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Perhaps it’s because he spent his early life being unjustly ignored, or maybe it’s because he’s seen so much garbage happen around him for very little reason than punching down the years he was living at the orphanage, but Nosaka has always had a sharp sense of justice. Or, at least, what he thinks is justice… when some people may not agree with it.
It’s all a question of whether or not you think the ends justify the means, because he thinks they do, especially when it comes to justice, retribution and punishment.
What more can he say about it? He’s seen some shit and the world is violent enough to, to his eyes, justify going the hard way on prejudice and discrimination. Sometimes, words can’t solve some issues and some people just won’t change their minds, no matter how many times some brave souls have tried to humanize the ones they’ve demonized.
It’s when that happens that his group and he intervene with schemes and plans to at least neutralize the threat, even if it involves becoming a devil. They’ll never have blood on their hands, but blackmail is just about where he’s willing to go. Maybe it makes him no better than the ones whose hearts have rotted away, maybe he’s been the monster all along and dragged his two best friends with him; but if Anna and Nishikage are both willing to follow and carry on his plans, then he considers they know the risks and agree to some extent with his deontology. Support and backup are usually crucial in this sort of underground activity.
Like every good villain origin story, he was the victim of what he’s fighting. Being told he had to pick a side, ridiculed for “being indecisive”, accused of sleeping around despite the fact he was barely attracted to anyone for their looks and even less interested in anything physical for the longest time (nowadays is another story)… He’s still got the memories of that and it didn’t help that the environment in which he was raised (parentless, neglectful, surrounded by prejudiced children who didn’t know better) and the atmosphere of his internship at Outei Tsukinomiya (it was conform or die, after all) didn’t make all of it much better.
Well, at least, that’s where he met his two companions. Nishikage was more or less in a similar situation to what Nosaka had been only a couple years earlier: scared, confused, and trying to bury it as deep as possible. Would have they not been so oppressed by Outei’s conformist attitude, maybe they’d have allowed themselves to act on their romantic attractions (after all, they’re both into men and they didn’t make it a secret to each other once they had found each other out – only the outside world wasn’t allowed to know about it). As it stands, however, Nosaka is pretty sure it’s a bit too late for that, despite their new freedom. Maybe the future will prove him wrong, however.
In fact, he hopes he’s wrong, for once.
Anna, on the other hand, was another story. He’s pretty sure she isn’t into other women – though he could be wrong there too, and she’s been questioning ever since he met her – but what he knows is that she had to try her hardest, when attending Outei, to hide her own origin story. To be very fair to her (and usually when he’s honest, he’s pretty harsh), Anna was passing so well he’d have never suspected anything. Would have it not been for a rare moment of vulnerability from the three of them, he’d have never known.
Anna held her secret with contempt, back then, but has been more and more outspoken about it ever since their Outei days were over. In fact, the only reason she told Nosaka and Nishikage in the first place was to gain their trust: it was a weird bargain chip, sure, but it worked, because he could tell to the way her voice wavered that she was desperate to find other “unconventional” people like her. Under her mask of the perfect class representative in a conformist environment, she was actually the one she thought to be the weirdest of them all.
I swear I’m like the other girls, she said, picking Miyano as her main example (they were friends and, much later, Nosaka got to learn she was bisexual – Anna and she shared a room and they both covered their own tracks).
You’re no less of a girl than all of the others here, he told her in an odd display of honesty. In fact, you had to put more effort into it. That’s commendable.
Now that they’re in university, out of Outei’s grasp, mature enough to know the limits of their high school approach to the issue and free to do whatever they please, they’ve been able to do something about what they’ve had to go through. Free to wear pins with colourful flags, free to say what they are, free to shoot back when attacked. There is no greater authority to please and no mould to constraint themselves into, no more limb-bending to do – they’re free to defend those who need it, now.
Nosaka may be some sort of chaotic figure with unclear intent, he’s still not that selfish. Seeing injustice in the world filled him with a rage he still feels in his veins, one that’s bound to erase from the world what he thinks is wrong with it… even if it requires a little violence. It’s a fragile balance between having an impact and not scaring those with fragile minds who could, one moment to the other, switch to the wrong side.
Their modus operandi is based on neutralizing danger, not convincing people to finally realize trans people are actually humans and not some sort of freaks of nature. Most of it works through their anonymous blog and tips they receive there, putting them on tracks of people who could pose some sort of danger. Sometimes, they just stumble upon it and use their usual methods, even if sometimes it gets to blackmail, although it rarely gets to that point,: most of the time, and if they’re just individuals without much power, just a threat or two can suffice, and sometimes, even talking does the trick. Nosaka was uneasy with the latter, at first, but now he can put on a sufficiently decent façade for it. Anna’s fairly cold persona and, later on, speaking to Miyano and seeing how gentle she was (yet was also fairly cunning in her own right) convinced him of the softer approach. It’s far less vigilante-like than how Nosaka and Nishikage began, but if it works, then it works. If there’s one thing he learnt after his days at Outei came to a close, it was that the most effective approach in the long term usually isn’t the darker one, as paradoxical as it sounds compared to how he’s thought of himself.
However, their main targets are corporations and bigoted bosses who won’t take no for an answer. In those cases, Nosaka has never hesitated to resort to blackmail and threats of classified file leaks to the wide and wild Internet. Because the influential Mikado Estate is always going to side with them and because even the big wigs know how savage and thirsty for either justice or amphitheatre-like dramatics social media users can get, it’s always worked in their favour… and holding more and more of the public opinion to their side has been a very big help in that too.
Maybe they should think about recruiting new people, judging from how many tips they now receive. That’s not a bad thing per say, because Nosaka is pretty sure he could recruit Miyano and another ex-Outei student to their side and recipe for justice… it just involves a lot more risks than they’re now used to.
Oh well, what’s fighting for justice if it doesn’t involve a little risk? They’re not wishy-washy enough to turn back now, are they?