I'm pretty sure it was a while before Tendou believed that not all Worms were a threat to humanity. I distinctly remember him saying something along those lines somewhere in the early 40s. Also, around when Kagami became Gatack and he said maybe all Worms aren't evil, Tendou called him naive, so I'm fairly certain that for the majority of the series, Tendou believed all Worms to be a threat.Wwhich is why I think he was able to put up a good argument with Negishi when he said that humans were all a threat; he's felt like that before, he knows the thinking and knows how it was flawed.
You'll have to get that quote, I don't recall that wording on Kagami's part. We could go back and forth on this. Given the evidence and Tendou's clarification of what he fights for and why he fights for to Hiyori when he brought her home, it seems that he had the right idea all along. Prior to Hiyori's transformation, he just never met a Worm that deserved mercy. There aren't any instances of Tendou executing a good-hearted Worm (besides Tsurugi, who asked for him to do it). He fought Scorpioworm multiple times, but that was in self-defense, as Scorpioworm attacked in his usual berserker rage. Of course, Kagami attacked Tendou, instead of explaining the situation (granted, Tendou's rhetoric made him understandably hesitant about revealing Tsurugi's secret to him).
So there is the possibility (because it can't be proven otherwise) that Tendou originally considered all Worms to be the enemy of humanity, but he never fought a Worm who was just minding his own business. He just those that attack him or other people or are rampaging with a bunch of other Worms. It's possible that some of the Worms are pressured into their role as soldiers, but when you have an army of Worms charging at you, you can't pause and interview each about their motivations. Furthermore, every Worm has presumably killed a human in order to replace them, the supposedly innocent one that you're defending as well (my theory for Tadokoro is that he mimicked a dying man).
Ryotaro said:
Hesitation is needed in battle sometimes. You can't always expect things to go your way or to know every possible outcome, if you think like that, you will likely end up doing something too rash. That's not to say that you should let your opponent manipulate the way that you think, but you have to examine how things are going and if someone really does deserve to die. Life is irreplaceable, Kabuto is strong, he could have easily held off that Worm until he knew for sure if it had killed someone else.
I would agree, if I believed that he spotted that guy minding his own business and figured out somehow that he was a Worm. The only logical explanation is that he was separated from the horde of other Worms and decided to try to appeal to Kabuto's (nonexistent) sense of mercy. If you hesitate in defeating a Worm who has shown himself to be an enemy of humanity, you just might end up dead. In regards to the Worm we're discussing, I don't think Tendou was genuinely worried about him, but needed to remind Kagami of that truth (Kagami has been tricked before, obviously).
Ryotaro said:
What I didn't like is that a lot of the times, he set the bar for what was just and if people didn't do things his way, they had to be stopped. Arrogance is one thing, but pushing that on other people is going to far in my opinion. I believe that last line to be a very flawed belief on Tendou's part. There is nothing wrong with believing that you are a strong person and that you are better than a lot of others, but believing that no one will ever exceed you is just ludicrous. There were lots of times when he was beaten in battle, Cassisworm owned him in their first battle, sure Tendou eventually found a way to beat him, but that doesn't negate the fact that he was beaten at one point in time. Tendou is able to adapt and that's a good thing, but he went over the top in his self righteous behaviors sometimes.
It's something that I think he realized by the end of the series. He can't do everything by himself and he does need the help of others at times. Again, I like where he ended up, it's just the way that he got there I did not like.
That part is true. Much of the time, his "My way or the highway" philosophy was for the best, but during his period of temporary paranoia and insanity, he took it to for. In the end, he acknowledged Kagami as his friend and a little earlier than that, began to respect him as a warrior.
Ryotaro said:
Probably should have been more clear on that one, sorry. I meant that Hosokawa could portray Tendou better with the type of Tendou we had in the first four episodes or so. Even though he wouldn't be as strong as in the first four episodes, I think he could do a good job as Tendou later on in the series. He's done some good roles like that in the past. But now that I think of it, Ken'ichi Matsuyama really would have been an ideal Tendou. If you've ever seen Death Note, he plays arrogant characters pretty well and without coming off like a huge ass, which I think was a side effect of Mizushima's inexperience in such roles and one of the main reasons I didn't like Tendou a lot. I like good and arrogant characters, but with the way he was acted, I just couldn't like Tendou that much.
That's funny, because I don't feel that the character of Tendou Souji had been fully realized until after that period. The character was being fleshed out, but it took a few episodes for him to become the Tendou we know (and some of us love) now. I liked Tendou, I found him really appealing, but he's a polarizing figure. You either love him or you hate him.
