Talk:Yumi Ogura/@comment-64.237.139.211-20140421033942/@comment-397235-20140704074346

Somehow that really doesn't make it better. What really bothers me is his complete lack or remorse, or even attempt to justify what he's just done. His reaction to Kouichi telling him he's wrong is "Oh, well, on to the next then. I guess I was going to kill you sooner or later, so why not start now?" Most people would've at least picked someone who'd legitimately wronged them, like Naoya, or at least had committed some imagined slight. The healthy human mind doesn't just start picking people at random to murder. It makes him come across as a sociopath. The other two at least had something of a conscience left. Takako wasn't willing to kill Kouichi because she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt he wasn't the dead one, and Izumi killed Tomohiko to protect him even though as far as she knew he'd killed Takako and even if he hadn't, it would've made things tricky when she got back around to killing Mei. On the other hand, her response to Kouichi's repeated insistence that Mei isn't dead isn't all that different from Tomohiko's ("If the curse doesn't stop with her death then maybe I'll believe you!").

I agree, there's a lot of blame shifting going on here. The person the Calamity has resurrected is just as much a victim as the everyone else; they can't control things anymore than the others can, on top of which they're someone the curse has already killed once and is now tormenting by bringing them back a second time. It's not that person's fault it's all going on; killing them is a duty, not something to be enjoyed.

I don't think Yumi going to help the boys would've mattered. For one thing, Naoya and Takako both knew the whole story and still tried to kill the wrong people, so even if Yumi had been there and heard the tape without any commentary, she still probably would've flipped shit at the inn. And think on this: she learns the Calamity can be stopped by killing one of her classmates and then goes home and finds out her brother is dead because of that Calamity. How do you think she'd have reacted? Probably not well.

As far as the Countermeasures people being bullies, Kouichi draws that same conclusion...but realizes there's more to it than that. Izumi, at first, isn't particularly powermad. Granted, she royally messed up by not explaining things to Kouichi at the hospital (but then, Reiko did too, since as Kouichi's aunt she could've explained Countermeasures to him without breaking the rules); everyone else is awkward about the whole situation to begin with, and a lot of kids don't even believe there's a curse in the first place (boy, are they proven wrong). This is what happens when you don't have a clear chain of command. If Izumi had delegated some of her responsibilities to, say, Tomohiko, who already has an in with Kouichi, he probably could've explained things (he's not an idiot, after all).

Naoya, jackass that he is, gets involved instead, something which should under no circumstances ever occur, and ends up making things worse (he's good for that; he tells Yumi about the tape, which leads to Izumi finding out, and he also tried to kill Tomohiko, on top of which he didn't even keep his promise to explain things to Kouichi, which leads to Ikuo keeling over dead when he tries to). The moral of this story is if you're going to have a pseudo-military organization, work out who's in charge of what.

The way the person to be shunned is chosen is interesting in the different adaptations. Mei is picked first in the anime, but she's given an out by Kubodera, which she doesn't take because realistically, no one's actually going to give it to her. I don't know how it's handled in the novel, but in the film they picked Takako instead (or whatever her name is in the movie). Takako can't handle it, so Mei volunteers to take her place. That puts an entirely different spin on things (and it's about the only change they made for the movie I liked).

The people who really messed up are the school administrators, who don't take this seriously at all and put Kouichi in class in the first place. Takako suggests it's because they don't believe in the curse themselves (which means they're all doing a very, very good ostrich impression or Japanese public schools are extremely dangerous). Izumi keeps picking on Mei because she's a somewhat spiteful and vindictive person (and Takako goes along because, so far as I can tell, she's not a real person at all). Ignoring Kouichi felt a lot like "No, dammit, this will work if we just take things a little further!" and demanding Mei apologize in front of the entire class was completely unjustifiable (I'd have demanded Izumi do the same for fucking up so badly in the first place). Granted, that doesn't mean I think she deserved to be nailed to a wall for it. She's probably a nice enough person when the lives of thirty of her classmates and their families aren't riding on her shoulders.

And I still don't think that justifies Yumi's death, since she just went along with the others...albeit a bit more vigorously.

It boils down to what I said earlier: if they'd had just one person who could calm things down, nothing would've blown out of proportion. But everyone got carried away, nobody tried to explain what was happening, and more importantly, no one tried to think things through beforehand, which is when the problems started occurring.