Me: Does Literally Anything

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Thoughts on Ranpo

I said something about Ranpo being a jerk but being the nicest person around from his perspective on twitter yesterday and my meta got too long to post there. This got way out of hand and is more of a Ranpo analysis than an explanation. Anyway:

Let us first consider Ranpo’s perspective in general. Ranpo can look at a person, place, or thing and know everything about it if he so chooses. He figured out Fukuzawa was an assassin in about 30 seconds and that was before he gained 12 years of experience as a detective.

His glasses gave him the confidence to acknowledge he was smarter than everyone else – something he was afraid of because, as he said in Origins, being smarter than everyone else meant he was all alone and because being the smartest person around meant that if he was wrong no one would catch his mistake in time as we see with Kunikida. But what we don’t acknowledge often enough imo is that the primary thing Ranpo does with his glasses is not wear them.

What Fukuzawa said when he gave Ranpo the glasses was: “If you put these on, your ability will activate, and you will be able to see the truth, right then and there. On the other hand, when you’re not wearing them, other people’s simplemindedness will not bother you anymore.”

(This is, of course, the basis of the ability Fukuzawa later manifested – “You can turn your power on and off at will” – but I digress.)

But Ranpo could already do the first part. He was like Scott Summers from X-Men who can’t turn his power off. If you notice, when Ranpo’s in Poe’s book with Yosano, Ranpo isn’t actually bothered by knowing things. He starts deducing the case out of sheer annoyance, and it’s only when Yosano goes “wow you’re on a roll” that he snaps at her and stops. Despite all his supposed self-importance, he spends the entire case trying not to be special.

He also gets mad and asks “are you saying the president lied to me?!” which. He knows. Fukuzawa told him to his face it was a lie. What matters here is that he didn’t acknowledge it because he didn’t want to know.

Imagine you have the ability to be better than everyone at nearly everything. Go to get your car fixed and they can’t figure out where the short in your electrical system is? Well, you can, so shouldn’t you do it? You go to the doctor and they’re not sure what’s going on with that click in your wrist. Well, you'll know if you just read a couple of anatomy books, so shouldn’t you do it? You go to the coffee shop, to the grocery store, to the post office, and you can do everything better than everyone else, so shouldn’t you?

Fukuzawa correctly believed that Ranpo had the confidence and support to drop the glasses charade after their first case. But what Fukuzawa really gave Ranpo with the glasses, and what Ranpo clung to for so many years, was an excuse to turn it off. To say no, I’m not taking all that energy to do all that thinking for other people. To see someone be totally, completely, maddeningly wrong and go “huh, sure I guess,” as long as it didn’t interfere with his life. To not be expected to just deduce how the trains work.

And to save his energy for more important things. Yes, some of the information comes easy, but it did take him a little thought to figure out Fukuzawa's past. He believed everyone was doing some thinking all the time, but the revelation that he was the only one would put all that effort on him. There's a reason most colleges limit the number of finals you're required to take in a day: you can't apply yourself forever without burning out. Ranpo admitting he was smarter than everyone else without the glasses would have had him on track to either run himself into the ground or harden his heart at the tender age of 14 to protect himself.

Case in point: it's Ranpo who says he has to protect all the "foolish infants" around him just seconds after he finally admits he's smarter than everyone else - and just seconds after he's been given an excuse to not kill himself doing it.

Circling back to the statement that triggered this essay: Fukuzawa’s final bullet point in his explanation of Ranpo’s ability is that nobody hates him. Ranpo digests this, and in the anime we see flashbacks to him getting thrown out of the academy, but we also see him at his parents’ grave. Now, what would his parents’ deaths have to do with people being foolish or hating him?

Potential answer: Even when he shuts his brain mostly off, Ranpo knows what people are going through. He knows their pasts, when he needs to, their bad deeds and things they’d like to keep secret. We've seen that he knows what would hurt them the most, too (re: his intro episode when he repeats Yamagiwa’s last words to Sugimoto.)

Other people don’t.

Other people might make an off-color joke that they don’t realize breaks their friend’s heart. Other people might spend two years guessing Dazai’s history and making strong generalizing statements about how evil and deplorable everyone in the Port Mafia is. Other people might accidentally get caught whispering at a funeral about how they heard the boy’s mother had an affair, which, to Ranpo, looks like intentionally being overheard saying things you know are lies about a kind and wonderful dead woman.

For two years he didn’t understand that they didn't know. For two years he walked by thousands of people who saw an energetic young boy, but he thought they saw an orphan who was lonely and hungry and sad. It looked like people hated him, because why would they say the things they said if they knew? (They didn’t.) Why would they walk by him if they knew how he felt? (They didn’t.)

In the novel he says “all the times I was suffering” at this revelation, implying it happened often and he couldn’t understand why people were so awful.

Of course, Ranpo is still a jerk – but he could be much worse. He’ll tell people they suck to their faces and advocate for leaving Atsushi to be sold on the black market and be obscenely arrogant, but legitimate stabs, those awful moments when you put your foot in your mouth and really hurt people – he never does that by accident. But other people do it to him by accident. For friends he knows just what gifts they want for the holidays, knows their favorite and least favorite foods, and a dozen other little things other people don't know and make it look like they don't care about him enough to pay attention.

Which finally brings me to my original statement: Ranpo is a jerk but from his perspective he’s the nicest guy around. Assuming they're idiots and "not being bothered by the ignorance of others" lets him ignore their lack of social graces.

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