Fridge / Dominoes

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Fridge Brilliance

Part 1: The Will of Zeus

• Part 1 is called "The Will of Zeus," with the title deriving from a line in Hesiod's version of the myth of Pandora. In Greek mythology, Pandora was created at Zeus' bidding to punish man for receiving the ill-gotten gifts of Prometheus, which were acquired through Prometheus' deceit of the gods. Through Prometheus, mankind received the use of fire, the skills of metallurgy, civilization, and a way to petition the gods for favors without surrendering the desirable parts of an animal sacrifice; in response, through Zeus, Prometheus' brother Epimetheus was wed to Pandora, "she of all gifts." With the creation of the first woman and wife came all the rest of the features associated with humanity—beauty, grace, cunning, intelligence, creativity, curiosity, and—through that curiosity and the infamous but inaccurately titled "Pandora's Box"—also illness, mortality, all misfortunes, and, at the very bottom of the container, Hope. As punishment for tricking the gods, Prometheus was sentenced by Zeus to eternal physical and emotional torment. Prometheus' story has long been interpreted as exemplifying the unforseen and tragic consequences that can arise from one's drive for achievement and good intentions, and Pandora's as exemplifying the inescapability of those consequences. These themes overlap heavily with those of Part 1.

• The above invoking of Ancient Greek themes and mythos ends up suggesting a connection between the myth of Pandora and Shinichi's gender inversion of (and defiance towards) the role of the Neutral Female long before Shinichi is concretely associated with Pandora in-story.
  • Ancient Greece was one of if not the most misogynistic cultures in history, and the myth of Pandora is one of their major excuses for it; their equivalent of Eve and the apple. In Ancient Greece, women were property: the Hellenic world culturally equated abduction with marriage and even artistically used the visual conventions of depicting abduction as shorthand for marriage in frescos and pottery, and although most marriages were actually arranged in practice, at least some of their marriage traditions were known to mimic kidnappings with men taking their intended by the wrist and leading her away from her family and to his household, with her family ritualistically in pursuit behind. After marriage, a woman ideally never left her husband's house except for religious duties and the occasional visit to other female friends (and even then, never without patriarchal supervision) and was secluded to her own chambers, with the actual construction of the house separating her and the other women from the "important" rooms where business and family decisions were made—although of course financial status and the need for labor changed how this ideal functioned among the classes. The Neutral Female was so idealized in Ancient Greek culture that, unless it was required iconography for identifying the character, "respectable" women in their art were always depicted as stationary and never shown doing any kind of activity outside of dainty patriarchy-approved domestic chores. Women in Ancient Greece were associated with wilderness and savagery and chaos and seen as dangerous to the order of society; giving them power and autonomy would threaten civilization itself. Containing them and keeping them controlled was the duty of the men of the household—for the good of all society. Because of this, Greek women spent all of their lives under the total dominion of a male, usually older relation and had no rights, with no recourse for mistreatment unless a man with recognized authority was willing to speak for her. This perceived innate chaos or evil in women is why all the "greatest" Greek heroes conquer and kill Amazons, who defy this "natural" order of male control through their independence, and also why female children were not uncommonly abandoned to die of exposure.
  • Pandora is the embodiment of Ancient Greek justifications for misogyny, wife-hating, and the enforcement of the Neutral Female as the accepted and idealized social norm: Pandora was created so wonderful as to inspire celebration, but her curiosity—the desire to see and do more than she was allowed by the patriarchal world she lived in—is the downfall of mankind itself. In posterity she has been linked to Eve and the Apple and used to argue that women are the source of the world's wrongs because they bring evils onto the world that cause others (specifically men) to suffer and sin. Pandora was the Ur example used to justify why oppressing women into the role of Neutral Female was necessary.
  • And of course, then there's Shinichi—regarded like an object, kept ignorant and controlled, led away from a lifestyle of his own choosing by his partner grabbing him by the wrist, which he compares to a "shackle," literally kept separate from the "serious work" of the rest of his family and household by his home's very architecture, constantly victim to attempts to "supervise" him, expected and instructed to do simple "approved" activities and shamed by his partner and family when he rebels, and disciplined over refusing to conform to demands that he abdicate all agency even in issues that directly involve him, with his rights as a person treated as, and implicitly accepted to be, nonexistent by his household, with the wrongness of the most extreme examples of this only dignified with address and explanation if someone else asks and speaks up for him. Word of God also confirms that, along with being abused, he was often abandoned for long stretches of time, and much of his family thought of him as someone who would likely have to be "put down." Because he is seen as a being that spreads chaos, destruction, and the subversion of order, he, like Ancient Greek women, like the Amazons, must be either controlled or destroyed. In short, long before Shinichi was definitively associated with Pandora in-story, Shinichi was already being treated a lot like an Ancient Greek woman, whose mistreatment was justified by her society, in part, through her association with Pandora.
    • The fact that ancient Greek marriage culture has an uncomfortably close relationship with abduction, and Shinichi is kind of stealth paralleled with an Ancient Greek bride, makes Shinichi plotting his own mock-kidnapping by KID in Part 1 hilarious.

• Along a similarly ironic line with her religious-themed superhero name, Ran's Part 1 arc is oddly reminiscent of someone who's unwittingly joined a cult. Ran took up an offer for training in a career in ISHA'S hero work under Kudo Yuusaku, but over time this demanded that she sacrifice more and more of who she was—her time, hobbies, side aspirations, work towards non-ISHA-related achievements, and the depth of her non-ISHA relationships. This eventually led to her blindly internalizing sanitized versions of her boss' abusive rhetoric and shaming her enforcedly outsider boyfriend for having inconvenient independent thoughts and aspirations, all for the sake of compliance with her boss' policies for her training and the instilled belief that people like her boyfriend were precious but "weak" and unable to handle their own freedom, which she had slowly internalized as accepted truth. When confronted with how much she's willingly sacrificed and changed for her ISHA membership—the thing she all but sold away her prior life for—she clings to the idea that, if nothing else, she really is a good hero, which in this instance is her literally attaching her only remaining identity signifier to the very group she's sacrificed all the other parts of her identity for. This rapid consumption of identity, including altering everything from beliefs and hobbies to social associations, is extremely cult-like, and while it is unlikely that Yuusaku has done so, the comparison between the effect of cult membership with the indoctrinal effect her Irregulars membership has had on Ran isn't helped by the fact that the Irregulars' leader, Yuusaku, can literally alter minds.

• To pair with an entry down in Fridge Horror below, it's a bit of Fridge Brilliance in and of itself to use Ran, a character typically defined by her outstanding kindness, empathy, and understanding, to give the readers a mostly sympathetic view of the very subtle inherent supremacy ideology underpinning ISHA, rather than writing all of the members of ISHA off as simplistic Super Supremacist strawmen. Ran isn't an outright supremacist, and it's not that those we've seen so far in ISHA have eagerly adapted the leanings of super supremacy because they hate "normal" people, but in their very stressful job, it's temptingly easier to unconsciously think of the people they protect as beneath them; it helps simplify very difficult situations by giving those in power an excuse to rationalize discarding the inconvenient rights and opinions of what is often the largest and most complicated party involved in any issue. Unconscious supremacist leanings enables those in ISHA to rationalize and excuse questionably ethical power grabs that give them more control over a given situation and better perpetuate a status quo that they prefer. Ran enacts this with her entirely one-sided idea of her relationship with Shinichi, making a power grab by restricting him to her terms on penalty of perpetual disappointment while giving him nothing in return and justifying that power grab with the idea that Shinichi's "fragile" and she believes she knows better than he does what he should be doing with his life. The brilliance of this extends to real-world commentary, as it mimics real-world human rights debates occurring now over the extent to which the various governments of the world, often staffed by people in far more privileged classes than those they make decisions for, should be allowed to violate and reduce citizens' freedoms and privacy in the name of furthering efforts towards public order and safety.
  • Word of God has stated that a major theme of the story is Freedom vs. Safety, and that Part 1 largely demonstrates the problems with favoring Safety. It makes a kind of sense that the most well-meaning person who whole-heartedly cooperates in enforcing the harmful excess of safety upon Shinichi is someone who doesn't have to consider what it's like to live under those limitations because her privilege and inclusion in the power structure comes from her literal Nigh-Invulnerability.
  • This can easily read as a commentary on Detective Conan itself. Were it not for the surrounding context of the situation magnifying the affects on Shinichi's life to explicitly abusive, life-destroying levels that damaged everything from his social life to his career prospects, Ran's exploitation of Shinichi's ignorance "for his safety" would make their dynamic far more like a role-swapped version of their relationship in canon—implying that Shinichi's canon choices are harmful and unfair to Ran, regardless of the "safety" excuse. However, the context of Dominoes does change things—for the worse. Shinichi's issues with Ran in Detective Conan can possibly be realistically worked out, but Ran's choices in Dominoes has made her complicit in genuine abuse and an agent of Yuusaku's attempts to control and police Shinichi's life choices. It's no wonder that despite similar secrecy and distance, Detective Conan's version of the couple is far happier than Dominoes' .

