Talk:Mei Misaki/@comment-25958024-20150115204740/@comment-397235-20150120040301

Well, tthree problems with that.

First off, the normal response to death is not a psychotic break and homicidal rage.

Secondly, none of the deaths in 83 actually occurred at the Inn; they were all on Yomi (the mountain) itself, along the road to the shrine. So Keiko wouldn't have actually seen anything.

Thirdly, why'd she kill her husband, and why's she do it so...vehemently? She stabbed him several dozen times.

I think, if anything, the Calamity motivated her to act on some deep-seated hatred of her husband, and, having killed him, found murder was easier than she thought.

Of course, to top that off, there's no reason Keiko could even know about the Calamity. I find it highly unlikely Ikuo told her, since that's against the rules to tell anyone about the Calamity (much like Fight Club). Considering Ikuo had a lot of trepidation over telling Kouichi, I doubt he told anyone else, even his grandparents.

As for Takako, her not killing Kouichi is what makes all the difference in the world. She had the opportunity to kill someone who she probably sees as an enemy, who's keeping her from doing her job and protecting the class, and someone whom, on some level she probably blames a lot of this on (she point blank says it in the movie). Moreover, she's got the upper hand. She could've easily stabbed him in the face, or after stabbing his arm, finished him.

Sure, she justifies it by telling him she's not going to kill him for fear of hurting Izumi, but let's be honest: if we follow your interpretation of her character, that she's a psychotic lesbian, she has nothing to lose and everything to gain by killing him. Izumi, apparently, has feelings for him, and if Takako is in love with her then killing him clears the way for her; she's even got the opportunity to blame it on the Calamity. Besides, with Mei out of the way there's probably not much standing between Izumi and Kouichi being together; if Takako kills her, she's making things easier for her friend and ensuring all Kouichi's hatred will be focused on her, sparing Izumi the same.

The examples you listed don't really work, and here's why: those kids weren't impeding the killer from doing his job. They were just there. Besides, I can counter it:

I'm watching Dead Man's Chest right now, and I remember the scene between Will and his father from At World's End where they're fighting aboard the Dutchman. Bootstrap nearly kills Will repeatedly, before Will finally manages to gain the upper hand. However, rather than killing his father, who by this point is completely under the control of Jones, he spares him and goes on his way, explaining he's not going to kill his father because he's come all this way to save him.

In Black Hawk Down there's a scene where one of the Rangers is trying to evade the militia and takes refuge inside a school. Two militia, a boy and his father, take up a position outside as the Ranger is attempting to escape. The Ranger slips coming out the door, however, and the boy panics and kills his father. The Ranger stops, looks at the boy clutching his dying parent, starts to raise his rifle, then turns and runs the other direction.

In An Unexpected Journey (and The Hobbit as well), Bilbo has the opportunity to kill Gollum, who's already attempted to murder him twice and is by all accounts an extremely vile creature. However, Bilbo takes pity on him and instead chooses to escape.

In I Am Legend, Robert loses a deer to a pride of lions. At first he starts to shoot them with his rifle, but seeing they're just trying to survive like he is, he thinks better of it and walks away.

There's actually an achievement in the remastered version of Halo: Combat Evolved which revolves around not killing Grunts on the mission "Assault on the Control Room." Several of these Grunts are sleeping and pose no threat to you.

In The Book of Eli, an early confrontation occurs between Eli and Carnegie's men. Carnegie's right hand man, Redridge, starts things by shooting at Eli. The rest of his men join in, and Eli methodically kills them all, until his gun is empty and only he and Redridge, who hasn't moved, are left standing. Redridge now has Eli dead to rights, but instead holsters his gun and watches Eli walk away. Given the other things Redridge does later on in the film, this scene appears to be an early indication Redridge isn't as much a monster as being Carnegie's right hand man would indicate.

In Modern Warfare 2, while fighting through the bombed out, EMPed ruins of the DC Metro Area, encounters and engages a group of Russian soldiers trying to restart their APC. After killing them, the squad's medic, Dunn, asks the squad's sergeant, Foley (David Scully) what he plans to do about the men still inside the APC. Irritated by his subordinate's apparent bloodlust, Foley coldly replies "What about 'em?"

Although I hated the game, Spec Ops: The Line features another one of these events. Your sniper is cut off from the rest of your team, and by the time you find him, he's been violently lynched by a mob of angry civilians, none of whom have guns. Whether or not you chose to open fire on the men who murdered your friend and are not about to attack you is one of the determining factors in the game's ending.

In Dishonored, likewise, your ending is determined by how many, if any, guards you chose to kill. Sparing those you don't have to kill results in a less bleak ending.

In the first Assassin's Creed, the entire plot is driven because Altair broke this very basic tenement of the Assassin's Creed and is forced to retrain as an assassin. I chose to play Etzio Auditore, his descendant, the same way, going out of my way to not kill anyone other than my target. And if you kill innocents as either Etzio, Altair, or Connor (the protagonist of the third game), you lose health because "(Insert Player Character Name Here) Didn't Kill Innocents."

Lastly, in Burn Notice, it's a major tenant of the group's beliefs that they never kill anyone, even people who really deserve it; it's what separates Michael from his former mentor, Larry, who likes to kill people. In fact, two of the major turning points in the final season involve Sam (Bruce Campbell) being forced to kill a random security guard, and Michael betraying and then murdering a friend; both events are meant to show how far down the rabbit hole Michael has slid.

Again, we always come back to this, but I contrast this with Tomohiko. Tomohiko's avowed belief is that Kouichi is the Extra, but this doesn't stop him from murdering Kyouko and Aki; further, he immediately went looking for Kouichi after he fell out the window and scared Yuuya in the process, suggesting he'd intended to kill Kouichi from the get go. On top of that, he expressed absolutely zero remorse after murdering Aki, which more than anything is what prompted Kouichi's angry response. On top of this, he sadistically attempts to justify himself to Kouichi as he's about to kill him; I can only imagine what he told Kyouko as he watched her bleed to death, or what he'd have said to anyone else he had the misfortune to run across.

The bottom line here, for me anyway, is the writers used Takako's mercy to show she's still a decent person, and they used Tomohiko's ruthlessness to show he very patently isn't.