The Phantom Thieves of Hearts.
The biggest sensation of last year. The center of the biggest
scandals of last year.
The
worst possible thing to try to look back on. It had been hard enough keeping up with it in the moment, and Hikari'd been
invested in how things turned out, beyond any sort of reason. Now, clicking through news articles, a large portion of them had been retracted, and some of those
retractions had been retracted, and even some of the pieces that were untouched, it was impossible to tell if the author still stood by them.
That was fine, she cared less about what people thought of them
now than how they'd thought
then, but literally no other subject on the internet was like this. Not within such a small timeframe, at least.
She'd known the shifting tides of public opinion were volatile, but before last year, she hadn't thought it was
possible for the shifts to get that extreme. People loved or hated them, and which one it was changed around by the day, sometimes. And yet, somehow, the articles always spoke like a monolith.
...Maybe it was just that journalistic integrity was dead.
Eventually, through careful backtracking and her own knowledge of the timeline of events, she reached what she believed to be the earliest news article about the Phantom Thieves' activities. They weren't mentioned by
name, of course, it'd be another month before that really got off the ground, but such was the benefit of hindsight.
Perhaps that was why it was so much less... sensational... than anything that came after.
Suguru Kamoshida Arrested
This morning, police were called out to Shujin Academy. One of the teachers, and a former Olympic medalist, turned himself in confessing to years of abuse against the students there.
"He looked really broken up about it," claims one of his students. "Like... 'he took over the morning assembly and tried to kill himself there' type of broken up. I'm not sure what he thought that would have fixed, I didn't sign up for being a witness to a suicide, but good on him for growing a conscience, I guess."
Kamoshida's list of confessions includes physical and sexual abuse of his students, as well as abuse of his power over expulsions. He claims responsibility for at least one student's attempted suicide.
More details will be released as the situation evolves.
...Suguru Kamoshida. For whatever reason, whenever Hikari saw the name, she imagined a giant rabbit with carrot cannons. She had no idea
where that mental image came from, but it existed, and she just had to live with it.
He was the subject of a number of other articles, as varied as there were stars in the sky. The days where the Phantom Thieves were unpopular saw a
truly massive amount of apologia, with some people even claiming that the crimes had been completely made up, and he'd just been brainwashed into believing in them. At least one of
those article writers had been sued into oblivion by the family of one of the victims. Some of them still kept going.
These days, most people agreed that there was physical evidence of
someone assaulting students at Shujin Academy, and that only one person had confessed to it, and the assaults stopped as soon as that person was arrested. Most left the question of the Phantom Thieves out of it.
Given the utter mess that was news articles that mentioned them directly, probably a smart decision.
Madarame and whatever happened with Medjed weren't as extensively covered after the fact. People just didn't care about old artists as much as they did recent Olympic medalists, and Medjed were a faceless hacker group. There wasn't much for people to go back over.
Okumura
was extensively covered, but that was... well, months after the fact, it turned out he'd been assassinated by
someone else, but it took long enough for that to come out. Like with Kamoshida, at least one reporter took this to mean that rumors of his mistreatment of workers was entirely fake despite documents that were eventually uncovered proving it. Some people insisted on saying that even now.
The top staff of Okumura Foods was
not among those people, and in Hikari's mind, that was damning enough. They'd actually maintained a pretty consistent assertion that all the allegations were true, which begged the question of why so many people were jumping out to defend them.
After this was a few articles celebrating how the leader of the Phantom Thieves had committed suicide in police custody. It was
clearly some kind of cover story, though, given what happened next.
Masayoshi Shido. Where to even
begin with Masayoshi Shido. The way some of those articles discussed him, it was like he was the center of their
religion or something.
Not just about the Phantom Thieves, either. Discussions of the election were more one-sided than she'd expected from even the usual suspects. She'd thought at the time that everything felt a bit odd, but looking back, it was weirder than she'd realized.
...Probably because she'd spent most of that time preoccupied with what school to apply to, and studying for entrance exams, and all those fun third-year activities. She'd just been too
busy to notice if anything was off.
A lot of things must have been off, though, if literally every journalist in Tokyo was writing
like that.
She wondered what else she must have missed.
It must have been a lot. Even now, text could only give her so much.
And even in the depths of research, she still needed to take breaks.
[ ] Did studying count as a break? She wasn't sure it did. She was doing it anyway.
-[ ] By herself.
-[ ] With Hanaya Chatani.
-[ ] With Tsukane Akabori.
-[ ] With Kazamu Kota.
[ ] Now that she knew a bit more, maybe Phantasmagoria would be a bit easier to explore.
-[ ] Theater Two.
-[ ] Theater Four.
[ ] Going to a cafe... might actually have counted as a break.
-[ ] With Hanaya Chatani.
-[ ] With Tsukane Akabori.
-[ ] With Kazamu Kota.
[ ] Maybe it was time for a movie night?
[ ] Maybe she could just play video games until she completely forgot about anything that was relevant to her life?
