Vivy - Exploring Free Will through Contrasts

 This is the script of my video posted here. The Japanese script can be found here.

INTRODUCTION

As I stated in my previous essay, Vivy is absent in this arc, but we still get to explore her further by contradiction. This is done through the introduction of Ophelia, whose journey to discover her version of singing mirrors Vivy’s. In this arc we also learn about Kakitani’s past and why he does what he does, which further demonstrates the different ways an AI can evolve in this world. Both of them also contrast with Matsumoto, who in Vivy’s absence is forced to reflect on his own behaviour and shortcomings over the course of their journey so far. Here I will break down the growth of all three of them over the course of Episodes 7 to 9. I will be fully spoiling all three, and I will also be touching on later episodes, so you have been warned. Watch this later if you haven’t seen the second half of Vivy!

ANTONIO

The first thing to address is that Ophelia is actually Antonio, and this is why he is an interesting comparison to Vivy. Simply put, he is what Vivy would have become if she didn’t have a kind heart. Both of them want to sing to the best of their abilities, and both of them try to do this understanding their own hearts. The difference comes from how Antonio only cares about understanding his heart as a way to become a better singer. On the other hand, Vivy wants to understand the philosophical heart, and she wants to do so for its own sake. An easy comparison to make here is that Antonio only asks other singers how they are able to sing well, while Vivy asks all of the AIs around her how they would define the “heart” and why they do what they do, whatever it happens to be. Both of them want to be fulfilled in what they do, but they approach it from completely different angles: Antonio just wants results, while Vivy is much more earnest and passionate. I believe anyone pursuing creativity can understand both sides, be they authors, musicians or even people writing blogs. Antonio’s mindset is hinted at during his time as Ophelia, when he says that he isn’t yet at what he “knows” his singing can be.

This means Antonio is far too mechanical as a result: he only cares about the optimal outcome and doesn’t care about understanding what the heart actually means or why it’s important. For example, in Episode 8 we learn that he keeps singing Ophelia’s song over and over again instead of choosing something new to express himself, like Vivy and Diva do: he doesn’t actually care about growing, he just wants to be as good as he thinks he and Ophelia should be (which is also what he keeps saying to himself in Episode 7). This also explains why he sings the same way in the rehearsal and the main festival instead of being even better the second time (he even sings with his AI eyes visible as if to show that he is acting like a robot) and it means he will never be happy, no matter how many answers he gets, because he isn’t able to comprehend that the heart is an abstract concept and thus can’t interpret it as something that can physically help him sing. It is also because he’s detached like this that even though everyone tells him he’s an amazing singer and the audience loves his songs, he can’t accept it: he simply can’t associate his singing to his emotions or feel any sort of pride or catharsis when he performs for an audience, so he never feels as if he’s getting better, even though he was selected to perform at the Zodiac Signs Festival – as the opening act no less! He can sense that something is missing from himself – in Episode 9 he even asks what Ophelia felt as she sung – but instead of looking inward, he gets angry when people praise him and thinks his audience, his fellow singers and even Ophelia are being complacent or idiots despite doing his best to learn from them, as he does several times with Diva in Episode 7. Him getting angry also contrasts Ophelia in Episode 8’s flashback, who was simply sad at the lack of applause she got when she performed in the small theatre. He said it himself in Episode 7: Ophelia simply “loved singing”, but he was obsessed with the “best singing”. The flower falling off of his head when he reveals himself to Matsumoto could be seen as symbolising him no longer pretending to love singing or wanting to live up to Diva’s wishes, and wanting to embrace his own obsession openly instead.

And it’s in how he treats Ophelia that we see just how far this mentality takes him, in that he interprets his mission in such a way that he ends up destroying Ophelia to do so. His mission is to work with her to bring happiness to everyone with “their” song, but he believes he can act for both of them by taking over her body. This is of course false, which means he made it impossible for himself for complete his mission at all. Vivy is also desperate to fulfil her mission, but she values the well-being of the people around her more than herself, hence her willing to download the combat program to save Yuzuka despite the potential risk to her singing. Navi even accuses her of abandoning her mission just to save humanity in Episode 13! As Matsumoto says in Episode 9, in this way Antonio contrasts him too, as Matsumoto also considered abandoning Diva before choosing to trust her instead.

Antonio choosing to be purely logical in his approach to be the best singer is another way he is different to Matsumoto. Matsumoto was also always logical in his actions, even complaining that Vivy wasn’t logical in Episode 2 and beyond, but this arc forces Matsumoto to embrace his emotions and take risks. For example, it’s because he thought he could simply watch the security cameras that he was tricked and it’s only because he trusted Diva that he was able to succeed in the end. In short, Antonio’s role is to force Matsumoto to confront his behaviour and to keep Vivy on the noble path before the final story arc begins. But just like Kakitani, who we’ll discuss later, on his deathbed Antonio finally admits his true feelings, that he just wanted Ophelia to sing for him. There is actually a subtle hint about this at the start of Episode 8, when he tells Ophelia that their mission is to bring happiness with their song, without saying that they need to do so for “everyone” like he and Diva say afterwards.

