Kenshin!Saito and Hakuoki!Saito
Nov. 6th, 2019 11:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
waterscroll(I posted this a while ago on a now-defunct journal, but since there's Hakuouki discussion happening here I figured I'd repost it.)
In Rurouni Kenshin, middle-aged Saito is badass, violent, sadistic, sometimes cruel, suffering from PTSD and very badly damaged by being on the losing side of the war and losing his friends and comrades. He's also incredibly idealistic, holding true to the code that he has followed all his life: destroy evil immediately. In order to do what he sees as necessary to protect Japan he's willing to work closely with his worst enemy, someone who was involved in the deaths of his friends. Y'know, back when he had friends. (::sob::)
The thing is, although his stated code is to destroy evil immediately, he doesn't actually do that. He destroys evil after carefully investigating it. Because it seems that what has changed since his Shinsengumi days is that back in the day he'd delegate the work of deciding what is and isn't evil to his superiors, so he can go straight to the business of killing it. Now he has to figure that out for himself.
At one point he refuses to kill someone who is doing evil before interrogating and putting him on trial. Because destroying evil is a lot more complicated than killing individual evil people, you have to also work to understand the systems that are supporting them.
Saito also has an important relationship with someone who starts out fairly unequivocally evil - like, he tries to kill a baby on screen - but Saito ends up turning him good. But that's also destroying evil, in a way.
So the moral code of 'destroy evil immediately' turns out to be a flexible code with a lot of room for growth. It can start as a code that demands blind and swift obedience to order and turn into something a lot more complex, that requires a lot of independent thinking and nuance. At the same time, the way Saito continues to hold to it makes him know that he is still himself, no matter how much he's lost.
I started Hakuoki wondering if the two versions of Saito would fit together - if Hakuoki!Saito would be a plausible backstory for Kenshin!Saito. And, sort of? I do think a Saito who is married to Chizuru would be happier than he is in Kenshin. Also I am super-behind the Saito/Sano ship in Kenshin and I can't really figure out a way for Saito to be with both Sano and Chizuru that would satisfy me. But you definitely do see a similar kind of moral development.
Saito's Hakuoki route progresses through philosophical conversations about the Good Life. What is it to be a good person? To be, as Saito keeps saying, a true warrior? Chizuru is his kind-of Socratic teacher who asks questions to prompt him to think more deeply about his answers, and through these conversations his moral compass develops.
(As an aside, one reason I'm so happy with Chizuru as a protagonist is that I really admire her teaching skills. I am a teacher and it is *really hard*, and teaching someone to rethink their core values is one of the hardest kinds of teaching to do. And Chizuru does it really well, and differently in every route.)
To be honest, I found Saito's early philosophizing kind of sophomoric. Like when he takes pride in the fact that his body count is just as high as Okita's. Or when he's confused about why anyone would be bothered by him killing someone in a duel, because isn't that what warriors do? But, okay, that just reflects where his moral development is at that point. He seems mature for his age, because he's quiet and earnest. But the best he can do for a code to live by is that strength means the ability to kill people and morality is only killing on command and not valuing your life any more than you value anyone else's. That is, being a sword wielded by someone else, who has to make the moral decisions.
But, with the help of Chizuru's supportive but unrelenting conversations, his moral code develops. Eventually he realizes that as a human being who is in fact not a sword he is ultimately responsible for choosing who he serves. And then he realizes that even the choice to serve someone doesn't mean that he doesn't need to make moral choices. Finally, in the very end, he realizes, and tells Chizuru, that being a warrior isn't about carrying a sword at all but about acting with integrity in every aspect of your life. And wow he's changed. And he's changed by *thinking* about things, which makes me love it even more.
I find it fascinating that in both canons no one, including Saito, ever defends the Shogunate on its merits, as opposed to as something to be loyal to because you're loyal. (And it seems that there is good reason for that.) Saito fights for it, but at a time in his life when the ability to make his own moral decisions about big-picture questions didn't really occur to him. As soon as he starts to make his own moral decisions, the very first decision that he makes is that his personal loyalty to Aizu is more important to him than the Shogunate's last chance in Ezo. And then after Aizu is defeated he chooses to work with the new government in its police, because he's relying on his own moral compass to do good. It seems that Saito's changing ways of thinking reflect the zeitgeist shift that is happening around him, from a more hierarchical/structured society to one that is more individualistic. He shifts with the times, but remains recognizably himself. He's still destroying evil in Rurouni Kenshin and still being a true warrior at the end of his arc in Hakuoki. It's just that what that means has to change. It's quite a beautiful character arc that resonates very much with my experience of trying to live authentically as a changing person in a changing world.
