In the last chapter of vol. 21, what I see as the out-of-character writing of Takaya is exacerbated even further by his giving in to blatant coercion and blackmail--even when he should know that Kusama is bluffing. Imagine that you go to the store and buy an apple, and midway on your walk home discover that the store made a mistake and gave you two apples. If by the time you make it home you find that you've lost the extra apple, are you going to toss away the remaining apple just because the free apple you lost was bigger and redder? This is exactly the situation the Red Whales have with Takaya and Ushio--if they're prepared to kill Ushio just because Takaya leaves, they're an organization that deserves to be stomped into the ground by the first opponent they face.

I think this is Kuwabara trying to solve a problem you see with superhero writing: how do make your hero the strongest (or second-strongest) in the Sengoku while also making them an underdog? She wants to give Takaya not one, but two origin stories, and it's not working for me.

Part of the reason it's not working is that at this point, I've completely parted ways with Mirage philosophically-speaking. During Takaya's conversation with Reijirou about what his life was like as a dirt-poor farmer-samurai, I kept waiting for Takaya to say something like, "Thankfully, we've outgrown the feudal system. Democracy, for all its imperfections, is designed to give everyone a voice. It's a system worth protecting." Instead, we get Reijirou's stated intention to get "revenge against life itself". Um, what? And THIS is the organization that Takaya's going to uphold?

One of the things that Kuwabara does to eat her cake and have it too is to be VERY squirrelly about the damage that is actually done to the 'people of the modern age'. When she says that someone 'dies', you can never be sure if it's just the possessing spirit or the person who was possessed, too. She's never clear about what psychic weapons actually do; even though they're seen to physically affect the environment, it's never stated that they can directly kill a living person. She blatant pulls this trick in the Aso arc: despite all the damage to the city and graphic descriptions of students getting tossed around--even a scene that reads like a student dying--she states in the end that nobody died. Sure. Did Yasuke's vessel get riddled by bullets? Was Yasuke even possessing someone? Who knows?

Let me just point out another big omission that blows holes in my suspension of disbelief. There's a reason guerrilla armies are regarded with wariness, even when they're 'friendly'. Here you have a group that:

- is all men
- is made up mostly of the uneducated poor
- can't even discipline its own soldiers
- has much more power than 'modern people' and thus can flaunt modern laws with impunity
- has members who feel a virulent contempt for 'modern people'
- has a 'might makes right' mindset and is prepared to use violence to get its way

And you're telling me that looting and raping isn't the result? Just what happened to the previous inhabitants of East Iya Mountain Village (which is a real place, by the way), anyway?

To me, Takaya has become much less sympathetic by joining the Red Whales. If it's going to be the feudal dead vs the democratic living, I'm certainly not taking the side that already plunged their whole society into war once.