MATSUMOTO

Matsumoto’s growth in this arc is about accepting that he has emotions like everyone else, and letting himself express them instead of always making jokes. He also learns to deal with other people’s emotions in the process, instead of trying to make everything work within his own world view.

He is in denial when we first see him in this arc, as he yells Vivy’s name as he saves her from Kakitani’s trap, even though he had supposedly decided not to involve her because she was a liability. He reveals later that he didn’t know about Kakitani’s presence, which means he left Ophelia to follow Diva out of concern in the first place. This paradoxical concern is best shown at the end of the episode when he uses all of his strength to save her when she jumps off of the building, so when he tells Diva that he thought she’d be too useless to help with the Project, we know that he just didn’t want her to get hurt again. Until now he has mocked Vivy for being emotional and later mocks the idea of AIs feeling love while talking about the importance of his mission (just like Antonio), yet he exposed himself to save her from Kakitani, which got him in trouble with her later, and even that was because he wanted to make sure she was alright! In other words: he risked his mission to protect her, despite calling Vivy a fool for risking hers to protect Yuzuka and Kakitani in the past! He claims to only operate due to pure logic, but Diva rightly calls him out for this.

This is the role Diva plays in his transformation. When they talk about their past relationship in Episode 8, she stops him from changing the subject and is shocked that Matsumoto and Vivy didn’t talk about their problems together. Matsumoto tells her that they only worked together for the Singularity Project and that he wasn’t interested in learning about the heart with her, then talks about how annoying Vivy was to deal with. But at the very end, even though he repeats that he didn’t want to work with her because she failed in the past, he’s clearly upset about her accident and doesn’t want her to be hurt again, and Diva sees this. This instinct to defy his own mission just to keep Vivy safe is another perfect contrast to how Antonio thought he defied his mission in an attempt to protect Ophelia, but ended up killing her instead in an attempt to be the ideal singer.

In fact, Diva explicitly points out that Matsumoto’s words don’t match his actions by reminding him that he saved her despite there being no reason to do so. Matsumoto is annoyed at this, but she gets through to him. Unfortunately, just before he admits that he actually does care about Vivy, the two are interrupted by the end of Ophelia’s performance. But it’s obvious her words had an effect on him, as he looks away and his voice becomes softer. Even in the museum, when he echoes Ophelia’s words about how important Antonio was to her, you could take it to mean Matsumoto was wondering both about how honest she was being and whether it applied to him and Vivy too!

The two start bickering again right after this, as they disagree on how to save Ophelia. It’s possible that Matsumoto’s fear of being open with others extends to all parts of his life though, as he chooses to monitor Ophelia through security cameras, again ignoring Diva when she tells him that they need to deal with the root of Ophelia’s problems to stop her from killing herself after the Festival as well. This isn’t the first time he has tried to use a hands-off approach either, as he tried to assassinate Estella and silence Saeki as well, while Vivy sought to form relationships with them and help them instead of oppose them. This is what I meant by Matsumoto not understanding other people’s feelings at the start of this section. Diva leaves to talk to Ophelia in person, and as a result of his stubborn refusal to try a personable approach or believe that he could be wrong with Diva sees Kakitani when he can't, he gets tricked by the hacked videos and Diva gets captured, and this mistake eventually leads to her death. Now that he’s alone though, he finally expresses his expressions honestly and freaks out. He even has to scold himself for placing her above his mission before flying away! If there was any doubt before, this proves that he truly does care for Diva and Vivy more than he admits.

Thankfully he’s able to find Ophelia and search for Diva at the same time due to his copies, but puts himself at risk when Antonio attacks him because he needs to devote most of his mind and body to finding her: despite mocking her all the time, he trusts her so much that he’d risk dying for her! And this brings us to yet another point of contrast between him and Antonio. As he says, he considered abandoning his partner to make things easier for himself, just as Antonio did. However, Matsumoto chose to place his faith in her instead, even though it made things more difficult in the short-term, because unlike Antonio he chose to follow his mission and trust her to carry her own burden (even seeming proud to call Diva his partner when doing so despite their prior arguing) – the very thing Antonio was too afraid to do. In doing so, not only is Matsumoto respecting his mission, he is also choosing the “emotional choice” over the logical choice of only trusting himself. Both Vivy and Diva always ignored his ideas and acted based on their emotions instead of his logic – Diva even called his ideas “haphazard” – and he did the same thing they always did: and this is what lets him win against Antonio and Kakitani in the end.

