Sure I can. He couldn't do anything about losing his wife, but it was his own goddamn fault for losing his daughter, too. He vented his anger on a freaking child who was hurting just as much as, if not more than, he was. The fact that he has never tried to make up for it, either, makes him the shittiest adult in this story so far. Akira is 100% right, no matter how much mental gymnastics Satsuki does to re-internalize her dad's emotional abuse.
He found his wife's body while his daughter was playing video games. The daughter was playing video games after passing by her mother's corpse when she arrived home. Plus the daughter also lied about not going through the front door.
His anger and pain are completely understandable and relatable. His subsequent behavior is not. It is okay for a child (read: Satsuki in that flashback) to let her emotions determine her behavior, because she is still developing and learning to process the former. It is not okay for an adult to do the same, no matter how much pain he is in, especially if he is a goddamn doctor and has a child of his own. Blaming his kid for not behaving competently in an extreme situation will only soothe his own ego in the short term, while messing up said kid's head something fierce in the long run -- specifically, by giving her a massive savior complex that has so far pushed her into increasingly life-threatening situations before her brain has fully developed the capacity to assess risks properly and before she even became legally responsible for her own well-being.
tl;dr Satsuki's father has done real, lasting, and entirely avoidable harm to a vulnerable person in his care because he was too emotionally immature to be a parent in the first place. Hence my condemnation of him, and if you consider his behavior somehow justifiable, I am not sure how we can come to an agreement.
last edited at Jan 3, 2023 7:59AM