM) so please excuse the messiness. 🙏 First thoughts post of the year!

Date: 03/27/2022

Thoughts under the cut. ↓ 

Mandatory disclaimer: This post is not meant to “justify” nor “excuse” Father’s actions but explore the how and the why, blah blah blah, I’m sure everyone knows the drill by now. As Twitter user @/girlsgutsgiallo said, perhaps it's not about "agreeing” or “disagreeing” with a villain's actions but simply experiencing them for what they are, and what is beautiful about art is that we get to sympathize with and understand all kinds of people.

While thinking about Father’s childhood and having gone back to reread the Sakura arc, I realized that Father and Yato are intertwined by their roles as foils to each other more deeply than I previously thought.

Back in my early theorist days back in, like, 2016 - 2017, some of my early thoughts on the series included the notion that Father and Yato were, essentially, “two sides of the same coin” - that is, they were reflections of each other not only in their narrative roles as antagonist vs. protagonist but also as parent and child, and as people. One could have easily gone down the path of the other had they made different choices, but those radically different choices are ultimately what make them so radically different. This view has been put on the back burner since then, yet I am once again struck by his how similar yet dissimilar they are, both narratively and as people.

First of all: I definitely think that the monk was to Father as Sakura was to Yato - the first influential, formative caretaker/guardian figure outside of their family, and their familiar childhood world, and who fundamentally shaped their worldviews. In their role as makeshift guardians, they were complete opposites.

Sakura gave Yato stability, security, and taught him the beauty and value of life and the world around them, in stark contrast to how Father taught Yato to treat life beforehand.

But for Father, when he became dependent on the monk, the monk betrayed his trust and tried to kill him (no matter how “good” those intentions might have been, although one can argue about the morality of trying to commit double suicide with a child to “save” him). Compared to Sakura’s compassionate guidance, Father’s lesson from his would-be guardian was the complete opposite of Sakura’s to Yato: “life is cheap”, and is is a constant competition between living things - whoever is stronger will survive, and those who are weak will die. Even if he didn’t directly “teach” that to Baby Father, the truth remains that this was the takeaway Father had from the experience.

And who could blame him for thinking that way, honestly, given that he had to survive in a very hostile environment as a child?

Before anything else is said, I feel that the time period in which Father lived in must be contextualized:

When Satou began his story of the Mask-Maker, he stated that Father was an orphan who lived 1000 years ago, which would put us around 900~, or the middle of the Heian period. The majority of the population were poor rice farmers who were one or two failed harvests away from starvation - only an incredibly small percentage of people were nobility (like Sakura was) or lived in the capital of Heian-kyo.

Unfortunately, the tenth century is known to be the most poorly documented century in Japanese history. However - according to Heian Japan: Centers and Peripheries - based on records from the previous two centuries, it was likely that local or widespread famine was hitting the peasant population roughly every 3 years, sometimes more frequently. The courtiers in the capital, however, did not do much to document or remedy this.

“Written sources in the tenth century more often than not merely mention starvation, with little in the way of concrete policies to deal with the crises. In 908, provinces ‘declined,’ but the elite did nothing except pray and cancel ceremonies. Only the capital received any grain relief. Harvest failure was noted in 913, but courtiers’ only concern was how much tax product it would cost them. In 917, one of three widespread famines known for the tenth century struck: the court described numerous robber gangs but otherwise seemed most concerned for its own welfare. (One measure was to ensure that Retired Sovereign Yōzei have enough water to make wine!) Untoward weather conditions were common in the 920s, but again the court was restricted to worrying about collecting enough in grain taxes. The capital utilized its granaries when starvation struck in 931, but officials also called out the police to crack down on robbers.” (Page 312)

Such a society was an immensely hostile place, and especially so for a lone child - and it certainly is implied that Father was on his own after the cliff incident, when we see him with the items the monk left behind, his staff and a piece of fabric tied around his torso, probably used to carry small items.

Father recalled having to do everything he could to survive, even killing, stealing, and sleeping with monks (if you’ve read anything about chigo or nanshoku, the connotations of this are immensely uncomfortable) - that says quite a bit about the kind of environment he grew up in, as a child with no guardian and then an adult with no home. (I find it interesting that both he and Yato are characterized by a stubborn desire to survive no matter what it takes. Father traveling around and doing random odds and ends like repairing houses and bridges definitely reminds me of the delivery god work Yato does as well, just in a much earlier age.)

Bearing this in mind...

Father:

- Orphaned at a young age; relationship with parents unknown but home life must not have been too rough if Baby Father immediately trusted a stranger

- Home destroyed, remained a traveler for a while as far as we know

- Very likely had an unstable source of material means such as food and clothing, since he had to do “whatever it took to survive” and resorted to killing and stealing

- Immensely distrustful of people and their good intentions; regards humans as having an “ugly human nature” that manifests as karma ayakashi

Yato:

- Awful relationship with his parent; Father is physically and emotionally abusive, not to mention manipulative

- Has a home to go back to physically but does not want to due to Point #1

- Had an unstable source of material means such as good and clothing when away from Father but while in Father’s care, Yato notes that he knows that he’ll be taken care of physically (food, clothing, etc.)

- “That boy loved people.”

This goes right back around to them being mirrors of one another that I mentioned in the beginning (you could also compare Father’s usually calm and collected demeanor with Yato’s emotional one and how Yato usually keeps his problems to himself while Father projects his baggage onto everyone else), but also... looking at the compare/contrast here, I think Father cares way more about Yato than most people think he does. And I think that, in some capacity, he thinks he’s doing right by Yato - even when that’s undercut by his anger and manipulation of Yato for his own ends.

First: providing for him materially. This seems to be be a common theme with Father and Yato. There’s the example above, and also...

Very obvious empty dishes in the background.

Father cooking for them.

And of course, the infamous line from the Father vs. Yato fight (sorry I know I’ve talked about this one like 3 times already, it’s just so important!!):

I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that having a roof over your head and food on your table were very hard-won things for Father, which is why they’re specifically pointed out by him here - Father is providing for Yato what he himself didn’t have, things that hung in the precipice for him.

Tying into this notion of providing what he didn’t have to Yato, Father’s caution to Baby Yato during the Sakura arc - “don’t talk to strangers - feels quite significant in light of this new backstory context as well. That piece of advice is something that a young Father could certainly have benefited from, before he almost got thrown off a cliff by a seemingly well-meaning stranger.

Which brings me to the question: was what happened to Sakura in the Sakura arc really just purely out of malice and because she was in the way of his plans, or perhaps Father was also trying to protect Yato in his own way? (I mean, while she didn’t try to kill Baby Yato, Sakura did leave him entirely defenseless and in pain at night and if Father didn’t find him, he’d probably have been eaten by ayakashi.)

Not saying that Father setting Sakura up for death and having Yato kill her was driven purely by a desire to protect him, because the whole ordeal was unnecessarily cruel - and Father certainly knew Sakura was getting in the way - but the below scene always gave me pause.

“I told you not to talk to strangers (because)...”

Father’s lesson to Yato here was that “all people have this ugliness inside them, even if they are beautiful or noble on the outside, and this is why I want you to cull the herd (and, implicitly, this is why you can’t trust people, because they’re all the same on the inside).” Father’s inherent distrust of people’s good will is fully shining through here, and is even further reinforced during the conversation he has with Hiyori in this very chapter, right before this flashback.

