So Saiteru Confession Indulgence Anyone?

so saiteru confession indulgence anyone?

neuvifuri genuinely drives me insane because like. imagine being neuvillette. imagine knowing furina for a whole four hundred years and her being one of few constants in your life. and you're so fundamentally different from each other and you can't understand her and sometimes you think you can't possibly like her but then she goes and does something so impossibly kind that you're left reeling and she's the one who's always pushed you to try and understand humanity, to try and get to know fontaine and every person who lives within it, and sometimes you think that the reason you ended up loving fontaine is because she loves fontaine and its people so much and she showed you how to do it every day you've worked together

imagine all of that and hundreds of years later everything you've known is overturned in a single instant, you find out through a god wearing her face but having none of her warmth and life that she has been enduring unimaginable suffering for centuries, that she was made only to suffer, that she has been suffering the entire time you knew her and you didn't notice and she didn't tell you because there were so much bigger things at play and did you even know her? was anything between you ever real or was it just part of her performance?

and in the end of it you finally see her for who she really is for the first time and she is so broken and lost and you want to help her but what if she wants nothing to do with you anymore? what if she wants nothing to do with all those years you've spent together because you grew and changed and became better because of her but she had to suppress and stifle herself and you want to help her the way she helped you all those years ago and---

The

Teeth

some more neuvifuri doodles from my twitter

about the three betrayals

None of the betrayals independently made Scara who he became, it was an evolution of things. None of these independently pushed Scara into making bad choices, and it feels a bit that fans either push the blame on Ei’s negligence or Dottore’s manipulation, as if either of these two had set the path for Scara on their own, while at the same time interpreting the third betrayal as a misunderstanding or an exaggeration (because what fault would a child have in his own death?) but it misses the point of the betrayals as a whole.

The ideas of inferiority influenced by being abandoned might have formed early, but they didn’t meaningfully influence Scara’s existence while he lived in Tatarasuna. Ei left him the golden feather so that if he wanted to, he could contact her, his creator, but he never did until Tatarasuna was in danger. He had no need to investigate the reason of his existence, so he never sought an audience with the shogun until it was necessary and only as a last resort (other villagers had tried to leave the island to ask for help already).

Niwa’s false betrayal didn’t make him snap either, he left the village to never return, but he immediately formed a new bond with another human. Being harmed by another person, especially one that Scara was made to believe had done intentionally, did not make him lose hope in humanity. Seeing his compassion and kindness for the child, it also didn’t turn him cynical or resentful.

Both of these things affected him very deeply, he longed for a heart to truly be a human and he only formed this new bond with a human he considered equal. But they did not shape who he became alone. It was the third betrayal, hence why the three of them are important to understand him.

It’s not that the child dying was a betrayal of its own, Scara didn’t even resent him, he even goes back to visit his grave. It’s the fact that even when humans don’t purposefully cause him pain, they still will hurt him. Any and all potential connection to the world he forges will eventually be severed by death. And this natural course of life is not available for him, he doesn’t belong to this world, doesn’t have a place in it.

If you remove the first or the second betrayal, which are largely seen as something that was done to him with intent, the third betrayal still stands. All three of them shaped him, not just the ones where he was hurt intentionally. And that’s the point, that he can’t escape the suffering of his existence.

The first betrayal was never what he assumed it to be, Ei didn’t abandon him for “being flawed”, she did it to not impose a will on him. She had her reasons for this, since she herself viewed herself as a tool with a purpose and understood right away the conflict of Scara’s nature (“he’s fragile both as a human or as a tool”). It was a decision influenced by her own world view and reasoning, and it had tangible consequences.

The second betrayal was a lie, Niwa didn’t betray him at all. Dottore deceived him, but Dottore doesn’t consider himself a human, he sees all living beings as test subjects, none of what he did was strictly personal to Scara. No human chose to harm him, that’s the explanation behind this betrayal, and it had tangible consequences.

The third betrayal revealed the nature of his own existence to him, there was no intentions behind it and it still had tangible consequences.

This is central belief in Buddhism, which Scara’s character is built around. Suffering exists in the world as a fact, it cannot be escaped, and this suffering exists in a chain of cause and consequence: Karma. All actions are preceded and followed in this chain by other actions, and trying to look for the original cause of pain is meaningless. So pain must be dealt with in other ways. Basically the “nothing matters” meme with a thumbs up.

Karma is also the impulse behind the action, not the action itself. So all actions are deliberately made by individuals who decided to act on that impulse. The mistakes and bad choices Scara made after these betrayals are his own to reflect on, they can’t be blamed in whoever participated in the making of that karma, but it is understood that they exist in a chain of events that triggered each other.