What kind of person do you think James might have been outside of his whole role... Like a more human side from him? I just love him way too much and you are one of the only blogs that talk about him nowadays!
Oh man you should hit up @officersnickers that's her guy when it comes to the adult characters in this series.
I like keeping with the Norman parallels and see him as someone who had no trouble engaging and speaking with people due to years of PR training but was still fairly introverted and reserved, which was either enforced by his upbringing or serendipitously suited for it.
As the 35th heir to the Ratri clan a lot fell on his shoulders, making him view the majority of his relationships outside of it as transactional even from a young age. "Don't be unkind, but never forget who you are" was a sentiment that probably always lurked in the back of his mind and colored a lot of his interactions. In this semi-emotional isolation I think he would indulge in escapism and latch on to the romanticization of heroic escapades in fiction as well as the history he knew of Julius.
All of this contributes to him having a rigid sense of morality attuned to his social standing that he fully throws himself behind, to the point that Peter respected him more than either of their parents or any other figure in either world because of it:
(Chapter 173: "[James] was kind, smart, handsome, sincere and refined.")
It's also why he reacts so viscerally to finding out the truth about Julius and the promise (and not to the events in 2020 preceding WWIII, although they may have planted some seeds even if he was shielded from the worst effects).
(Mystic Code Book Chapter 7 - Series Timeline)
(Chapter 179)
The Ratris are shown to still have enormous prestige even after the world was overhauled in the wake of this war. James threw away a life of wealth and comfort as part of his atonement, and while he wasn't willing to break the promise himself, he was willing to stand behind the cattle children if they did.
(Chapter 72)
We don't know if there were already pockets of resistance among the scientists and other Ratri associates, but regardless, James is able to use his intelligence, charisma, and networking to not only suss out people open to his cause, but convince them the head of the entire clan was genuinely trying to dismantle the world order that led to him having his wealth and prestige and that this wasn't just a ploy to snuff out traitors.
Under this united front, that voice in the back of his mind is silenced, and while still somewhat isolated given the role he had to play between the two worlds, he's able to find some of the most authentic, fulfilling relationships in the last years of his life, in keeping with the theme of finding true freedom in dismantling or breaking away from oppressive systems. (Again going back to me being a JamesSmee shipper but one of these is with Smee lol, even if it's bittersweet with the way it ends).
But through all of this, he loved Peter dearly. After spending so many years as an only child, having a younger brother whom he could drop some of his walls around and dote on was the greatest gift his parents could give him.
(Chapter 173)
And that love would be his undoing.
(Chapter 73 | Chapter 173)
Peter was always a loose end as the one who witnessed James' revelatory breakdown that he'd never be willing to tie up. It's unclear how long he kept what he saw a secret from everyone not sympathetic to James' crusade, but it was at least a few years given how young he looks during the flashbacks we're privy to and that he's 15 when James is murdered. All of that time, if he ever gave any hints of wavering from what he told James about agreeing with him, James elected to ignore them, and I don't know if that's more tragic than him being completely blindsided by his brother's betrayal.
(Chapter 173)
But it's very telling that even knowing who ordered his death and everything else in play, his final thoughts were spent thinking of his brother and apologizing for being unable to save him.
A few headcanons:
☆ I think James' romanticism is part of the reason he never had children in any capacity.
(Mystic Code Book Chapter 6 Q&A)
I don't think he was being pressured to start a family given he was still young and everything he had going on even before WWIII broke out, but with all the pretenses in his life I think he was holding out for at least this sort of relationship and commitment to be founded on authentic feelings that he could find refuge in as opposed to it being a box he ticked off to keep up appearances.
☆ We don't know how involved James was with Smee beyond that Smee was a Minerva supporter, the one who killed James on Peter's orders, and the one who took up the reins from James' afterword, but I like to ship them because of the James Hook-Smee connection from the original Peter Pan and then have the tragedy of Smee being tasked with killing James (for some reason). Another parallel with Norman but similar to how Ray is the only one allowed to see Norman's prideful and impish side at Grace Field, Smee's at first the only one who sees the cocky and impish side of James.