• A close look at the order of events within the story implies that Ran and Shinichi began dating in late September or early October a year and a half ago and Yuusaku offered Ran a place in the Irregulars sometime after this but before November 3 of the same year. Given that they apparently had a few dates before Ran began wearing her Irregular Comm earrings, which she received before November 3rd, the time between her beginning to date Shinichi and Yuusaku asking her to join the Irregulars can't have been more than a month. Not only that, but she's "Irregular Operative 2," implying she was the second member on the team and the first person Yuusaku approached after Hakuba, his own sidekick. Given how Yuusaku likes to exploit Shinichi's relationships with others to control him, this adds a disgusting implication towards the timing of Yuusaku's offer and helps explain why Shinichi's already paranoid regarding personal relationships by the beginning of the story, because Ran seems to have been not only his girlfriend, but his only friend after his relationship with Hakuba fell apart, and even she turned on him for his father immediately after becoming his girlfriend. It's almost enough to suspect that the formation of the Irregulars within days or weeks of the start of Shinichi's first romantic relationship isn't a coincidence, especially considering that the first child Yuusaku offered this exclusive offer to (besides his own sidekick, Hakuba) just happened to have recently become his son's first romantic partner. And there's no way Yuusaku didn't understand what his brand of exclusivity would do to that relationship.
  • Even further, this implies a really horrible scene went down that we don't even hear about: The day Shinichi first noticed Ran's Irregular Comm earrings, Ran told him that she was giving up her extracurricular activities, but she hadn't told him with what she was replacing them. She must have done that at a later date. Imagine the moment that Ran came to Shinichi, only weeks after she and he started dating, to tell Shinichi that she'd accepted an offer from his father to enter said father's brand-new exclusive mentorship program allegedly specializing in criminal investigation. "Exclusive" in that Yuusaku had refused to provide his own son with that kind of opportunity, and in fact had shown Shinichi nothing but negative attention for his interest in that exact field for all of Shinichi's life, despite Shinichi's clear talent, Yuusaku himself specializing in it, and Yuusaku's clear willingness to teach others in Shinichi's age group. If Ran's anything like canon personality-wise, she likely hadn't even expressed much interest in criminal investigation before Yuusaku's offer. Further, recall that the last time Yuusaku chose to mentor someone, it was Hakuba, and Yuusaku has spent every moment since seemingly favoring Hakuba over Shinichi. It's hard to imagine this moment that absolutely had to have happened at some point as being anything other than a really painful metaphorical slap to Shinichi's face, the full extent of which Ran probably didn't understand at the time she was hitting him with it, given her apparent ignorance over the abusive dynamics in the Kudo family. More than likely, the fallout of this was also probably Ran's first hint that her involvement with his dad wouldn't go well for their relationship.
    • Add all that to the fact that, after this offer, Ran circumstantially appeared to be cheating on Shinichi with Hakuba, and it's clear that Shinichi's and Ran's relationship ended up a perfect storm when it came to Shinichi's emotional vulnerabilities and Ran, despite being his closest and longest friend before being his girlfriend, somehow missed all the signs. Ran wasn't just ignorantly stepping on Shinichi's toes, she was continuously crushing his entire metaphorical foot, and somehow didn't notice until long after.

• Studies have shown that victims of emotional abuse in childhood are far more likely to enter into and/or accept other toxic relationships throughout their lives because they often don't know how healthy and balanced relationships work, and we see exactly this happen to Shinichi in his relationship with Ran. Despite the fact that Ran's very presence makes him feel terrible about himself, a vocal part of Shinichi during his internal debate argues that Shinichi should just accept the relationship as it is because Shinichi's feelings don't matter. Also, it is heavily implied in Part 1 that Shinichi had accepted this increasingly toxic relationship up until now because, typical of emotional abuse victims, he felt (and still feels) isolated and alone; Ran was his only remaining companion and everyone involved in the abuse knew it. It goes unsaid, but it's clear that, until Shinichi finds out their secret identities, tolerating Ran's hurtful behavior was still better than seemingly having no one at all. After discovering Ran's secret identity, Shinichi's self-respect is just enough for him to reject the relationship, but even then the deciding reason isn't that what she did to him was wrong: he breaks up with her because he doesn't want to be her "burden." Their relationship gets to the point that Shinichi admits he feels his feelings don't matter to her or anyone, but his understanding of how a person should be treated in a relationship is so warped he uses this as an argument for why he shouldn't break up with Ran, rather than recognizing it as the #1 reason why he should. There is no better example of how thoroughly screwed up his understanding of relationships is than that.

• One of the earliest of the Irregulars' disrespectful behavioral patterns towards Shinichi, and certainly the most easily noticeable early on, is Hakuba's naming conventions. To Shinichi's face Hakuba refers to Shinichi distantly by his last name, Kudo, per Shinichi's request, but when Shinichi's not in earshot Hakuba disregards this request and refers to him as Shinichi. In Japan, first-name basis is traditionally reserved for those who are very close and someone's first name is typically only used with their permission; to assume you have permission to use someone's first name is tactless at best depending on the person and how rigid they are with this tradition, but to use someone's first name despite that person explicitly telling you not to is a hugely disrespectful social taboo no matter what that person's general attitude towards their name usage is. The fact that the other Irregulars notice this behavior (that is, in their culture, extremely disrespectful to Shinichi) but no one seems to have a real problem with it, not even Shinichi's own girlfriend, really serves to underscore just how little consideration they give Shinichi's feelings at present—this disrespect isn't even a perceived necessity of the job like ditching him or lying to him, but it's accepted without comment anyways. While they are children, and missteps are to be expected, this is when they're supposed to be learning the acceptable perimeters of the privileges and responsibilities of the role they've decided they want, and this behavior is one of the earliest tells that they're learning bad habits and practices. The peer acceptance of Hakuba's disregard of what is, in their culture, a behavior of basic respect towards Shinichi, someone they have so much power over, reflects the formation of a genuine culture of condescension towards Shinichi (and, through him and their justifications, implies a number of things about how they see "normal" people and what liberties they see as completely fine to take with them). It's a small thing, but hints at a bigger problem.
  • On a micro level, this appears similar to the current hot topic regarding complicity over aggressions, macro and micro, in police ranks, most currently noticeably in the United States. When looked at with hindsight, problem officers who make the news for beating or killing people or otherwise abusing their power tend to have a history of behavioral infractions and disrespectful behaviors that were overlooked by their fellow officers, a practice that has been attributed to the us vs. them mentality that builds up inside many police units and the critical need for good inter-department relations due to the life and death risks of the job. When coworkers around the officer displaying the bad behavior say nothing, the complicity creates a culture that further encourages disrespectful behavior to go on without comment or, eventually, even much notice. Unfortunately, reality tells us that these normalized microaggressions and disrespectful behaviors tend to escalate when they exist inside police ranks, and combined with the other wrongs the Irregulars are complicit in, this may portend bad things for the Irregulars' future if this is not somehow checked or corrected. Hakuba and Yuusaku are literally acting within teaching and leadership positions training the Irregulars how to behave and handle issues in their superhero careers and supposedly modeling those behaviors; the Irregulars do not seem to have completely converted to being bad faith actors yet—they're a bunch of kids, for crying out loud—but they're surrounded by so many bad faith influences regarding what it means to "protect" civilians that it is a distinct possibility. Yuusaku may be trying to condition the Irregulars to accept specifically how he treats Shinichi, but how they treat Shinichi and accept how Shinichi's treated for the accepted justification of "protection" demonstrates the extent to which they are currently willing to mistreat civilians in general for the sake of "protecting" them, and that's a bad sign for the future if nothing changes.
  • Shinichi revoking Hakuba's right to use his first name isn't just a sign that their friendship is over: it's Shinichi lashing out and exercising the one bit of social control he has left, and reinforcing the one thing he still has that his father hasn't taken from him and given to Hakuba: his family name. Every time Hakuba calls Shinichi "Kudo," it's preteen Shinichi's vengeful little reminder that no matter how thoroughly Hakuba has seemingly taken his place in everything else Shinichi cares about, and no matter how many times Yuusaku treats Hakuba as if he's above Shinichi, Shinichi is the one who revoked the last bit of equality between them on his own terms, and Hakuba still isn't Kudo Yuusaku's actual son.