“And I want you stop stop getting mixed up with my boy just because of your lukewarm emotions.”

He even chides Yato for “letting his guard down around this one", with a suspicious eye zoom.

And again, as early as Chapter 27:

“Her feelings won’t last. People change. [...] But we won’t betray you. We will always be by your side.”

And this bit from Chapter 91:

And the notion that Yato will “learn his lesson” when he loses someone dear to him isn’t a new one - Father echoes something similar in regards to Yukine as well:

And again with Hiyori:

Also, the interesting thing about Father’s latest confrontation with Hiyori is that he establishes the belief that he isn’t hurting Yato, but Hiyori (and probably others as well) are the ones hurting him instead.

He even vocalized that he’s been “protecting” Yato all of his life, and will continue to do so.

And it reminds me of something that he said to Bishamon back in the Heaven arc, in which he says that thanks to her, Yato has gotten some “funny ideas”, which he sees as something that should be corrected (”he’ll realize his mistake”):

As we’ve seen recently, Father does actually believe that gods (and maybe people in general) cannot save anyone - he mocks them for their inability to save their shinki when they’re struck by Chiki in Chapter 97. It does seem, at least to me, that Father is trying to impart these views onto Yato - that you shouldn’t try to save people because you can’t, you shouldn’t trust people because their feelings are fickle and they all have an inherent ugliness within them - and it’s not solely out of malice, but because Father actually does believe all of this.

The scene below where Father explains his views on shrines and prayers portrays this very well, in my opinion - Yato not having a shrine is one way for Father to make sure he’s isolated, yes, but I have no doubt that Father actually does believe everything he’s said here, and thus his belief that Yato doesn’t need one of those “things only fools pray to.” (This is a point for an entirely separate post altogether but Kugaha says in one chapter that he believes Yato is “different from the [other gods]” - considering Kugaha is probably parroting Father, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that Father also believes Yato is different from other gods.)

Not to be like “abusive parents, though they horribly mistreat their children, can still ultimately care for them” but, yeah. I think Father cares for Yato in his own fucked up, selfish way - if this line isn’t convincing enough of this notion:

“Huh? Well, yeah, you’re a pain in the ass, but you’re still my son. That’s what I wished for, after all.”

Father knows that Yato sold him out to Amaterasu and yet he’s still keeping it up with the “why are you running away from me, Yaboku?”, when Mizuchi - who was always loyal to him - immediately got the boot after becoming a potential danger and when Father realized that she didn’t really hate Heaven. And yet, with Yato...

It feels very significant to me that Father - who has recently been revealed to be an orphan whose home was destroyed - places such a heavy emphasis on being this parental figure and “playing family” with a god whom he calls his son and his own shinki. And I know that the omakes aren’t canon per se, exactly, but they are always in-character - and every single omake featuring Father has always involved Yato, constantly playing on Father wanting to spend time with him, or scolding him as a parent would.

There’s a lot more that can be said about this but you can cram only so much within a post in 2 sittings and I’m all out of brain juice so I think that will be it for now.

I will leave this post off with perhaps my favorite page that Really Makes You Think, ever: Father seething with rage at the Covenant and his gaze seems to be directed straight at Yato, who’s writhing in pain on the ground because of Yukine’s distress in the Box. Interesting paneling choice there, Adachitoka, when Amaterasu is right there.

I apologize again for the messiness but I hope this was interesting, at least. 🙏

Noragami Meta Masterpost

Outdated: This post contains content that has since been disproven by the manga, or better info has been found. Obsolete: This theory/meta/analysis does not hold up to scrutiny and is no longer deemed plausible by me.

The Loophole™ [OUTDATED]

So, what’s the deal with Nora?

Goryoujin: what’s the deal with Father? (89-2 edition) (Part 1) (Part 2) [PARTLY OUTDATED - See “Additional Thoughts on 89-2″]

Additional Thoughts on 89-2

Father: true desires, projection theory, and related thoughts (Part 1-1) (Part 1-2) (Part 2 - TBA)

(Mini) thread on some thoughts about Father’s “separateness” and isolation as a person (Twitter)

Chapter 95-1 Thoughts

On Magatsukami: A Few Noragami Thoughts [CURRENT]

The Raiden Shogun’s/Baal’s Buddhist Influences, a very small thoughts thread (Twitter) (Not Noragami but still relevant)

Chapter 97-1 Thoughts (Part 1) (Part 2)

Chapter 51 “Salvation” (救 Sukui) vs. Chapter 97 “Savior” (救主 Sukuinushi) (Twitter)

黄泉帰る(yomigaeru) “to return from Yomi” vs. 蘇る (yomigaeru) “to return from Yomi” (Twitter)

Chapter 97-2 Thoughts (Part 1) (Part 2)

On Father and Yato

(Bursts into Arcane fandom 2384893 years late)

How I’m talking about how monumentally important and emotionally poignant and powerful it is that Silco went from “Jinx is perfect” to “you’re perfect” when Jinx was going through her biggest identity crisis, torn between “Powder” and “Jinx” - it’s all about the unconditional love, about being loved and accepted and embraced wholly not despite your flaws and fucked up parts, but including them; she’s perfect, whoever she is right then and there - not who she was or could have been, but who she chooses to be right now!!!! This line deserves every single ounce of hype it generated MY GOD!!!!!!!!

Listen, I will not hear any slander about this line. Based on what she says to Vi right after - “I thought you could love me the way you used to, even though I’m different” - what Silco says to her is exactly what she has been yearning to hear: it doesn’t matter whether she is “Powder” or “Jinx”, she wanted someone to love her without constraints, full and unconditional love and acceptance. Vi obviously loves her very much but her major blunder here is that she couldn’t let go of that image of “Powder” from before, when her sister has made it pretty clear that she is no longer the Powder she remembers (but that she still yearns for her unconditional love, none-the-less). That is where Vi lost her, and where Silco demonstrated a trope that works best with villains, especially this kind: “I love you, all the beautiful and ugly and broken parts.” Idk about y’all but there is something healing about this notion - in a world that often tells us we need to love ourselves before anyone else can love us... to hear that you’re perfect, you, right now, including all of your flaws, is cathartic.

I best save the rest of my thoughts for after my rewatch, though.

Reblogginig this again for... Reasons.

Father: true desires, projection theory, and related thoughts (Part 1-1)

[Part 1-1] [Part 1-2]

Wow, another Father theory/thoughts post from yours truly. Who could’ve predicted that???? /s

Huge manga spoilers ahead, obviously.

In this post, I will be expanding on some concepts I touched on in my two-parter Goryoujin thoughts from way back in August (god, it’s been a hot minute) - specifically the parts about the nature of Father’s wish and Father’s “double meaning” lines, as I had described them in the post. If you haven’t read the Goryoujin thoughts post and Additional Thoughts on 89-2 (both of which can be found in my pinned), I strongly urge you to do so as I build a little on my previous words and concepts introduced in those posts.

This theory/thoughts post will be divided into two sections:

Part 1: True Wish theory, leading into

Part 2: Projection theory

I will be making several references and taking quotations from the book Matsuri: Festivals of Japan by Herbert E. Plutschow as it was very informative for some of the subjects I will be touching on.

