yakuza 6 retrospective, spoilers ahead

ok this ain't conclusive but i wanna like. babble about daigo and found family a bit.

rgg has always heavily featured adoptive/found family dynamics. it's a reallllyy common thing for the series. kiryu is an orphan. big man literally starts an orphanage. the series begins with him losing his adoptive family to the criminal underworld and beginning a new one with haruka. the rest of his life is this cycle of violence and protection and failure and it's all real tragic for him. you know how it is. he's got that need to get involved to protect something or someone or some principle and along the way the people he loves get roped in and he always, always messes up just enough for people to die where they technically didn't have to. it's essential to the series that kiryu can't leave well enough alone, or at least that others can't for him. and because he's basically invincible, the main thing at stake for him and for us plot-wise is his emotional state. who will he lose, how much will he hate himself, what new drastic step will he take to cut himself, the tumor, from the bodies of those he cares about, etc.? he gets involved for family and is tortured by it. those adoptive relationships are essential to the games' narratives.

but throughout it all there's been a kind of tension, a hesitance to treat these adoptive families as equally legitimate to bio families. every time kiryu speaks about kazama or haruka speaks about kiryu, there's this kneecapping thing going on. it's always "i consider you to be sorta exactly like a father to me emotionally and whatnot even though we're not "real" family or whatever" rather than "you are my dad". even (to my memory, so if i get this wrong it'll be REAL embarrassing) haruka and kiryu, whose father-daughter relationship is vital to his entire saga (particularly yk and y6 as their bookends) don't declare themselves literal family. it's always "he raised me like his own daughter" or "i viewed you as my daughter". (and even if it is said explicitly somewhere, the kneecapping never goes away).

and clearly the series does see these bonds as incredibly emotionally important, or it wouldn't keep centering them. even other relationships feature this, like saejima and yasuko's devoted step-sibling bond or the hirose family's relationship to their patriarch or the y3 patriarch guy and his adoptive daughter. i don't think a series that saw blood relationships as inherently superior would show these, consistently, as the most precious ones to our heroes. blood is not disregarded (see yuta and haruto, sayama and ryuji, and tachibana and makoto as examples), but found/adoptive families are more commonly positive (in the main plot) and are, i think, considered just as if not more important by the narrative.

so, why the kneecapping? i think it's a social thing. plenty of (and probably most) cultures see blood dynamics as more important than other/chosen families, or even just regular friends. more than that, it's a very vulnerable thing to admit to someone that you view them as family, let alone declare that relationship as official. what if they don't feel the same? what if they want things to stay as-is? that hesitance is, to me, one on the part of the characters rather than the games, though i think that's more of a toss up than I'm portraying it as.

and here's where daigo comes in as the last of these declarations in the saga. daigo is kiryu's son. at the end of y6 kiryu writes that he, without any right to, views daigo as his son. he says he's failed him, but that he has one more request: don't avenge him like a son would a father, because his life's not worth that. when daigo declares the order, he says it was his father's last request not to attack the yomei alliance. he doesn't say kiryu was a father figure or anything or that he felt the same way, but that he IS/WAS his father, and a good man.

he claims that relationship for himself, regardless of whether or not kiryu thinks he's worthy of it.

now, perhaps it's easier for daigo to say this because

1. kiryu's "dead", and therefore can't reject him

2. kiryu already said he felt that way, so in some ways, daigo was more grabbing a hand already offered than reaching out himself.

but i still think this declaration is really important for the series. daigo deems him worthy while still respecting his final wish, in essence forgiving kiryu for his mistakes.

throughout y6 there's been an emphasis the scene itself draws attention to on parent-child, and especially father-son, relationships, and how the parents failed their kids and the kids hurt them back and all that mess. it's about the child's willingness to forgive what the parent can't, something seen in kazama and kiryu, in haruka and kiryu, and in the hirose family. kiryu chooses to finally cut his family off completely because he could never forgive himself for their deaths, regardless of how often they would (and did) forgive him for endangering them. it's the end of his series-long struggle to choose between protecting large numbers of strangers and protecting his little family. by then he's made so many enemies in these escapades that he can't protect them; he messed up too badly to be around them safely now, even if he never set foot in kamurocho again. it was too late. and daigo, having been presented with his flawed found father's feelings on the matter, forgives him like a child (by y6's standards) would, puts his foot down and determines the nature of the relationship himself. he states it as fact, like a patriarch would. kiryu is daigo's father.

i honestly think some of kiryu's inability to leave the tojo alone (in the instances where it is his choice) makes much more sense with the daigo relationship in mind. he was torn between two of his children. on one hand, he had a defenseless girl with no one in the world but him. on the other, he had an adult surrounded by guards and who could, frankly, kick moderate amounts of ass. faced with the need to choose (the inability to split his attention without bloodshed demonstrated time and time again), he tried to choose haruka every time. daigo probably gets it, too. but, though he course-corrected and helped daigo at various key points, he still left the main protection and guidance to others, namely majima. he really wasn't there for him consistently. he was, if any kind of father, a neglectful one.

but daigo says he's his dad. like it's unquestionable.

now, whether or not it's noble or beautiful to accept neglectful parents is not really something i want to focus on much, though I'll outline my thoughts briefly. most people aren't in kiryu's position, and daigo and kiryu likely formed this relationship in adulthood (though they did interact when daigo was young, i think kiryu really assumed the father role later, during/after yk2), which is itself not typical for these relationships (or, rather, kiryu neglected him as an adult rather than as a child, so the effects are inherently going to be different and, i believe, less severe than if a caretaker neglected a child as a child). cases of emotional neglect are even more complicated because they're often unintentional, and kiryu's lack of direct responsibility for him further complicates things. and, really, if choosing a relationship with someone who's "undeserving" is valid by this narrative's standards, i think it could also mean it is equally valid to choose a lack of relationship to people, to tell the people who raised you "you are not my parents" if it is better/true for you. when it comes to forgiving lackluster parents, my view is that the individual's choice is what matters most, rather than what they choose specifically. in this case, daigo sees kiryu's regret and acknowledgement of his failures and forgives him, thinks him a good man. is this too lenient? perhaps. i find it endearing because i love kiryu, but the broader implications could be weird. idk.

my point is that daigo, and by extension, y6, believes that, regardless of if anyone's "worth it", and regardless of if they're related to you, if that relationship means something to you, it's yours to describe as you wish. your family is what your feelings make it, and adoptive families don't have to be an approximate of those family roles. they don't have to merely resemble family; they can be family. kiryu may have seen kazama as his father regardless of his crimes, but daigo says kiryu's his father regardless, and in doing so, makes official and defined the feelings they share, even if kiryu's not around to call him his son.

so, let me say it again: daigo is kiryu's son, kiryu is daigo's father, and those words from both are all that matter in proving it so.