• Related to above, Hakuba's not the best leader—he's manifestly mediocre at managing or settling conflicts within his own team without causing further issues and divisions later—but his biggest failings appear to come from his internalizing Yuusaku's strategies and policies and enacting them in situations that are no longer suited to them, if they ever were at all. In other words, Hakuba's status as a true Child Soldier starting from elementary school onward appears to have, perhaps unsurprisingly, made him a worse hero and leader—he struggles to take any decisive action that breaks from his childhood training. There's an irony to this, as Hakuba seems to believe Yuusaku took on Hakuba as a sidekick to train him to be his successor and help Yuusaku find solutions for his biggest problems, but Hakuba can't help Yuusaku in this manner because Yuusaku trained Hakuba to problem solve exactly like Yuusaku. In contrast to Hakuba's assumptions, it's actually quite clear that this limitation was instilled methodically, if perhaps unconsciously, given that we see Yuusaku weaponizing shame to quell both Shinichi and Hakuba's disagreeing with him in chapters 9 and 10, moralizing the concept of agreeing and complying with Yuusaku as mature and smart and implicitly good, and disagreeing with him as childish and ignorant and, consequently, bad. The result is that Hakuba's training actually seems to cripple Hakuba from even imagining new ideas, strategies, or solutions, because he's been programmed to think as Yuusaku does—or at least, in the field, how Hakuba imagines Yuusaku would in his circumstances. He even replicates Yuusaku's abusive behavior of moralizing agreement with him and Yuusaku, to the point where he is briefly proud when Yuusaku makes Aoko cry because the points Yuusaku uses to do so mirror Hakuba's thoughts and opinions exactly (though the pride only lasts until he sees her tears). Further, Hakuba's perception that the cast is "doomed all along" by whatever problem Yuusaku and Hakuba face is untrustworthy because Hakuba as of yet seems unable to evaluate the situation outside of his programming, so all that tells us is that the situation looks hopeless from what Hakuba thinks is Yuusaku's perspective, which isn't trustworthy either. Because of this, Hakuba seems, in effect, less qualified to lead in the current round of crises than Ran (who demonstrates a greater ability to unify the team) or Hattori (who demonstrates independence of thought), or even Shinichi (who demonstrates all of that and more), despite the fact that the latter is someone kept deliberately unfamiliar with how this hero business even internally works. It's no wonder Hattori leaves.
  • Hakuba notes that he feels sympathy for Aoko and what she's about to go through when Yuusaku asks him to report on their mission against the Red Siamese Cats (during which Aoko made several colossal but understandable rookie mistakes). However, it's outright stated that his sympathy instantly disappears the second Aoko shows disrespect by questioning Yuusaku's disciplinary action against her. Then Yuusaku gives her a "The Reason You Suck" Speech, and Hakuba feels pride at how his internal criticisms and Yuusaku's external criticisms align, before Aoko starts crying and Hakuba's pride immediately turns to shame and he thinks internally that he should have taken complete blame for his team's mistakes and shielded her. This is the same passage in which Hakuba details that Yuusaku speaks to Aoko using a voice perfectly crafted to emotionally harm teenagers, and that Hakuba mostly sees it used towards Shinichi. On some level that he's not willing to look at directly, Hakuba is 100% aware that Kudo Yuusaku is a monster who deliberately hurts the children in his care and he knows that this is wrong, but he's been indoctrinated to consider that instinctive knowledge of the harm done to be childish and untrustworthy because it comes from his capacity for emotional sensitivity, and Yuusaku calls emotions childish in the face of reason; and further, he's been incentivized to feel pride at being just as cold as Yuusaku and completely unsympathetic towards anyone who dares question Yuusaku's unquestionable authority.
  • This actually partially explains why Hakuba and Shinichi turned out so differently: Hakuba was given a "constructive" and permitted way to achieve his goals that enabled Yuusaku to control him with Hakuba's own cooperation under the guise of someone tutoring a prodigy. Shinichi wasn't given any permitted way to do the same, and so was forced to either abandon his investigative dreams or break from Yuusaku's direction entirely. Yuusaku may have damaged Shinichi more obviously, but he has more hooks in Hakuba.
    • That "more hooks" thing might explain why Yuusaku speaks as if Hakuba is above Shinichi when he and Hakuba are alone, despite Hakuba insisting Yuusaku actually really loves Shinichi. Hakuba offhandedly mentions in the Interlude that his biological father isn't supportive of Hakuba's choice of lifestyle and career, and given how little a presence Hakuba's biological father has in his life and the fact that Hakuba has been Yuusaku's sidekick since Hakuba was nine, it's likely Hakuba and his biological father aren't close. When Hakuba begins questioning his loyalty, Yuusaku uses positive attention, something that it doesn't sound like Hakuba received from his biological father, to manipulate Hakuba's emotions and keep him loyal and subordinate—even if this positive attention occasionally comes in the form of a backhanded compliment, such as in chapter 10 when he insists that Hakuba should be above "Shinichi's dramatics." Yuusaku appears to try this manipulative "kindness" with Shinichi when it comes to soccer and violin practice, but because Shinichi insists on finding an outlet for interests Yuusaku refuses to let Shinichi indulge on any level (unlike Hakuba), Yuusaku's interactions with Shinichi devolve instead into negative attention and highlights restrictions rather than any privileges Yuusaku could use as bargaining chips. Yuusaku can control Hakuba through what Hakuba sees as privileges and positive attention towards the efforts Hakuba's most invested in, things that Yuusaku isn't willing to give to Shinichi.

• Hakuba's relatively quick willingness to follow Shinichi's plan during the Black Hole Crisis has interesting implications for the given "reason" why Yuusaku and the Irregulars excluded Shinichi. As noted under The Leader on the main page, Hakuba's not actually good at leading the Irregulars and his choosing between Yuusaku's and Shinichi's plans only brings attention to this fact because Hakuba never actually takes charge himself, just uses his leadership position to help organize and facilitate someone else's decisions. Not only does this have implications that Hakuba's not actually comfortable with or well-inclined for leadership, it also implies that on some level, Hakuba recognizes that Shinichi is a competent natural leader despite Yuusaku's attempts to minimize Shinichi's influence and isolate him—Shinichi is independent-minded and unable to be cowed into toeing someone else's line against his own principles, quick and thorough in creating plans to manage problems, willing to advocate for his own ideas in an even and fair manner, confident in creating and enacting his plans with the resources available while being sensitive of the ethical issues of exploiting people, and even the characters that cooperate with Yuusaku's abuse discuss Shinichi's solid moral and factual integrity and accuracy of perceptions (though never to his face). Despite Hakuba being the one trained for the position and Shinichi confronting infinitely more road blocks, the bare, obvious fact remains that Shinichi still ran circles around Hakuba in every facet of Hakuba's job throughout the entirety of Part 1, and Hakuba's acceptance of Shinichi's plan is simply emblematic of this. It hints again that the reasons for excluding Shinichi aren't that he's "useless," because he appears to honestly be a far better leader in a crisis than Hakuba despite his lack of training]].

  • Even more: the sheer irony of what this implies. Hakuba and Yuusaku couldn't come up with a solution to their problem. As far as Hakuba's perspective goes, they now appear to think too much alike, and have no fresh ideas to give each other. You know who did? Shinichi. But they couldn't use the solution he came up with because they didn't trust him enough to tell him the problem. And if they did it to spare his feelings—well, they went and made his life Hell and seized and ruined everything he actually valued about his life anyways. If Hakuba's assertion of the problem is true, Shinichi was the best-equipped person to solve the (alleged) problem of Shinichi, and not including him ruined everything.

