Jinako Carigiri

            I’ve been interested for a while in writing about a certain character from Fate/Extra CCC, and particularly how she ties narrative elements to strictly mechanical level design. As it happens, the character—one Jinako Carigiri—made a reappearance last week in the fourth chapter of Fate/Grand Order: Cosmos in the Lostbelt, Yuga Kshetra. Jinako’s role in Yuga Kshetra is a really excellent example of how to reuse a character with an already-complete character arc in a later work, so I’ve decided to take this opportunity to roll the two topics into one.

Neet

            Jinako starts off as something of a cliché. She’s both a “hikikomori” and a “Neet”—terms that are sometimes used interchangeably but technically mean different things. The term “hikikomori” is a nominalization of the verb “hikikomoru,” which means to physically hide away or seal oneself off. Hikikomori are people who never leave their homes. It’s something of a social phenomenon and issue in Japan right now and as a result the character type pops up in Japanese fiction with some regularity. They’re often portrayed in fiction as having some form of agoraphobia, though I don’t know how strongly agoraphobia and being a hikikomori are correlated in reality.
            The term “Neet,” on the other hand, is an acronym for “Not in Education, Employment, or Training.” It basically just means “unemployed,” though it typically has the connotation in Japanese fiction of “someone who plays games and surfs the web all day without actually doing anything productive.” Jinako is both a hikikomori and a Neet, but the two terms don’t necessarily have to go together—someone can never leave home but still be employed (such as in a work-from-home situation), and someone can be unemployed but nonetheless spend a fair bit of time outside.
            Long story short, Jinako is an immediately recognizable character type. She fits all the usual clichés associated with hikikomori Neet characters—an unhealthy fondness for junk food, esoteric computer skills, a love of video games, extreme-but-high-energy social awkwardness, and so on. What makes Jinako particularly interesting, though—and the key element that carries over to Persona 5’s Futaba Sakura, who is likely modeled after Jinako—is the way her character develops.

Launcher

            For the first half of CCC, Jinako adheres closely to her trope. She’s relatively unfriendly and she only takes action after much prodding. In CCC’s fourth chapter, though—the point where Jinako comes into focus—things change somewhat.
            Although it’s not initially visible, Jinako is a character who feels trapped by forces beyond her control and who despairs at her own uselessness. Her parents died in a car accident when she was young, and the combination of their life insurance and her inheritance ensured she would never be in danger of financial ruin so long as she lived frugally. Teenage Jinako, traumatized by the sudden loss of her family and support network, saw this as a blessing—rather than face the world, she was able to retreat into her own home indefinitely. She didn’t “need” to go out into the world in order to maintain her lifestyle, so she just… didn’t.
            Over time, though, she grew less and less satisfied with her life of endless leisure, and by the time in which CCC was set—as Jinako was approaching her 30’s—she found herself despairing at her decade of wasted time. She wanted to make her life meaningful, but she had neither the experience nor the connections necessary to find worthwhile work, and as a result she felt trapped. Prior to the beginning of CCC, Jinako took a single step toward her goal of finding meaning, but immediately she became overwhelmed by the world outside of herself and retreated into a prison of her own making, deeper in despair than before.
            Jinako covers this with a self-deprecating levity through the first three chapters of CCC, but at the beginning of the fourth chapter, CCC’s secondary antagonist (BB) brings Jinako into direct awareness of her own despair, and her demeanor changes entirely. Jinako sinks fully into apparent depression, and her story chapter begins.
            Each chapter of CCC features three dungeon floors followed by a chapter boss. Each floor reflects an aspect of the chapter boss’s psyche, with the entire chapter serving to make the chapter boss accept the feelings or sentiments she has been repressing. If this sounds familiar, it’s ripped more-or-less wholesale from Persona 4—CCC borrows several key ideas from the Persona games that precede it, and then Persona 5 steals Jinako from CCC (to the point that Futaba even has the same voice actress). There’s a definite give-and-take happening here.
            The first three chapters of CCC are fairly straightforward in terms of dungeon design. They do have a few clever gimmicks or puzzles that relate to the chapter boss’s character arc, but for the most part they’re straightforward dungeon-crawling segments punctuated by narration. Standard fare.
            What makes Jinako’s chapter so memorable, though, is the way it subverts both the structure of the game to that point and typical conventions of RPG dungeons in the service of developing her character.
            The first floor is a meandering path filled with signposts covered in misinformation. Things like, “There’s a powerful enemy ahead, so you should turn back,” or, “The area up ahead is a complex maze, so you should give up.” While a typical RPG might use this as a puzzle—having signs that say, for example, “The left path is the correct path” when the right path instead leads onward—here it’s strictly narrative. The path forward is clear and obvious throughout. The significance of the signs is less the misinformation they provide and more their attempts to discourage the protagonist.
            This operates on a few levels. On the surface it’s emblematic of Jinako’s perceived laziness. Rather than actually create a complicated labyrinth to keep the protagonist out, she created a simple hallway and just filled it with discouraging lies. She couldn’t be bothered to put effort into making her maze challenging—all she could do was lie about its difficulty. This emphasizes her “uselessness,” though I think the point is not that Jinako is useless but rather that she perceives herself as such.
            More importantly, though, this section of dungeon-crawling is a metaphor for how Jinako experiences her life. Even simple, easy tasks appear daunting and nearly impossible, and every step along the way induces the temptation to turn back. A straightforward path is as intimidating as a maze. A small roadblock looks like a gigantic monster. Et cetera. Rather than presenting a gameplay challenge, the floor is an experiential analogue to moving through life with anxiety or depression.
            Jinako’s second floor, then, twists things even further. Instead of the long, twisty hallways typical of every chapter thus far, the second floor is just a huge, empty square. There’s no obvious way forward—it’s a floor where you feel simultaneously lost and trapped, just like Jinako does. This floor then subverts the game thus far further by having Jinako narrate a significant section of it—CCC’s first notable example of a narrative perspective shift.
            And then there’s the third floor. The third floor is somewhat more normal except for the very end—the floor’s exit is protected by a barrier that will kill anyone that passes through it. This floor represents Jinako’s sense that her actions are futile and her life meaningless. No matter what she does, the only way her life can end is with her death. This is the thing that most firmly stops Jinako from taking action. She deeply desires some form of meaning in her life, but she also feels that the world is inherently meaningless and thus that nothing she does can possibly create meaning.
            Jinako is ultimately persuaded to open up and take action regardless—primarily through the help of another character, Karna. Karna is a hero from the ancient Indian epic, the Mahabharata. He is in many ways the opposite of Jinako—infinitely selfless, enormously competent, a hero who lived a full, meaningful life. It is his support and encouragement that enables Jinako’s eventual reversal. Jinako holds Karna in enormously high regard, and his unfailing support ultimately inspires her to continue to try to take action, even if she doesn’t find the answers that allow her to resolve her anxieties.
            Jinako’s character arc in CCC is interesting in that it doesn’t resolve to the degree that one typically might expect.  Jinako doesn’t suddenly find all her answers and go from being an anguished, deeply flawed person to a heroic figure or anything. All her chapter really represents is an early stumble in the course of her overall journey towards self-betterment. It’s surprisingly subtle in a game that (and I don’t mean this negatively) is not especially subtle as a whole.

