That one plothole in KHR that possibly bothers me the most.
More KHR manga edits: here
I thought it was explained that dera didn’t actually believe it? That he would get the place of decimo I mean
@otaku-alert That’s the thing- I can’t find a hint of it in canon, though I have read so in fanfiction a lot and I agree he’s too smart to believe that- especially as he grew up in the mafia. But honestly, at this point of time? If it was a hoax thought up by someone else, I doubt Gokudera would have gone along with it. But he’s there for that purpose, he says, and why else would he be there? To have the Vongola Decimo on his ‘defeated’ list? Because we know Gokudera- if he was actually prepared to become Tsuna’s subordinate, then he would’ve acted differently.
It could have been a test, of course. Testing Tsuna if he was the kind of boss Gokudera wanted. But this conflicts with his attitude- he’s a good Hitman, but we all know he’s been rejected for being a bastard a lot, and his desperation to belong is just that- desperation. He was constantly turned away, but this time, Reborn invited him. You could say Gokudera values himself enough to test Tsuna anyway, but Gokudera’s self worth is a strange thing and I honestly have no idea how it factors in this situation.
My own personal headcanon for this is that he went there expecting to die.
Picture it from Gokuera’s point of view: You are the bastard son of a mafia boss who ran away from home to become a hitman. You’ve killed people, nearly been killed yourself, and are generally just scrapping by. You try to get acceptance, a place in a family, a place to call home, and you get rejected at every turn. You are tired, you are questioning your self-worth. There’s probably a lot of self deprecation there, a lot of self hatred. He was depressed, traumatized, and a child trying to navigate the shark infested waters that is the mafia. There was nowhere safe.
Then one day you get a call on your phone. It’s not a number you recognize, or if it is, then its one you hoped would never show on your phone. Because you’re certain someone as prestigious as Reborn, the World’s Greatest Hitman, wouldn’t be calling you for anything good, especially when (or if, I can’t quite remember if this is true) there are rumors that Reborn is training the Vongola Heir.
“Come to Nanimori,” Reborn tells you. “Come kill the Vongola heir.”
You’re not stupid. You never have been, no matter how many years you spent being fooled into thinking your mother was a person she wasn’t. No matter how long you spent willingly eating cookies that were poisoned. No matter how long you spent thinking Shamal had 60 something sisters. Succession, especially succession of a mafia family as powerful and old as the Vongola, the most powerful of all the families, is something you don’t mess with. Not if you want to live. Unless there was some kind of messed up conspiracy (as some people in the fandom believe) surrounding the other three Vongola heirs deaths, you can bet your life the perpetrators would have been viciously hunted down, interrogated, and murdered. Made an example of.
You can’t say no. No one says no to the World’s Greatest Hitman. So you go. Even if you’re certain this won’t end well.
You go.
The way I see it, Gokudera went to Namimori with two options: Become the 10th boss’s subordinate, or die. And he knew this, the entire time. And because of the constant rejection, the constant refusals, he probably thought the subordinate option wasn’t a possibility. In other words, he went to Namimori expecting to die. He knew it, from the moment that Reborn called him, from the moment Reborn contacted him, about killing the 10th Vongola heir, that this was to be his end.
Reborn probably did tell Gokudera that if he succeed, he would become heir in Tsuna’s steed, but I doubt Gokudera believed it. He’s too smart for that. He’s been in the mafia too long for that. But he went along with it anyways, because you can’t say no to Reborn. So he went thinking that if he succeeded, Reborn would kill him, and if he failed, the heir would kill him. He probably didn’t see any other outcome. Until Tsuna–wonderful, crazy, accepting Tsuna–saved his life instead.
And people question why Gokudera is as devoted as he is.
xD Maybe it isn’t true, maybe there was something else going on, but this is honestly how I see it. It’s also the story I use in all my KHR fics. So, yeah. Gokudera went along with it because you can’t say no to Reborn, and he expected to end up dead one way or another, until Tsuna came along and just kinda went “fuck that” and offered a home instead. Without realizing he was doing it in the first place. And Reborn probably planned for it to turn out that way the entire time, the bastard. (
I love him anyways)
Cheloneuniverse 