You can see many ways in which this new mindset has changed Matsumoto throughout Episode 9 and everything that follows. For example, when Kakitani is dying, he doesn’t insult him and simply says he won’t judge Kakitani’s decisions. And compared to how he mocked singing as something silly in Episode 7, he respects Diva’s wish to sing in the time she has left, and even acknowledges how devoted she is to her mission. In fact, even Diva is amazed by this change! This also shows that he no longer expects everyone to conform to his way of thinking, and combined with how he had to change his way of thinking to fulfil his mission, could be why he is so quick to agree to Vivy’s plan in Episode 13, instead of forcing her to follow his ideas.

And all of this is because Diva forced him to confront his softer side. Matsumoto knows this and clearly values what she did for him since, instead of going to sleep afterwards, he looks after Vivy just as she asked, even thinking about Diva in Episode 10. He is much kinder to Vivy too, though as I said in my previous video, he still isn’t comfortable expressing himself until they are both desperate at the end of Episode 12. Episode 10 shows this the best: when Vivy admits she’s struggling to find her heart, he laughs at her but right away motivates her by making a bet with her. He also checks in with her every year and warns her when she tries to write a song, but when she faces the problem he predicted she would, he doesn’t say “I told you so!” as he would have done in the past and simply congratulates her on finishing her song. Not only that, he remains kind even after Vivy falls asleep. He cancels their bet after seeing that she is at her wit’s end and genuinely wishes to see her again in a happier world. Diva’s request could be seen as her asking him not to revert to his old ways too, because of how well she gets to know him in their short time together. Diva even explicitly calls him “Vivy’s partner”, as if to remind him of how important he is to her!

How much he cares for Vivy is shown again in Episode 11, when his first instinct upon seeing the bad future is to find and protect her even before his own Master, and in Episode 12 when he finally stops hiding his emotions and tells her to find her own heart, something Vivy desperately needed permission to do, being fully honest with her for the first time in their 100 years together. He even does this by complaining about her just as he did with Diva, only to follow his complaints with an explanation of how amazing she is and why he respects her so deeply. It is also fitting that he forces Vivy to be honest with herself, as that’s exactly what Diva did to him! When Vivy is being sent to the past, he tells her the same words his father did, but he calls her by her true name instead of calling her “Diva”, showing that he respects the identity she’s made for herself and trusting her to save the world on her own, without insisting he be sent back instead of her. And to show how kind he has become, he even apologises before asking if Vivy really can sing when they part ways in Episode 13, instead of assuming she can’t or making fun of her as he would have back in their early years together.

As I said before, all of this is because Matsumoto was coerced by Diva into finally being honest with himself and not forcing his own views onto the world around him. That he was able to learn these two things means he also also contrasts with Kakitani, who we finally learn the history of in this arc and who I will discuss next.

KAKITANI

The motivations behind Kakitani’s actions are hinted at as far back as Episode 2, when he clutches his teacher’s piano keys as Toak retreats. We also see glimpses of his obsession in Episode 4, when he stops caring about his plan so he can confront Vivy on the Sunrise and especially in Episode 6, when he can barely control himself from demanding answers from her. We also see a glimpse of his AI teacher then as well. So we already know that his actions are fuelled by something more than just pure hatred of AIs. He even sweats profusely in Episode 4, he’s that desperate to talk to her after only seeing her once before!

We learn about his past at the end of Episode 8 and how much he admired his piano teacher, but we also see that doesn’t think highly of AIs overall as when his teacher leaves to help the people in the crashed cars, he asks “Aren’t you just a piano teacher?” In other words, even when he had no reason to hate them, he didn’t think they were capable of doing anything other than their missions – or at least, that’s the excuse he used to keep his teacher from risking his life, just as he tells himself as an adult.

But this moment shows that since his childhood, Kakitani has been a firm believer of determinism when it comes to AIs: that they should only be allowed to do one thing and one thing alone, and that that’s the only thing they can do. In fact, this is exactly what he says in Episode 6. This is why he is so confused by Vivy choosing to save him instead of escaping with Aikawa, even willing to be shot by him as a result. Yet, even though he is aware that Vivy is capable of more than just her mission, he is also in denial about it, demanding why she does what she does in Episode 6 (even though Vivy is watching over him just as she did in Episode 2) and refusing to believe Diva can behave the same way as her in Episode 9. But this confusion also reflects his confused feelings towards his teacher.

The belief that an AI should only ever work to complete their mission and nothing else is what makes Kakitani both pitiful and dangerous, as when he becomes an AI as well, he applies that logic to himself as well. As I said before, we’ve seen signs of how mad he is before, but by choosing to get an answer from Vivy for his mission, he cursed himself to only work towards getting an answer from her and nothing else. For example, even though Diva is a singer with a similar past to Vivy, he never thinks of asking her for her opinion, insisting multiple times that Vivy is the only one who can answer him, even injecting Diva with a virus to force Vivy out of hiding. Even when Diva says the exact same thing that both Vivy and his teacher told him, he just gets angry, only acknowledging her as someone who can also answer his question when he’s on his deathbed.