Special thanks to Raelin and Jowi for helping me make this post happen - both with editing and helping me cohesively formulate my ideas!

Without much further ado, let’s begin.

Dated: April 11, 2021 || Part 1 Wordcount: 4250~

Keep reading

Chapter 100 Thoughts (Part 1)

(Part 1) (Part 2)

Well.

I wasn’t going to do a Chapter 100 Thoughts, but it has come to my attention that my fave isn’t being talked about enough so it is not only my right but also my sworn duty to talk about Father as the resident #1 Father enjoyer and Father stan, PhD.

Let’s get right into it without much further ado, shall we?

Dated: June 7, 2022 (technically it’s already the 8th but whatever)

Even though this first scene is such a short one, there is a lot to unpack here. I would say that I’m mildly surprised that I haven’t seen it discussed almost at all on either Tumblr or Twitter, but I understand that most people are either just not paying much attention to Father or write it off as Abuser Tantrum #3294 of this arc.

But I feel like it says a lot in very few words.

First of all:

I feel like this dialogue beautifully and subtly conveys a dichotomy in Father’s character that throws a lot of casual readers and non-Father enjoyers for a loop.

“Useless... Why didn’t he strike down Amaterasu while she was within his reach?!”

The first, thinking about things in relation to his own personal goals: he wanted to strike down Amaterasu, and is angry that Yukine didn’t do it despite having the chance to - that small “useless” goes a long way to show Father’s perception of people as tools.

“What about his revenge on his father?! You said that you were absolutely not going to let him get away with it, right, Yuuki?!”

But then, the second... it gets a bit more personal in an indirect way. You can learn a lot about Father from the way he talks to and about other people because he notoriously projects very heavily onto other characters, as I’ve talked about in the past with my other meta and chapter thoughts.

And here, it’s especially important since we canonically know that Father sees himself in Yukine - in his mind, they share those feelings of despair and betrayal.

Chapter 96

So with that it feels less about his goal and more about Father’s perception of Yukine - and his perception of their relationship, in a way. They are two sides of the same coin and Father could never give up his revenge, so why is Yukine thinking of giving up? Wasn’t he going to make them pay, like Father wants to make the ones who had put him through so much pay?

This displays very well how these two sides of Father exist concurrently with each other: on one hand, thinking about the goal, about what other people can do for him; on the other... something wholly more personal. More raw and vulnerable.

And, of course, that “damn traitor!” on the bottom... the “personal, vulnerable, raw” side of Father escalates even further on the next page:

Before we actually talk about this page, I feel like I need to put the timeline of Noragami into perspective here because it can feel elongated due to the slow update schedule:

Father has first talked to Yukine in person maybe a week ago in canon. One week. Hagusa has been Father’s shinki for two days, three days tops. These two barely know each other and Father is having such a visceral reaction to this and calling him a traitor and everything... in my opinion, it very clearly indicates there is more going on here than just “my plan isn’t going my way.” Again, two sides of Father that exist concurrently: one is like, what about the goal, you were going to cut down Amaterasu and you didn’t, and the other is like... you betrayed me, you’re a traitor, what about your revenge? (And, implicitly, I thought you were like me.)

I didn’t think that Father would have quite this much of a reaction but I should have known that it was heading this way from this page, which I’ve talked about a few times previously:

“Poor Hagusa. You thought you had a home, a family waiting for you. But you never did. That’s why you crave them so badly... I can give you what you want. The only home you’ll ever have is with me.” (official trans. because I think it makes it a little more clear)

Chapter 87

This is like, a day into their cooperation as master and shinki. You want a home, you want a family, and I can give you that... knowing what we now know about Father, it is such a self-report.

And probably why Father is having the reaction that he is. Two orphans, without a home, without a family, so wronged by the world... Father can’t comprehend why Yukine is thinking the way he is. Again, Father is so entrenched in his own trauma and being the meanest fish in the pond as a result of that that he gets incredibly narrow-sighted.

But I digress!

Again, that emotional, vulnerable, raw side of Father taking helm here, and you can tell so very easily by the “Forgiveness is how a loser excuses himself.”

I mean, seriously, oof.

Literally 2 chapters ago Father had an entire internal monologue about how the weak die and only the victors survive, how he’ll expose the GGS as many times as it takes to win, and how he did anything to survive - this is the kind of mindset that Father has internalized not only for himself, because he had to survive as a child and later adult in an incredibly hostile environment (as I’ve explained in my previous post, “On Father and Yato”), but it is also the standard that he has for others. Because that’s how he sees the world.

Losing was not an option for Father, because that would have meant death. So, by extension, forgiveness is not an option, either - because that’s an excuse that a loser makes for themselves, which Father cannot be.

And all of this is like, so intrinsically connected to his past, to the whole incident with the monk - his words, “at least try to keep fighting back!”, even brought to mind the imagery of Baby Father wrestling with him on the cliff - where he trusted someone and was subsequently betrayed and, arguably, abandoned, left all alone with no family and no home. It struck an incredibly raw nerve and Father is going into his fight with Yato in that emotionally vulnerable state. This is going to be important.

I was going to say that there’s, again, that recurring theme of betrayal for Father, but he’s more reacting to Nora calling Yukine by Yukine and Yato by Yato, hence why he says “they’re Yaboku and Hagusa”... but then I realized that his rebuttal here is the response to the notion that they had betrayed him.

(Also, I find the need to again reiterate that Hagusa has been Father’s shinki for 2 days. If it was only “Yaboku”, I would have looked at it a little differently - you could argue it could be something similar to the scene with Hiyori back in the hospital arc where he told her that Yato’s name is Yaboku - but Hagusa? They barely know each other. It’s more than just about that.)

Names are obviously incredibly important in Noragami, not only to shinki, but to gods and humans as well. They embody a person’s entire identity - this is especially true for shinki, whose names were granted by a god (or, in this case, a human-turned-god wielding the Word). Those names are a blessing from their master, and mark the shinki as theirs; and shinki, at least to the gods we see in our main cast, are not just servants but something akin to a family or a clan. They give all members of the group a sense of belonging, as much as they are a sign of “ownership.”

And so it goes with Father and “Hagusa” & “Yaboku” - those names are something he bestowed upon them, they are intrinsically tied to him. I think, in a way, Father is desperate to know that someone is on his side. I think that’s going to have to be something I elaborate on another time because my brain doesn’t want to put my thoughts together in a cohesive and comprehensible format.

(Ironic thing is, Father does have someone who is in his corner unconditionally - Mizuchi. But Father overlooks her so much that he doesn’t really see that. I hope Father will actually get hit with the realization after hearing her say “I love you, Father” to him. Honestly, I think part of why he seems to be so indifferent towards her is because he can’t relate to her like he can to Yukine, and she’s not his child in the way that Yato is; Father said himself while naming her that he wanted someone who knew no good nor evil - that makes her malleable, perfect for progressing his ultimate goal, but that makes her not have much of a sense of identity herself, and certainly no shared experiences with Father (in his perspective).)

