LogFAQs > #978797219

Again, spoiler but only up to shido's palace.

I feel pretty ambivalent about the whole "stealing hearts" thing. At its core, the game tries to highlight various societal problems in japan, from kamoshida to shidou which most likely has real life parralel. The teenagers "rebels" against these people, but i guess stealing hearts is just too convenient power fantasy to convey author's intent on how to tackle these problems, and it became kinda toothless in that way because you just steal hearts, and conveniently these people realize their mistakes and confess everything? I am not saying the author can amd must offer a solution to this multi-generational and multi faceted issues, but stealing hearts feels very reductive toward real people who cried and bled trying to solve these issues.

On the philosophical side, it seem to assume and deep down these culprits seem to know what they are doing is wrong, thus when the treasure is taken, they judged themselves by this seemingly objective measure of morality of what is "right and wrong" then fix their behavior from that basis. (This can be explained, that the phantom thieves targets corrected themselves to the what the general masses think is right. So if the public think plagiarism isnt wrong, madarame's change of heart wouldn't happen)

I am not a moral relativist, but there is also no absolute and some people who do these kind of crimes genuinely doesnt think what they did is wrong. Unless the whole judgement against the majority of society perception about morality is right, the change of hearts wouldnt happen to people with actual and severe sociopathic/psychopathic behavior.

Maybe i am just overthinking a simple premise about fixing society with basically magic.