His strong belief that an AI should “stick to their lane” also means he torments himself in pursuit of his answer too, from waiting 40 years for a single day to jumping out of a skyscraper to catch Diva after being caught in an explosion. What’s interesting is that he doesn’t understand that even though Vivy and his teacher did things that weren’t directly related to playing the piano or singing, they always had their missions in their minds: they were simply acting for the long-term benefits of their missions, to ensure that people would live to enjoy their music. Kakitani on the other hand believes all AIs should only work to achieve their goals in the simplest of terms and this is something else that he makes himself do too: for example, he could have interpreted his mission as anything that would let him learn about AIs – or he could even have realised that he himself was free to do anything he wanted despite being an AI – but he still staked everything on getting an answer from a specific AI at a specific time and place. Becoming an AI gave him an excuse to stop hiding the obsession her had as a human and devote everything he had to pursuing Vivy no matter how painful or pointless his mission was, just like Antonio. But he only became his own definition of an AI: incredibly simple and short-sighted.

But even when fighting Diva, he shows that he clearly still loves his teacher dearly – he calls him his “teacher” instead of by his name or by calling him an AI, and even lets slip near the end of the fight that he’s only angry about AIs thinking for themselves because that’s why he died – but it’s only when he’s about to die that he realises what he truly wanted; much like how Antonio only gained clarity in his final moments. In fact we can see the birth of this inner conflict at his teacher’s funeral, where his ability to grieve is blocked by his disgust at how his teacher was humiliated: all he wanted to know was whether his teacher suffered as a human would, and whether he should be treated as a human because of it. It’s understandable then that he would apply this same question to Vivy, another AI who was able to think outside of her direct mission just like his teacher.

Not only that: we see a message he recorded just before confronting Diva in Episode 11 and we learn that despite everything he said and did, when he allowed himself to be human instead of what he thought an AI should be, we see that deep down he really did care about Elizabeth. He even jokes with her a little and asks her to protect the rest of Toak, showing that he cared about them too despite leaving them behind in pursuit of Vivy (we saw him care for them in Episode 6, which is also when he insulted Elizabeth directly). We see some hints of this in Episode 4 as well, with him thanking Elizabeth for her service and the gentle expression on his face when waking up in the escape shuttle at the end, but back then he had convinced himself he hated all AIs. But in the message, even though he hid his feelings for the sake of his mission, we see that he understood that he never truly hated AIs: he just hated that his teacher died and wanted to learn why. In a strange way, it may be better to say that in truth he loved AIs and saw them as people (he kept his teacher’s piano keys with him for his entire life, after all), but his intense grief and disgust at how they were treated hid that from even himself except for those few moments of clarity (maybe even when he clutched his teacher’s keys in Episode 2, realising he’d met an AI just like him was his first moment of clarity?) It makes perfect sense why Elizabeth is so amazed by the video and why his granddaughter created her own faction within Toak!

And just as she understood what Matsumoto truly felt about Vivy, I believe Diva understood this about Kakitani too. She even tells him during their fight that the person that Kakitani wants to talk to isn’t Vivy, but his teacher, and when Kakitani puts her in a headlock she is silent while he demands to talk to Vivy. She also looks sad when he is dying and tries to hold his hand. I think she pitied him and wanted him to be honest with his feelings, just she did with Matsumoto. She succeeded in changing both of them, but unlike Matsumoto, Kakitani was only able to tell her what he truly wanted to know and acknowledge people outside of his narrow world view moments before he died. In this way, I believe Diva’s greatest strength – and something Vivy lacked until much later – was that she was in touch with the emotions of the people around her. She understood them better than they understood themselves, so it’s only natural that she also understood her own emotions and found a definition for her heart far more easily than Vivy could.

CLOSING

Thank you very much for making it to the end of this essay. I hope you found it very informative! This is something I’ve been wanting to write for a long time, but I wasn’t happy with my first draft: I hope this version does a much better job of conveying what I wanted to say, as I really like how Matsumoto changes over this arc and how both Kakitani and Antonio reflect him and Vivy in different ways and inspire them to be better! Please keep your eyes on the script as I will likely update from time to time with things I forgot to mention, because as I said before: there’s so much depth to Vivy! Even while writing this, I learned some very clever and important details!

Please let me know what you thought about this and if there’s anything I should add or correct. Please also consider subscribing to my YouTube channel and like the video to help me grow, and if you can, I would greatly appreciate support via Patreon or Ko-Fi as well. Thank you all once more and, as always, have a great day.