Before I get into The Fight (TM), the man himself, the main course of the evening, I gotta say this:

I just realized that Father knew about Yato’s relationship with Kazuma this entire time. That perfectly demonstrates what he says on the next page about being permissive with Yato and letting him hang out with whoever he wanted. Well played, Adachitoka-sensei.

Okay, before I get into the fight... (sorry, wall of text)

I’ve briefly talked about this before on here and on Twitter but I really do think that “Father’s and Yato’s relationship is abusive and toxic and manipulative and Bad” is a genuinely boring lens to read their relationship (and the relationship between Father and Mizuchi & Yato as a family unit) through.

Yes, it is an objectively true take on their relationship, one that literally every single reader (and even non-reader) of Noragami will agree on, including Father “stans” (using the term very loosely here) such as myself. It’s painfully obvious that this is what their relationship objectively is. But looking at a relationship purely through an objective, matter-of-factly lens will often overlook a lot of a relationship’s complexity - or, putting it simply, the emotional dimension of it: what the characters have individually gone through and how that shapes their perceptions of the world and of other people, how they see their relationship individually and as a whole, what they think and feel about the other, etc. Those aspects are as important to understanding the relationship between characters as the more “objective” dimension is.

For example, I don’t think anyone (or, at least, most Noragami readers... unless you’re a Yukine hater) would analyze Yato and Yukine’s relationship through the lens of only their relationship as master and shinki. It is an objective truth of their relationship, and that relationship isn’t exactly wholly functional - Yato keeps keeping things from Yukine, he named another shinki without his knowledge or consent, and Yukine, on the other hand, has stung Yato so severely that he was on death’s doorstep... three separate times, not to mention Yukine also went behind Yato’s back and got named by another master. If you look at it that way, it’s kinda like... yeah. What a mess.

But that’s not the whole story, is it? Because we also know how Yato’s past abuse influences not only his behavior but also his very perception of the world and himself, we know that Yukine has very deep-seated issues with abandonment and his own baggage from abuse at the hands of the father who killed him (although that’s subconscious for most of the series), we know that what Yato did - esp. during this arc - is because he loves and cares for Yukine, was thinking about his well-being and safety when he went out to fight Father, and Yukine reacted the way he did because, in his eyes, Yato naming Kazuma was betrayal. And, as readers, most people understand that and take that into consideration when looking at that relationship.

What I’m trying to get at, basically, is: why is it that all these other relationships in Noragami are afforded the acknowledgement of their emotional complexity, have all these different factors taken into consideration, while Father’s relationship to his children, esp Yato, is... not?

I get it, it’s not a relationship that a lot of people want to analyze due to the subject matter. It’s a sensitive subject, an incredibly complex one. But on the other hand... so often this relationship is boiled down to only its objective truth: Father is manipulative, abusive, toxic, and does use Yato & Mizuchi for his own ends... and then it is made the only aspect of their relationship: everything that Father does must be manipulation, he only uses Yato for his own ends and sees him as a tool, as a “thing” that he owns. It completely fails to take into account how Father perceives this relationship, what Father’s frame of mind even is (hello backstory), how Yato perceives their relationship and understands it (esp in this chapter, because it revealed so much imo).

It’s like onions, yo! It’s got layers! Looking at a whole, unchopped onion and saying “Wow, guess that’s all there is to it” is not some revolutionary take.

If there is one thing I will defend to the death, it’s Father’s complexity as a character.

Why am I bringing this up? Because I left a comment on a Reddit thread that was like “finally we got solid confirmation that Father cares about Yato as a son/family and not just a tool!!” and I got a thousand (not rlly) comments being like “how was it confirmed tho”, “Father was lying actually” and I am incredibly petty and need to defend the complexity of my fave. I’ve been thinking about this for nearly 7 years now, I’ve got files on top of files, do not even start that nonsense with me. :PP

And also, it’s great setup for the discussion ahead - to get everyone in the mindset.

(Continued in Part 2.)

Chapter 100 Thoughts (Part 2)

(Continued from Part 1.)

Again, two concurrent sides of Father: one that’s thinking about the goal, “I got shit to do”, “I can’t die here so I’m gonna do whatever it takes to not die here” (like the previous panel of Father taunting Yato about Kazuma, definitely manipulation there) - and the other that’s vulnerable and raw right now.

And so, he clashes with the one person who he has the most emotional baggage about. So yes, there is manipulation... but there’s also vulnerability. Desperation.

This moment, I think, is the one moment in this fight where Father is the most honest.

Saying something so outright personal is not Father’s mojo - it’s always been “we’re the only ones who won’t leave you”, “do you really think they can love you?”, “do you really think you can stand on your own?”, “I’m your lifeline, you’ll die without me”, basically just vague platitudes and undermining Yato’s independence as a person. But here, it’s “I let you do all of those things because you’re important to me.”

This is so unlike Father that I had to stand up and pace around my apartment and keysmash into Twitter for a couple because I could not believe what the hell I just read with my own two eyes. You’re important to me. You’re important.... to me.

Is Father actively trying not to die? Yes. But do I think he is being 100% honest about this one thing? Yes. We have talked at length about the little details dropped throughout the manga that hint at this very thing - and how Father thinks that his actions are not hurting Yato, but others’ are, and that he’s trying to protect him in a fucked up twisted way - so I am not going to hash it out all over again but... yeah.

What has been implied, finally spoken aloud: Yato is important to Father.

And I think it’s important to note that it’s about what Father does say as much as it is about what Yato doesn’t say.

Because Yato does not rebuke Father on ANY of this - in fact, he directly affirms what he says here...

“Well said. That means you understand why I was so afraid of you! You knew that if you were the reason I could do whatever I wanted in safety that I would always come running back to you.”

(Another note on this: time and time again we have seen this exact scenario - letting Yato do whatever he wanted so he would come back to Father - play out in the manga but something sticks out in my mind... that is, the last Yato vs. Father fight, where Father says this:

“You’re a pain in the ass but you’re still my son. That’s what I wished for, after all.”

And then we get this moment at the end of this chapter part:

In which Father basically says, I have Yukine (the one person you care about most on the Far Shore) and Hiyori’s gonna die eventually, so why are you bothering to run away from me when I have everything you could ever want... and the implicit of that is “...I want you come back to me.”)

Yato even further elaborates that Father was the one who couldn’t let go (of Yato).

And then this page, of course:

It is a doozy.

Half of it is definitely “pls don’t kill me lol” but the other half... pure desperation, vulnerability tinged with a manipulative veneer because Father’s trying not to die. But it’s, again, incredibly unusual because Father does not beg. Period. He didn’t even beg when Yato almost killed him the first time around.

But here he is, pleading with Yato to come back to him, looking up at Yato standing over him. Even his dialogue boxes get progressively more scraggly and uneven, indicating that his voice is breaking more and more - which, btw, his last two boxes on the previous page were almost completely even.

And also...

“You’ve been using me, too, after all!!”

This actually reminds me of a line that Father said to Kazuma in the exact same chapter that I showed above. Again, if you recall, Father is the CEO of Projecting...

“Your unrequited love is merely what fuels Bishamon’s ability to keep using you.”

I was definitely getting the projection vibes from this line but I was scratching my head what this could even apply to with Father, as he seems to never have truly worshipped any god... of course, I should have known Adachitoka would’ve gone there.

