Tear Jerker / MILGRAM

As per troping policy, all spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned!

”I wanted to be a pitied and loved weakling.”

The cast of MILGRAM may be a bunch of dysfunctional murderers, but that doesn't mean your heart can't break for them.

---

• "Weakness" is about Haruka desperately wanting to be loved by someone who abuses him and calls him a disappointment, apparently his mother. He feels so alone that anyone paying him the smallest bit of attention, including his mother saying "you're crazy," is enough to make him happy. His life sucks so much that he's actually happy to be in MILGRAM because the other prisoners are nice to him.
  Tell me, why are you drifting away from me?
  Tell me, why do you say it’s my fault?
  The word I tried to say was “You’re unfair”
  And those words thought how pitiful I am
  
  Why is it breaking?
  Tell me why? Please don’t change
  If I tried and couldn’t say it
  You would get angry at me and say “You’re hopeless”
• "After Pain" shows Mu being viciously bullied by her two former friends, to the point that she contemplates suicide. They destroy her belongings, laugh at her and film her humiliation on their cellphones. Finally, Rei sees her lying on the floor of the school closet looking pitiful, and does nothing to either help or hinder, walking away. Mu seems to hope that this means Rei doesn't hate her, but when she chases down Rei as she walks home from school and seemingly begs her for help, the other girl does not answer and turns to leave. Mu finally snaps and stabs her to death with a boxcutter.
  • At the beginning and end of the video, Mu is shown standing in front of the class chalkboard, which has various insults written on it (translations here), including "you don’t need to come to school!!", "the trash of society", "worth less than a cockroach", and "just notice that everyone hates you already".
  • After another bout of bullying involving a mop and a bucket, Mu looks at the screen of her cellphone, which shows herself, her former friends, and Rei, apparently in happier times.
  • The way Mu looks absolutely horrified with herself after she's just stabbed Rei is soul-crushing, especially the closeup on her trembling hands clutching the boxcutter. As other schoolgirls surround them, Mu collapses across Rei's body, as the lyrics repeat over and over, "'I'm sorry' won't reach anyone (I hope it will someday)."
• "Bring It On" shows Futa through his own eyes as the hero of a video game slaying monsters and bringing justice to the world, when in reality he is conducting cyberbullying campaigns against those he feels deserves to be punished. When he "slays" the final "monster," his expression turns from triumphant, to worried, to scared as he notices the blood splatter on his face and hand, and his "companions" in the background fade away even as he turns to look at them. The last shot of the video is him under a blanket as he looks at his phone screen with a horrified expression, implied to be the moment when he realized he drove his last victim to suicide.
• "Magic" is a bright and peppy song with a colorful music video that looks like a children's TV show, but under it is Amane trying to impress or at least satisfy her teachers in the cult she belongs to, only to be brutally punished. When she gets a question wrong, Gachata finger-flicks her in the forehead hard enough to knock her to the floor. Then, when she bandages an injured cat's head, the mood of the song changes from cheerful to dark and foreboding as the cult leaders approach her ominously. The video then cuts to repeated shots of all four of them putting her through various tortures.
• "Double" gives us more insight in to Mikoto’s alter, making him more sympathetic. The song implies that any of his violent actions are all that’s keeping the system somewhat functional, but he understands that it’s still destroying their lives. He wishes he didn't exist in the first place, because that only means Mikoto suffered horribly and needs his protection. His last line of the song is an apology, the recipient of which is unclear.
• "Imposter Boulevard," Kazui's second voice drama, gives more hints to his crime and how they relate to the lies he told. Combining lines like "I’ve tried to be myself! I’ve tried to just be the way I was born!" with the common theory that he's gay and married his wife out of pressure to conform, then confessed, leading to her death is heartbreaking because he just wants to be himself without guilt.