This ALNST Friday’s comic adds so much more context and depth to Mizi’s breakdown in Round 5.
You know this guy? The guy we all collectively hate now?
First thing I noticed about him is that he looks quite a bit like Luka, though his hair is a touch darker and his eyelashes are black rather than blond.
The unnamed boy in the comic messes with Mizi’s head, blaming her for making people love her, for making people attracted to her—and this translates to Mizi blaming herself for this as Till lies dying in her arms. The ghost of her past self taunts her: You knew what you were doing all along, didn’t you? You led them on just to save yourself. You led everyone on.
The encounter with this boy in the comic is the catalyst for setting off this guilt, shame, and self-loathing within Mizi. As an audience, we’ve all been fooled right along with the other characters around her into believing she’s always been naïve, blind to the way the world works run by segyein. Mizi hasn’t had enough time to tell us how she feels. There hasn’t been a right time. In Round 1, she’s singing with Sua, for Sua, so who is she thinking about? Sua. In Round 5, she’s fresh off the trauma of Sua’s death and being actively pushed closer to her death by Luka. During her time with Hyuna, everything is too fast-paced to give her time to stop and tell us how all this has affected her, or how it always has. Mizi couldn’t tell us these things, so we instead saw her through Till, Sua, and Ivan’s eyes in the videos and official side content as a beautiful and innocent girl whose facade charms them all in one way or another. The sad thing is that Mizi didn’t mean to build this facade. She never meant to hurt anyone. She built it because it’s what people needed her to be.
So we have Round 5, and Sua is dead, Mizi is alive, and it’s all her fault, because she charmed Sua right into self-sacrifice. She lost the one person whose love she could return, genuinely and without reservations. And not only does Luka mimic Sua to throw Mizi off her game, but he manipulates her through touch.
The boy in the comic told Mizi all those years ago that boys and girls can’t be friends, that they’ll only end up “mating” and it’s Mizi, the girl’s, fault. It’s her fault that people are attracted to her. She knows what she’s doing. She knows what she does to them. Doesn’t she?
In Round 5 she’s set up purposefully in a performance that, as Vivimeng stated, is meant to look like a wedding. White clothes, romantic music, a boy touching her and dancing her around the stage like a trophy. Like the boy in the comic said, right? It’ll always be a boy and a girl. They’ll always end up together. It benefits the segyein to force them together because that means more future contestants.
They killed the love of her life and now they’re forcing her with a man who’s touching her and asserting control over her.
The expectation of heterosexuality even in this futuristic society is so interesting to me. Mizi experiences it plainly in this comic, and I would say Till experiences it since he claims the main reason he likes Mizi is because she’s “pretty” and then struggles so intensely with denial with Ivan. Again, I believe it’s because encouraging heterosexuality as the norm encourages “mating” and the creation of more humans to exploit and parade around. It gives the segyein more control.
That play of compulsory heterosexuality in Round 5 contributed heavily to Mizi’s crashout.
(Tagging some Alien Stage moots!! @ivanttakethis @rockwgooglyeyes @alien-til-i-stage @awaggaa @verdantlights love you guys <33)