Again, you kinda have to look past what we’re thinking as readers - “it’s Father who was using Yato!” - and think about what Father’s thought process is like here. Everything is give and take, life is a constant competition to survive, winners live on and losers die and make excuses, “it’s me vs. everyone else/the world”... so if Father is lashing out, of course it’s gonna be “you were just actually using me (to keep yourself alive) so you need to return the favor.” If you think about what Father says here and what he says a few pages earlier - “you’re important to me” - this very much could have been a moment of insecurity: “Yaboku is important to me, but he’s only using me (and that’s another betrayal from someone I cared about).”

And, of course... “Yaboku, you were my prayer.” Mournful sigh. Right back to Chapter 94 with Father’s whole “you’re a pain in the ass but you’re still my son, that’s what I wished for.” (You wished for what, sir? A son? And now you’re saying he was your prayer while begging him to come back to you? I see you.) True Wish theory still going strong.

Father’s dialogue box goes right back to being mostly even so I definitely feel like this is said to be more manipulative but. That doesn’t change the fact that Father did want to preserve Yato’s existence, he did want to protect him - because he’s important to him.

And Yato’s face in both this page and the previous one... I know it’s manga so expressions are more subjective than they would have been animated for example, but in my opinion, Yato shows a kind of... quiet understanding of what Father is saying. Yato knows Father is a liar, but in this moment, I think he sees that what Father is saying here is true - he does care for him, he wants him to come back because he cares for him, and he wants to protect Yato’s existence. That... almost regretful face he makes in this page kills me.

And he offers Father a swift and merciful death. He could’ve offed Father several times in this fight but here, he simply tells him not to move and that he will make it quick. That is significant.

And the most surprising thing?

Father seems to give up. With the way he was beginning to bow his head, I believe he was actually going to let himself be killed by Yato.

Father, who we have seen fight like hell to survive (whose entire world view is constructed on that very idea), literally right up until a few seconds ago, even - he gives up.

If that isn’t a testament to how much Yato means to him - that he would give up because he finally sees that they’ve reached the point of no return - then idk what is.

I talked about this a little bit on Twitter but I think Mizuchi’s words to Father - “I love you” - were actually a direct reaction to this. Because Mizuchi saw that it hurt Father, so she tries to reassure him - “(Yato may not appreciate you but) I love you (and it will be okay)”. My poor, poor girl. </3

Not gonna lie, when I first read this page, I actually thought the “I love you” “I love you, Father” were echoing in Father’s head because he was the last character we saw besides Mizuchi before those words were said. And that’s partly because, again, I really, really, REALLY hope that this will shift Father’s perception of Mizuchi a bit - he has ignored her so many times in just these last 3~ fights alone, I really hope Adachitoka won’t be that repetitive. Nice bit of character development for Father, something to shake things up.

I am also partial to the idea that they were echoing inside Yato’s head - with the shot of those words over Yato’s hands about to swing down on Father symbolizing his inner conflict (thanks @gagiru for this one, it killed me) over the act that he’s about to do. Someone on Twitter brought up the idea that even though Yato is ready to be done with Father, there’s still things left unsaid that need to be said... and I really hope we’re heading in that direction, too.

Whew, I think that was actually my longest chapter thoughts. The scenes with Father are not being talked about nearly enough so of course it was my pleasure and my duty to talk about them in depth!

Until next time?

So, let’s talk Father and Yato in Chapter 102-1

Not a formal chapter thoughts post because I haven’t done meta in a few months and I am very very very rusty and this might be kind of incomprehensible and also this might be a hot take so.

This is just one perspective from a Father Enjoyer and Theorist, etc etc. More under the cut.

Dated: September 6, 2022

First off: I don't think any question that is asked in Noragami goes unanswered.

In the case of this chapter, there is one central question at play in this scene: Yato, in his inner monologue, asking "Why would [Father] be crying?"

This question is posed at both the present day situation AND the flashback we see here, between Father and a young Yato.

Before I go on, I think it's important to establish that Yato has a warped perception of how Father feels about him (for a good reason, obviously, definitely not faulting him for that). The fight between Father and Yato this arc has done a lot to further flesh out the dynamic between Father and Yato. And even though this moment is a pretty small one, it illustrates the disconnect perfectly, both in dialogue and with the visual of Father and Yato’s clash: 

"Why are you hurting Yukine?! If you hate me that much, then come after me directly!", aka, Yato for the first time explicitly vocalizes the thought that Father hates him.

To which Father responds in confusion: "Huh? Well, yeah, you're a pain in the ass, but you're still my son." Whatever Yato thinks Father thinks of him is not how Father actually feels about him - he doesn’t hate him, but says that even though Yato is a pain in the ass, he’s still his son. This notion is multiplied tenfold and put on crack in the conclusion of this fight in the latest chapters.

There's also a small moment in the Heaven arc that reinforces that a bit further, in which Hiyori relays to him that Father told her it's "Yaboku that needed saving", to which Yato responds "the old man is meddling again."

Foregoing the fact that Yato falsely assumes that Father set up Bishamon and was involved in sending the Heavenly Guard after her (when it's very clear from earlier scenes that he didn't, Bishamon took that risk in order to defeat him herself), this is the arc where Father proceeds to purposefully put himself in the spotlight of a fight with Heaven in order to bait Bishamon into fighting him instead, so that attention may be drawn away from Yato. It is very explicitly stated that this is what Father's aim here was - he was doing this to save Yato, as he told Hiyori when she confronted him.

For someone as meticulous as Father, this was a hasty move that almost got him killed.

Even in Chapter 100, when Father explicitly says that he let Yato do all of those things because he's *important* to him, Yato's response to that was "you let me do whatever you wanted so I'd always come running back to you, you knew that's why I was so scared of you."

It's not that it's not true necessarily - because it absolutely is true, that was the main underlying purpose of Father being so "permissive" with him -  but it's more about perspective: this is, fundamentally, how Yato sees Father and his actions, more importantly the motivations behind his actions. Again, he isn’t wrong per se, but there’s more to this story that Yato obviously doesn’t see (and who can blame him?).

And even by Yato's own admission in Chapter 49, he doesn't know much about Father because he didn't want to think about it... because he was scared of him. Understandably so. This fear permeates their relationship, and how Yato sees Father.

So with this in mind, we once again return to the question: "Why would [Father] be crying?"

Yato doesn't understand why Father is crying because that action does not fit within his understanding of Father and his actions, because the Father that Yato thinks he knows wouldn't do that. And that's where it gets interesting with this flashback.

@nyappytown​ brought up an interesting point about how this might have been a memory that Yato repressed to protect himself. And why would he need to do that? Because it's not something that fits within his understanding of Father, and the implications of this interaction might be more than Yato was capable of taking previously.

There's a few key elements here:

(a) Father openly admitting that he knows Yato hates him

(b) Expressing the belief that it's essentially inevitable due to the nature of parent-child relationships, and how it’ll be the same no matter where you go (Father once again projecting his trauma)

(c) The crying, which is out of character for Father + "You're tired, aren't you, Yaboku? So am I..." (rare moment of vulnerability)

(d) Father being... well, being a parent (asking Yato what he wants to eat, telling him a story like a parent would, it’s a very parent-child interaction)

Like I said in the beginning, Adachitoka doesn't ask a question and leave it unanswered. The connecting point between this moment 1000+ years ago between Father and a young Yato and THIS moment is:

  "Why would he be crying?" 