Yuga Kshetra

            And then, six years later, Jinako resurfaced in Fate/Grand Order. Each Nasuverse work exists in its own timeline, so even when familiar characters show up in FGO they typically function essentially as cameos—the characters don’t “canonically” experience the events of FGO within their home works, which keeps each Nasuverse work isolated, as it should be.
            Jinako, however, is a special case. The Jinako who appears in Yuga Kshetra is the exact same character as from CCC. CCC’s secondary antagonist—the aforementioned BB—has the ability to transcend timelines, and after the events of CCC she sent Jinako from CCC’s world to FGO’s, which means Yuga Kshetra is canonically a follow-up to Jinako’s story arc in CCC.
            This works because Jinako’s character arc was technically left unfinished. CCC did everything for Jinako it needed to—we didn’t need to see her arrive at her answers in order for her development to feel complete and satisfying—but there was room leftover to explore Jinako’s full growth as a person, and that’s exactly what Yuga Kshetra does.
            When Jinako first appears in Yuga Kshetra, she’s reluctant to do anything at all. It takes a reunion with Karna to motivate Jinako to continue pushing towards her own personal growth. As the chapter develops, she fades into the background somewhat, doing very little and growing more and more frustrated with her inability to make an impact. Meanwhile, several other characters grapple with the meaning of taking action in an inherently meaningless world, with the overall sentiment expressed most concisely by a line from the character Lakshmibai: “I do not take action because my cause is meaningful; my cause is meaningful because I take action.”
            In other words, Jinako’s traveling companions struggle with the same anxieties that colored Jinako’s CCC arc, and the conclusion they come to is that meaning can be created through action even if those actions are not intrinsically meaningful. This is not lost on Jinako, and near the end of the chapter she steps up and volunteers herself for a horrific mental trial necessary to the heroes’ goals. She survives this trial, of course, and after she finishes Karna commends her for her work, acknowledging her not only as a worthwhile human being but as a hero worthy of standing beside him as equals.
            Jinako is, of course, moved to tears.
            Jinako’s combined development in CCC and Yuga Kshetra sees her coming from a position of total incompetence and emotional paralysis and ending as a proactive, positive person capable of standing as equals with her hero and role model. It is, if nothing else, heartwarming.
            At the end of Yuga Kshetra, rather than permanently joining FGO’s main characters (as most new servants do when story chapters end), Jinako chooses to travel through parallel worlds, seeing as many different places and perspectives as she can, and learning as much as possible. In other words, she quite literally breaks out of her own world—the ultimate victory for a character whose defining trait once was locking herself in a storage closet and refusing to leave out of fear.