☆ Based on the chapter 173 cover art, l think he read to Peter a lot, be it bedtime stories or them being research buddies in the library of their estates.
I mentioned that I think he gravitated toward grand heroic escapades and probably favored ones dealing with ancestral duties to sort of explain how he subconsciously reinforced his own beliefs about the farm system being predicated on ancestral sin all cattle children inherited even 1000 years out from the original promise. I talk about this here too, but it's interesting to speculate on whether James still held onto this belief or if it made him reform his worldview entirely that maybe all people are entitled to certain inalienable rights regardless of their birth.
☆ He strikes me as someone who would enjoy parlor tricks. Initially he taught himself this to impress his parents, who weren't thrilled with it but they never dissuaded him from the hobby, and eventually even they had to admit how deft he was in his execution and timing during a few dinner parties when they were trying to ease relationships between themselves and other party-goers they wanted to remain on good terms with.
Peter also absolutely loved these as a child, and I like how it would play into him reflecting on James' creation of William Minerva as an adult. How his slights of hand evolved into such an elaborate deceit that threatened Peter's entire identity and lead to him losing one of his most foundational connections. How it made him question whether he ever truly understood his brother at all and if that was better than having known him once and him becoming unrecognizable.
☆ I omitted Mike from my general trajectory of how James' childhood went because I like playing around with how antagonistic he is toward the cattle children and I tie that up with who between James and Peter is his favored nephew, but if it's James, I think they bonded over alcohol (keeping the burdens of the gatekeeper side of things and the human world side of things within the family, James setting up contingency plans for cattle children who made it to the human through Mike without directly revealing his plans, etc.) to partially explain how James developed a high tolerance that he used to his advantage.
(Chapter 179 | Mystic Code Book Chapter 6 Q&A | Yakuneba Community 8th Anniversary Q&A with Shirai and Demizu)
What ages do you think each GP member was shipped out?
I have a headcanon that the older members (Oliver, zack, Paula) are neurodivergent because they were shipped at a young age and probably didn’t do well at standardized testing of grand valley because they have been at goldy pond for years
(rather than months compared to some newer members. I think Pepe was the most recent?)
He's the only one whose shipment age is officially confirmed.
My guesses:
1. Adam: 14 at most, but probably younger (shipped in late 2045)
2. Gillian: 7/8 (2038)
3. Nigel: 8/9 (2038)
4. Oliver: 9/10 (2037; confirmed to have been at GP the longest out of the group, chapter 69 says he's somewhere between these ages when he's shipped)
5. Paula: 9 (2037)
6. Pepe: 16 (2045)
7. Sandy: 12 (2040)
8. Sonya: 9 (Early 2038)
9. Theo: 12 (Late 2045/January 2046)
10. Violet: 10-12 (2042-2044)
11. Zack: 10 (2037)
Without exact dates, the ages and years might be a bit off because I'm mostly focusing on their birth years, but within a year of error hopefully for everyone except Sandy and Violet, for whom I have the least amount of information to go off of so it's just personal vibes.
Reasoning under the cut:
Oliver, Paula, and Zack have been a part of the most recent incarnation of the Goldy Pond Resistance the longest, with Oliver being there the longest out of the three per the chapter 69 extra since he was either nine or ten. We also see flashbacks of them together.
(Chapter 85 | Chapter 95)
From here, all we have to go on is the "Two Wills" story of the third light novel that focuses on Gillian and Nigel.
In this conversation with Emma on January 29, 2046, Nigel says it took him eight years to create one of the guns they use in their plan.
I'm assuming the ages provided in the extras are their ages on the day they met Emma, so a few months later on March 27 of that year Nigel turns seventeen. 2045 (when he's sixteen) minus eight is 2037, when he's eight years old, but without exact dates and rounding going on this could also be in 2038 when he's nine.
Depending on how long it took Oliver and companions to recognize his technical knowledge, which probably wasn't more than a few hunts in.
Similar to how it didn't take long for Gillian's sister to be recruited for the cause.