Yato has not found an answer to that question in those 1000+ years.

But I believe he finally realizes the answer to it with Father's response here.

"But it'll be all right. Even if you fell into the Underworld, I'll come save you. Because I'm your lifeline, after all."

You can even see the change of expression between a few pages ago - clearly fearful, furrowed eyebrows - to this page, where his expression shifts to surprise, brows slightly upturned.

The "but it'll be all right" is actually on the bottom of the previous page, and it creates a very interesting continuity between the two pages: on the previous page, Father talks about how Yato as a child was so terrified of Father's stories about the Underworld that he would wet himself, then we have Father’s reassurance of "it'll be alright", because "even if you fell into the Underworld, I'll come save you."

May I perhaps be so bold as to suggest that this is where Yato realized that the answer to his question is this: it's because Yato's existence is precious to Father. So much so that he's saying "I would literally go to h/ell to preserve it, because I am your lifeline, and you are important to me." With how Yato saw Father all of his life, this conclusion was not possible. But if he understands that now...

Yato has had issues with valuing his own life this entire arc, basically throwing it away for the sake of the greater good - going as far as to say that it would be better for him to reincarnate - while the people around him (mainly, Yukine and Hiyori) mourn the possibility of losing THIS Yato. Yato hasn't quite realized the value of his life, THIS life, yet (ironically, the thing that he taught Ebisu in the Yomi arc).

I must again mention @PeevesV2 and her big brain cuz I am still very much thinking about the connection she made between Iwami's lesson to Ebisu ("never again sacrifice yourself, your precious life, for another") (oh hey look at that moon in that panel, just like the moon over Yato and Father in the flashback) and Father-Yato a while ago.

And like, Father HAS shown genuine anger at the thought of Yato reincarnating. It can be a little hard to catch but in Chapter 93, it's not "I told everything to Amaterasu" or Yato basically saying "I'm gonna off you" that had Father seething, but "that'll be the end... for me."

And we know that because Father directly responds to that with "do you hear, that, Hagusa? Yaboku is thinking about reincarnating." And ends the chapter with "Hagusa is pissed off TOO." (about the thought of Yato reincarnating)

Obviously idk how anyone else feels about this but imo, Father being the one who helps Yato really get it in his head that his existence right now is not disposable, is precious and important and shouldn't be thrown away, is a really great step towards the conclusion of both their arcs. It doesn't brush off the horrible abuse Yato endured at Father's hands but neither does it trivialize Father's own experiences and how that all fed into this inter-generational cycle of violence, nor his complicated feelings towards Yato. 

Just two deeply broken, hurt people finally being able to see eye to eye for the first time in their lives. So yeah, I do kinda hope this is the path Adachitoka ends up taking.

Sorry for this being messy, I haven't written analysis in ages LOL Anyway yeah I’m in so much pain right now

Addendum that I forgot to fit into the main thing: If that flashback was indeed a repressed memory for Yato, it's no wonder cuz... which one is worse: believing that your father hates you and that's why he treats you the way he does or knowing that he loves you... and still puts you through all that? Much to think about.

Noragami Meta + Misc Masterpost (V3)

Some meta and adjacent thoughts may no longer hold up to canon or my current thoughts on the manga, this is just an archive of my Noragami-related posts to date.

Apparently, Tumblr decided to somehow eat my last meta masterpost (or I accidentally deleted it, lol) so, here’s V3. 

The Loophole™ - May 31, 2019

So, what’s the deal with Nora? -  December 6, 2019

Goryoujin: what’s the deal with Father? (89-2 edition) (Part 1) (Part 2) - August 8, 2020

Additional Thoughts on 89-2 - February 28, 2021

  Father: true desires, projection theory, and related thoughts  (Part 1-1) (Part 1-2) (Part 2 - discontinued) - April 11, 2021

(Mini) thread on some thoughts about Father’s “separateness” and isolation as a person (Twitter) - June 24, 2021

Chapter 95-1 Thoughts - July 5, 2021

About the poem from Chapter 95... - July 6, 2021

On Magatsukami: A Few Noragami Thoughts - August 8, 2021

Chapter 97-1 Thoughts (Part 1) (Part 2) - November 11, 2021

In response to “Villains and Victims”... - November 14, 2021

Chapter 51 “Salvation” (救 Sukui) vs. Chapter 97 “Savior” (救主 Sukuinushi) (Twitter) - November 19, 2021

黄泉帰る(yomigaeru) “to return from Yomi” vs. 蘇る (yomigaeru) “to return from Yomi” (Twitter) - November 24, 2021

Chapter 97-2 Thoughts (Part 1) (Part 2) - December 8, 2021

On Father’s “I’d even sleep among monks” - Feb 3, 2022

On Father and Yato - March 28, 2022

So, let’s talk Father and Yato in Chapter 102-1 - September 6, 2022

Chapter 103-2 Thoughts - February 6, 2023

“Even if you fell into the Underworld, I’ll come save you” - July 6, 2023

“Is this run-down nation what you really wanted to create?” - November 21, 2023

Chapter 103-2

Happy extremely belated New Year’s, everyone - it is now February of 2023 buuuut this is my first meta of the year, so. :P

These Noragami thoughts where brought to you by “3 AM coffee and write the chapter thoughts post because it will never get done otherwise.”

Note: I had to remove all the links to my sources because Tumblr really hates them and so prevents the post from showing up in the tag. Urgh. Sorry about that.

Thoughts under the cut.

Word Count: 2,100~

Dated: February 6, 2023

Chapter 104-1

If you follow me on Twitter, you might have seen me change my mind about this chapter at least 3 times already - the truth is, I am still kind of on the fence about it. I think the next one and a half chapters could make or break the plot of this arc, depending on how Adachitoka chooses to contextualize Father’s new-found (asspull?) ability and what happens within the space this ability created. But that’s getting a bit ahead of things!

This page in particular is very intriguing to me.

 夜ト　おまえは言ったな　「どこの世界で生きてんだ」と

それがいい。今なら出来る

…この力を何と呼ぼう

What Father is quoting here ( どこの世界で生きてんだ ) is Yato’s line to him from Chapter 102-2: Lifeline.

I usually read Noragami chapter raws in full when they first come out and what I found interesting here is what comes after Father quotes that: それがいい。今なら出来る sore ga ii. ima nara dekiru (roughly, “That’s just fine/good. I/You can do that, now.”) The thing about Japanese is that it often omits the subject of a sentence if the subject can be inferred from the context of the conversation, which can be... quite vague, sometimes, more so in manga format where it isn’t always clear what the speaker is referring to. 今なら出来るin very literal terms would be something like “now, can do.” It’s not specified who can do (something) here: you could insert “you” or “I” or even “we” - if we’re counting Mizuchi as a participant in the conversation - as the pronoun and it would still make sense.

I think fast-moon’s translation makes perfect sense too but personally, when I first read this page, I inferred the subject to be Yato (”You can do that, now”) rather than Father (”That’s something I can do now”) because Father was quoting Yato (the subject of the sentence, the one doing the saying, おまえは言ったな... omae wa itta na). If Father was referring to himself, I would rather think that he would have used オレ (ore) preceding the sentence, the masculine pronoun that Father uses to refer to himself.

