Annotated 45-3
FB: “Oh, I’m sorry, Father, I guess you said bring in the BOYSENBERRY juice for breakfast. Honest mistake.”
Spoilers for a twenty-year-old set of novels: these moments owe a debt to a striking passage at the end of S.M. Stirling’s Nantucket trilogy, with a more realistic use of poison than is found in a lot of fiction. Looking back, I don’t recommend the series as a whole…it’s overpopulated, its worldbuilding tends to swallow up its characterization as it goes along, and even that scene is kind of anticlimactic in the larger context of the story. But that one scene did stay with me.
One bit’s different, though. Iwatani does register what seems to be genuine concern for his wife in panel 1. It’s not slam-dunk conclusive proof, I guess…he could just be confused and alarmed. But if he really didn’t care, if the marriage were just for show, I’d expect him to be annoyed (“What, is she day-drinking now?”) and not using her name quite like that.
Perhaps he didn’t know he cared. Perhaps he didn’t realize that until just this moment, exactly when it became too late to matter.
Strange that Masuyo seemed to keel over painlessly, but not Iwatani. Or is he expressing shock that he’s going into paralysis?
Her glass seems to be emptier than his, so she probably got a higher dose than him.
Masuyo wasn’t attempting to stand. This seems to hit hit the nervous system as Iwatani is reacting to falling more than anything else. Masuyo seeming started to slump over while Iwatani started to stand up in concern only for his limbs to give out from under him.
I kinda got the impression Taro literally pulled the chair out from under him?
Curare derivative?
I always felt for Iwatani in this moment. It’s not excusable what he’s done or what he planned, but for better or worse he always put family first. He maybe didn’t express this enough to Taro, but he did express it often. Family. I wonder how much of Taro being inevitably and irredeemably evil is written intentionally and how much is up to us the readers to decide.
I don’t know if it was from comments or annotation, but I remember mention during the father-and-son field trip to ApocalyptiCon how one thing he failed to impart on Taro is that while everyone else is fair game, we don’t betray *family*.
Assassinating the boy’s uncle was probably a mistake.
“Who taught you how to do this stuff?”
“From you, dad. I learned it from watching you!”