#kanitarou

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Volume 22 Extras

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Volume 21 Extra Page and Back Cover

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Seaweed crab/Japanese mitten crab. I don't really see the resemblance.

(So Messar's line about being seaweed doesn't make much sense, but in Japanese the crab's name is literally "seaweed scraps" or "seaweed scum." Kani is saying that he looks like scraps ie. an unwanted toy after his seams get ripped apart. Messar responds to that by saying that they're able to protect what's important to them because they're both scraps/scummy/expendable/however you want to put it. It's a callback to the debate about who should go to rescue Tonari and Bon, which was basically an argument about who was the most disposable.)

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Chapter 171.2 Rough Summary

As a reminder, I won't be translating the chapter this week. But since the official release won't come out until Wednesday, I thought I would do this for anyone who can't wait.

Kai asks who gave the doll her tagchip. The doll doesn't know what he's talking about, and he says she's wearing one around her neck. She pulls out the tagchip that we've seen in her memories.

The doll doesn't know what it is or when it got there. Kanitarou gives the run down on tagchips: every human has one inside them and they give humans their freedom and rights. The doll is ecstatic.

The doll thanks Kai for giving it to her, and he explains that he didn't do it. The doll wonders where it came from for a second, maybe it was the ramen stall owner, but decides it doesn't really matter. She asks Kai to show her how to use the tagchip, but Kanitarou rains on her parade by reminding her that they don't work on toys.

Cue long explanation by Kanitarou on how tagchips are implanted that I skimmed because it hurt to look at. The doll gets pissed at him and complains that he always talks too much (I felt a sense of kinship in that moment). Kai wonders whose tagchip it is and why they removed it from their body.

The doll says it must have been the ramen stall owner again. On the subject of the ramen stall owner, she thinks of ramen, and then of the dream she had of ramen, and then the dream she had of the tagchip.

That train of thought leads the doll to her dream of the girl with the blindfold. Kanitarou calls her stupid because dolls can't dream. Kai asks her what the girl looked like and Eko brings her pot out so the doll can show her her memories. But before they can do that Eko notices that the tagchip is saying something and snatches it away.

The tagchip displays the image of a 5-star girl whose name is listed as Number 32, and says that she's dead. The doll notices that this is the same person who appeared in her dream and Bon notices that she looks exactly like Mizuha.

Gugu asks what happened to the Guardians, and Bon says that Mizuha dissolved them but the remnants formed Kaibara Cybernetics. Hylo says that Mizuha was dead by the time tagchips were implemented (meaning she couldn't still be alive by the life extension affect of the chips). Gugu asks if that means 32 is one of Mizuha's descendants, but Tonari says no, it's clone of Mizuha.

Tonari reveals that she learned of this some years ago, when she spied on Kaibara as a ghost and saw that they have a number of children who resemble Mizuha. She told Fushi, but they apparently already knew about it.

In order to keep Hayase's bloodline alive, they have a ton of Mizuha clones working at Kaibara as employees. Bon realizes that Number 32 means the girl is the thirty second clone.

Tonari wanted to get rid of the doll because Kaibara can track the tagchip to their location, but getting rid of the tagchip should work as well. Hylo and Messar agree with her.

The doll tries to get them to change their minds, because she needs the tagchip to become human. She believes that 32 gave it to her so she could do that. But Tonari asks her why she wants to do that in the first place.

The doll is taken aback and feebly starts to reply that it was because the ramen stall owner told her to, but Kanitarou butts in and declares that if Tonari, Hylo, and Messar try to take the tagchip, he'll stop them with his super arm.

March and Eko join him. Bon and Kai try to deescalate the situation, but March makes them join her. Gugu is still undecided. The chapter ends with the two teams facing off.

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Chapter 166.2

The doll is laying back in a chair like the nameless boy during its first appearance.

The person with the blindfold also first appears in a chair. The all-white lighting of this scene and the way they struggle forward are also reminiscent of when Fushi first used the nameless boy's body and struggled to move in it.

And then the poses in these panels also mirror each other. Just a guess, but this person is probably the reason the doll is so determined to become human, just like the nameless boy was for Fushi.

I'm never going to shut up about how Fushi spent the last two arcs feeling like they weren't allowed to be happy unless they were constantly helping others and now no one can be happy unless the people around them decide that they've helped enough to earn a good rating. Everything is so much worse now. With all my love to Mizuha and Yuuki, they fucked up big time.

I really like that we're looking at what lies outside of the star system along with the people inside it. The star system is presented like it's fair because it gives everyone an even chance. You don't get human rights unless you have stars, and how much of a human you are is dictated by how many stars you have, nothing else. Every human gets an equal opportunity to earn stars once they turn eight. But then characters like the doll and Kanitarou don't have a hope in high heaven of being human, because they were never part of the system.

Just spinning my gears here, this is all hypothetical but if human beings are being mass produced and tailored to each customer's specifications like we saw in Chapter 166.1, then they're no more "real" than Kanitarou and the doll are. Toys are made up of wires, not flesh and blood, but human society only functions with the chips inside each person's body. Both rely on technology to live. People can even end up looking less and less human as well, if they get a low rating. They might eventually end up looking like a toy, given that the ramen store owner and others assumed the doll was just a person who had one star. The qualifications for being human are very specific and very arbitrary, aren't they.

