Disclaimer: I do not own Hamatora or any of the characters.
Author's note: Spoilers for the last episodes of Re:Hamatora. Momoka character study.
Nihilism
"Desire is the struggle to fill a void that cannot be fulfilled."
Those were the last words she remembered seeing before passing out.
It was a murder suicide. The lone survivor was a girl in her teens with a flower birthmark surrounding her left eye. A girl that now gazed silently out the hospital window with an indifferent, almost peaceful look on her face.
"We're very sorry for your loss."
The girl looks over at a man in uniform.
"Do you have any relatives?"
The girl thinks hard but doesn't answer, opting instead to look out into the horizon as the sun dips below the city scape.
"Is there anything I can get you?"
The girl now ignores him completely.
Sighing, the man excuses himself before exiting with his partner.
"I told you not to force it! The poor thing, she just lost her entire family in such a gruesome way."
The Inspector scratches the back of his head.
"I just don't get it. Why would a family so well off, so loving, so...perfect in every way, be victims of a murder suicide?"
His partner looks back at the now closed door of the girl's room.
"Only she could possibly answer that question now."
A genius was born to a family of three. She was marked different at birth and named so for that difference.
"You will grow to be a tranquil, beautiful and gentle girl."
The girl doesn't understand, but she thinks it would be nice to have something to aim for. It didn't take her long to become the most well behaved, sweet and pretty little girl the neighbourhood had ever seen.
"Here little sweetie, have a candy," the old lady down the street told her one day when she returned from school.
"Thank you very much, Granny," is the correct answer so she says it. The wide grin is held in place until the old lady down the street is out of sight.
How...boring. The girl is finding that more and more things are becoming unfulfilling. She receives candies, treats, presents and affection with a bat of her eye. She is the love of her family, class, and neighbourhood. She has more friends than she can count, more toys than she could ever hope for.
But it all came so effortlessly.
So she tries to find something that would require more effort to complete. She tries to score perfect on all her exams.
"Isn't it wonderful to have such a sweet, smart little angel for a daughter?" the little girl's mother is asked one day.
The girl looks down at the floor, feigning embarrassment to mask frustration.
Too easy.
Being perfect is far too easy. Being good is far too boring.
So she tries something else. She frames a classmate for theft.
"To think he would do such a thing! And he's usually such a gentle child!"
The girl's classmate leaves school soon afterwards.
Too predictable.
So she tries something else again. The opportunity arises by accident. The girl is the last to leave her class one day when she sees a pretty little trinket lying on the floor. She knows the owner. She knows she should return it. She decides not to. Silently pocketing the small keychain, the girl feels her heartbeat increase and her palms grow sweaty.
So this is what excitement feels like.
And so the little girl becomes a thief. Small toys escalate into more expensive accessories until she is nearly caught one day.
"I'm sorry. I was so entranced by it I forgot to return it before leaving."
The store owner sees she is a child, forgives her with a simple warning of having enough money to pay for things before picking them up.
The thought of having the rights to anything as long as she pays for it seems satisfying so she wonders how she can earn enough money to buy everything she lays her hands on. This she tells her father.
"Father works with stocks."
And since her father says so, the little girl begins to study stocks.
The girl soon becomes better at studying world trends and buying stocks than even her own teacher. She knows she should be bored at this point, but she's found something else along with these dallies online. The internet.
"You can be anyone you want to be."
Her brother tells her when she asks why he spends so much time playing online games. He tells her how the games work, how you can say whatever you want and not be punished as long as you aren't found. How you can even change things in real life if you get good enough at hacking.
So she turns her attention to learning code and hacking.
But even that begins to become dull. So she decides it's time to spend the billions she earned online through "stocks".
She travels. She eats. She visits historic sites. She tries every tourist attraction that catches her eye.
The best this world had to offer just didn't satisfy.
"Wanna try your luck?"
She loses for the first time in her life and she's enthralled. She spends days at a time hooked at the different games within the casino. Her family begins to worry but she brushes them aside, saying she isn't spending too much and she isn't falling behind school either. Billions come, billions go, until she realizes that's all it is. A change in number, a difference in sum, nothing she can't make back with little to no effort.
If possessions couldn't satisfy her, then what if she tried to satisfy her body?
She tries drugs for the first time in her life.
The high is alleviating, the low is frustrating. She longed for addiction to kick in. If she could be addicted then wouldn't she never be bored again? It's not like she couldn't afford this habit. Yet it never happened. High, low, high, low but she never craved it. She changed drugs, she changed dosages, yet her body would never crave the next dose, would never need it.
Granting bodily desires solved nothing.
The girl thought back to her childhood, how she manipulated those in her classroom and smiled as she watched them dance in the palm of her hand.
Maybe she could gratify her desires through the dominance of others.
She bought her first slave online.
