Is This Run-down Nation Really What You Wanted To Create?

“Is this run-down nation really what you wanted to create?”

I have Thoughts about this that I don’t know how to quite articulate properly but like, that’s the question, isn’t it?

I think it’s certainly the world Father of right now wants - the chaos of the nation Father created visually embodies it, that senseless desire for indiscriminate destruction - because, as he himself put it, all that he has left is anger, it “doesn’t even matter” what he wanted to do anymore.

I think Mizuchi questioning whether this is really the world Father wanted is a particularly important question to think about for readers right now.

Is this really the world Father wanted to create?

We’ve seen a pretty clear progression with Father in the flashbacks so far: Adachitoka starts off with how his worldview was shaped by the incident with the monk on the cliff that underlies his entire character (life is a constant competition to survive, life is cheap, “winning” means you get to survive, forgiveness is how losers excuse themselves, this world under the sun is hell) and how he hates that status quo, then it shifts into the thought that he wants things to be better in this life, and finally - in the latest Kaya flashbacks - that this system was wrong from the start and that he will fix the world, even if such a thing may be impossible.

Even when Father from the flashbacks seems to expect the worst from people (”aren’t you going to cut off my head or something?”, “I’d thought it to be normal for even family members to steal from each other”, his overall reaction to the villagers being suspicious of him), he was still able to say that the village is “full of good people.” We see little - if any at all! - of the contempt Father regards people with in the Sakura flashbacks and beyond.

All of that is to say: Father didn’t always want chaos and destruction, it actually seems to be far from his original intentions. The strongest link we see between the three flashbacks is that Father hates what he perceives to be status quo, he wants things to be better, he wants to “fix” the world instead of, well, “cull the herd” and “torment the hell out of them” (Ch 60).

With that being said, the math is just not mathing when Father says the only wish he’s been able to wish in his entire life is “cull the herd”, the wish that supposedly brought Yato into existence. Even if you get nitpicky about it and suppose that there’s a difference between “wanting” and “wishing”, I feel like there’s too much of a discrepancy between what Father desires in flashbacks (after all, “the only wish [he’s] been able to wish in [his] entire life”) before Kaya’s death and what we see in the Sakura flashbacks, which take place after.

I’ve ran this point into the ground at this point but gods in Noragami more or less adhere to their “natures”, because they are literally manifestations of certain phenomena/natural features taking human form: Bishamon is indeed the strongest warrior god, Kofuku brings misfortune as the goddess of poverty, Ebisu remains business-oriented through his reincarnations as a god strongly associated with business, even if their general dispositions changed based on guidance from their shinki/human prayers. That nature remains more or less the same.

Yet Yato, as a god himself, never seemed to express any genuine malice even as a child before Sakura, when he was the most “free” of outside influences - he “played” by killing because he knew no better but even then, the first thing he does after his first cull is to run to Father, looking for his praise. Even when Sakura hasn’t “taught” him anything yet, his main concern is what he can do to make her happy.

(There’s more to be said about this but I already expanded on this idea in Part 1-2 of “Father: True Desires, Projection Theory, and Related Thoughts” so I won’t rehash a second time LOL.)

There is still a gap between when we last see Father in Yomi (”I will fix the world”) and Father in the Sakura flashbacks (”cull the herd”) in which the two big missing pieces are Father’s return from Yomi and Kaya’s death that most likely mark Father’s change in thinking. And if Yato was indeed born from Father’s wish, but that wish doesn’t seem to be an embodiment of Father’s superficial desire for destruction, then one has to ask:

Is that run-down nation (and, by extension, “cull the herd”) really what Father wanted to create in the first place?

Much to think about.

I’m definitely worried about how things will pan out in 2 chapters but I have a bit of hope when this question is being posed, yet we haven’t seen Kaya’s death or Yato’s birth. The missing puzzle pieces to the Father puzzle.

Other related thoughts I didn’t know where to fit in:

“I should have just created a nation to begin with instead of you.”

A part of me wonders whether Father says this in part because “Yato” and “the Nation” are diametrically opposed concepts. The Nation that Father has created truly embodies his superficial desire for destruction and chaos (visually, metaphorically, functionally), while Yato embodies Father’s desire for a different world that’s not steeped in Father’s anger and misery.

(And like, obviously a Nation also can’t rebel and try to kill you and go against your whims, LOL. That was probably the main thing.)

I don’t know how much sense this will make buuut both Yato (”why [are you doing this]...?”) and Mizuchi (”why are you like this?”) have posed a “why?” question about Father when we are about to breach the final parts of the backstory for sure... Boy, we about to get to know exactly why (or at least I hope so).

But also re: that Yato page specifically, on the subject of the callback to Father crying from several chapters ago: that scene is linked to one of the most important (imo) expositions we’ve gotten about Father so far, where Yato asks another important “why?” question (”why would he be crying?”) that has been left hanging a little bit.

Boy, we about to get to know exactly why (or at least I hope so)!!!

Despite everything, it’s still you.

just read ch 100 - 105 of noragami on k manga and ummm let me just say i will wake up every single day and thank god for @fast-moon and their hard work on this series from now on.

the verdict: don’t bother with the official. just go read fast-moon’s. it has way more soul than that version could ever

after noragami ends maybe i’ll finally do that father character dissertation in full. someone around here has to do it