Plurk paste

Shuusei Kagari is a latent criminal. While everyone in the series is to some degree impacted, sometimes profoundly, by the privileges and restrictions of the Sybil System presiding over Japan, Kagari is in the unique position of being completely defined by his relation to it. Marked as a latent criminal at the age of five and effectively raised in an isolation facility, Kagari’s entire life has been not about self-actualization or fulfillment, but rather negotiating the path to the least possible suffering.

Unlike the rest of the Enforcers, Kagari is not someone who fell off from the expected path, whose mental health hit a stumbling block and never recovered. Instead, a machine decided from nearly the beginning of his life that he would never have even the possibility of a future, that he was better off isolated from society at large. His fate was never truly his own to decide, and Kagari copes with this largely through excessive hedonism. Whenever he has time to himself, he’s having whatever fun he can in the most aggressively irresponsible ways possible, whether that means getting drunk, screwing around on the internet or playing video games even while others are discussing important cases, or filling up on as much sugary junk as he can possibly get his hands on. He’ll ignore the Ministry of Welfare’s news bulletins and mental health advice because none of that is relevant to him or ever will be, and he jokes that it’s the privilege of latent criminals like him to be able to indulge in risky behaviors like consuming alcohol, which ordinary citizens avoid due to the potential for Psycho Pass deterioration.

Regardless of this constant hedonism, Kagari might seem at first glance to be remarkably stable and functional for someone who was never allowed to be properly socialized--cheerful, friendly, carefree. However, there are clear signs of the anger and bitterness that lurks underneath the surface. He is intensely resentful of the position Sibyl placed him in, ostensibly due to some inherent flaw within his brain that made him unworthy of living a normal life, and that translates into an almost childish inability to tolerate anything he sees as taking one’s freedoms in life for granted. He challenges Kogami to a fight when he first arrives at the MWPSB, seeing him as a member of the spoiled elite who’s unprepared for the world he’s entered upon his fall from grace. He throws his past in the isolation facility since childhood in Akane’s face purely for shock value because the idea of her being overwhelmed by choices seemed like such a ridiculously nice problem to have. He almost seems to revel in the sanction to take out his aggressions on the “acceptable” targets Sybil has designated as similarly unfit for society, and claims after a riot caused by helmets that could disrupt cymatic scans to have found it satisfying to see the same “wholesome” citizens who’d dismissed him as a monster and thrown him away were now killing each other.

If there is anything that can rival the resentment Kagari has for society, though, it would be the resentment he feels toward himself. Kagari is shown to have a very skewed sense of self; at one point he tells another latent criminal that they are both “nothing but trash who envy the happiness of others.” He’s come to have internalized the notion that he was more or less born so quintessentially deficient as a human being in some way that his very existence was a threat to society, and for all his anger and bitterness about his situation, he seems to accept Sybil’s assessment of him as objective reality. The person that Kagari becomes is in a sense almost a self-fulfilling prophecy; society sees no value in him except as a hunting dog with which to capture the rest of Japan’s undesirables, and in turn, Kagari takes on his role with no moral reservations, content to be unleashed on whoever Sybil sees fit.

The spots of viciousness exhibited by Kagari, however, appear to be just that; after his initial outburst at Akane, they are later seen to get along well, and he clearly both respects and likes her. He refers to Kogami familiarly as Kou-chan, and they are said in supplemental materials to spar and play video games together. In the side novel about Kagari, he’s shown to have a vulnerability toward kids in particular, feeling a sense of protectiveness toward them due to the suffering he himself experienced as a child, shuffled from one isolation facility to the next. Even when given the opportunity to join Makishima’s crusade to take down the Sybil System, Kagari categorically refuses. Not out of any Stockholm-esque attachment to the system, but out of the sentiment that those who utilized their choices to cause shit for other people shouldn’t get to reap the benefits. He may not have a conventional sense of justice and morality the way some of his fellow Enforcers do, but he’s not purely out for himself, either. Kagari is a pack animal, through and through. He cares deeply about his team, about Kogami’s quest to avenge his late subordinate Sasayama by bringing down Makishima, even about protecting Akane’s pristine Psycho Pass, despite her being ostensibly part of the ruling class he should (and by and large, does) hate. Indeed, one radio drama mentions that he enjoys his work as an Enforcer not because he cares about protecting the public, but because he gets to live and work with his fellow members of Division One--the only place he’s ever belonged.

In light of all that, it’s likely that all of his hedonistic, pleasure-seeking behaviors are not only intended as enjoyment for its own sake, but a means of constant distraction from the anger and pain that might otherwise threaten to consume him. They say the best revenge is living well, and what better “fuck you” to the system that ruined his life than to be as happy as possible as often as possible? He believes life is just killing time waiting for death, and he’s going to enjoy the goddamn ride, regardless of whatever anyone else has to say about it.