Originally Posted by
Dullahan
h I don't believe for a moment that he has or will - it would, I think fairly probably, go along those lines. But I am not convinced, not entirely, that it would have gone along those lines had he written it in 1999.
Because it's in that earlier period, I am thinking mainly in KnK, that we see how the artistic statements he makes along the lines of what will become his 'mature' theodicy are shot through by an earlier, now occulted stratum of thinking on suffering. This we can abbreviate in the thesis that 'suffering has ordinary causes and extraordinary consequences', i.e., that intense suffering is not 'abnormal' in origin but rather arises from the 'normal' situation itself. This is most clearly drawn with the Ogawa mansion residents e.g. Enjou's family - their suffering is not the product of the 'abnormal' but rather arises within the ordinary, 'normal' order of things, of domestic relations, etc. The much-abused term 'everyday life' is here not the resolution but the root of the problem. And the suffering that arises produces consequences that are 'abnormal' - one might say that suffering which exceeds a threshold is 'vomited out' as something supernatural. (To a certain extent this makes you think of DDD, doesn't it? You also can compare this to the arising of 'kaii' in Bakemonogatari for instance; Nisioisin is the first to come to mind when I think of authors with a theodical outlook closer to early nasu than mature nasu. One also also can trace here Nasu's early influence by the detective novels of Kyougoku Natsuhiko - if you go watch the (actually quite good) Madhouse anime adaptation of the 1995 novel Mouryou no Hako you will understand perfectly what I mean.) What happens after that is variable, but clearly it's not essential that suffering be 'resolved'; in this earlier outlook on things it's possible for suffering to be wholly unremediated, unredeemed, a pure loss. In KnK Enjou's 'resolution', such as it is, has to come after death, because he can't get anything back in life: there is no 'normal' situation to return to which would resolve things as they are resolved e.g. in HF True.
To draw this back to Sacchin - it strikes me that what made Sacchin's route so hard to write in 1999 is not that Nasu felt that he necessarily needed to make her backstory even edgier (which is to say, more 'abnormal') than Kohaku's, but, on the contrary, that in keeping with his 'early' theodical outlook, he wanted to try with her to illustrate how, quote, a person who profoundly believes without a shadow of doubt that her entire life is nothing but continuously sinking negative value, that there can be nothing good that will possibly happen to someone like her, unquote, is produced wholly by the 'normal' order of things, in other words that Sacchin is precisely the product and mirror-image, the internal critique if you will, of the 'normal' or 'ordinary' daily life Tohno is oriented toward in every Tsuki route from his meeting with Aoko onward. The problem Nasu faced, I imagine, was that this was in contradiction with the developing theodicy of his mature works already present in Tsukihime, and he couldn't figure out how to do it while keeping Sacchin's route within the overall structure. So he cut it and kept her around as a joke. (laughs)