Forsaken Daughters

AKA: My lengthy ramble about Araya & Nozomi and their Freudian complexes.

Spoiler Warning for Canto 9 of Limbus Company & Hundred Line (specifically Killing Game Route).

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Just two girls who are super normal... Nothing to worry about here...

Last year, a game named The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy occupied almost every aspect of my life. I couldn't read, watch, play, or listen to anything without going "how can I make this about Hundred Line?"

I have not recovered from this, actually. Hundred Line still permeates most of my thoughts. It's a genuinely beautiful game full of complex characters navigating the horrors of war alongside their interpersonal relationships.
So imagine my sheer joy as I played Canto 9 of Limbus Company, and started noticing the similarities between Araya and Nozomi. I decided that since I have a blog now, it was a perfect oppurtunity to dissect why I like them both.

Nozomi Kirifuji

To be honest, when I first started making my way through the routes, I didn't really like Nozomi. The primary reason being that her writing reminded me of the heroines of previous media I experienced that made their respective narratives irritable for me, namely heroines like Elena Gilbert from The Vampire Diaries, among others.

However, as I kept playing, I slowly grew to love her. What drove it home for me was the Killing Game route, which is easily my favorite route for Nozomi outside of Second Scenario.
Out of all the routes that I played (as of writing this, Coming of Age is the last one I have left!), I feel that Killing Game delves the most into the complex relationship Nozomi had with her mother.

Nozomi's mother was already mentioned in Route 0, as Nozomi unveils her past to Takumi during a tender moment, unaware that Eito was listening in on them (lol). She tells Takumi that she came to the Last Defense Academy to avenge her mother, wanting to prove that she was useful despite being a failure of the Hemoanima experiments (I am not calling it Cryptoglobin. Sorry.)

Everytime I remember Eito was under the bed during this I start to laugh.

However, the more she talks about her mom, the more things seem... off?

Her mother essentially burdens a young Nozomi with the knowledge that the Artificial Satellite was at war with an mysterious enemy, and that only the two of them could do anything about it.

She ropes Nozomi into her experiments (even though Nozomi maintains that she herself insisted), using her as a guinea pig to test Hemoanima, something that would cause her severe health defects throughout Hundred Line's routes. When her mother was faced with the shutdown of her project, she decides to take her own life, uncaring of the fact that Nozomi would now be an orphan left to fend for herself.

What really stood out to me is that, not once did Nozomi view any of her mother's actions as 'wrong.'

Nozomi is proud of her mother and her work, was genuinely devastated when she killed herself as a result of the experiments being called off, and devoted herself into getting into the Special Defense Unit to prove her/her mother's worth.
Nozomi is driven by the warped maternal 'affection' she received from her mom, and her desire to be useful to her. It contextualizes her desperation to keep fighting the Invaders despite her ailing health, and why she was so attached to maternal characters such as Moko, which was mainly pointed out in the Killing Game route. Nozomi also takes on a 'maternal' role herself to characters like Eva, Kurara and Kyoshika.
For me, this is easily the most interesting aspect of her character.

"If this was already established in the first Route, why did you dislike Nozomi?"
Because I felt like her familial relationship wasn't delved into during most of the routes.

Granted, part of that was because Takumi (and therefore the viewer) was essentially isolated from her, such as during the Retsnom Route when Nozomi shuns him over the deaths of her friends, or during the Boxes Route where she spends most of it possessed by a parasite (I love you, G-Nozomi).

The routes she was mainly in didn't really paint her in an interesting light for me imo. Her naive hope for Takumi to do the right thing during the Cult Route leading to two awful fates for her was the most interested I had been in her since Route 0 and Retsnom.
Combined with the fact that there were other characters the routes focused on, there wasn't any room for further retrospection on Nozomi and her mother.

The Killing Game route finally gives me what I wanted by having Nozomi's unresolved feelings about her mother resurface in her relationship with Eva, who in this route is held captive without being brainwashed (a rarity, when you count all the routes in this game).
Takumi uses Eva's daughter Kamyuhn to guilt Eva into letting Nozomi drink her blood to curb her Hemoanima rejection symptoms. This triggers more memories of Nozomi's mother, causing Nozomi to cry about how she would do better and begging her mom/Eva 'not to die'.