• Ran probably had to quit karate club after developing her powers. Her strength makes any competition she competes in completely unfair to anyone she competes against, not to mention much more dangerous. The only surprising thing is that she stayed a member so long after developing powers.
  • Further, despite Shinichi's incredibly low opinion of himself and how the rest of the school sees him, it's hard to believe that Ran is still as popular as Shinichi thinks. Given the highly dedicated and competitive nature of Japanese sports and school rivalries, Teitan's karate champion and team captain quitting their team out of the blue with no explanation can't have made her very popular. When added to a year and a half of subsequent repeated ditching of all responsibilities and social commitments at the drop of a hat (with very poor and inconsistent cover stories, considering that she gives two different excuses to Sonoko and Shinichi for the same disappearance)... Even if she eventually told them the excuse that she's training with Shinichi's dad in a special seminar, it's hard to imagine that none of her other classmates and friends have held her choice to abandon her previous obligations against her or noticed these inconsistencies, or that they're going to be that much more forgiving than Shinichi, someone who was actually in love with her.
  • Worse: to any outsider who bothers to pay attention to their school's former ace Karate champion (Ran) and/or their school's resident minor celebrity (Shinichi), Ran's behavior circumstantially looks a lot like infidelity, something acknowledged by Hakuba in-story. Shinichi may think of himself as a loner with few if any friends, but Ran appears more social—or she likely was when she was karate captain. So it's not like everyone who'd been her friend would just not notice any of her suspect behavior, and not discuss it between them.

• It's no wonder the Irregulars are a mess. They're a bunch of immature kids in way over their heads trying to balance emerging independent personal lives with being made into Child Soldiers partially responsible for dealing with terrorists and basically being Tokyo's first response to disaster, all while doing so in complete secret, and the only leadership they get to model how to deal with these challenges emotionally repeatedly chooses to prey on their emotional weak spots with divisive and corrosive language towards themselves and others for the sake of control. Both being Child Soldiers and being mentored by an abusive man who gets his power kick by manipulating teenagers' emotions are each bad enough separately, but combined? The Irregulars were a disaster in the making from the beginning even without any other factors.

• The heavy implication that Hakuba believes Shinichi possesses some dangerous emotion-altering ability makes sense when you consider Yuusaku's and Yuukiko's abilities and the existence of Ran. It's frequently mentioned that metahuman abilities can be inherited, and Shinichi mentions how Ran's powers seem to be the result of her father's and mother's abilities commingling and resulting in abilities that seem to contain aspects of both. Yuusaku can perceive and alter others' thoughts and memories and Yuukiko can alter the emotions of huge crowds of people at once; while we don't yet know if Shinichi is or is not the source of the Pandora Effect as many theorize, it is heavily implied that Yuusaku and Hakuba have made assumptions about Shinichi's abilities and certainly the commingling of Yuusaku's and Yuukiko's abilities could theoretically result in the creation of something like the Pandora Effect (with Yuusaku's ability to severely alter an individual's mind and mental state mixing with Yuukiko's ability to alter the emotions of entire crowds). It's not clear whether Shinichi actually is this hypothesized version of what the mixing of his parents' abilities could function like, but it makes sense that this is a conclusion someone like Hakuba would believe, particularly given that, owing to his confusion over how Shinichi discovers information, Hakuba does not seem to be familiar with the ins and outs of Shinichi's actual currently confirmed powers.

• Yuusaku has gone out of his way to obfuscate every bit of evidence of what really happened the night Kuroba Toichi died - from obstruction of evidence to Mind Rape. Why, then, does he frame himself as respectfully honoring Kaito's attempts to hide Toichi's identity and tolerating poor Kaito's villainous tantrums, when he could just do the same things he's done to Shinichi and not have to deal with Kaito remembering that Yuusaku killed his father? Except: 1. The Kurobas fled Japan after the incident and Kaito only returned a year or so ago, 2. Jii's an Android who likely could not be forced to forget by Yuusaku's powers (although perhaps Agasa could have done something?), but most importantly, 3. It's mentioned in the previous chapter that KID has always somehow been able to shield his mind from Yuusaku's influence. The fact that Yuusaku knows this implies that he's actually tried to influence Kaito's mind and failed. This isn't a rare instance of Yuusaku respecting Kaito's right to grief and the memories of what he experienced that night, but probably instead another self-righteous rationalization by Yuusaku after he tried to erase Kaito's knowledge of that night and failed.

• It's pretty clear that Yuusaku has trained Hakuba to see emotions as, at best, an opportunity to manipulate people and, at worst, a worthless distraction. We see it in the way the two discard others' points and opinions based on their "irrationality" due to their present emotions. This perspective also explains why Hakuba tends to forget that Hattori is clever, because Hattori is also "hot-blooded," and thus by Hakuba's and Yuusaku's perspective should be more irrational and easier to manipulate. Shinichi's powers center around emotions.
  • Not only that, but teaching Hakuba to repress and logic through emotions gives Yuusaku another benefit: Hakuba has never learned to understand or trust his own emotions. As discussed above with the moment that Yuusaku made Aoko cry and Hakuba was first proud and then ashamed, Hakuba's been taught by Yuusaku since he was at least eight years old that emotions are childish and that they are to be repressed in favor of reason. But of course, all of Hakuba's "reasons" for aiding Yuusaku in hurting the other children in his care were taught to him by Kudo Yuusaku, and the only reason Hakuba expresses for not wanting to aid Yuusaku is emotional, and thus "childish." Teaching Hakuba that emotions are childish destroys Hakuba's ability to fully and decisively recognize Yuusaku for the monster that he is, because when you've been groomed by a smooth-talking monster from childhood, even if you become aware of what other groomers do, your particular groomer's going to fill your head with reasons why he's not like those comparative others and he's not going to teach you the language to express or articulate why his particular behavior is wrong, so the only reasons you're going to have to stand against him initially are emotional, especially when your own ability to reason has been turned into a weapon against the validity of those emotions. And if you don't trust the damage you feel emotionally to be valid, you're never going to trust yourself enough to stand up for yourself—or anyone else. Hakuba's been groomed as a child soldier by a man who has hurt every child we see put under his care, and he's been taught that the pained reactions the man causes in them are childish and to be ignored. That's really convenient for a man his groomed surrogate child claims doesn't want to hurt people.
  • This is also probably the easiest way for Yuusaku to control people. People aren't robotically calculating beings. Logic may be reasonable, but it usually isn't reason itself; it isn't motive. Unless you're extremely calculating, emotions tend to be a bigger motive somewhere down the line, and it seems obvious that that's where Yuusaku falls short. Making people into mindless puppets lacks subtlety, and he can't directly control the emotions and thus the motivations of those around him, but the mind is very good at confusing the heart.

• In a way, despite Yuusaku's and the Irregulars' stonewalling, Shinichi here is just as much, if not more, a Sherlock Holmes figure than he is in DC canon. The thing is that he embodies an aspect of Holmes that is less commonly represented in DC's case formula. In the Sherlock Holmes canon, Holmes' cases don't usually start off with a murder as the initial mystery, nor is he privileged and/or isolated with the recent crime scene and the suspects, nor is the police almost inevitably called to work alongside the great detective to give him authority and forensic backup. In fact, the police are just as often an obstacle. Holmes' cases are more often brought to him by people whose problems are ill-suited for, or have been ignored or mismanaged by, the authorities—seen as too sensitive, small, odd, pedestrian, or undesirable for the official channels of law enforcement to manage and/or to spare the resources to look into—so clients brought their beneath-the-official-authorities issues to Holmes. Because of this, a lot of Holmes stories deal implicitly with the flaws and failings of official law enforcement agencies during Holmes' time. In Dominoes, Hakuba and Aoko openly discuss how Shinichi often jumps solidly from seemingly frivolous informational odds and ends to the uncovering of huge stories and cases, and we see how Shinichi engages with cases the authorities seemingly don't prioritize or recognize for what they are, with witnesses that don't trust the cops, and with people who have been seriously under-served by law enforcement. Reoccurring emphasis is put on individuals the official authorities have failed. Holmes was often framed as an alternative source of answers to clients when the official authorities were either ill-suited for a case or had failed to serve those in need—Shinichi is still Holmes in a way that "boot-licking" Hakuba, being sycophantically rigid to the practices he's "supposed" to perform and part of the actual authorities in this universe, could never truly be.
  • The whole of Plot 1, when stripped of its superhero aesthetic and Kaitou KID sideplot, is very much like a classic Holmes story: a small, seemingly unrelated case that isn't being prioritized or looked at from the correct angle by the very flawed but generally well-meaning authorities unraveling into a more complicated scheme with those authorities sometimes being assistance and sometimes being obstacles.
  • What little we hear of the Sakura Loom factory fire also sounds a bit like the formula of the end of a classic Holmes story, given Shinichi's weeks of traveling for solo investigation stirred on by an insignificant detail he fixated on before succinctly laying out his findings for the interested parties (in this case, the public as a whole) and Hakuba the impotent figure of officiality being very busy with other matters at the time and having no idea it was going to turn into that big of a case.
    • There's some interesting potential meaning in Hakuba, who as a child competed for being Shinichi's equal and routinely evenly matched wits, becoming the impotent figure of authority in the formula almost entirely due to his membership within official channels and subsequent greater influence and power but lessened freedom to act as he would if he were a sole individual—ironic, given both the detective genre's and superhero genre's typical vigilante coding.