In Rurouni Kenshin, middle-aged Saito is badass, violent, sadistic, sometimes cruel, suffering from PTSD and very badly damaged by being on the losing side of the war and losing his friends and comrades. He's also incredibly idealistic, holding true to the code that he has followed all his life: destroy evil immediately. In order to do what he sees as necessary to protect Japan he's willing to work closely with his worst enemy, someone who was involved in the deaths of his friends. Y'know, back when he had friends. (::sob::)
The thing is, although his stated code is to destroy evil immediately, he doesn't actually do that. He destroys evil after carefully investigating it. Because it seems that what has changed since his Shinsengumi days is that back in the day he'd delegate the work of deciding what is and isn't evil to his superiors, so he can go straight to the business of killing it. Now he has to figure that out for himself.
At one point he refuses to kill someone who is doing evil before interrogating and putting him on trial. Because destroying evil is a lot more complicated than killing individual evil people, you have to also work to understand the systems that are supporting them.
Saito also has an important relationship with someone who starts out fairly unequivocally evil - like, he tries to kill a baby on screen - but Saito ends up turning him good. But that's also destroying evil, in a way.
So the moral code of 'destroy evil immediately' turns out to be a flexible code with a lot of room for growth. It can start as a code that demands blind and swift obedience to order and turn into something a lot more complex, that requires a lot of independent thinking and nuance. At the same time, the way Saito continues to hold to it makes him know that he is still himself, no matter how much he's lost.
I started Hakuoki wondering if the two versions of Saito would fit together - if Hakuoki!Saito would be a plausible backstory for Kenshin!Saito. And, sort of? I do think a Saito who is married to Chizuru would be happier than he is in Kenshin. Also I am super-behind the Saito/Sano ship in Kenshin and I can't really figure out a way for Saito to be with both Sano and Chizuru that would satisfy me. But you definitely do see a similar kind of moral development.
Saito's Hakuoki route progresses through philosophical conversations about the Good Life. What is it to be a good person? To be, as Saito keeps saying, a true warrior? Chizuru is his kind-of Socratic teacher who asks questions to prompt him to think more deeply about his answers, and through these conversations his moral compass develops.
(As an aside, one reason I'm so happy with Chizuru as a protagonist is that I really admire her teaching skills. I am a teacher and it is *really hard*, and teaching someone to rethink their core values is one of the hardest kinds of teaching to do. And Chizuru does it really well, and differently in every route.)
To be honest, I found Saito's early philosophizing kind of sophomoric. Like when he takes pride in the fact that his body count is just as high as Okita's. Or when he's confused about why anyone would be bothered by him killing someone in a duel, because isn't that what warriors do? But, okay, that just reflects where his moral development is at that point. He seems mature for his age, because he's quiet and earnest. But the best he can do for a code to live by is that strength means the ability to kill people and morality is only killing on command and not valuing your life any more than you value anyone else's. That is, being a sword wielded by someone else, who has to make the moral decisions.
But, with the help of Chizuru's supportive but unrelenting conversations, his moral code develops. Eventually he realizes that as a human being who is in fact not a sword he is ultimately responsible for choosing who he serves. And then he realizes that even the choice to serve someone doesn't mean that he doesn't need to make moral choices. Finally, in the very end, he realizes, and tells Chizuru, that being a warrior isn't about carrying a sword at all but about acting with integrity in every aspect of your life. And wow he's changed. And he's changed by *thinking* about things, which makes me love it even more.
I find it fascinating that in both canons no one, including Saito, ever defends the Shogunate on its merits, as opposed to as something to be loyal to because you're loyal. (And it seems that there is good reason for that.) Saito fights for it, but at a time in his life when the ability to make his own moral decisions about big-picture questions didn't really occur to him. As soon as he starts to make his own moral decisions, the very first decision that he makes is that his personal loyalty to Aizu is more important to him than the Shogunate's last chance in Ezo. And then after Aizu is defeated he chooses to work with the new government in its police, because he's relying on his own moral compass to do good. It seems that Saito's changing ways of thinking reflect the zeitgeist shift that is happening around him, from a more hierarchical/structured society to one that is more individualistic. He shifts with the times, but remains recognizably himself. He's still destroying evil in Rurouni Kenshin and still being a true warrior at the end of his arc in Hakuoki. It's just that what that means has to change. It's quite a beautiful character arc that resonates very much with my experience of trying to live authentically as a changing person in a changing world.
