follow me into the rain

[Another Tumblr repost, from here]

One fun thing about Gintama is that since it has no fourth wall for most characters, the line between in-universe and out-of-universe explanations to canon questions (also called "Doylistic" vs "Watsonical") isn't as sharp as usual.

For instance, take the age-old question, "Why is Katsura so... Katsura?" Why is he frequently so idiotic and delusional in spite of clearly being able to be smart and competent at other times? Obviously the first answer that comes to mind is, "Because it's funny", but what else is there?

If you want to go strictly in-universe (Watsonical), you could offer explanations like "too many hits to the head in the war and afterwards affected his grip on reality", or "too much psychological trauma from the war made him eager to retreat into delusions". Or, "No, he was actually always like that, he just repressed it better at the start of the series; but after reuniting with Gintoki, gaining a constant companion in Elizabeth, and turning away from extremist terrorism to moderate freedom-fighting, he's been able to relax more and let out his silly side much more often". Or, more whimsically, "Elizabeth has infected him with weirdness". Or a number of other things.

If you go full-on out-of-universe (Doylistic), you can offer explanations like "It's mostly a comedy manga that frequently pushes its gags to absurd limits, and Katsura makes for a very good Comically Serious Boke, so it would be mad of Sorachi not to exploit that". Or maybe something like, "If he's both serious/competent and sympathetic most of the time, the Shinsengumi are going to start looking bad and they're meant to be sympathetic and frequently heroic in this series. But if he's villainous instead that pushes the balance of the series' world too far in the other direction, so he'll have to be ineffective comic relief most of the time for everything to work well". Or again, a number of other perspectives!

But then there's the third way of looking at it. Gintama characters can't break the fourth wall in flashbacks set before the series started, because the story didn't exist yet then. But after it does start, most of the regular characters gain that meta awareness eventually (to enable more gags, Doylistically speaking). So from Zura's POV, presumably at some point early on in the series he realized that he's a character in a work of fiction, more specifically a secondary character in a shonen manga where Gintoki's the protagonist, and that the manga is mostly comedy. "If I want to get more screentimepagetime and stay relevant, I'd better up my comedy stats", might well have been his conclusion. And he is sometimes very good at keeping up an act...

Or, to put it yet another way: Katsura is above all else a dutiful character. Sometimes duty means comedy.

That's my take on it. What do you think?