If you know me in any capacity beyond the semi-occasional update here, you'd know I've managed to finish Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy in the span of a month and am now extremely annoying about it. I've done a lot of thinking on elements of the game I like, and I guess after all that, I need to air out some thoughts about one thing I dislike about it. Not a normal dislike, but a deep one that I can't really get past until I essay my thoughts on the relevant character out. Obligatory warning: There will be spoilers for many game routes, including Second Scenario, Coming of Age, Killing Game, Retsnom, Cult of you know who, Box of Calamity...a lot, basically. If you've got those done you'll probably be safe. Probably.
The itch I've gotten myself stuck on relates to a certain important white haired girl, Nozomi Kirifuji, who's central to the plot due to the mystery she presents. On the prologue route, Takumi spends a long time fixated on her similarities to his childhood friend, Karua, and with Nozomi's last words before she dies, he's left thinking of them as one in the same while not knowing how that would even work. Nevertheless, this phantom of Karua over Nozomi drives a lot of his choices when he loops back.
This isn't about Nozomi, though. She's her own character, with her own traits, backstory, motivations...so it feels, though this is something I feel the game struggles with and ultimately fails to address. I'll present the bold claim that, despite her importance and intrigue, Nozomi's writing comes off as objectifying, simplistic, and very much misogynistic in the way she's handled and her personhood. I tried to like her, I really wanted to especially with the mysteries she presented and how she seemed like just the kind of overlooked character compared to the louder personalities in the group. But as the credits rolled for the 100th time (or well long before that, I finished on Comedy) I just. Couldn't see it. It felt like a lot of the people who enjoyed her saw something in her that I didn't, and I constantly analyzed the bits we got to figure out what.
In the end, though, I realized my issue with Nozomi didn't come about because she had some hidden depths I didn't see, but because the depths I saw often failed to appear in the narrative. It left me wondering why these elements were neglected despite her strong focus in the truth-revealing route, easily the longest one in the game.
Here's my view of Nozomi as a character. She's isolated, having lost her dad as a child along with her mother bringing her into her experiments. She mentions not being able to hang out with friends, and from what I can tell, has no connections to anyone outside of her mother (who commits suicide). She's lost out on a lot of common experiences people her age have, and to fit in pushes herself to be kind and friendly to others, lending a helping hand and consideration even to those who may not deserve it. She finds her purpose in doting on and caring for others, and due to her mom's influence, is fixated on winning the war for the sake of humanity.
Not because she cares for humanity, despite what she says, but for her mom. It all goes back to her mom, that isolation, and wanting everything she's endured to mean something.
That was the kind of person I saw Nozomi as: obsessively, concerningly dedicated to a goal for the sake of a single person, otherwise being quite empty beyond her interest in the outside world. She provides a nice complement to Takumi, someone who's equally empty outside of a connection to one person.
However, the game never really...gets into Nozomi as a person. We see snippets of this stubbornness and isolation in Retsnom when she snaps at Takumi for lying to her (and then forgiving him later on in a poorly developed conclusion to that plotline) and Killing Game (where she loses focus after Eva dies and becomes Kamyuhn's older sister for the rest of it), but none of it is a focus. Which would normally be fine with me, considering her arc and importance in Second Scenario and prologue...
Wait, did I say arc? Erm...
Other routes she shows prominence in are Coming of Age and the Cult route along with Box of Calamity, though the third isn't really her, the first has her as a love interest for the shounen style plot, and the second is actually fun to see as a voice of reason, even if she ends up either brainwashed or dead by the end of it :(. But though you see snippets, you'd expect the main meat of her character moments to properly address and tie together Nozomi as a person: her hopes, her wishes, her struggles, her personhood. I expected Second Scenario to show us some insight into Nozomi! I really wanted that! I wasn't expecting her to flip as a character like some theorized pre-release, but I was excited to see what kind of change she might go through or what other secrets she could have.
But nothing like that happened. All her reveals are related to and encourage Takumi's development. Her changes are relegated to the background, to the point where it made me want to bang my head against a wall. In Second Scenario, Sirei changes Nozomi's memories to make her think her mother's alive for...some reason. Maybe because he thought her remembering the hospital was risky, but even then, it was like. I don't see the point but okay, that's not my main gripe. My biggest gripe is how the Nozomi-Karua plotline is handled without any agency on Nozomi's part. In the end, the similarities had to do with her speaking to Takumi while he was in the pod and that subconsciously shaping his memories, until someone caught her and erased it all from her memories. But of course, she remembers this just in time to encourage Takumi to develop as a person.
How does she feel about these memories? How does she feel knowing she influenced Takumi like this? Had her memories messed with? How does she feel about throwing her youth and life away for the sake of a mother she was made to forget? It doesn't matter, because the game tells us it doesn't matter because she has no qualms abandoning her connection with her mom (who she let experiment on her) deciding to fight for people she met not even two months ago. Of course, what she learned was horrific, and I'd expect that to shake her up. But she doesn't experience an iota of conflict, cleanly reacting however keeps her romantically viable for Takumi. Always unknowing, always nice, always helpless, always malleable.
My main gripe with Nozomi is that she's too nice. She's too perfect. She's too much of a love interest that it prevents her from being a person. She cannot cause any conflict that isn't resolved in some fashion so Takumi (BoC as an exception but like, come on, is it really) can get along with her again. She can't struggle between her dead mother and the SDU because that'd be too much conflict, she can't be angry and not forgive Takumi for something because she's too nice, she's so nice...it's a pitfall that I can only describe as misogynsitic, a caricature of a nice girl without the humanity of a person. I mentioned before that her niceness struck her as her way of trying to fit in, but you wouldn't know that if you played the game. It's all conjecture from me, because to put it bluntly, either the writer doesn't care about her or wants to see her as a potential girlfriend before a person.
It just...really irritates me. The pieces were there. If she had even a tiny bit more agency or conflict in her, she could've been something great. A character I'd tear apart and think about in terms of what she wants and what she's willing to do to accomplish the goals of someone long dead. So much of her motivations and backstory parallel other characters and could've been explored for some really tasty conflict. But alas. We have another victim for the 'Nice Girl' cage, one she's never allowed to leave.
I don't normally do this, but I've decided to add a comments section at the end in case anyone wants to lend some thoughts. I'm curious to see what others think and if you disagree. I may reply if I feel like it...not in a moody way I PROMISE, I'm just lazy. But also I love yapping about Hundred Line.