Annotated 45-1
FB (written on Halloween): “Trick or treat! The trick is when we threaten even more of your civil liberties, and the treat is when we don’t! Or is that the other way around? Do you like our costumes? [cracks knuckles] SURELY you mean to say you like our costumes.”
My original last line for Taro here was “What about MY feelings?”, which is arguably funnier but a little out of context here. As it is, Taro seems to be saying HE might contest Iwatani’s claim, which is obviously…just more bluster from a kid who’s full of brag, nothing to…
A’ight, I’m just gonna spoil this scene, okay? If you’re a first-time reader and you somehow haven’t guessed already where this is heading, check back in a couple days.
So, yeah, the most important detail here is that everyone has at least sipped their orange juice except Taro. It’s a little ambiguous whether Misa (Taro’s sister) is actually sipping hers in the last panel there, and that, combined with her suspicion of him on the next page, led some readers to hope she might survive the next few minutes. There’d maybe be some precedent for that, since she was introduced as the kid too smart to fall into the trap with all the other kidnapped kids. Still, it’d feel a little deus ex for her to suddenly appear on the scene and match wits with Taro, and if she’s not his intellectual equal, then she wouldn’t have a lot to do.
TMW you don’t realize exactly how much of a horrid little sociopath you actually raised. You thought you knew, but you didn’t actually know. An intersting parallel is that Taro is smart, but he’s not as smart as he thinks he is, and he’s short-sighted as hell.
Every empire has a Caligula!
I liked the turnaround (followed by another similar turnaround much later) that Iwatani’s careful plan (to have other people smash shit so he can take what he wants) works, as does Taro’s direct smashing shit and taking what he wants, but both are completely blindsided by the shortcomings of their approaches.
I’m wondering how things would have played out had Taro been patient enough to just take over after his father had actually finished consolidating power. I imagine, faced with the united forces of everyone outside of Gastonia/Iwatania and the Adventurer’s Guild, Iwatani would have tried to parley rather than take a clearly losing battle. Maybe he’d have even claimed that this was his plan all along, that he had realized Gastonia was corrupt and needed to do something drastic to bring about peace? Anything to secure his legacy, right?
Taro learned this lesson well. Taro set his own goal and met them. He didn’t bluster, he didn’t promise, he just poisoned all his family to be the heir, and they never saw him coming. Not even his dad who was the one who encouraged all of Taro’s sociopathic impulses and even directly showed him how poisoning other people in the name of power-grabbing was cool and good.
I am reminded of the TV show “Lost”, when Linus asks Jacob, “What about ME?” and Jacob replies, “What ABOUT you?” So … Linus stabs him!
Caneghem, Miyamoto not tagged.