• Bit of a brilliant piece of subtle characterization connecting with the Aesop on the main page—"No matter how noble it is that you want to save people, making someone's problems all about yourself, your perspective, your judgments, and your decisions on the matter is self-centered and a bit narcissistic." Shinichi learned this when he was twelve and outed the homeless children's location without their consent, and in the present, he is deeply ashamed of his past behavior. Yuusaku is a middle aged man of such outstanding maturity and sound judgment that it appears he's been repeatedly choosing to make the same kind of deeply toxic judgment calls for over a decade that his son matured out of when he was twelve.

• The frequent disconnect in understanding between Yuusaku, Shinichi, and Hakuba makes further sense when you consider their specialties. Yuusaku, Shinichi, and Hakuba each possess an aptitude for totally different kinds of awareness. Yuusaku's is mental (mind reading/mind control), Shinichi's is emotional (psychic empathy), and Hakuba's is physical (enhanced physical senses).

Post-Part 1 Interludes

• The conversation between Hakuba and Hattori fully encapsulates not just what makes Hattori a great Lancer for his team, but also the fatal flaws of Hakuba's leadership that have driven Hattori away.
  • Hakuba is more consistently focused and aware of his tangible surroundings, but is unfortunately prone towards hindsight realizations when it comes to bias, motivations, and emotional complexities. Hattori is more instantly intuitive towards people's motivations. Throughout Part 1, each time the Irregulars discover a new bit of information, Hattori is the quickest to consider the implications of that information, and specifically, the motivations and bias behind it.
  • Hakuba hesitates when confronting the bias and potential flaws in his own perspective or in Yuusaku's owing to his deference to authority; Hattori has no such hesitation and has little to no deference to authority, for better or for worse. Here, Hattori is the one who cuts through Hakuba's heavily sanitized "explanation" to underscore its key flaws. But when Hattori asks for honesty, even under the pressure of needing to convince Hattori not to quit, and even after realizing that his dishonesty was what ultimately drove Shinichi away weeks ago in very similar circumstances and led to the situation they are in right now, Hakuba still lies. And so Hattori, in response, not only implicitly calls Hakuba out on the fact that he's still not telling the whole truth as he knows it, but also explicitly points out that Hakuba's knowledge, and thus, his judgment and rationalizations regarding his and the team's actions, are themselves of questionable credibility.
  • Through the above, Hakuba and Hattori prove both why the Irregulars desperately need Hattori going forwards, and why the team has lost him: Hattori is the best among them at recognizing and calling out manipulation. In a quagmire of disinformation, deception, and power abuse, some even self-perpetuated, the Irregulars need someone to ask those hard questions to help them navigate the forces pulling on them. But those questions need honest answers in return in order to get them anywhere, and Hakuba, their leader, is not only not going to ask them, but he won't even give the team straight answers himself. Hakuba proves in this moment that, as things stand, Hattori will not get what he needs from Hakuba, or Yuusaku, or from being a part of the Irregulars. Unless Hakuba steps up his honesty and integrity, the team as a whole is at the mercy of others' power games, and their situation and morale isn't going to get better. So Hattori leaves.

• Mentioned above, the brief but complicated exchange between Hakuba and Hattori does a lot of things at once with two lines: when Hakuba tells Hattori he could really use a friend right now, Hattori sidesteps the question and tells Hakuba that he knows this, that's why he's looking for him. It's not the outright rejection that Hakuba arguably deserves, but the response is both a kindness and a disciplining: after all of Hakuba's avoidance tactics, Hattori refuses to let the conversation shift to how hurt Hakuba is and keeps the focus on the person Hakuba has wronged; Hakuba doesn't get to move on and live his life with all the things he deprived from Shinichi until he can make up for the mess he's helped make of Shinichi's life. It's heartwarming because it's a reaffirmation both of Hattori's desire for friendship with Shinichi and for the idea that Shinichi truly is not only still Hakuba's friend despite everything, but is the friend Hakuba needs, despite all of Hakuba's colossal screw ups regarding him. The line also demonstrates a resolution on where Hattori's loyalties now lie—with Shinichi, not with Yuusaku or, by his proxy, Hakuba.

• It's implied by Hakuba that Shinichi has caught Hakuba searching through his room before. Shinichi's a psychometric empath who hates how familiar the Irregulars are with his house because they keep leaving their emotions and painful secrets on his things and he feels there's no longer a space in his house untainted by their intrusive presence. This bit in the Interlude subtly validates that feeling of intrusion—they didn't even respect him enough to leave his bedroom off-limits, and Hakuba's apparent multiple searches probably means he'd touched as much as he could get his hands on.
  • A huge part of Shinichi's hesitance towards physical contact is the intrusiveness of others' memories, thoughts, and emotions, which—depending on his state of mind—he can have difficulty blocking out. His house—and especially his room—were supposed to be secure places consisting of just his thoughts and emotions; the one place he didn't have to field this constant intrusive strain on his mind. They were Shinichi's literal safe space from an otherwise constant bombardment of mentally and emotionally abrasive stimuli. Instead, Shinichi has to deal with the thoughts and emotions of others even in what should be his most private spaces—even in his bedroom, which has apparently been non-consensually searched through many times, and each time, Shinichi has to adjust to the new feelings and emotions that have been placed in his space and all over his things, new feelings that he will have to struggle to block out or accept, adding some level of emotional and mental strain to every instance of physical contact he has with his own things in his own space for however long those psychic imprints last. What Hakuba has confessed to doing here isn't just disrespectful, it's extremely violating to someone with Shinichi's senses.

• Borders between Fridge Brilliance and Fridge Horror, but of course violence and emotional instability would get worse in Tokyo, even if the "Pandora Effect" wasn't getting any stronger. Trauma begets emotional instability, emotional instability begets irrational behavior, irrational behavior begets trauma. In real-life, hysteria can occur with no supernatural influences at all; just a whole lot of bad influences. The Pandora Effect isn't the only calamity happening to Tokyo, a city that has been near-constantly besieged by disasters and monster attacks for the last three years. Every single traumatic incident would chip away at the emotional stability of the first responders, the ISHA personell, the police, and the civilians. Just in Part 1 alone, which covers a span of three weeks, downtown Tokyo gets flattened by a fire giant, upended by gravity quakes, and missiled by international law enforcement. Second-hand PTSD is a real effect that can change the emotional climate of whole cultures; think 9/11. Then think that most in Tokyo would have some first hand experience with these catastrophes as well if they're as frequent as implied. The "Pandora Effect" didn't have to get stronger; with each disaster, Tokyo as a whole became weaker. An escalating increase in violence and crime in a city clearly going out of control isn't the unusual thing; the fact that an unspecified something about this escalating violence notably stopped after easily the most traumatic catastrophe of the lot is.

