Keigo Takami Quotes

Every other stated ambition in this setting is upward: be the strongest, be number one, go beyond. Hawks wants the profession to become boring, which is the only genuinely radical goal anyone articulates, and he is the character least equipped to survive the world that would produce it. The Hero Public Safety Commission took him in as a child and trained him. A society with nothing for heroes to do is a society with no use for him, and he knows it while saying the sentence. That is what gives the line its strange flatness. It is a wish made by someone who has correctly worked out that he is not included in it. The genre almost never permits this. Aspirations here are supposed to be self-serving in the wholesome way, the hero's flourishing and the world's improving being the same event. He is proposing his own obsolescence and calling it the good outcome.

Offered to a villain, by the hero who has just been exposed as a spy inside that villain's organization, which makes the sincerity hard to assess and is exactly why it is worth reading closely. He has spent the arc performing warmth as tradecraft. This may be more of it. But the specific formulation (a bad hand, dealt, followed by atonement as available rather than earned) is the position he holds about himself. The series does not resolve whether he meant it, and the character is built so that he probably could not tell you either.