[2.6] Kazuha vs Scaramouche - The Secret Inazuma Finale?

[Music] oh you are so naive it kills me i knew you were still worried about me you're getting all worked up over nothing i felt much turbulence in my heart just like that embrace the anger embrace it he did not wish his descendants to blindly seek revenge and be deceived by things of the past okay listen these two are definitely foils of each other and by foils what i mean is that kazuwa and skara moosh are perfectly contrasted to each other they both embody polar opposite ideals and they make choices that the other wouldn't make despite having very similar circumstances and yeah alright usually foils aren't really worth dedicating an entire video to because as a literary device they are super common but this case is a little bit different the way kazua and scaramouche counter balance each other thematically changes everything we know about the themes of the inazuma story chapter and you might find this a little difficult to believe but the inazuma story chapter was never about eternity or transience or respecting the wishes of the people or what makes a good ruler or visions or even finding the traveler's sibling it wasn't even about ryden it was always about kazua and indirectly it was about scaramouche and more importantly it was about the loss of the original electro archon makoto and how the people of inazuma coped but i'm getting a little ahead of myself here let's rewind for some context we need to talk a little bit about what makes kazua and scaramouche foils for a second because this is the foundation for the basis of the rest of the video so as far as we can tell kasua is the last of the kayadahara family line despite being born into a somewhat noble family he lived the humble life of a wanderer since his family and the yashiro commission they belonged to had had their reputation severely damaged due to the loss of their sword smithing arts more on that later despite wandering from place to place and never really settling anywhere plaza was the type to form friendships wherever he went and one of those friendships was particularly dear to him but after the vision hunt decree was announced and kazua was forced into hiding this friend challenged the vision hunters to a duel before the throne and lost probably on purpose since his only wish was to confront the ride in shogun's musso no hitotachi kazuwa arrived just in time to watch his friend be struck down by the shogun's blade distraught he took his friend's fallen vision and fled the country only to be picked up by beto and her pirate crew skaramoosh actually has a similar story as a prototype puppet that was deemed too frail by its creator to house the gnosis it was originally planned to hold scaramouche was supposed to sleep for an eternity but he woke inexplicably and began to wander inazuma in a blank and impressionable state it was then that he met katsuragi an assistant to a man named nagamasa katsuragi became an important existence for the impressionable scaramouche but when skaramoosh's true identity was discovered by nagamasa he was presumably told by katsuragi to flee nagamasa considered this an act of betrayal on behalf of katsuragi and cut him down with a blade he forged himself in a political and public execution skarmush's reaction is unknown as of now but he also left inazuma shortly after and was taken in by the fatoui that makes both kazua and skarmush young men of noble birth who grew up in very humble settings as wanderers that later had someone very dear to them killed by an important political figure's blade which then forced them to leave the country and join questionably criminal organizations but it's not just their backstories that are similar they also share swordsmithing and hearts as general themes since kazua's family were originally swordsmiths of the ishin or one heart swordsmithing school and scaramouche was supposed to house the gnosis or the heart of god and was taken in by an assistant to a swordsmith or possibly a swordsmith himself but we'll talk about that a little bit later too but what makes these two different is in the way that they responded to their respective losses kazuwa falls in with beto's pirate crew shortly after fleeing inazuma and they served as an excellent emotional support system this along with kazua's naturally easy going nature allowed him to grieve properly and come to terms with his friend's death even going so far as to call it fair and justified since it was a choice his friend made on his own and not a choice forced upon him in his own way kozwa recognizes and respects the wish of his deceased friend which is a part of the reason why kazuwa bears no grudge against the one who killed him skara moosh by contrast fell in with the fatoui while fleeing inazuma and consequently into a rather toxic environment it's unlikely he had any emotional support or guidance and as a result his feelings of loss festered for over 300 years eventually manifesting as a desire for revenge nagamasa was a swordsmith and by scaramucci's logic all associated swordsmiths must also have been guilty of wronging him so he decided to destroy each of the five swordsmithing schools or at least four of the five more on that later too therefore scaramouche was not able to respect katsuragi sacrifice or rather his choice to save skaramoosh from nagamasa's wrath okay i've made my point about the foils thing but you're probably wondering why i'm even talking about it in the first place i know it looks cool but it's seemingly irrelevant except it isn't see when viewed together scar moosh and kazua share a theme of coping with loss that theme can then be extended and applied to the rest of inazuma and yeah the whole thing the whole of inazuma case in point let's start with ryden a because she's the one that kind of kick-started all of these events in the first place so 500 years ago a lost her twin sister to the cataclysm in conria and that experience emotionally destroyed her because not only did she lose her sister but she had no one