"Harrow" by Yuzuriha Kotoko (MILGRAM)

"Harrow" Album Cover

Yuzuriha Kotoko is a 20-year-old woman who has been imprisoned for murder. I like to call her The Punisher of MILGRAM. She could also be considered like a Batman figure, but without the strict morals that Batman adheres too. (Punisher is a vigilante from Marvel Comics who hunts down bad people and kills them without mercy.)

She is the 10th prisoner, and has a sense of superiority, or authority because her whole thing is that she finds people who have done bad things, and most likely kills them--like The Punisher.

In Harrow, the second line is "I can't forgive the evil hunting the weak", and the whole song is basically about how anybody who hurts someone is evil, but not her though! She's cool because she hurts the evil who hurts the week. So it starts to become a commentary on if somebody evil is killed, is their killer also a bad person? Or should they be punished the same way as someone evil who kills? "Evil" would have to be defined, but Kotoko does define it as "Oppressing innocent weaklings" from her 20th interrogation question from her first trial.

She sees anybody who wants to hurt or oppress those who cannot defend themselves, as evil. And she does not hesitate whatsoever to administer who own judgement (more on that later).

Throughout the video we get a LOT of wolf motifs, most likely comparing her to a lone wolf because she does work alone to get her "evil-doers". We also see just how smart she is, gathering different news reports, and even paying people to get information about these people. The people she seems to look for are those who kidnap young girls. She is relentless in her search, and she is very good at it, hence why she's like The Punisher or Batman.

She's also brutal in her administering of justice. At the end of the video, after she finds the man she's been essentially hunting, she reveals a pair of brass knuckles and just goes to town on the man. One of the very last frames we see is Kotoko standing over a body, with a pool of blood underneath them, much more blood than there should be if she just knocked him out or even killed him--she had to beat him bloody and keep beating him even after he died in order for that much blood to pool.

Kotoko was voted Innocent for her first trial. After this first trial, and before her second trial, she beat all of the guilty prisoners, some of which I've talked about in this blog, Mahiru, Mikoto, and Prisoner 3, Fuuta. She did say in her second interrogation or voice drama (don't remember) that she would have gone after Amane (the 12-year-old) but she simply ran out of time. It wasn't a 'light' beating, Fuuta lost an eye, and Mahiru was severely injured and had to be constantly looked over by the 5th prisoner who was a doctor. Mikoto managed to hold his own (because of John Doe), but she took the verdicts of the other prisoners into her own hands, administering her own justice solely based on the verdict. She even becomes the guard's second-hand, taking on a deputy role and playing even more into her authoritative mindset.

Kotoko is such an interesting character because she embodies the idea of "does killing a killer make you a bad person?" She has killed before, and is clearly not afraid to hurt people she deems evil, but to her, and to maybe some viewers, who doing this is the right thing because they have been judged, and she is simply the one who must give out punishment.

She's Batman (or The Punisher).