Nagisa Renge/History
Life means suffering. |
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Eight years ago [as of the start of the game], the Kirijo Group experimented on a group of one hundred children for the purpose of artificially inducing their Personas, putting them under the knife of advanced surgical procedures and giving them expensive, addictive drugs to control their powers. Because of this, the vast majority of those children died, and those that survived were sentenced to a greatly reduced lifespan--either their own Personas would kill them, or the suppressant drugs would, as one of its inconvenient side effects, induce an early death.
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The origin of suffering is attachment. |
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It would be a lie to say that no one ever did love her. Nagisa managed to survive in face of her near-constant pain and the occasional proto-Persona attack, and the homeless shelters in Sumaru City gave her places to sleep and eat. The money she stole from homes and businesses when she returned to Port Island were shared with the poor when she returned to Sumaru City, to let her rationalize her "bad" actions. It was the little things that allowed her to keep her sanity--learning how to cook, talking with other homeless people, helping the shelter workers, helping out at libraries where she also stayed for hours to read, learning other people's stories, wandered and ran through the streets at night to explore Sumaru, and in a twist that never occurred to Nagisa to be messed up, was taught by an older homeless man who'd lost his own daughter to violence how to use knives to "dissuade" assailants and perverts. Nagisa slowly gained an understanding that, as unfortunate as her life was, she was not alone in feeling that way. It, at the very least, made it a little easier for her to try to be "good," and for a given value of happiness in light of her situation and her constant repressed fears and loneliness, she was, or at least could be, happy.
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The cessation of suffering is attainable. |
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All of a sudden, it seemed to Nagisa as if the universe, for all its uncaring ugliness and thoughtless cruelty, was more beautiful than she could have imagined. The stars were brilliant and spread to all corners of the sky, and the full moon seemed to wrap her gently in cool light. Truly beholding them made Nagisa realize how vast a place it was, and how small she was within it. Why should the universe care? It wasn't that it was being cruel to her specifically, or that it favored anyone in particular. It was what it was, as was everything within it. An end would someday come to everything. Hers had just come then, that was all. In this way, all the pain and suffering and anxiety she had endured was unthinkably petty, but because it was petty, it was something she could rise above. There was no point in regretting or begrudging her short life, and in this way, the beauty that was the world would envelope her and return her to a place where there was no more suffering. And so, with this sudden understanding of the universe, Nagisa severed her attachment to life, accepted her death, and closed her eyes, letting darkness surround her.
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The eightfold path leads to the cessation of suffering. |
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And so Nagisa made her decision to start a new life, which she has embraced over the last year. She utilized the power of her Persona and the skills she'd learned on the streets to gain the strength enough to "help" others, the first of whom being those shelter workers who'd been warped as a result of the rumors that had been spread about them. They survived the attack--and by Nagisa's perspective, they seem these days much more sedate and at peace (or, possibly more accurately, terrified). More recently, she also began to hear the preachings of Strega, and recognizing its leader Takaya and supporters Jin and Chidori from their brief time together as the Kirijo Group experiments, Nagisa traveled back to Port Island and approached them, introducing herself plainly and asking to join them. Surprised to see that anyone else had survived those experiments, the three accepted her easily enough, at least from Nagisa's perspective. These days, she goes between Sumaru and Port Island to help Strega with their work, believing in Takaya and the message of the Fall--knowing very well from her own experience that death can, indeed, save someone. Whether she's simply deluding herself or not depends on one's point of view. |