This is turn causes Nozomi and Eva to see each other's memories, creating a strange link between them where they genuinely start to treat each other as mother and daughter. Nozomi insists on protecting Eva, taking on a maternal role as she acts as Eva's caretaker while she's held prisoner.
The same way Takumi projects his desire to 'protect' onto Nozomi because of his memories of Karua, Nozomi projects the desire to 'save' her mother onto Eva.

I think this is one of the few times in the entire game that Nozomi uses this specific sprite too....

It's such a fun dynamic, as Nozomi's feelings start to spiral further and further, such as when she refuses to participate in the Invader Hunt anymore after developing empathy for the Invaders which nearly gets her executed, and when she gets into a violent battle with Takemaru, Ima and Kako due to them wanting to kill Eva for Invader Hunt points.

The crux of Nozomi and Eva's relationship is when Eva sacrifices herself to save Nozomi from losing the Invader Hunt. Eva's monologue about loving both Nozomi and Kamyuhn and that she was more fulfilled by being their mother rather than a war hero was one of the most beautiful scenes in the game.

Eva is genuinely such a good character when she isn't being brainwashed into the SDU's pet.

I think I infodumped enough, lol.
To sum up this arc, Eva's death causes Nozomi to become catatonic. She only recovers once Takumi and Tsubasa follow Eva's map to find her daughter Kamyuhn. Nozomi gleefully takes on the role of Kamyuhn's older sister/mother, and by the end of the Killing Game route, they decide to live together on the Artificial Satellite along with a baby Shion, who Nozomi decides to raise as her little brother.

I went on this lengthy tangent to explain why my perception of Nozomi did a heel-turn into a more positive light.
This was easily one of the best routes for her and Eva both (Yes, she dies. But believe me, this is the best treatment Eva gets). The love that Eva and Nozomi have for each other, and Nozomi's drive to be the 'good' mother she never got to have was beautifully written.

Araya(shiki)

This drive also motivates Ryoshu, the protagonist of Canto 9, in her singleminded pursuit to "save" her daughter Araya, unaware of how much she had already doomed her.

To preface my next incoming tangent: I adore the House of Spiders. They are easily my favorite Faction in the Project Moon universe now, barring the Sephirah.

I always find myself invested with flawed characters and how they rationalize their actions (as long as it's an intentional narrative decision and not just the writers making a character worse "just because" or without retrospection).
If there's one particular thing I can say about the Project Moon writers, it's that they're really good at writing this when they want to.

I like when stories explore the concept of love in its different forms. Whether that's in "wholesome" ways or unhealthy, obsessive, strange ways. That word has different meanings depending on who you ask, so it's fun to see varying interpretations of that.

If I had to sum up what they are, the Spiders House to me are a polycule of emotionally stunted adults who never really grew up. Each of the Nursefathers act "childlike" to some degree, such as Matthias' obsession with children's toys and his views on family, Valencina and Shiomi Yoru's tantrums, or Rien and Callisto's childlike naivete.

Together they raised a daughter to have virtues they themselves did not possess (such as Valencina's lack of honor, Matthias' lack of loyalty, Rien's lack of 'free will', etc), which in turn created Ryoshu's desire to become a better parent than them.

Each of the Nursefathers poison Ryoshu with their ideologies while believing they were nurturing her.
Shiomi Yoru's verbal abuse, Valencina's physical abuse, Matthias' possessiveness, Callisto's obsession, and Rien's infantilization of Ryoshu all drive her to try and give her daughter Araya all the things she couldn't get to enjoy.

What fascinated me, though, was despite how horrible they all were to each other, each of them still possessed the ability to love. This is something that Ryoshu herself acknowledges.

The same way Nozomi equates the experimentation and medical abuse her mother put her through as "love", Ryoshu equates the violence she experienced in the Spiders House the same way.

Click to full-screen the images.

Ryoshu defines herself by violence and conflates that with affection.
It's why her main quirk was making 'art' from the suffering and bloodshed she witnesses in the City, something that she was taught by Callisto.

It's why she decides to "sever" the thread tying her to the Nursefathers by attacking them with her sword Arayashiki, permanently mutilating all of them in the process.