Fridge Horror

Part 1: The Will of Zeus

• There isn't a minor we see Yuusaku interact with that we haven't also seen him manipulate, traumatize, or make cry. To some of them, he's done all three!
• Shinichi informing Hakuba of his investigation into the kidnapped children is apparently the first time the Irregulars were informed that the recent disasters around Tokyo were due to experiments on these children. Shinichi does this after Hakuba hung up on Yuusaku and directly through word of mouth - not through any electric communications. Metahuman abilities were not working, and even if they had cameras and microphones around the city that were still somehow functioning, it would realistically take hours to sort through all the data for a third party to figure out what Shinichi and Hakuba discussed, even or especially if any of their usual surveillance processing relied on the metahuman abilities that had unexpectedly stopped working. But someone in control of ISHA's firepower still knew enough to be able to target a missile at the exact right child in the exact right location mere minutes later. If ISHA knew enough about the situation with the children to accurately aim a missile at one, why weren't other solutions taken earlier and why weren't the field agents in Tokyo given any useful information on the same? The question has no good answers.
  • Four likely possibilities: first, that someone in ISHA was actively at that moment listening in on all of Shinichi's and the Irregulars' transmissions covertly through devices on their persons and that someone either decided to murder Santa themselves using the information gained from the Irregulars' communications or relayed that information to someone else who did. Second, that Yuusaku dobbed the victim in, using the small portion he'd heard of the conversation between Hakuba and Shinichi to figure out the gist of the situation and tracking Shinichi's and Hakuba's location to the site of the black holes' source—a possibility which implies complicity in the attack that ensued. Third, that ISHA had already known that the cause of the disasters were out-of-control children^* and chose to use the teenage Irregulars to put them down without informing the teenage trainees of this, turning them all into unwitting child murderers and therefore already knew the specific causes of this particular disaster and how to stop it, which again implicates the highly-ranked Yuusaku in the extrajudicial execution of a child but also makes ISHA as a whole much more insidious. Fourth, that ISHA itself really didn't know the specifics of the victim, but since an ISHA-sent missile definitely hit Santa, someone else had to and that someone also has a large measure of control over ISHA's operations and resources at the highest level. All of these options are horrifying on different levels and none of these options speak well of ISHA's "heroism," but the last implies some high-level membership overlap with criminal parties, if not outright Evil Running Good. And no matter which option is true, the Irregulars are the underlings of the culprit, be it Yuusaku's immorality, ISHA's underhanded tactics and ultra-utilitarian view towards people's lives, or puppetry by criminals controlling ISHA behind the scenes.
    • The first Interlude confirms that ISHA could not operate fast enough under those circumstances to order the missile strike in the proper, above-board fashion. It's the unstated conclusion by internal employees that someone very highly ranked in ISHA ordered the missile strike illegally. Further, absolutely none of those with the power to make such a call are owning up to it, which has caused a few ISHA employees themselves to become suspicious of something rotten.
    • A point circumstantially in favor of this: if it is Evil Running Good, ISHA's large-scale influence would logically be used to help cover up the Crows' crimes and eliminate witnesses and evidence. Wouldn't you know it, but ISHA not only immediately takes the Tequila case off the local police force's hands once Shinichi brings it to them, but has the police confiscate Shinichi's evidence and lie about its condition with, clearly, no intent to give his property back, and subsequently deny the evidence exists. This is all circumstantial, of course, but it's also worth noting that there were, at the point of Part 1's climax, only three known witnesses to the Crows' crimes that weren't directly under the Crows' or ISHA's control, and not only were two of them right next to each other when ISHA ordered its airstrike on their location, but the third was murdered separately immediately after. Suddenly the police's insistence on taking Shinichi's evidence of the Crows on ISHA's orders and clear intentions not to return it seems much more insidious...

• The first of Daichi's kids were taken four months ago, and since the story begins on the last day of Spring Break (or, the end of the first week of April), that puts the first known child kidnappings around December. Though it is possible some were taken earlier, if we assume that Daichi's timeline is roughly correct then that's roughly forty kids in four months or about two or three street kids kidnapped a week. Also according to Daichi's kids, Satoshi disappeared about a week prior to the beginning of the story. That means the time between him getting kidnapped and going critical was about a week. While the various children's meta-abilities may become unstable at differing degrees and rates (we don't know), what this does prove is that it's possible—extremely likely, even—that other children went critical during the four+ month period. Some may have been put down by the Crows, or destabilized to the point of death without affecting others, but we know that at least two in a period of only three weeks destabilized in extremely destructive manners that required ISHA's intervention. Given this, the likelihood that there weren't any previous incidents of a similar nature in the prior four months of experimentation is unlikely. In other words, there is a very high chance that ISHA—and in particular, the Irregulars and Night Baron, who appear to be the primary field members stationed in Tokyo—have killed more of the kidnapped children than just Satoshi and Santa over the last four months.

• In chapter 10, Ran's perspective gives us this conceptually horrifying jewel: "It had been a long, long time since she’d had to worry about injuries. She couldn’t even remember the difference between the pain of a bruise and a broken bone, or how to tell how bad a hit she’d taken. But if she was still standing, that meant she had to be mostly fine, right?" Invincibility may be useful, but imagine a person with so much power who, as a consequence, has lost the ability to feel, understand, and relate to the physical pain that the rest of the human race experiences. Now imagine them being in charge of deciding how to handle the human race's emergencies. Sweet dreams! As one commenter pointed out, this likely plays "a concerning role" into why Ran's typically empathetic personality was so easily misled into adopting ISHA's and Yuusaku's decidedly unempathetic ideologies.
  • We actually do see Ran express something like this, although again it's hard to definitively say this invulnerability led directly to this perspective: Ran isn't willing to admit it directly when Shinichi asks for her motivations, but she obviously reinforces and replicates Yuusaku's abusive control tactics largely because she, frankly, considers Shinichi her inferior, and all but directly states this to be because of his assumed lack of metahuman abilities. As she puts it herself in a moment of emotional duress in chapter 8, "Shinichi was normal, delicate, weak, and [she] was even weaker, because she couldn’t bear the thought of losing him. He didn’t need to be always happy, so long as he was okay." In other words, she considers the physical risks of Shinichi's life choices to so outweigh the worth of his happiness to her that, in her mind, they invalidate his right to the freedom and agency to make such choices. Yet her reasoning for believing Shinichi too weak to make his own choices regarding dangerous situations certainly can't be linked to actual physical strength, because Hakuba, Ran's own team leader, has no abnormal strength or physical capabilities beyond better hearing and vision. Because the idea of Shinichi being weak only makes sense when compared to those who are metahuman (which she believes Shinichi isn't), this implies that the bar to be considered "strong" by Ran is simply having superpowers, regardless of what those powers actually do, and consequently, that Ran sees all "normal" people as similarly "delicate" and "weak," and isn't considering her boyfriend weak on his own merits, but instead because he belongs, in her mind, to the group "normal." And normals are weak.
    • Ran uses Shinichi's "delicacy" and "weakness" to rationalize emotionally and psychologically abusive control policies that heavily threaten his basic human rights, and that these "reasons" for doing so apply to the vast majority of the population Ran is supposed to work to "save," given that most of them are "normal." Ran genuinely cares and genuinely thinks she's doing the right thing, but the idea that specific large populations of people are inherently too inferior be trusted with human rights like freedom, autonomy, and self-determination, and thus need others to control their lives for their own good is literally the burgeoning mentality of a supremacist, and is a chilling mentality for a supposed hero to begin showing, especially when added to the implication that she feels this way largely because of how those "weaker" people's freedoms will burden her (Shinichi's weakness is too much for her to bear; better that he be unhappy and safe than free to put himself in danger and worry her).
    • While Ran openly dismisses the relevance of Shinichi's psychic abilities when confronted with Yuusaku's abusive nature and the question of the Irregulars' rightful reactions to it, and thus deserves the benefit of the doubt in terms of her internal motivations, it circumstantially doesn't help her case that her realization that she was wrong to deceive and neglect Shinichi comes only after learning Shinichi himself is a metahuman.

