Utsuro was a poorly written villain

Quite surprising considering other villains Sorachi has written and even more surprising taking into consideration he’s the final boss. I tried to keep this as concise as possible focusing on both the character and the story.

How he affected the story

Gintama, through its comedy and serious arcs, showed how people struggle and overcome different situations in their lives. The main characters, Gintoki, Shinpachi and Kagura, have suffered losses that made an impact on them and on who they’re. This is especially true in Gintoki’s case, since he not only lost the war, he lost his friends and his master, by his own hands. Then, part of Gintoki’s story arc was to show how he deals with the consequences of his decision. However, when Utsuro was introduced a large part of the emotional weight said decision entailed dissipated. Gintoki was supposed to be one of the many orphans, one of the many who fought, one of the many who lost. And how with the same events he, Katsura and Takasugi took different paths. But Utsuro changed that, giving them a chance to atone themselves, something no one in the universe could have. At the beginning we’re told this character isn’t Shouyou, they just share the same body, although this would prove to be incorrect later. That Utsuro killed the Shouyou persona, but it still was Gintoki the one who killed his master. That Takasugi knew it all along. The story had to adjust itself to work around Utsuro, instead of Utsuro explaining the story. 

The altana

This power helped to explain the advanced technology present in the series and why the Earth was a target. Nevertheless, it was never really explained how it worked. People could regenerate with some blood, or ashes, it wears off after some months or years, can reincarnate, can possess bodies… it became the ace up his sleeve to justify the plot. Besides, it was properly introduced to the series pretty late, in chapter 554. Said chapter discloses Utsuro as a being born of altana, but how this happened and what makes him different from Kouka, who died when she moved away from her birth planet, isn’t explained either.

He doesn’t make sense

Utsuro founded the Tenshouin Naraku because the government decided it, then lead the organization for centuries. His backstory is tragic, he was persecuted, tortured and killed. However, most of the time he was very passive in the sense of letting things happen. If people found out somehow he’s immortal, why couldn’t he just go to another town once discovered? Or another country for that matter. He always stayed in Japan, letting himself be locked up and leading a group because others told him so for 500 years. He wanted to escape the suffering but didn’t make an effort until the last years of the story, when the Shouyou persona decided to leave and pursue happiness. Later he rejoins the organization in order to end himself by blowing up the entire planet since he can’t die for some reason, although he tried to survive when he fought against everyone. On top of that, dying, as seen in chapter 703, was actually easy.

Being the final villain

What does a final boss, or any antagonist for that matter, need? A video I watched (The Dark Knight — Creating the Ultimate Antagonist by Lessons from the Screenplay) explains it very well.

1. A powerful antagonist is exceptionally good at attacking the hero’s greatest weakness 2. Antagonists pressure protagonists into making difficult choices 3. Antagonists compete for the same goal as the protagonists 4. An antagonist causes the hero to grow

Something powerful about Utsuro was his physical strength and immortality, but there wasn’t any other struggle that actually posed a threat. Despite knowing vital information of Gintoki, he didn’t use it to target any vulnerability of him. Utsuro didn’t succeed into pushing Gintoki’s limits, test and reveal his character, either. Maybe he wasn’t the right antagonist to our hero, or maybe he could’ve been if handled differently, who knows. But he failed to have a profound and specific effect on the story and the protagonist. There wasn’t any battle of beliefs and principles, or a moment when Gintoki really questioned himself, or the chance to understand where Utsuro was coming from because of what Utsuro’s goal was. He just wanted to die. In order to to that, he must sacrifice the entire planet. The good guys can’t allow that to happen, right? The problem is, it’s way too impersonal.

The downfall

There’s more to be desired of the final boss than be a fully crafted character and complement the protagonist in things such as personality, values and objectives. They need to be the climax of the story, therefore, embody the story. Ultimately, Utsuro’s theme was about emptiness, he thinks everyone is hollow and is useless to struggle against fate. But in the end he realizes that, in fact, people are hollow, but because they know that, they can bring other people in to live on inside them. This is the reason why Takasugi couldn’t be the final boss, there’s just not philosophycal weight in him realizing that since it wasn’t his theme and he never detached himself from people. However, since there never was a clash of ideologies between Gintoki and Utsuro, that realization falls flat, also because the way the antagonist is overcomed is essential to the conclusion and Gintoki did it just by hitting him.

I understand that Sorachi didn’t have everything planned from the start and coming up with new ideas each week can be very difficult and stressful. But not being able to craft the final villain since his first appearance (ch. 541 in May 18, 2015) to the last (ch. 703 May 27 2019) it’s a shame since it affected the story in a negative way.