On a side tangent, it struck me that the powers ordinary humans possess are more like the Beholder's than like Fushi's. The ability to make things that weren't already preexisting, the ability to give vessels life, the ability to replicate tiny details like grains of sand and such, even the ability to stretch lifespans indefinitely. Together, humans and knockers have reached a new height where anything is possible, and it's terrible. It's true that if Fushi had taken on the Beholder's abilities, they might have been able to present this from happening, but it's because they were unwilling to exert control over others like Kaibara Cybernetics does that they decided not to. You can't be a good person while holding onto that kind of power. For Fushi, they wouldn't have been able to be a person at all.

Which begs the question, what kind of state are the five star people working at Kaibara Cybernetics in? Just food for thought.

Kanitarou and the doll have the start of an interesting character dynamic. Kanitarou is polite and logical where the doll is brutish and intuitive, but by the end of the chapter it's apparent that he's just as hard-headed as it is. I think it's interesting that he insists becoming human is a pipe dream but despite that, still has a strong sense of justice for toys and wants them all to be treated well. A little sad how he basically repeats what the boy who was torturing him said, that he and the doll are just programs. It's not any less hurtful if he says it nicely.

Overall, he seems very kind, and his attentiveness to the doll seems to bring out her kindness as well. They're goofy, I hope they become friends and stick together.

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Chapter 170.4

My favorite thing is when I say something and am proven dead wrong a week later. I know there's an easy solution to this and it's to stop trying to predict immediate plot points, but I can't help it. It's my forbidden fruit.

OK, like.... to be fair to myself it's still possible that she was still drugged because I can't think of any reason why she would have had to fake that. As a distraction so they could escape, maybe?? But she seemed a bit annoyed that everyone left. The more interesting thing is how she was able to escape so casually. No one was worried about her at all, they knew she would have no trouble getting out... But I could be embarrassingly wrong again, the details will be ironed out eventually.

The name "Anton" really doesn't fit him... it'll take a while to get used to. Going forward, I'm curious to know if Kaibara will let him become an employee despite the fact that Tonari's now gone or if they'll make him redeem himself first.

Side note: I love that Ooima insists on continuity for the stupidest things. The bird microphone was just a joke so that Bon could act like a celebrity being swarmed by journalists in a time period where microphones weren't invented yet and it's still here....

FnAe is a Very Serious Drama.

I don't think Tonari ever went by "Tonari Dalton," but this is nice confirmation that she's remembered by the place where she lived with her friends instead of by her father. Part of Tonari's character development in the previous era was going from hating Jananda and wanting to leave to taking over and protecting the people there the way she wasn't protected.

Kani's dream has been fulfilled :) His search for an owner was really a search for someone to care for him. He and the doll are like siblings now... wait no. He and Fushi are like siblings now. I hope Fushi turns into a cabbage crab and scuttles around with their new little brother.

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#169 "Human Choice (1)"

Share the link to the MangaDex upload and/or comment on the chapter to let me know you liked it!

To Your Eternity - Ch. 169.1 - Human Choice (1) - MangaDex

Read To Your Eternity Ch. 169.1 "Human Choice (1)" on MangaDex!

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Chapter 167.2

I completely forgot about this until just now. Literally less than an hour before posting it. I've just been so distracted by this week's anime episode (so fucking good), but we're good now. It's fine, everything's fine.

Kaibara Cybernetics has the same symbol as the Defense Corps., who took it from the Bennett/Zumla/Monjo church trifecta. I hope we'll get to see how the company originated during the five hundred year time skip. It's almost certainly connected to the Defense Corps. in some way, but how? The name Kaibara is also completely new. Mizuha moved their operations overseas, but Kaibara is a Japanese name (the real world equivalent of Yanome).

The triangle has always symbolized a united faith in god. For Kaibara to em-blaze a giant version of their symbol in onto the sky, it's like they're saying that the god everyone has faith in is them. Once again struggling to not make any comments about capitalism.

The doll holds onto Kanitarou's insinuations, even thought they put their argument aside after Kanitarou gets stuck under the train. It's hard to tell if the doll's insecurities about being worthless even as a toy, and Kanitarou looking down on it are going to be fleshed out later or are only for comedic purposes.

Building off of that, even though Kanitarou takes a "caretaker" position with the doll like he's supposed to with children, and has access to more information than she does, the doll has more emotional intelligence that he does. Which isn't saying a lot, since Kanitarou refuses to even recognize that he has emotions, but it's still gonna be fun to explore.

Like in this scene, the doll expresses compassion for Kanitarou, and on the very next page he snaps out of it. Even if his program is causing him to be this melodramatic, he was still stuck indefinitely, and told the doll to leave him there. And the doll recognizes that that must be painful to reckon with when Kanitarou himself doesn't.

It's a bit sad that the doll expects its life to flash before its eyes while it's dying, another stereotypical "human" experience, but all it sees is the ramen it ate in Chapter 166.1. Because that's the only meaningful memory it has.