• The sheer amount of human rights violations perpetuated in ISHA's work culture, against both civilians and their own employees, in the name of maintaining the perception of order and competency in the eyes of the public—ranging from everyday things like mass-Gaslighting of the media and public at the hands of ISHA's emotion-manipulating spokespeople to the apparent accepted normalcy and systematic grooming of Child Soldiers to the implicitly shady and self-regulating way ISHA responded to growing calls for employee accountability (the Undertakers). Yuusaku may behave terribly, but his issues seem to reflect many of the issues and internal contradictions of ISHA itself.
  • Hakuba was already a sidekick at the age of eight years old. Eight. Years. Old. His inclusion within the social entity that is the Kudo family from childhood—attending social events with the family unit, including more events with the Kudo patriarch than the man's own son—implies he was basically taken out of his biological family and introduced into this surrogate familial structure, something he himself describes when he states that Kudo Yuusaku raised him. Fun fact: prosecutors have serious difficulties with convincingly holding children legally accountable for their actions because, psychologically speaking, the average child doesn't develop a full enough working understanding of the basic concepts of right, wrong, and rules until they reach around nine or ten, and a full understanding of consequences and responsibilities until the later teen years. Further fun fact: no one should need to be told any of this to know that an eight year old is not ready to literally do battle with criminals or obligate themselves to a future of such. Technically speaking, this complicates the morality of all of the Irregulars' tutelage by Yuusaku (given they were all under most countries' age of legal consent when they joined), but for Hakuba it's a special case: The fact that Kudo Yuusaku has been "training" Hakuba since before Hakuba was capable of even really understanding what he was being trained to do immediately invalidates all of Hakuba's defenses for Yuusaku and for ISHA, because he's been indoctrinated since he was eight years old to think of the exploitation he himself has undergone as acceptable and necessary and therefore has no "normal" perspective by which to judge anything.
  • From chapter 8: "It was nostalgic to be rushing into danger together like this; though the two of them still patrolled together often enough, this was a rare occasion. It made him feel like a kid again." The perspective is Hakuba's; the "together" is Hakuba and Yuusaku. In other words, Hakuba really was Yuusaku's Robin-style sidekick as an actual child, running into violent and potentially lethal situations at Yuusaku's side and everything, to the point where Hakuba running into a burning building with Yuusaku against a terrorist reminded him fondly of his childhood. Yikes. I mean, Conan occasionally gets in direct confrontations with armed criminals in canon, but it sure as hell isn't with adult encouragement and even the most permissive only ever intend to let him as close to the criminals as suspect interviews.
  • Rebound was made a full-fledged Overseer at the age of 18. Hakuba claims that while he dislikes Rebound, he can't deny that this is impressive, meaning he probably considers Rebound more advanced in training than him, someone who was trained since before he was eight. Unless Rebound had some 80's style magic training montage once he reached the age of majority, that can only mean that the entirety of his combat training took place while he was a minor. It makes one wonder just how old he was when he started.
  • Are the Irregulars even paid or compensated for the extremely dangerous and deeply personally costly work they perform for ISHA? Or are they truly "interns," performing extremely dangerous labor with no compensation other than "experience" for their resume? (An ISHA exclusive resume, at that - it's not like they could ever tell another employer about any of this). If they're not paid, it sure as heck looks like ISHA's basically scamming children into locking themselves into ISHA's Child Soldier-producing system, since the children are too young to consent when first inducted, do not appear to be paid for their extremely dangerous child labor, and by the time they're old enough to consent, most of their training and experience doesn't seem to be mentionable with employers outside of ISHA, owing to the strongly culturally informed and possibly 'legally'' enforced secrecy—so they get no benefit for their sacrifices unless they continue to work within the ISHA system.
    • It's mentioned that the metahuman registry is basically an ISHA recruitment list, and Kazuha was a late bloomer when she developed her powers at fifteen. So... Yes. Basically all of ISHA appears to be child soldiers, former child soldiers, or older members that personally groomed child soldiers. If all of this is true, ISHA appears to very much be not just using, but foundationally built upon child exploitation. Which makes this a point of similarity between ISHA and the Crows: Both the "heroes" and the villains continuously exploit children regardless of the probable harm done unto them in the process. No wonder Shinichi wasn't pushing his parents to get him registered.

• Shinichi last kissed Ran about nine months prior to the beginning of the story. They've been nominally dating for a year and a half. Given the timeline, Ran must've become an Irregular only a few weeks after she and Shinichi began dating. That meant they had months of relative physical intimacy. We know that physical proximity exposes Shinichi to more of others' thoughts, emotions, and memories; we literally see him view a memory through a kiss at one point. Given Shinichi's powers, there is no way he could have stayed completely ignorant of Ran's activities, especially in the beginning when she first began acting like this and he wouldn't yet be beaten down and resentful enough to avoid information about her. The only feasible explanation is that Yuusaku went after his son in the first nine months of Shinichi's and Ran's relationship and basically policed Shinichi's mind, and, given Shinichi's defensive and defeated attitude towards Yuusaku's apprentices and his relationship with Ran, Yuusaku likely also spent that time emphasizing the exclusivity of the apprenticeship he offered to Ran and putting Shinichi down in comparison, just like Yuusaku did when favoring Hakuba to Shinichi's face.
  • Because Yuusaku apparently cannot completely erase memories Shinichi obtains from others and seems only able to suppress them, this implies that there is a ton of information in Shinichi's head that has been forcibly suppressed by Yuusaku's thought policing.

• A lot of these require deeper analysis, but this one is plain to see: if Shinichi had done as Yuusaku and the Irregulars wished, there exists the strong possibility that everyone would be dead. As karmically funny and ironic as it is that Hakuba and Yuusaku needed Shinichi to explain the plot of Part 1 two days after telling him how worthless his attempts at contribution are, the fact remains that Hakuba, and likely Yuusaku, don't appear to have known much of the specifics of what was going on until Shinichi told them. Excepting the possibility of Black Org moles who already knew about the specific cause and risks of the disaster using that information to order the airstrike, it seems unlikely that ISHA would have had that critical intel already and chose to sit on that info for two days as the situation deteriorated instead of informing operatives in Tokyo of the situation. ISHA only acted at the last minute, in the most extreme and visible way, counter to public order and to international relations—they fired a missile on a country's capitol city without permission, for crying out loud! Somebody dropped the ball to let things get that far. Unless the goal of the forces inside ISHA was chaos in Tokyo, the timing of ISHA's actions implies that ISHA probably learned of the Black Hole Crisis' specific risks with very little time to act, meaning the information more than likely came from Yuusaku reporting it in after Shinichi briefed Hakuba. Leaving the matter to Yuusaku and Hakuba could very easily have obliterated Tokyo.

Post-Part 1 Interludes

• The second interlude's Hakuba-perspective chapter informs the reader that the April 25th riots had shown Yuusaku and Hakuba that the Pandora Effect had, like Santa's black holes, gotten to the point that the only way to stop its effects would be to kill the metaorganism responsible. Hakuba says this in conjunction with confirming that he believes, and has been told by Yuusaku, that Shinichi is Pandora. This implies that, had Shinichi not disappeared, the riots not stopped, and the Pandora Effect not vanished, Hakuba and Yuusaku would have attempted to murder Shinichi themselves to end the riots.
  • Even worse: During the riots it would be easy to pass off Shinichi's death as a result of the chaos, but given the two of them almost certainly already had a just-in-case plan for killing Shinichi prepared before the April 25th riots, what was that prior execution plan? Pre-riots, anything violent or unnatural would cause some level of scrutiny, and since they don't seem to have reported their suspicions about the Pandora Effect's cause to anyone else, they probably aren't going to want to have to try to explain their reasons for executing Shinichi or want to be linked in connection with his death. They could frame someone or something else, make it look like a random act of violence or a burglar or some dangerous figure Shinichi got involved in through his reporting, but that's so much extra work and the excess details inevitably won't perfectly line up if someone looks too hard. No, we've already seen the easiest way Yuusaku and Hakuba could kill Shinichi: Mind Rape him until he's little more than a puppet and then make him kill himself. Shinichi was already noticably troubled and lonely and miserable. After all, Hakuba and Yuusaku made him that way. Few if any could prove outside intent for his death. It'd be the perfect crime... at the cost of whatever remains of Yuusaku's and Hakuba's souls.

• Ran being led over to examine the corpses of the missing children. Either the officials really don't see the teenager behind her mask, or they're so spread thin that they don't feel they can afford to spare her when they need someone from ISHA there. Either way, it speaks yet another volume towards how the authorities in this world handle and exploit teenagers, and from her reaction, there's no way—absolutely no way—Ran won't have some form of permanent mental trauma from this.

Fridge Logic

Part 1: The Will of Zeus

• Nobody in the cast has yet to ask an important and rather obvious question: if what happened to the Kaitou KID eight years ago was so above-board on Yuusaku's side, why did Yuusaku feel the need to damage Shinichi's mind to prevent him from remembering what happened? Even if the memories were upsetting, we know from Hakuba that metahuman alterations to the mind, especially regarding the forced suppression of things like knowledge, memories and emotions, are known to inflict mental and emotional damage, so Yuusaku could hardly justify simply trading one known damaging experience for another that may damage Shinichi more. And then, why continue to exercise this morally condemned power on Shinichi after those memories have already been buried? Even without the inside knowledge the reader gets from Hakuba's perspective, the Irregulars have enough to realize something's not kosher with Yuusaku's story.

