Oshi no Ko

[Kraco]

Imagine you've been learning for an important test, only to find out the day before the test that everyone passes automatically due to some new rule. You'd lose all the built-up stress from one to the other moment.

I've never been a paranoid person, per se, but even back when I was in high school, I wouldn't have believed that unless I got the info from an official source. Even if my best friend had told me that, I wouldn't have believed it just like that. I wouldn't have thought the friend was lying, I'd have merely thought he fell victim to rumours. If it was some random person I had interacted with rather minimally, yeah, right, no chance. Forget about easily believing such a thing later in my life, which would be the case for Aqua, who's accumulating life experience from a second life already. And what's my life experience compared to Aqua's? The dude was first murdered and then he witnessed his (second) mother get brutally murdered.

That said, I don't believe it's that simple either. My first thought was that the half-brother himself is the evil guy or at least part of it. First of all, we don't know if he's even telling the truth. Secondly, he said he hated his father. That's a pretty severe thing to say for someone who just slept around with women and wasn't successful at his job. Considering that Himewaka has been portrayed as pretty smart, too, I can see him being the bad guy. Setting up the murder of Ai-chan who, in his eyes, caused his parents' double suicide. Or maybe he caused the double suicide, too, because his parents' relationship was made miserable by the dad's affair with Ai-chan and he did a tabula rasa on all of them.

He would have been less than ten years old when Ai died. In the most mellow scenario, I reckon he just doesn't care that much. Why would he? He's not looking for a murderer and he never liked his father. The supposed double suicide wouldn't have affected him overly much. In a more severe scenario he knows much more than he's telling, maybe to the point of if not knowing, at least suspecting it was not a double suicide but a murder. In the worst scenario he's actually cooperating with the murderer to some degree and also knows the man who died in the double suicide (murder) wasn't even his real father, just a sacrificial dummy. So, in the worst scenario he would be wilfully lying to Aqua and protecting the real father/murderer.