And despite doing that, Rien refers to the burns she gave him with affection instead of resentment, telling her that he would touch the scars whenever he missed her.

All of the Nursefathers take on apprentices to fill the void Ryoshu had left, trying to instill in them the same "values" they taught Ryoshu, which only continues the horrible cycle.

While it is obviously up to the reader's interpretation if the Nursefathers were loving or not, I found it interesting that their ability to love is something Ryoshu herself points out, who would reasonably be the last person to say this considering the mistreatment she suffered at their hands.

I have seen other players discourse about this, particularly Lucio's love for Valencina despite desiring to kill her, Matthias stabbing through his adoptive daughter Kira to land a hit on the player's team despite her blind devotion to him, and Rien sending Sora to her death despite her wish to become his "real daughter", but I personally do think that the Nursefathers cared about their Apprentices.

Did they show it properly? No, obviously. They're all incredibly emotionally inept, which leads to most of the stories' tragedies in the first place. But I don't see emotional ineptitude as being 100% unable to care for others.
They're horrible people, but that's what makes them fascinating to watch and mentally dissect.
I don't engage with fiction from the perspective that my interpretation is the "right one". I learned my lesson long ago that that mindset is really stupid. So maybe others will disagree with this viewpoint and that's fine.

Despite Ryoshu's indifference to the emptiness she left the Nursefathers with, she ends up doing the same thing to her daughter, as Araya herself starts to doubt if she would return for her and leaves the protective vault Ryoshu had hidden her in.

Araya loses her sense of time due to her temporal abilities, stuck phasing in and out of being a child, teenager, adult, and old woman all at once.
She takes the place of Ryoshu's bio mother Shiomi Yoru, giving herself lung disease as she lets the resentment towards Ryoshu fester inside.

I found it sweet in a miserable way that despite Ryoshu's decision to stop smoking because of Araya, Araya herself picks up the habit as a way to remember her.

While all of this is revealed to the player, Ryoshu herself doesn't find out the truth until the two duel and Ryoshu stabs her with Arayashiki, killing her own daughter she was trying to save.

I had joked with friends that I didn't think the writers would go through with it, so I was genuinely shocked when Ryoshu severed her link to the MC and left the party lol.

Despite my qualms with gacha writing, it was genuinely sweet when Dante used their power to help Araya save Ryoshu, giving her a crimson chain representing the Red Thread of Fate as Araya realizes that Ryoshu has loved her in every timeline and had never actually abandoned her. (Something something, Freud)

They make me want to hit my head on a wall.

Unfortunately, my qualms resurfaced when the climax of Canto 9 was Araya's Ego turning into the scabbard of Ryoshu's sword, tempering its power but causing her to lose all memory of her daughter in the process. I kinda knew it was coming, considering:
A. This is a gacha and we need a reason for the playable character to remain, well, playable.
B. They had already done this exact same thing with Heathcliff and Cathy three chapters ago.
But I wasn't really on board with it. I guess, at least they're together now? Ryoshu will obviously find the real Araya and bring her back later on in the story, so I'll just sit in my corner entertaining hypotheticals until that day comes (in like 3 years maybe LOL).

Why Make So Many Paragraphs about These Two?

Because they drive me crazy.
The less joke-y answer is that I simply find myself drawn to fictional characters who have strange relationships with their families (chosen or otherwise). The Special Defense Unit and the Spider's House fulfill that purpose for me.

Nozomi and Araya define themselves by their love for their mothers. Even if it's 'unhealthy' or abnormal, that doesn't matter to them. Both girls are filled with the urge to be 'maternal', with Nozomi treating Eva like her own child and Araya confessing that her dream was to "become Ryoshu's mommy."
They're messed-up girls trying to 'love' in their own ways, and their stories are very touching to me because of this.

She actually achieved this in the most roundabout way possible. Good for her.

We need more stories about weird girls with messy families. Because I find it interesting.

Despite my complaints about the state of online fandom culture, I am pleasantly surprised to see other people engage with these characters and themes with an open mind. I have seen amazing fan-content of Nozomi and Araya and I'm really happy. If I don't burn out, I hope to draw lots of fanart!

If you made it this far, Thank you for reading!
And remember, Momma's Girls are forever.
Mina ★