she could really share her grief with remember a was makoto's shadow as far as most people were concerned there was only one electro archon how could she tell anyone that her twin sister died who would have believed her i mean granted she did have miko but theoretically mikko would have been extremely young so perhaps a didn't even feel comfortable telling her anything yet as for the rest of her close friends well they were either dead or would be very soon so that left a without a support system and she ultimately chose to cope with her feelings of loss through self-isolation on a speculative note it's possible that a made skarmoosh initially as an attempt to completely replace her and her sister as the electro archon so she could announce her sister's death properly by kind of faking her own because twins but when that didn't work she made a clone of herself instead and then locked her inside of it no one would know the electroarchon was dead if an autonomous puppet that looked like her sat in her place right then she could just meditate inside and not feel anything for hundreds of years it's a perfect plan the thing is the state of mind of any nation's leader is reflected onto their nation in this case an unstable arkhan is not able to properly protect its country this is kind of illustrated by the sacred sakura which as you might remember did not exist prior to makoto's death this tree required a to be in a good mental state in order for it to go back in time and protect inazuma during a time when she wasn't in a good mental state oh that's confusing but during that time it would purify the elemental energy of enozuma and remove toxic energy that eventually turned into tumors within its roots these tumors if left unchecked would bring disasters to inazuma like that one time when it turned to sea black and monsters ravaged all the islands this obviously results in unnecessary losses that are indirectly caused by a's isolation that came about because she couldn't cope with her own grief and now she's not doing her job right it's a never-ending cycle but we see this happen again in more recent times because a refused to leave her room to see what was happening outside for herself her poorly supervised shogun puppet allowed a war to break out between inazuma and watatsumi while also forcing the island itself into isolation via the sakoku decree and of course there was the infamous vision hunt decree that followed shortly after which forced people to give up their visions which in turn caused them to lose a part of themselves again perpetuating a cycle of isolation and loss oh and her first puppet woke up and became a very small terrifying monster that does as he pleases because he has never taught anything else which is great so i think we've established that a can't cope with loss very well so she isolates herself and suppresses her feelings logically you'd think that the traveler is gonna be the one to come in and fix this but then this happens the traveler gets their butt whooped when they challenge her alone but on the second attempt the only thing that really changed from the first was the presence of kazua by blocking the muso nohitotachi kazuwa creates an opening for the traveler to bring in yay miko the only person who knew the rydens were twins and can therefore relate to a on a level that others can't nico may have been the one to get a to come out of her room but kazuwa was the one who provided the opportunity and the traveler was just a catalyst kazuwa was the initial trigger for the healing process and this is important because when you look closer you'll realize that kazua has played a pivotal role throughout the entire story chapter for similar reasons kozowa was the first inazuman character we met and the first thing he does when we meet him is give us some tips to help us win our final match in the crux clash though it's beto that actually brings us to inazuma kazuwa is the one who prepares us for it by telling us everything we need to know and later on it's his friendship with general goro that allowed watasumi to hire the crux pirates as extra manpower for the resistance helping them turn the tide of war in their favor his additional connections with ayato may or may not have played a role in helping the resistance infiltrate narukami island so that he and the rest of the resistance could be there in that perfect serendipitous moment when kazua managed to block the muso no hitotachi had that not happened the traveler would have been sanyorad and that's just it kazuwa goes out of his way to form connections which is the opposite of what a does and those connections create a powerful support network that's proven to be crucial in helping inazuma overcome its most recent hardships in that way you might even say that kazuwa is helping people heal by teaching them how to confront their problems that seems to be his thing and the fact that skaramoosh is his perfect foil proves that these events were not things mihoyo decided to include on a whim and now that a has finally begun to heal from losing makoto and inazuma is finally at peace again and not having its borders closed anymore there's only one loose end that needs tying up and that's skara moosh the only one who has not been influenced by kazua's presence and wouldn't you know it the irridori festival sets up a confrontation between the two quite nicely as for how this confrontation will go well if it were any other character in kazuo's place i'd say scaramouche would probably be the target of some well-deserved vengeance but this is causewa we're talking about his current track record suggests that he's the end of a cycle of pain rather than someone who continues it if a's inability to cope with the loss of her sister resulted in her creating and then abandoning scaramouche who was as a result unable to cope with the loss of katsuragi which caused him to destroy kazuwa's family line then kazuo represents the end of that cycle because nothing he's done has come from a place of pain it's come from a place of