• In most countries, it is perfectly within a parent or guardian's legal right to consent to things for their underage child. Most of the Irregulars probably had the permission of their parent(s) to be trained by ISHA as superheroes, and while the parents' decision to consent may be ethically questionable, it would still be - technically - their legal right to make that decision, as long as ISHA provided that parent or guardian with full awareness of what their child would be signing up for prior to acquiring consent, typically via signature (in most countries, lack of easy access to any information pertinent to the agreement voids the agreement). (Well, legal at this particular point. Child Soldiers are still a war crime under the Geneva Convention's Rome Statute in Real Life, so this would just legally make the Irregulars' parents party to the crime of creating child soldiers and unable to sue for damages to their child). However, according to Hakuba, Hakuba's father evidently does not agree with Hakuba's current life. How did ISHA and Yuusaku even put up the façade of acquiring Hakuba as a sidekick in a morally upright manner? Did Hakuba's father agree at one point and no longer? In which case, why didn't he legally revoke consent from that point onwards, which he should legally be able to do? Did ISHA steal custody from him? Or is this world just so screwed up that training eight year olds to be Child Soldiers is normal and no one batted an eye concerning the issue of parental consent? Or is Hakuba's father such a bad father that when Hakuba asked for permission to join ISHA, Hakuba's father went along with what he openly believed was a bad decision on Hakuba's part out of spite and the belief that Hakuba needed to learn his lesson the hard way??
  • These options seem even more strange when you consider that the story still implies that Hakuba's father is the police superintendent (Hakuba at one point says that "his mentor" had always suspected the Crows had a mole in the Tokyo police but that Hakuba hadn't wanted to think one of "his father's officers" could be a traitor). Why and how did the Superintendent of the Tokyo MPD's younger-than-eight-years-old son join ISHA if said superintendent didn't want that? Is it just considered normal and legally acceptable for tiny children to pledge themselves to train and work for huge powerful international organizations without their parents having a say?
  • On the other hand, do all of the Irregulars' parents know about them being Irregulars? Or were some told the cover story of being in a program for learning detective work? If the activities that ISHA directs the Irregulars to participate in aren't 100% fully disclosable to their parents, that's yet another thing that would be a crime in Real Life. This, of course, brings up the conclusion that Hakuba's apprenticeship is actually outright illegal even sans the law against Child Soldiers, because Hakuba heavily implied his father doesn't know what Hakuba's apprenticeship entails and that Hakuba confiding in his father would confirm his father's worst ideas. Basically, unless the laws of this fictional Japan provide little to no protection to children whatsoever, Hakuba's apprenticeship is secretly at least three kinds of illegal, which is hilariously ironic considering how Hakuba talks about criminals like KID.

• Why did Hakuba and Yuusaku tell Aoko Kaito's identity immediately after Kaito made clear he would expose them to Shinichi in retaliation if they did so? Shinichi's knowledge seems to be something they were far more desperate to keep control of. Hakuba and Yuusaku are also increasingly aware throughout the story that they're losing what control over Shinichi they had because they've destroyed every good faith reason for him to obey them and controlling him by manipulation and force has proven to be an unreliable strategy that usually backfires at some point, so the two must know they can't feasibly prevent every single method Kaito could possibly use to expose them to Shinichi if they continue to intentionally provoke him. What was their plan? They can't feasibly monitor Shinichi every hour of the day to prevent KID from making contact. Were they planning on wiping Shinichi's mind once Kaito succeeded, with the attempt to monitor Shinichi just a pretense so they can argue they did their best to avoid this tactic? What was the plan to keep Kaito from exposing them to Shinichi again, or escalating the exposure to more people in retaliation? If they pushed Kaito further, what would stop him from going nuclear and exposing all of them? And even if their initial response plan relied on Mind Rape, are they really so comfortable with using that on Shinichi that they were fully willing to intentionally create the circumstances in which such a horrible tactic would be necessary? It makes no sense to deliberately antagonize Kaito while being unprepared for the retaliation he's openly warned them about unless, on some level, they consider the possible fallout and personal cost of that provocation acceptable in exchange for being able to expose Kaito to Aoko—despite Yuusaku and Hakuba repeatedly implying they can't afford to take these kinds of risks with Shinichi. Their decisions just don't make sense.
  • Word of God implies that Yuusaku may not actually care so much about whether Shinichi knows their secret identities and simply wants those he interacts with to think he cares. They don't imply as much about Hakuba, on the other hand, but he may well have been so angry at KID for using Aoko's ignorance to manipulate her that he grabbed firm hold of the Idiot Ball, perceived consequences and hypocrisy be damned. It's also possible that Hakuba's frustration and anger at KID for lying to and manipulating Aoko, which is apparently his reason for exposing KID to her, is at least somewhat displaced anger at himself for doing the exact same thing to Shinichi.
• Back when he had decent relationships with Ran and Hakuba, why did Shinichi not tell them about his meta-abilities? Was it simply his stubborn independent streak? With Hakuba there's always been some level of tension since he's Yuusaku's toady, but why not tell Ran? Did the trust issues between Shinichi and Ran start earlier than previously thought? It's never explicitly indicated that Shinichi didn't tell her, but the fact that she calls Shinichi "normal" in contrast to herself implies she didn't know, so why did he tell no one for seemingly his entire life?
• If Yuusaku and Hakuba have files with enough proof to convince even Aoko of Kaito's secret identity, why hasn't Kaito been arrested? Why only try to arrest him when he's in costume? Are they trying to arrest him? Are Yuusaku and Hakuba hiding the fact that they actually know Kaito's identity from the police and ISHA? If so, why? Why choose to out Kaito to Aoko and not to the police? It's mentioned that Aoko is a security risk because of her ignorance over Kaito's identity but that security risk wouldn't be there if they just arrested him. Why not use any of this stockpile of information to actually capture the Kaitou KID? Are they afraid of what Kaito will tell people if he actually gets arrested? Consequently, if this is true, just how much would Yuusaku's testimony of events differ from what Kaito might tell ISHA and the police in custody?
• How was Yuukiko's meta-ability concretely identified? The idea that she has passive mood-altering superpowers is hardly the most obvious conclusion to the phenomena of people generally being in a better mood when she's around, and the understanding of meta-genetics and subsequent gene expression don't appear advanced enough to identify one's abilities simply through genetic code.
• Kazuha and Aoko were considered late-bloomers with their superpowers; it's detailed that most superpowers manifest in childhood to early adolescence. Ran quit being karate club captain (and champion) when she joined ISHA, the implication being that ISHA training would be a time constraint on any other obligations. How long had Ran been competing with such a huge and unfair advantage? If she'd still been competing after developing super strength, why was this allowed? With how much validity should her title as karate champion be regarded, if she can just power through opponents with brute strength regardless of who has the greater skills or technique?
• As Yuusaku admits and tells Hakuba, both the current KID and the former KID had a way of completely blocking Yuusaku's psychic mental senses and attacks. Logically, this implies that Pandora's presumed mental/emotional influence is much more overwhelmingly strong on each individual than Yuusaku's. However, what we do see of Yuusaku's abilities doesn't support this; Yuusaku is powerful enough to turn even those experienced at resisting intrusive mental influences into People Puppets, while Pandora, if the riots are the Pandora Effect, appears more en masse and can be resisted by those of strong focus. So how could it have affected Kuroba Toichi in particular so badly? If anything is true of what Hakuba explains in the Interlude and it really was Toichi who went crazy and started killing people, why would he be more susceptible than others when he has a resistance to such influences that not even the much more intense Baron could breach? How could Hakuba resist what the more-resistant Kuroba Toichi could not? How could Toichi simultaneously be Immune to Mind Control and the one most affected by Pandora eight years ago, enough to kill three people? Something isn't adding up.
  • Maybe the reason both Toichi and Kaito have mental protection is because it's built into the KID suit. In which case, did something damage Toichi's protection measures? Were they not adequate? Or, again, is Hakuba's description of events inaccurate?
  • Kaito, at least, isn't immune to all psychic interference—after all, Shinichi uses his Psychometry to view Kaito's memory of Toichi's death. This still leaves the question of why Shinichi's power works on Kaito when Yuusaku's doesn't.