It was boring how easy one was to obtain. She dressed her slave in multiple outfits, made her slave come to her every beck and call, made her slave steal and commit felonies before she tired of commanding and decided to turn to torment. The look on her slave's face as he begged for his life, it shook her very being. So she bought more slaves, made them fight, offering the winner freedom. She tried physical torture, she tried mental torture but their faces soon bored her. Their reactions became too repetitive, too predictive. So she paid to have them all discarded.
The girl sighs as she slumps against the wall.
What else could fill this every growing void?
When the Inspector returns, the girl with the flower birthmark is still in the same position.
"I know this may be too soon, but we have a few questions for you."
The Inspector pulls a chair up beside the girl.
"Can you tell me what happened? Anything you remember will be fine."
Looking down to flip his notebook to an empty page, the Inspector suddenly sees a sinister grin flash across the girl's face. He blinks a few times, and looks again. The girl is still stoic, the same indifferent slight smile on her face as before. Had he imagined it? The Inspector shudders as he prays that he did. For the smile he saw, however brief, could only belong to an insane individual who took joy recalling a grotesque memory.
"It was written in bright red."
The Inspector is pulled back from his thoughts by those words.
"Excuse me?"
"The words on the wall."
The girl is looking straight at him now, with that slight smile and a pair of remorseless eyes.
"Desire is the struggle to fill a void that cannot be fulfilled."
The Inspector can't understand why, but he feels he has just been ensnared in a trap.
"I wonder. What did father desire so much that he opted to kill mother, brother and me?"
The interrogation ends not long after since the girl remembered nothing else.
"Please do visit me again, Inspector. It was so pleasant having someone to speak with."
The Inspector seriously considers denying the invitation.
The visitor the next day is the Inspector's partner.
"Oh? I was expecting the Inspector himself."
His partner shifts her eyes to avoid eye contact. He had warned her there as something off about the girl but she looked normal in every sense.
"Looks like you're not the only one to lose someone close now."
The young detective tells the girl who asks her to continue.
"He was hit by a drunk driver last night on the way home. Died on impact."
If the girl was shocked or felt saddened, she didn't show it. She simply acknowledged it before turning to face the window once again.
Taking that as a sign of her dismissal, the young detective closes the door as she excuses herself. Silence sets in on the lone inhabitant of the hospital room.
"It seems even human life no longer quenches my thirst."
The girl laughs dryly for but a second.
"But the crimson was quite beautiful. Their faces, delicious. Betrayal is truly a wonderful distraction."
The girl now recalls those memories. Cries and screams of denial from her mother, anger from her brother and disbelief from her father. She experimented on her brother first, trying to see how long he could scream for. How long he could curse for. Her mother had been unexpectedly resistant to her, as if denying reality and falling straight to numbness. Her father had been the most fun, trying to reason with her, asking what he did wrong and how he could make it up to her. He denied her a guilty party to the end even as she wrote those words in his blood on the wall as he gasped for breath from the noose around his neck.
"Desire is the struggle to fill a void that cannot be fulfilled."
The ecstasy of the slaughter was exactly what she craved. It was livid, coursing through her very being. She had never experienced so much emotion all her life. So overwhelming was the experience that she lost all consciousness.
Imagine her disappointment when the emotion completely vanished upon her awakening.
As if none of it ever existed.
The girl stood from her bed. She needed to find something else to entertain her. Even the memories of the excitement of the slaughter were starting to bore her.
"Desire is the struggle to fill a void that cannot be fulfilled."
Just what else did she have to do to attempt to fill the endless void?
The world was dyed in crimson. Art's plan had succeeded and the Nihilism Minimum set off across Yokohama.
This is what she had craved all along; a nihilistic world where desire didn't exist. She could finally stop seeking to fill the endless void.
Yet she remained the same.
She was not Art, who had absorbed so many egos that he was immune to the nihilistic effects of the Nihilism Minimum. So why?
"Because nihilism is your ego"
The flower birthmarked girl looks over at the offered Black Cosmo. Jealousy and despair.
"It must be lonely at the top with no one who can save you."
He's smiling. Not in a condescending way, just in the way he normally does.
She laughs. It was so obvious, right from the start.
"I see. It's because I've always been..."
The girl reaches for her gun. Perhaps this is what she had longed for all along.
"How boring."
-End-
Author's note: Hopefully I kept her in character! Momoka's character really intrigued me during the Ferris wheel scene so I wanted to explore her a little bit. I wish more of the Hamatora cast got detailed backstories, but I guess it would've had to be a much longer anime for that to happen ^^'''? Though I found most of the characters in Hamatora loveable, I have to admit I found Momoka the most interesting (does that make me a bad person given what she did to the poor Hama-gang and others :(?). Candies for anyone who can remember which scene the picture came from :) (was picking between two of them but I thought this fit better).