TL;DR: OP villain 😈 fails in his quest to be a good antagonist 😢

Hello! Thanks for writing this, because I do like reading your point of view even if I don’t necessarily agree with it entirely. I hope you don’t mind if explain why I think Utsuro was a pretty good villain.

I think in many ways, Utsuro was the culmination of what all the characters in Gintama had been enduring and fighting back against throughout the series: anger, futility, despair, emptiness, loneliness, anguish, hatred etc. All things very central to Gintoki’s struggle throughout the series, and things implied to not really ‘end’.

As I understand it, Utsuro is not really a ‘man with a mission’ so much as ‘an idealogy to be challenged’ - and that is built into his ‘monstrosity’; the way he is able to possess others, and revive over and over again, until someone gave him an ‘answer’, such as Gintoki did in Chapter 703.

It is because people have emptiness, have loneliness or despair in whatever form - and it is because they lose to the Utsuro inside of them that he is able to take root inside of them and guide their actions.

And for the sake of structure, I’ll address the four points you brought up:

What is Gintoki’s greatest weakness? Or Takasugi’s or Katsura’s?

Was it their trauma due to the cruelty of the machinations of the government as it tore apart its own citizens? In a way, Utsuro helped build that. Was it the ‘death’ of Shouyou? Utsuro did that.

Is it the fragility of hope?

Utsuro, when he appears, is the culmination of the foreboding shadow that has threatened to stamp out the bud of new life (as a ‘human’!) that Gintoki has built in the 10 years after the war, the slow change that Katsura has been tirelessly fighting for near his entire life, and a seeming perversion of the idol that Takasugi had built his life around.

Nobume points out that the moment he sees Utsuro, Gintoki tends to lose sight of all else around him - and we see Gintoki feeling like he’s stood still the past 20 or so years of his life, feeling like he hasn’t overcome any of his emotional challenges throughout the series. Standing off against Utsuro is like Gintoki standing against the shadow of loss and despair that’s been cast over him his entire life.

…Chapter 703?

He is what Kagura, Kamui and Umibouzu unite to fight against when they have been doing their own thing the entire series. He is what Shinpachi fully comes to an understanding (?) with his father against, when he thought ‘his dad never did anything for them’ and joined Gintoki to find out what it was all about.

If you think Utsuro’s goal is simply ‘to die’, I don’t think so.

I think it’s actually the same as Gintoki’s: The ending of suffering. Specifically their own.

Dying is simply the means that Utsuro chose, and because he’s sort of the personification of all the Utsuros’s hatred, he chooses to do so via a global-scale murder-suicide.

(In some ways, this is also what Takasugi wanted to do - but Takasugi’s was on a smaller scale? What’s important is that Takasugi has been portrayed to be ‘the destructive path Gintoki didn’t take’ and the inverse of what Gintoki could have become after the war.)

Gintoki also wanted to not suffer anymore, to be relieved of the burden of his life:

- but as the series progressed, bit by bit he chooses to keep living instead, even if it continues his suffering. He continues to choose ‘the manju for his breakfast’ rather than the one laid on his grave.

Since I see Utsuro as an extension of an ideology or way of thinking that runs as an undercurrent to the events of Gintama as a whole, I think every time Gintoki overcomes his despair and chooses to live on instead of giving up sorta counts, but that’s just me :P

For an example more directly his doing though, something could be said about Utsuro causing Gintoki and Takasugi’s relationship to grow (and.. I don’t mean this in a ‘shippy’ way - Takasugi and Gintoki, and by extension the Joy4, never would have reconciled and fought together once more if not for the looming threat of Utsuro) by making them face their past and restarting a war.

With regards to Utsuro leaving, I think the recollection he gives is vague enough that we can imagine that maybe he did, but no matter where on Earth he went he was persecuted. Or maybe it’s a reference to how the historical Yoshida Shouin actually tried to leave Japan but was caught and executed (his physical freedom seems to have been very limited when he was alive).

I think the Utsuros’s reasons for continuing to serve as an assassin are more complicated than just ‘Emperor told me so’ (though there is some symbolism in that) - there was probably a lot of pent up rage, frustration, resentment, longing and revenge that they wanted meted out and kept them in the cycle of killing (”the me that hated humans, the me that feared humans, the me that longed for humans; they were all me”).

Hello! First of all, I’m sorry for taking so long to respond. I enjoy reading what others have to say, but I forget to check for replies and I’ve been very busy 🙇‍♀️

We both agree on what Utsuro sought to represent, the criticism I make is regarding the lack of development of the theme.

