theories after reading season 1

so it becomes apparent that the hasegawa/tachibana family practises hitobashira, the ritual human sacrifice, and that's why yonghyun's father's gold mine became successful after headless corpses were placed there. now "ao" is obviously a god of some kind and since midori promises that she will free her after becoming the head of the family, i think that the promise was fulfilled through sho - as in ao and sho are the same entity, and midori "freed" them by taking them out of japan. there's some sort of memory manipulation that i think midori is able to practise, and we already see it in the way that she erased sho's memories of itami (which drives both me and yonghyun crazy ). and we already know the goddess ao is able to change their physical form since they are shown with both a male form (the flashbacks) and female form (when she met midori). i think its possible that through changing physical form + using whatever that memory manipulation ability midori has, ao has become sho. this also explains the hasegawa family heirloom that midori allegedly ran away with to korea, the heirloom being ao/sho.

i still don't know what midori wants with yonghyun or why she took him under her patronage (perhaps because he knows too much?), but since jujo thinks she gave him the key, that's where the belief that he will become the successor comes from. obviously that's not the case, although maybe midori IS looking for a successor, just not yonghyun. since the succession tests in japan took place during summer, and the only time yonghyun is allowed to see sho is also in the summer, perhaps its a condition for the entity god to have contact with humans in the summer specifically, as opposed to this being just a test of succession? idk but it feels weird that they would allow a child to visit sho and even go so far as to pay him to continue visiting for no reason.

i feel like there's more to tachibana jujo than just what we've been told so far, i think he is somehow connected to ao/sho in another way other than the fact that midori married him cause her gay ass wanted to be with someone that looks like ao. yonghyun mentioned that it wasn't just his appearance that reminded him of sho, but also his cadence and the way he carried himself, something that can't be pinpointed. jujo also mentioned that the title of "count" comes from his family and not the hasegawas which could also mean something to the story in the future.

i really want to know more about what happened to midori to make her like this, since she was so committed to finding justice for ao yet somewhere along the way she became exactly like the heads of the hasegawa family she despised so much. maybe everyone who gets too close ends up sharing the same will as the first head of the family, the initial one who rescued the "traveller", and this is what keeps them in the cycle of repressing the god and keeping them in bondage.

prayer circle that sho gets his memories and old personality back, his character is kind of pathetic now which hurts knowing how smart and ambitious he was as a child lmaoo i completely get how yonghyun feels in this regard.