He's Still Gonna Be Sympathetic But Just Not Excused At All. Hence Him Being A Cognition And Another Tie-in To Zen's Trauma - Tumblr Posts
Finally did an edit of how me and Creepy would imagine Zenkichi's father who will be featured in the next Prison of Grief chapter! I tried to make his normal self's eye color match the ones on Zenkichi's sprite. More under the cut!
(tw: talks of various forms of abuse (namely child abuse and spousal/domestic abuse), mentions of victim blaming too along with neglect) Compared to Maki, who was more wrathful in nature, Junichi Hasegawa is more regretful in nature. Regrets on how different things could have been had he noticed or acted sooner, had he not been so cold and distant. Needless to say, he was basically Zenkichi in present day with a lovely dose of history repeating itself which was the LAST THING Zenkichi wanted. Unlike Maki, he wanted to keep Zenkichi. He had hopes that maybe the situation would improve. But it didn't, in fact, it got worse. As a result, despite legitimately caring about him... He ended up also resenting the kid, treating him coldly at times. In his case, it's because he felt like said kid being born worsened the abuse. He had tried to report his wife, but it all fell on deaf ears. He's also not home often which unwittingly gave Maki free range to further torment Zenkichi, especially since he resembled Junichi a lot. It did come to a head when he finally puts his foot down and had Zenkichi be put under his care after some difficulty but there are still scars no matter what. He disapproves of Zenkichi wanting to take up a law enforcement career. He feels like the young man is setting himself up for disappointment (which to be fair DOES happen) due to being exposed to so much of the darkest parts of society and human nature. He ends up doing something in a misguided attempt to stop him from potentially making a poor decision (and to keep him safe in a way), which leads to a confrontation and then a full-blown argument. Junichi ends up saying something that ended up hurting Zenkichi badly (like with him and Akane). Zenkichi finally snaps at that and after storming off to cool down, Junichi is left with more regret but rationalizing that he's doing all this for his child's own good. Zenkichi severs ties with him along with his mother before he leaves for good. As you can see, it's pretty obvious where Zenkichi gets his self-loathing from. He just didn't expect to unwittingly act like the very people he hated as an adult and that fact tore him up inside even more.