Odd Ducks in KHR: Xanxus and Iemitsu

So, thinking about odd characters.

For one, we have Xanxus. He’s presented to us as completely selfish and more than a little psychotic, and never shows regret for any of it. Then comes his defeat, more by Fate than by Tsuna, and he gets a Revelation scene. Normally a Revelation scene gives the audience the backstory of a villain and explains to us why they have done whatever dreadful things they’ve done. This may or may not be accompanied by repentance and may or may not affect the character’s final fate, but it generally secures some sympathy for their motivations. Only, in Xanxus’ case, his backstory makes it clear that he’s always been a selfish bastard, that he was arrogant and carelessly cruel and full of exactly the kind of pride that goes before a justified fall. Just to drive the nail in further, at the end of the Revelation, Xanxus affirms once again that he has no noble motives at all, he just wanted to be praised and elevated, to have the prop of a high position.

What this suggests about his character is that he has no real sense of self-worth. The Revelation shows his pride in his (supposedly) birth-given position, and, when he realizes the position isn’t his by birth after all, shows Xanxus himself saying that he’s actually lower than all those people he scorned and abused. This makes his motivation blindingly clear; if he has no other source of worth, then of course he would go to whatever lengths it took to reclaim a “rightful” position as the Ninth’s heir. But it also suggests that Xanxus has no belief in his own abilities and his strength is less in rage than in desperation, which makes him… well, rather pitiful.

Pitiful, but stubborn, because he utterly refuses Tsuna’s empathy and any redemption that might come out of accepting a worldview in which the Ninth genuinely loves him as a son. Instead he is explicitly preserved as someone among the Vongola who, despite defeat, does not accept Tsuna and will undoubtedly be trouble for him one way or another.

And then we have Iemitsu. He stands in a long line of shounen genre dads who are genius weirdos and useless as actual parents. Some examples of this include HxH’s Jinn, PoT’s Nanjirou, GB’s Kaizer, Naruto’s Fourth, Ranma’s Saotome; occasionally we see genius weirdos who are decent parents, such as IniD’s Bunta, or who can be argued either way, such as Bleach’s Isshin, but they are far less common. Normally, if they have any excuse it’s that they’re dead. Unusually, Iemitsu is given a really good reason to be a deadbeat dad: he has an extremely dangerous job that could easily spill over onto his wife and child if he stays with them, and we are shown first-hand evidence of how dangerous both when Xanxus and the Varia show up and in the death toll of the Future arc.

Iemitsu is shown to be dedicated to his job, to the Family before his family. He doesn’t try to get Tsuna out of it, when the putative Ninth’s orders place his child in life or death competition with practiced killers. He is the one who returns to Italy during those battles, to rescue the Ninth, leaving Tsuna in Reborn’s care. This demonstrates his faith in Tsuna’s strength, to be sure, but also an iron commitment to his duty above the natural reactions we might expect a father to have. He is not the usual sort of useless-genius parent.

Indeed, the complexity of both these characters and how they are deployed in the narrative are far more typical of seinen than shounen, and I find myself wondering if post60, at least, more deserves the seinen genre classification.