The curse of ■■: 2. another thousands of times

Either from suicide, poisoning or murder, yjh manages to reach his 1863rd regression. 

What we see is a destroyed man through and through. Completely alone with his sword. No force is needed to slay even the greatest of contellations, he's feared and extremely passive agressive, one wrong step and you die. He does that because at some point he will be lucky enough to finally end with the star stream, one day he'll reach the end it waits for him, whatever that may be, he just want all of this to be over soon.

How many years has he lived already? How many times has he seen his friends dying? How many innocents and constellations has he killed?

Thousands of years at the very least. Hundreds of times each. Billions of them. Walk forward as his dirty hands were cleansed by his every regression. Yjh suffered something worse than Diavolo's punishment in Jojo's Bizzarre Adventure: Vento Aureo, he didn't just die painfully, he lived and then died many times over.

Happy memories.

Kdj reminded him how many times he had failed to protect those precious moments during his little voyage in the 1863rd round. I found it cruel but it also shows how little it takes to reach the deep of his fragile mind. 

I'm currently studying psychology and I call a fragile mind a mind made mostly of subconscius matter than conscious one. When you're traumatised, all those memories and emotions if too dangerious for your mind, they get stored in the subconscious and fogotten by your "awake self" that is your conscious. If someone knows what's inside your subconscious -which is, because of traumatic events, way too much informations- then said person can easly control you. Long ago they used this method to cure hysteria. It's like a rich man scared to get his money stolen so he stores them in a bank account: when he has too much money in his pokets, he gives most of them in the bank, what's left is the money he needs to live until the next huge paycheck. If he goes back though, he finds himself with money he doesn't know how to use at all.

Yjh then is that rich man looking at his bank account and he's surrounded by mugglers, and the richer he got, the more they cold succeed to seal from him: the cinema master in the third round controlled his mind but it was still possible to free him quite easly, Nirvana knew he would have succeeded to have him if he invested all of his stats in psychic power and the 1863rd yjh was done enough that even the memories of the past rounds could drown into depression.

Yjh had too much trauma for his own good. After a few regressions he began to hide his feeling into a cold-hearted shell to protect himself from seeing someone he cares for to die in front of him. He manages to fail anyway because it's not in his nature to be cruel. That's how he was able to meet kdj: if he truly belied he was that dangerous, he would have killed him even before to ask his identity. He would never let his curiosity change the course of time, that would be too dangerous for himself.

"Eat dirt, yjh." This one moment made me realise how miserable he was. 

No one deserves to feel this done of his own life to listen such a stupid order. Yet, he knelt down and bit the ground. With no hesitation, no complaint or fight. 

[This one scene was one of the few scenes that made me cry in ORV.] 

The scene is "hilarius" by itself but if looked deep into it you see it: this yjh was so "rich" that the only conscious thing he had were passive sensorial responses to the outside. The protagonist became an empty soldier. 

The final destination of immortality is in fact the apathic contemplation of life. Reached this point, the real yjh is hidden and treasured into the subconscious, like an embyo developing inside the egg while the shell itself is the body made of simple responses.

Throughout this arc, in ORV you find out that yjh doesn't mind phisical damage, instead it -not the person, the body- focuses on dealing damage. It doesn't feel pain because pain, as a feeling, has sank as well. This could have been the last time he regressed: regession is based on the perseverance of the incarnation himselfof refusing death. Yjh wouldn't have refused death at that moment.

Yet a side of him refused death. And so he said:

"The world that you showed, does it really exist?"

[This is something not even I can explain to myself.] 

What's left of a broken man when he's completely helpless? Not stubbornness, not perseverance, not even frustration.

It was hope. Kdj coming from another round, that was flowing diferently from his own third round, demonstrared that there was a way he could have reached the end of the story as a human being. But that body was meant to die there with the wall that protected the yjh of the subconscious from the outside world that tortured him for so long, longer than he could even remember.

There it is: the perfect representation of what suicidal thoughts feel like: your will to live, fighting against the wish to die and finally rest. 

[It was beautiful. Every line of that chapter liberated me.]

[If there's something beautiful about the depiction of immortality is the fact that it perfectly describes human's will. If you wish to study the meaning of being human, look for a book with an immortal main character.]

In the end, the husk died and the soul ascended to another regression. They both won, just like nobody wins at war.