healing and acceptance for this reason i think in the next couple of patches we're going to get a surprise finale to the inazuma story chapter i think the traveler will track down scar moosh for some reason only to find scaramouche in conflict with child who was also tracking him down in order to retrieve the gnosis i expect that child will be defeated by an out of control skaramushu's blows can only be initially countered by kazua in the same way that kazua was able to counter the muso nohitotachi i expect a boss fight after this of course but i also expect that the whole encounter will end with kazua sparing scaramucci's life not because he's forgiven him mind you but because kazua knows that killing him would accomplish nothing he's already done this once before in the inazuma prelude chapter where he threatened to kill a thief that stole his friend's vision thinking that it might trigger the vision's powers but in the end he just gives the thief some advice instead and lets him leave unscathed and yes the two situations are really different but kazua knows that it's much more effective to let someone live and learn than it is to just kill them outright and never give them the chance of course this is dependent on the recipient of said mercy being receptive to it which is a separate thing altogether but i do expect kazua to give scaramouche a very different outlook on life one where scaramouche is forced to confront himself and his choices which for someone like him is probably a worse punishment than death no one really wants to live with their bad decisions and regrets you know and i do think scaramouche will experience some regrets when he faces kazua now in my previous video on the iridori festival i speculated a little bit on what or who niwa is and what that name meant to skaramoosh because it was important enough to get him to stop destroying swordsmithing schools i was pretty sure it wasn't a surname for katsuragi since katsuragi is generally already a surname however two things were brought to my attention afterwards first is that the way katsuragi is written in japanese is not the way it's usually written when used as a surname which i didn't think too deeply about until a youtube commenter by the name of firex pointed out the following nagamasa is called nagamasasama or roughly lord nagamasa instead of mikoshi sama or lord mikoshi this is important because nagamasa is his first name and not his last name and katsuragi was referred to in exactly the same way as katsuragi sama or lord katsuragi it would therefore make the most sense for katsuragi to be a first name instead of a last name in order to stay consistent with nagamasa especially because nagamasa outranks katsuragi and it'd be a little bit weird to be more formal with someone of a lower rank than someone of a higher rank therefore i am now convinced that the niwa scaramouche asks about was the surname of katsuragi that's enough to conclude that niwa katsuragi is related to niwa yoshinori which was kazuwa's great grandfather who was adopted by the kayadaharas making kazuwa quite literally the descendant of the only person skaramoosh cared about it also means that skarmoosh likely never had any intention of destroying that particular branch of the ride in gokuden what's interesting about this potential scenario is that both the niwa and the kayahara families belong to the eastern swordsmithing school while skaramoosh was built to house the gnosis while the original electro archon makoto died in the cataclysm a retrieved two items from her her sword the mussoisian and her gnosis if kasua is from the eastern school and scaramouche has the gnosis then in a way both of them represent the two halves of makoto interestingly makato's blade was never sharpened until after she died and a started using it this is kind of a neat reference to the fact that kazua would rather not resort to violence unless it's absolutely necessary and both isian and gnosis like i mentioned earlier mean heart ishin means one heart or wholeheartedly while the gnosis is literally the heart of god in chinese and skaramoosh's constellation is this a peaceful puppet holding a heart which says to me that scaramouche as angry a little vengeance grumbling as he is will absorb some of causewa's infectious and peaceful mentality and become a proper vessel for the gnosis which might make him the next actual electro archon for reals this time which is a really weird thing to think about but i think it would be a really really cool way to close out the inazuma story chapter by having kazua teach us that eternity is pointless and that learning to accept life's ever-changing transient nature is for the best and giving us the only real sensible way to uh redeem scaramouche without actually condoning all of the horrible he's done it seems like a story of recovery and second chances and i am much more excited about that kind of a story than i am for just like hey let's fight this weight clean and get rid of their memories and oh hey because they have no memories now they've done no wrong i i don't like that trope that's silly characters should be allowed to be problematic that's part of what makes them interesting anyway that's really all i have to say for now this was a little bit more of a ranty style video but that's okay trust me when i say i have plenty more theory and actual lore videos coming very soon so if you want to see those you should find that big red button and then do that little thing where you like click the mouse button and then you'll get more quality entertainment videos in your subscription box because that's a good thing to have in there anyway thanks so much for watching this has been ashikai i'm signing out and i will catch you all in the next video bye for now [Music] you

Channel: Ashikai

Views: 84,826

Keywords: game theory, genshin impact theory, genshin impact, mihoyo, theory video, game lore, genshin lore, hoyoverse, scaramouche, kazuha, inazuma

Id: WmACdqmbHQM

Length: 19min 30sec (1170 seconds)

Published: Mon May 16 2022