In that sense, I took it to be something like “You say I’m living in a completely different world, well, now you can do that too”, as in - you can live in that world (that I live in), too. Definitely take it with a grain of salt because I certainly don’t have as much translation experience as fast-moon buuut considering Hiyori sees the memories of the past in that void, I think it’s a reasonable interpretation to entertain.

102 also gave us this flashback, after all.

So, what is Birthing a Nation and what can it do? And - perhaps more importantly - where did this ability come from? (The jury is still out on whether it’s an asspull ability or not, lol, but I am definitely intrigued by it.)

The only thing we know for certain is that it can create a space: it is that black, reflective void that Shiiho likens to a lake, which is expanding (insert domain expansion joke here). Hiyori sees it as a space that is underwater, where several scenes can be seen. They might be memories, as we see the sakura tree under which Yato met Tamanone, Father and co.’s old hut, and possibly their home in Tamagahara. The end chapter note describes it as an “enchanted world” ( 魅せる世界, miseru sekai)* that was created by Birthing a Nation.

* Side note: I thought the 魅せる in 魅せる世界  miseru sekai was an alternative/archaic kanji spelling of the modern 見せる (miseru, “to see/to be shown”), but it’s actually a special class suru verb 魅 する (misuru, “to charm/to bewitch/to enchant”). I do wonder if it’s meant to be homonym worldplay on both  魅せる世界 “enchanted world” and 見せる世界 “world that can be seen/is shown”, Adachitoka does love their worldplay.

Its Japanese name, Kuni-umi ( 国生み ,”the birth/creation of the land/nation”), also alludes to this ability to create. As fast-moon pointed out in the translation notes, it specifically refers to the creation myth of the Japanese archipelago by Izanami and Izanagi.**

After the formation, Heaven was above and Earth was still a drifting soft mush. The first five gods named Kotoamatsukami (別天津神, "Separate Heavenly Deities") were lone deities without sex and did not reproduce. Then came the Kamiyonanayo (神世七代, "The Seven Divine Generations"), consisting of two lone deities followed by five couples. The elder gods delegated the youngest couple Izanagi and Izanami to carry out their venerable mandate: to reach down from heaven and give solid form to the earth.

This they did with the use of a precious stone-covered spear named Ame-no-nuboko (天沼矛, "heavenly jewelled spear"), given to them by the elders. Standing over the Ame-no-ukihashi (天浮橋, "floating bridge of heaven"), they churned the chaotic mass with the spear. When drops of salty water fell from the tip, they formed into the first island, Onogoroshima. In forming this island, both gods came down from heaven, and spontaneously built a central support column called the Ame-no-mihashira (天御柱, "heavenly pillar") which upheld the "hall measuring eight fathoms" that the gods caused to appear afterwards.

- Kuniumi, Wikipedia

** According to Wikipedia, Kuniumi in reference to this myth is spelled 国産み instead of 国生み, which is how it’s spelled in Noragami. The kanji 産 seems to have stronger connections solely to the act of childbirth, among other things. While 生み can also mean “birth, giving birth”, it can also refer to the act of creation, “bringing into the world.”

I remarked (partly in jest) that Father has become undeniably “Izanagi-coded” buuuut in truth, he has always been partly “Izanagi-coded” in the sense that he seems to have been inspired by the mythos of Izanagi (an idea that @nyappytown​ helped me tap into with her brilliant breakdowns of Susanoo inspirations in Yato’s character). I touched on this briefly when I did my post on the origins of the mythical magatsuhi-no-kami 禍津日神 (once again Noragami’s spelling differs a bit, magatsukami 禍津神, even though clearly this concept was inspired by the myth). It warrants another mention because immediately following the Kuniumi came the Kamiumi 神産み (”the birth of the kami”), a period where many kami were born from Izanagi and Izanami’s union, then Izanami’s death, Kagutsuchi’s death, during Izanagi’s escape from Yomi, and, finally, during Izanagi’s purification following his return from Yomi.

I think a lot of the comparisons to the Izanagi mythos re: Father came from the fact that he calls himself “Father” (as in, the “father” of the gods, in a sense) and the parallels with his descent into Yomi (I think it’s fair to say that Father seeing Kaya’s likeness in Izanami can be compared to Izanagi descending into Yomi specifically to see Izanami, his deceased wife, on some level) and subsequent return from Yomi. Father returning from Yomi has certainly been talked about a lot but the immediate aftermath has not yet come up - I think it’s safe to bet that it will be drawing from Izanagi’s purification, the last part of the Kamiumi.

The TL;DR of the Izanagi purification story, as written on Izanagi’s Wikipedia page (complete with citations that I will not include here):

Izanagi, feeling contaminated by his visit to Yomi, went to "[the plain of] Awagihara (i.e. a plain covered with awagi) by the river-mouth of Tachibana in Himuka in [the island of] Tsukushi" and purified himself by bathing in the river; various deities came into existence as he stripped off his clothes and accouterments and immersed himself in the water. The three most important kami, the "Three Precious Children" (三貴子 mihashira no uzu no miko or sankishi) – the sun goddess Amaterasu Ōmikami, the moon deity Tsukuyomi-no-Mikoto, and the storm god Susanoo-no-Mikoto – were born when Izanagi washed his left eye, his right eye, and his nose, respectively.

(Note: As you can see, water plays a big theme in Shinto. The islands of Japan were born out of the sediment in the ocean, and here, it is an agent of purification by which one can clean themselves of ritual impurity, kegare 穢れ. That continues to be the case in modern day practices, which you can see at Shinto shrines, and in Noragami as well - clean water is used to purify blight caused by ayakashi.)

The Kamiumi Wikipedia page goes on to elaborate that Omaga-tsuhi (Magatsuhi-no-kami, just a slightly different variation of the name) was the second god born of the impurities that were stripped from Izanagi after he discarded his clothes, following his return from Yomi. According to Japanese Wiki Corpus, Magatsuhi-no-kami is a god of disasters.

I won’t rehash too much of what I said in “On Matagtsukami: A Few Noragami Thoughts” but one thought has got me thinking:

How exactly was Yato wished into existence by Father, from a single strong wish? Perhaps, just maybe, the thing that some people argued would make it implausible for Yato to have been born from Father’s wish - the fact that his return from Yomi rendered him no longer fully human - is the very thing that enabled it to happen in the first place? Could it have been from the purification process after returning from Yomi? Or maybe with the help of the Brush - not Father forcing another name on an already existing, reincarnated god, but by using the Brush as a catalyst for the manifestation of Father’s wish in some way, since Yato was born after Mizuchi had been named with the Brush?

Bear with me, here.

It was said a few chapters ago that the Brush has been “infused with Izanami’s spirit” - it has Izanami’s power in it, and that’s probably why it works and simply naming ayakashi with a mask and incantation does not. After all, ayakashi have “lost their spirit” and have “neither true names nor human forms” - they are simply vectors of negative energy and impurities.

Side note: Just realized we got pretty much the same visual in this chapter. Not a coincidence by any stretch of the imagination.

But Izanami helped create the islands of Japan, her power is (was?) “creation”, just as it is Izanagi’s. Her status as the “matron god” (国母たる神, koku botaru kami) of the country has even brought up in 103-2.

