Invisigoth wrote: ↑Mon Jan 07, 2019 8:46 pm
AFAIK the only mechanism available to Miho to "change" the story is to place herself in a situation where she'll be killed. Her death is still equally tragic so there is no real change.
That's pretty much what I thought too. In fact having slept on it I'm even more confused by the "but she kept choosing to die" part of what I was responding to.
Of course Miho dies. Everybody dies, as the saying goes. That's not at all the important part of her story, it's that she
keeps getting brought back. I see no evidence at all that she chooses let alone enjoys the process, and am still unconvinced by claims that she chose to begin the process so many years ago.
Consider the most recent cycle we've seen. The sadness and resignation in her face in
1123 were obvious from the first; but now in retrospect, it seems plausible to interpret her mood (including a lot of what she was saying to the others in preceding strips, up till her refusal of Erika's dinner invitation) as one of hope -- hope that she doesn't have to come back this time. "Maybe a killball blast will be enough this time, never tried that before.
"
When Yuki finds her in the hospital, Miho isn't her usual inscrutable or even mildly snarky self -- she is downright nasty to Yuki, nastier than we've ever seen her, arguably much nastier than she could reasonably expect to be to poor little Yuki. Even taking into account issues like invasion of privacy or what have you, that would deserve a response along the lines of "You're just a dumb kid, you don't know what's going on, so on your bike please." But the things she says about Yuki and eventually Yutaka are downright vicious. But they
do make sense if we consider them from the point of view of someone who didn't want to be here in the first place, didn't want to come back, hoped against hope they
wouldn't be back this time, someone who just wants to be left alone for as long as possible before the Story pulls her back into itself. Someone who becomes emotionally unhinged at the fear that Yuki will physically drag her back into the Story before Miho is ready... and, ta da, that's exactly what Yuki does.
Miho doesn't want, and I claim never wanted, any of this to happen. But it's happened so many times she knows how it's going to go down; hence the resignation mixed with frustration, occasionally rising to exacerbated snark (her conversation with Piro around 1206-1207 ish), more rarely boiling over into outraged nastiness (like with Yuki in the hospital; possibly also with Largo in the Cave of Evil when he kept calling her "undead").
Yes she expresses guilt over Piro's "death" when telling Kimiko the tale of the sickly Irish girl and the pirates. That's because she thinks she
should have seen it coming, or did see it coming; she let herself get too close to him, and let him get close to her again, and "people who love her
die in her story." (Thinking she''d gotten Piro killed was a guilty as we've ever seen her in the comic. If she had
chosen this cycle of deaths and reincarnations in some form, this would have been the perfect time to confess that to Kimiko as well.)
Teddy-Werebear wrote: ↑Mon Jan 07, 2019 11:30 pm
Anybody else miss l33t d00d? It has been how many years now? I hope he did not run out of his meds...
I confess I am vastly less interested in his antics than in (short term) the interaction between Ashe and the Old Man (I am still holding out on him being Ping's "father" despite all the cries of "child prostitution!" being bandied about
), or (long term) the further development of Yuki + Yutaka's relationship. But if Fred has something else interesting for him to do I certainly won't complain (the last time we saw him was plot-related, furthering the student-teacher relationship between Junko and Largo, so he's clearly not just the comic relief he was on the plane to Japan.)