Annotated 38-31
“Your UNCLE?!?!” Jeezum crow, Iwatani, you really are making it hard for me not to blame you for your own impending demise. It’s one thing not to specify “we don’t betray family,” but to assassinate someone while calling them family…
Iwatani’s motives are not too complicated, but we needed this moment to explain them. His goal is dynasty, and his only guarantee of that is to raise his House above all others.
Alt text jokes, but there’s pretty much no way that nice nurse isn’t going to be held at least partly responsible. And if she realizes what’s happened and tries to finger the Iwatanis, well, you probably can guess how that’s gonna go.
I’m sure someone expected this story to end with only one House Head left, but that’d be too abruptly paced even for me, let alone Flo. This chapter was about the Altruist conspiracy eliminating all outsiders to it. Revealing the true scope of Iwatani’s ambitions, and how they extend beyond even his allies’, is a tease for chapters yet to come.
Excellent movie, by the way. The Knives Out. You get to see who does the killing from very get-go, which is highly unusual for these stories, but why and also a bit of how eludes you until near end.
But yeah. Probably Iwatani’s not really of relation to Persson, someone’s bound to wonder that too, but it’s a powerful way of teaching the kid. No matter who, no matter where or when, if they are in your way, you deal with them.
I wonder if it will come to haunt him later… Hmmhmmhmmmmm…
“Uncle Persson” — in my family it used to be that my parents called every grown-up family friend an aunt or uncle, regardless of whether they were actually relatives.
Could be that that’ just how Iwatani calls Persson in front of his son. But still a very bad idea in this moment. He’s teaching him all the really gritty “grown-up” stuff, exactly the things which most parents would try to avoid their children from noticing exist at all, way before he demonstrates he’s able to handle himself in way less grown-up situations. I really wonder what Iwatani’s youth must have been like that he thinks this was a good idea.
Funny that he should say “succumbs to our power” when the only role that Taro played in the succumbing was as a spectator. Maybe he should have given more thought to what can happen when someone gains power without having to work for it.
(Of course, that raises the question of how Iwatani came into power in the first place. If he inherited it, it stands to reason that he’d see nothing wrong in passing it on to his own son, regardless of whether he’d proven himself worthy of it.)
Well, you can’t fault Iwatani for failing to work hard to increase his power … or that little monster of his.
Actually, quite interesting that he phrases things in terms of establlishing his *family* on the throne, not himself. He talks like he’s only doing it for his son. Maybe that’s some internal rationalizing (“I’m totally not selfish, I just play the game better than others, for the glory of my family”)
On the other hand: All that stupidity we see at work here was completely invisible to me on the first read. It just made Iwatani look like an even bigger monster. Seeing it now, one might think it as obvious beforehand what was going to happen, but nope. All these aspects only become really visible once you know how it ends.
I don’t even know why there’s a need to blame anyone, or call it an assassination. A dying man just finished dying, all very sad, but not anyone’s fault, is it?
“And this is how you eat someone’s face, little leopard” says the proud father of the face-eating leopard, completely sure that his own face would be just fine