I suspect that Father had “infused” himself with the power within the Word by drawing the ayakshi eye on his face, giving him abilities similar to that of Izanami. We never really got an explanation of the powers we see her use in Yomi. Naming ayakashi and corrupted spirits is one thing... using such a power on a spirit akin to a deity might be entirely another. (Considering the fact that Izanami is sealed in Yomi and the whole “laws of the Underworld” we’ve gotten a few chapters ago, though, I can’t see this ending well for Father.)

(Note: The above panel of Izanami is from Chapter 36, titled 呪 縛 Jyuubaku, “Binding Curse/Spell.” It’s the chapter in which Izanami completely seals off Yomi to prevent Yato from escaping. Possibly the name of one of her abilities?

Also, I’ve always thought some of the patterns bear a striking resemblance to Jomon pottery.

From Prehistoric Japanese Pottery.)

Birthing a Nation being a reference to the creation of Japan would seem to confirm that, indeed, the Brush has powers of “creation” - Izanami’s powers. In tandem with the myth of the birth of many gods following Izanagi’s return from Yomi (and the established parallels with Father), I would not be surprised if Father had somehow used that power to create Yato, hence why just one man/deity/goryo was able to create a kami when it shouldn’t have been possible.

Considering that the last Brush was said to be weaker than the current one Father is using, I do think that another element was needed for a kami to be created. As to what that would be, I have no idea - this theory certainly has its holes, it’s not perfect, but I wouldn’t say it’s far-fetched, either. A lot of kami seem to be born from things like blood and random articles of clothing so maybe that’s on the table? ;P

But back to Birthing a Nation. So, it has created a space that looks like a reflective, watery void, bearing the same patterns that we see Izanami use in Yomi. Hiyori sees what seem like memories but... what is that space? What is actually in it?

I don’t think they necessarily have to be memories. Seeing as Father was specifically responding to “you’re living in a completely different world”/”just what world are you living in?”, I think it could be any number of things. Does Father want Yato to experience the world as he sees it (considering that Yato specifically said he doesn't know "what bullshit you think you've been seeing or hearing")? Is he sending him back to the past? Has it something to do with Father's or Yato's memories?

...Is he creating another alternative timeline altogether?

I guess that remains to be seen. But I think we are going to be seeing Father’s return from Yomi and Yato’s birth very soon!

“Is this run-down nation really what you wanted to create?”

I have Thoughts about this that I don’t know how to quite articulate properly but like, that’s the question, isn’t it?

I think it’s certainly the world Father of right now wants - the chaos of the nation Father created visually embodies it, that senseless desire for indiscriminate destruction - because, as he himself put it, all that he has left is anger, it “doesn’t even matter” what he wanted to do anymore.

I think Mizuchi questioning whether this is really the world Father wanted is a particularly important question to think about for readers right now.

Is this really the world Father wanted to create?

We’ve seen a pretty clear progression with Father in the flashbacks so far: Adachitoka starts off with how his worldview was shaped by the incident with the monk on the cliff that underlies his entire character (life is a constant competition to survive, life is cheap, “winning” means you get to survive, forgiveness is how losers excuse themselves, this world under the sun is hell) and how he hates that status quo, then it shifts into the thought that he wants things to be better in this life, and finally - in the latest Kaya flashbacks - that this system was wrong from the start and that he will fix the world, even if such a thing may be impossible.

Even when Father from the flashbacks seems to expect the worst from people (”aren’t you going to cut off my head or something?”, “I’d thought it to be normal for even family members to steal from each other”, his overall reaction to the villagers being suspicious of him), he was still able to say that the village is “full of good people.” We see little - if any at all! - of the contempt Father regards people with in the Sakura flashbacks and beyond.

All of that is to say: Father didn’t always want chaos and destruction, it actually seems to be far from his original intentions. The strongest link we see between the three flashbacks is that Father hates what he perceives to be status quo, he wants things to be better, he wants to “fix” the world instead of, well, “cull the herd” and “torment the hell out of them” (Ch 60).

With that being said, the math is just not mathing when Father says the only wish he’s been able to wish in his entire life is “cull the herd”, the wish that supposedly brought Yato into existence. Even if you get nitpicky about it and suppose that there’s a difference between “wanting” and “wishing”, I feel like there’s too much of a discrepancy between what Father desires in flashbacks (after all, “the only wish [he’s] been able to wish in [his] entire life”) before Kaya’s death and what we see in the Sakura flashbacks, which take place after.

I’ve ran this point into the ground at this point but gods in Noragami more or less adhere to their “natures”, because they are literally manifestations of certain phenomena/natural features taking human form: Bishamon is indeed the strongest warrior god, Kofuku brings misfortune as the goddess of poverty, Ebisu remains business-oriented through his reincarnations as a god strongly associated with business, even if their general dispositions changed based on guidance from their shinki/human prayers. That nature remains more or less the same.

Yet Yato, as a god himself, never seemed to express any genuine malice even as a child before Sakura, when he was the most “free” of outside influences - he “played” by killing because he knew no better but even then, the first thing he does after his first cull is to run to Father, looking for his praise. Even when Sakura hasn’t “taught” him anything yet, his main concern is what he can do to make her happy.

(There’s more to be said about this but I already expanded on this idea in Part 1-2 of “Father: True Desires, Projection Theory, and Related Thoughts” so I won’t rehash a second time LOL.)

There is still a gap between when we last see Father in Yomi (”I will fix the world”) and Father in the Sakura flashbacks (”cull the herd”) in which the two big missing pieces are Father’s return from Yomi and Kaya’s death that most likely mark Father’s change in thinking. And if Yato was indeed born from Father’s wish, but that wish doesn’t seem to be an embodiment of Father’s superficial desire for destruction, then one has to ask:

Is that run-down nation (and, by extension, “cull the herd”) really what Father wanted to create in the first place?

Much to think about.

I’m definitely worried about how things will pan out in 2 chapters but I have a bit of hope when this question is being posed, yet we haven’t seen Kaya’s death or Yato’s birth. The missing puzzle pieces to the Father puzzle.

Other related thoughts I didn’t know where to fit in:

“I should have just created a nation to begin with instead of you.”

A part of me wonders whether Father says this in part because “Yato” and “the Nation” are diametrically opposed concepts. The Nation that Father has created truly embodies his superficial desire for destruction and chaos (visually, metaphorically, functionally), while Yato embodies Father’s desire for a different world that’s not steeped in Father’s anger and misery.

(And like, obviously a Nation also can’t rebel and try to kill you and go against your whims, LOL. That was probably the main thing.)

I don’t know how much sense this will make buuut both Yato (”why [are you doing this]...?”) and Mizuchi (”why are you like this?”) have posed a “why?” question about Father when we are about to breach the final parts of the backstory for sure... Boy, we about to get to know exactly why (or at least I hope so).

But also re: that Yato page specifically, on the subject of the callback to Father crying from several chapters ago: that scene is linked to one of the most important (imo) expositions we’ve gotten about Father so far, where Yato asks another important “why?” question (”why would he be crying?”) that has been left hanging a little bit.

Boy, we about to get to know exactly why (or at least I hope so)!!!