As I thought, Mejiro’s actions don’t really make any sense if you simply think that she’s out to kill vampires. After all, why warn them ahead of time about their weaknesses, i.e. personal items? Why fire bullets that can’t do any real damage just to walk away? It’s plainly obvious that Mejiro is trying to provoke the vampires. Most of them are harmless, especially the ones she’s been harassing, and yet she’s trying to stoke their fury and push them past the brink of no return. Mejiro wants them to kill her. If any of them were going to do it, the honor has to go to Nazuna. Unfortunately, things never work out the way that you want them to. Mejiro’s threat to hurt Kou is ultimately an empty one, but she still hurts him anyway. Kou doesn’t want the two former friends to fight until someone dies, but seeing him bleeding out might quickly change Nazuna’s mind. This is all because he wanted to save Mejiro’s life. Ironic.

So why does Mejiro want to die anyway? And if she wants to die so badly, why does she keep dodging Nazuna’s attacks? I wouldn’t say humans are complicated in general, but we are pretty contradictory in general. Oh man, I so want to lose weight, I say… as I devour another bag of chips while sitting on my ass, watching anime. I’m totally going to work on my passion project when I have free time, I say… as doom scroll on social media or boot up my PS5 for the eighth time this week (to be fair, Silksong just came out). It’s not that we don’t mean what we say, but rather, we don’t always say what we mean. We’re pretty funny like that.

It’s totally to kill vampires, Mejiro says! If the public digs into her death, they’ll discover the existence of vampires! And then people will stop going out, so vampires will eventually starve to death! See, this is how she’ll truly eradicate all vampires! I mean, yeah, if the plan would work, I guess it’s better than trying to eliminate vampires one by one. But even a child like Kou can easily see through Mejiro’s genius plan. Even a child has reasonable doubts about it. I actually laughed when she talked about scaring people into never going outside. Bro, c’mon. We couldn’t even stay quarantined long enough to get rid of covid. You think the dumbass public will stay indoors over a video of Nazuna? Nah. And the thing is, she knows that; Mejiro is too smart not to have realized this. The real truth, however, is a bit embarrassing.

I think Mejiro can dress it up all she wants, but she simply wants to die and that’s actually the shameful part. We’re all human — even the vampires — and humans don’t generally want to kill themselves. Yes, it still tragically happens, but only after someone has been suffering for a long, long time. And that’s her. That’s Mejiro to a T. She’s been dealing with loss, guilt, and hate for so long, and I think a big part of her is ashamed to end it all without actually accomplishing anything. She can’t get her revenge in a way that will rid her of her anguish, she obviously can’t bring her family back, and she couldn’t even fall in love with Nazuna and become a vampire herself. Even if her ridiculous scheme gets people to dig into her past, she can’t guarantee any of it will play out the way she intends it to. What if the government suppresses the information to prevent panic? What if people just think it’s all a hoax cooked up by the “globalists” and Bill Gates in order to control the masses into not going out. Yeah, yeah! And something about nanomachines! But seriously, Mejiro even admits to Kou that even if people did get scared, any self-imposed quarantine likely wouldn’t last long enough to starve out the vampires. So again, she can dress it up all she want, but the real naked truth is that she simply wants to die after struggling fruitlessly for so long and, well, that’s embarrassing. Unfortunately, Kou and Nazuna make the critical mistake of letting a suicidal person go off on their own after forcing them to confront a painful truth about themselves.

Is there anything Kou could have done differently? Well, maybe don’t try to wrestle a gun out of someone’s hands by charging them head on. But he’s panicking, and I doubt an adult could’ve done any better in his shoes. Who’s ever had to stop someone from killing themselves anyway? Most of us have luckily never been in that position. The only question now is where do we go from here? If Kou’s finally fallen in love with Nazuna, then she could simply save his life by turning him. That’s an awfully big risk to take, though. They can also rush him to the hospital with her vampire speed, but there’s no guarantee that this would save his life since he took a shot to the gut. Plus, even if this did work, the incident would get reported, authorities will start investigating, so on and so forth. If he had reasonable parents, they would ground him for eternity and never let him out of their sight. But we’ll find out about his fate soon enough, so I won’t speculate any further.