As you mention, he doesn’t have a mission, but his ideology also doesn’t represent something to be challenged by the cast. Not wanting to suffer more is, on the one hand, very vague, and on the other hand, a thing that all the characters share, so we cannot say it’s an objective for which Utsuro and Gintoki compete and that unites them in a special way. 

Utsuro wants to end the suffering through his death, which involves destroying the Earth, independent of Gintoki. Gintoki only gets involved because he feels obligated by who Shouyou was in the past and of course, because it compromises the lives of those who live on Earth. This brings a couple of problems I didn’t mention before.

The first is that the objective is so implausible (to destroy the world) there is no tension, suspense or challenge because you know this won’t happen. The second is related to having a villain with multiple personalities, it’s complex since it isn’t enough to develop a single personality and then try to attribute those characteristics to the others (and Shouyou wasn’t developed well either). This could’ve been raffled off by changing Utsuro’s goal to something he can achieve and using his unstable personality to exploit Gintoki’s weakness. The moment when Gintoki doubted himself and felt like he didn’t made any progress was great, but it was resolved immediately when the Shinsengumi appeared, and Utsuro wasn’t even present.

Utsuro also didn’t force anyone to make a difficult decision. Regarding chapter 703, I didn’t consider it for two reasons basically. The first is because Gintoki didn’t have the real opportunity to make a decision since he never had other options available. It was kill or kill Takasugi. Even when Takasugi stabbed himself in the heart in two different occasions, Gintoki wasn’t present to choose to do something. The second is because there were no real consequences of such action. In fact the manga repeated over and over again how everything remained the same. The unnamed guy who forced Gintoki to kill his teacher affected him and the story much more than Utsuro in that regard.

Initially the character and motivations of Takasugi were quite generic, but then Sorachi knew how to build a conflict and solid elements that relate and contrast him with Gintoki. (The same happened with Kamui and Kagura, among others.) Both share a past where a broken promise caused a change in the other, directly and mutually, which didn’t happen with Utsuro. Takasugi felt so strongly about society that he was willing to go outside the bounds of the law to transform or create imbalance in the world, while the only thing I can remember Utsuro ever felt strongly about is his desire to die.

Yes, he takes root on people who experience loneliness and despair, but it’s not explained what the process is by which this happens or the reason, and the story of his past is not logical. If you can imagine certain scenarios for it to make sense, it’s great, but those interpretations are never made clear in the manga and I prefer to analyze the things that were actually shown, not vagueness or the historical character one of his personalities is inspired. From what it was presented, he didn’t serve as a way to explore questions of the chosen themes and reveal more of the protagonist’s attributes, he fell into the trap of simply being the big bad.

Regarding the fact that he gave Gintoki and Takasugi a common goal, yes he did, and I’m glad you mentioned it because I didn’t touch upon this point before. Utsuro was more of a plot device than a character of his own. 

The information that’s revealed about his character and the story of his past is only used for the purpose of justifying his actions within the plot, as opposed to trying to build him up in someone who is anyway believable as a person with their own life or nuance. Things like Takasugi’s and Kamui’s charisma, their sense of humor, their hobbies, makes them feel real. Working up that side of Utsuro’s character would’ve probably done a lot to avoid being a two-dimensional villain.

It’s insane how much damage a weak villain can do to an otherwise good series. You expect something to give them a boost but that something never comes. The defeat could be done brilliantly but, if at the beginning of creating the threat there’s a flaw, it will fail. Even the other characters that served as antagonists in the last part of the arc also didn’t develop, we don’t even know the names of the Tendoshu guys that were defeated.

Sada Sada ended up being a better villain and much more hated than Utsuro ever was because of how he affected the story, those around him, and his nasty personality. He also had a clear motivation, while that of Utsuro didn’t even directly oppose that of the protagonists, which causes the conflict to not be strong. Coupled with the fact he has no ethics, personality or charisma, since his character is reduced to a poor unfortunate soul, it produced weak plot points.

https://sakataginxhan.tumblr.com/post/188706862227/why-utsuro-was-the-perfect-gintama-villain this is a good post on explaining why he’s actually the best and imo the only final villain that makes sense in the story. Not sure how you dismiss the fact that he is literally the embodiment of the conflict of the story and somehow Gintoki, Taka, and Katsura having to face off against and Gintoki most likely having to kill their teacher again isn’t somehow a poetic and fitting villain to the story. But yea the post expands on that and even more so I’d give it a read.