1) Saitō has kind of this Deep Existential Issue where he literally says in canon that if he isn't a samurai, he might as well not exist. During the brief period after he was charged with murder/left Edo and no longer had a lord, thus stopped wearing his swords because no lord = not a samurai, he says he felt like he didn't exist.
This kind of goes horribly with the fact that he's also from a time when being a samurai is becoming basically irrelevant; the imperialists just trounced his side at Toba-Fushimi despite having only a third as many men, because they had awesome guns and awesome swordsmanship doesn't mean jack if they just shoot you all down from a couple hundred feet away.
So while he hasn't really sat down and processed that because then suddenly alien spacecraft and everyone's dead, oh no, that...is kind of a thing that would be easy to mess him up with. Especially considering that since he doesn't know if his commanding officers or anyone from the Aizu domain (who authorized the Shinsengumi as peacekeepers in the first place) actually got saved/podded or not, he might not actually have a lord right now at all, for all he knows.
And then there is also the part where -
2) Oh right he also just decided his humanity was an acceptable sacrifice to finish his mission, and willingly became a blood-drinking creature of the night. But he hasn't really had to deal with...the consequences of that, because there's no sunlight on Stacy and the mess hall covers everyone's special snowflake dietary needs. On a prolonged mission off-ship, though, he would absolutely start running into the drawbacks, and I definitely want him to finally get hit hard by the bloodlust and realize oh, that's what it means to stop being human.
no subject
Basically I have two things to work with:
1) Saitō has kind of this Deep Existential Issue where he literally says in canon that if he isn't a samurai, he might as well not exist. During the brief period after he was charged with murder/left Edo and no longer had a lord, thus stopped wearing his swords because no lord = not a samurai, he says he felt like he didn't exist.
This kind of goes horribly with the fact that he's also from a time when being a samurai is becoming basically irrelevant; the imperialists just trounced his side at Toba-Fushimi despite having only a third as many men, because they had awesome guns and awesome swordsmanship doesn't mean jack if they just shoot you all down from a couple hundred feet away.
So while he hasn't really sat down and processed that because then suddenly alien spacecraft and everyone's dead, oh no, that...is kind of a thing that would be easy to mess him up with. Especially considering that since he doesn't know if his commanding officers or anyone from the Aizu domain (who authorized the Shinsengumi as peacekeepers in the first place) actually got saved/podded or not, he might not actually have a lord right now at all, for all he knows.
And then there is also the part where -
2) Oh right he also just decided his humanity was an acceptable sacrifice to finish his mission, and willingly became a blood-drinking creature of the night. But he hasn't really had to deal with...the consequences of that, because there's no sunlight on Stacy and the mess hall covers everyone's special snowflake dietary needs. On a prolonged mission off-ship, though, he would absolutely start running into the drawbacks, and I definitely want him to finally get hit hard by the bloodlust and realize oh, that's what it means to stop being human.
...sorry for herding the teal deer there, wow.