Alright I feel like I should say something about the recent criticsm. Which I believe most of it is justified. For many people, reading Subaru's mindset during these chapters may be emotionally draining, or just kinda boring.
But I decided to write this story because I wanted the asnwer to one question. How would Greed IF Subaru do without Echidna? What kind of horrible mindsets would he fall in? Would he be able to find hope at the end when those mindsets tumbled down? Or would he just lose himself, to hoplessness, a puppet who danced for ages upon ages, then had his strings cut. Or would he find a way to make himself more than a puppet.
I don't care to sugarcoat that answer with fluff, and magic bursts of hope. I care to explore the nitty-gritty, the descents into insanity that Kasaneru Subaru would have. I just care to explore what I believe would happen for Natsuki Subaru while putting him under new situations. I wanted to see how far I could stretch this man, how far would his sanity go? Would he just break, it was an interesting question to me. And at one point I contemplated having Subaru perma die somewhere in this arc, just being stretched to the end of his rope, and giving up.
I still contemplate that outcome. Because I believe that Kasaneru Subaru's recovery would be something nigh impossible to come by, and downright unlikely. Some part of me believed that nothing could ever heal Subaru of all the things he endured in Kasaneru. There would always be fundemental flaws in his mindset that pushed him to his breaking point.
To be honest, I'd be fine, downright satisfied even, writing a tragedy of a man freed from control, only to have been so destroyed by Echidna that there is no hope of recovery, that Shattered Kasaneru would just be the story of a man who glimpsed hope, but was too scarred to ever reach it. But alas, I've decided against that. That just means at the end Subaru will find that hope. But in between, I have no intention of changing that. Arc 4 will be a story full of melancholy, full of hopelessness. A story that pushes Subaru to near his breaking point, and almost destroys him. I have no care to try and make that an interesting story to you all. Because I'm here to answer my own question of what would happen. In the end I write for myself, I always have.
So I'll write the answer to my question how I think the answer would go. If you want to join me for this ride full of despair, horror, hopelessness, and repetition into even further insanity, until at the very end, when it all seems lost, hope finally flourishes, then join me.
If you don't want to join me. If you'd rather read a story that gives you hope without dragging you through even worse horrors than Tappei, then I hold nothing against you, when I say that you don't have to join me on this ride.