Annotated 48-13
FB: You know how it is: sometimes you get a surprise spa vacation day, and then literally fifteen minutes later you’re being forced into a war. Mondays, am I right?
I don’t think the question of what happened to the co-pilots is too much of a dangling plot thread. The machine looks like it might be unstable, Taro is definitely unstable, and so they may as well run, because who’s going to prioritize catching up to them? Even if victorious, Taro would have other people to flog. I imagine they weighed their options and made their choice, and I imagine Mich and Franz would do the same if they ever made it out of Taro’s sight.
Kind of karmic justice, now that I think about it, that Mich and Franz are the ones who get stuck with Taro at the end, since they started their criminal careers by throwing in with him at the expense of their people. Yeah, you guys sure ended up picking the right “friend.”
When a king has to resort to threatening you with a gun, you know they’ve already lost.
Yup. In practical terms…he’s only got enough shots to kill one of them.
Hah nice “get in the
robotmurder machine” ref.I think Taro is well short-sighted enough to do this but it’s such a hollow threat. He has no co-pilots and his solution is to conscript the makers; good enough plan. But then he threatens to kill said makers if they don’t comply, which would put him right back where he was with no co-pilots. Even if he just killed one as an example, he’s back in the same situation: one person he wants to threaten and what’s he going to do? “Help me or I won’t have any suitable co-pilots left.”
I suppose they are going along on the premise that the unstable war machine they built is only PROBABLY going to leave them dead. If Taro were smart, he’d have already dismissed the co-pilots with the plan to use these two and their knowledge of the machine to make sure it’s not a trap. But it seems they were genuinely surprised he would be piloting and he’s far too naive to actually presume someone would boobytrap him, it seems. He seems so convinced of his own superiority and position that I wouldn’t find it unlikely at all for him to fall for the same trick that got him into power, only it wouldn’t even have to be someone so close to him that did it.
This is why I miss his father being the villain: Iwatani would probably have planned to pilot it himself. He becomes a symbol of strength, there’s no chance the machine is used against him, and he would have arranged a situation that Mich and Franz are on-hand like this to ensure that their self-preservation would also assist in his own.
Taro is sadistic enough that it’s not an empty threat. If he lets them go, he has no co-pilots, and he gains a reputation as someone who makes empty threats. If he kills them, he still has no co-pilots, but at least he gets the satisfaction of punishing the insult to his authority. Even better: if he only kills one of them, the other survives to spread his reputation as someone who makes good on his threats.
I will just add to this to note: he doesn’t have to *kill* either one of them. they can probably still co-pilot with one functional leg each, right? :|
plus, if he ends up with a dead copilot, he gets to blame the incapable copilot!
This wouldn’t have happened if they’d made it a single seater.