Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans #44 – Well, everyone knows approximately how nuts Fareed is now. The Gjallarhorn council knows it, Gaelio knows it, the revolutionaries know it, even the punk kid soldiers he’s dragged into this and his nine-year-old fiancé have started to figure it out. Even having the apparent blessing of the spirit of Agnika Kaieru isn’t enough to overcome the misgivings of half the council about teaming up with an obvious madman.
Kudos to Orga and Almiria for being able to stand up to him. What it’s going to take to really stop Fareed, though, is to take away his Chosen One status. And I think he’s already made a critical error on that front.
Before Mikazuki returns to Tekkadan, Fareed all but admits that the Bael uses exactly the same Alaya-Vijnana system as the other Gundams. All he’s really done is reconstruct how to do the necessary surgery on adults. Which means that anyone else who’s already had it and can get access to Bael can grab the apparent blessing away, and Mikazuki is going to let Orga know that. Probably one of the two of them will be the one to take over Bael.
ACCA: 13-Territory Inspection Dept. #7 – Even though Jean’s trip to Dōwā includes crossing paths with the king again, no big revelations there. Instead, the bombshell drops when he makes his next trip to Kororē, Land of the Literally Militant Second-Wave Feminists: Mauve has confirmation that Jean is first in line for the throne.
Schwan, who is also suddenly a lot smarter than he looks, gets the rest of the story. The king’s second daughter fell in love with one of the household guard, they faked their deaths, and took up new identities in Bādon. Abend must have kept in touch with some of his old colleagues, and that’s how Nino has been spying on Jean for the Privy Council their entire lives.
If ACCA can find that out, it must be known to a fair amount of the governing elite already, and that explains why people think Jean is involved in the coup. But he isn’t (unless we’re dealing with a serious case of Unreliable Narration). So if not him, and not Grossular, and Mauve’s people who are competent enough to uncover Jean’s backstory are convinced there really is a coup being planned, then who is involved at high levels? Lilium, maybe, who seems awfully interested in Jean?
(Crunchyroll — Wakanim — VVVVID — bilibili)
CHAOS;CHILD #6 – Not only does Momose’s friend’s clinic turn out to be Aoba Clinic, Uki turns out to be Yui’s old classmate. That feels like a coincidence a little too far.
But it does lead to the revelation that Uki hasn’t aged a day in the six years since the incident in Shibuya, meaning the light did more than just help awaken psychic powers. It may also have damaged people with psychic potential.
Another of those people was Senri Minamisawa, though given what she went through in the psychiactric ward, she was likely to have come out of there damaged anyway. She seems an unlikely murder suspect. She doesn’t seem to be able to do more than conjure fire, and that may be happening under the disruptive influence of the Sumo Stickers, just as Takuru and Arimura were unhinged by them when they first met her.
So I’m guessing that we’ll learn next time that another murder has happened, and no one at the Aoba Clinic was being targeted.
(Crunchyroll — bilibili)
Saga of Tanya the Evil #6.5 – The anime business operates on a shoestring budget with tight deadlines. (Watch Shirobako if you want details.) Towards the end of the season, it’s not uncommon to see episodes showing up on streaming sites a day or two late, which means they were delivered to the streamer with no lead time. (Spare a thought for the translators who have to get up at all sorts of strange hours and set up those subtitles with a deadline of ASAP.)
A clip show at the season break helps catch up new viewers, but just as importantly, it gives the production schedule some breathing room. A mid-season clip show is a sign that something has gone seriously wrong behind the scenes. Coming after episode 6 showed up late last week, it’s a good bet that things got so far behind schedule that it looked impossible to deliver the remaining episodes on time. (With CHAOS;CHILD streaming late this week, one starts wondering if this is all due to one company involved in multiple shows having problems.)
Saga of Tanya the Evil has been delivering a high-quality product so far, and if the choice was made to keep standards up rather than rush things and have to fix them later for the DVD release, then I won’t complain too much. I just hope this doesn’t lead to the rest of the story feeling too rushed.