Gillian and Nigel arrived at Goldy Pond within a few days of each other, if not on the same day, for the two of them, Nigel's younger sister Lala, and Emilia to all experience their first hunt together. Gillian is a year younger than Nigel, so she's shipped to Goldy Pond when she's seven/eight.
"A boy a little older than [Nigel]" is referring to Oliver, who's already shown an aptitude for leadership for him to start taking on the duty of announcements to the new arrivals, couldn't have been there for too much longer than Nigel, so my guess is he arrived at Goldy Pond in 2037 around the time he turned nine.
Sonya is also shown to have arrived before Nigel and Gillian, yet she arrived after Oliver, Paula, and Zack, as she's not featured in any of those early flashbacks with them, so my guess is she also arrived in the first half of 2038 before she turned ten on June 3 of that year.
This only thing that throws me off with all this is this page from chapter 77 because of how small and young Lala looks at the time of her death while Nigel looks like he's the same as he does in the present.
And shortly after she's murdered is when Gillian and Nigel go off on their own to try and kill Luce with an unfinished gun and fail, but the description makes it sound like it's near completion with the damage it's able to do to Luce's mask. It's hard to say, but with the light novel being published in October 2020 and the Goldy Pond arc being published in 2018, it's possible they retconned Lala into being older, or that there was actually a much larger gap between then and Nigel finally perfecting the weapon and ammunition.
But whenever this incident occurs, Sandy has also been around long enough to be integrated into the Resistance.
As this is the only time he's mentioned throughout the entire light novel. Violet's only mentioned during the conversations in the present day when Emma's talking to Gillian and Nigel about their pasts, so it seems safe to say she's the newest member of the Resistance after Pepe and has probably been with them for at least a year, so she was shipped out in 2044 at the latest.
My arbitrary designation for her shipment is sometime between 2042 and 2044 because of my personal headcanon that she only realized she was a trans girl after being shipped out, but she's had enough time to settle into her identity in her new environment surrounded by the new friends who support her. With the farms acting as institutions of violent oppression, I like the symbolism of kids coming into themselves once they've been removed from those restrictive environments they grew up in when they were unaware of the reality of their world.
(Mystic Code Book Chapter 3)
Your headcanon of neurodivergence being a factor in determining which kids are shipped out early before 17 at Grand Valley could also fall into this, which I think is cool. Thrown away due to narrow, arbitrary metrics of success, and becoming the menace that dismantles them thanks to the very reasons they were discarded.
Back to Sandy, he has to arrive sometime before Violet, so 2040 when he's 12. Just because.
Finally, there's Adam, who was at Lambda at least until November 2045 because he sees Norman there.
(Chapter 75)
But he has to have been at Goldy Pond for a bit for him to become the doorman for the resistance, so he was probably sent there in November or December of 2045.
Lambda 7214 did not exist fifteen years ago when James left this message, and the timeline in the mystic code book doesn't provide us with a date for when it was completed, though it's probably in the 2030s.
(Mystic Code Book Chapter 5)
With the experiments that take place at Lambda resulting in Hayato and Jin being born two days before Conny's shipment on October 12, 2045, and having them look as old as teenagers in October 2047 when Emma's group meets them, Adam could be anywhere from one to fourteen when he arrives at Goldy Pond. I go with eleven if I'm indulging in the Adam and Norman are twins theory.
#another fave: James Smee and their stupidity building a shelter for cattle children right next to Bayon's house #like what? (via @officersnickers on this poll)
Are we sure that's the main Bayon clan property and not a vacation home he built after Peter approached him about using Goldy Pond as a hunting ground in September 2031? Or that James had control over where the path to the human world was located?
I'm not contesting the first one too hard because from what we can see of it in chapters 76 and 94 during the present, the architecture of the columns lines up with what's shown in Bayon's flashbacks in chapter 84:
It's not impossible with both his funds and his luxuriating in decadence in nearly every facet of his life for over a millennia that he had identical manors built, though for the convenience of avoiding confusion and because he never says anything indicating this, it's most likely the same one.
For the second question, we're not entirely sure how paths between the worlds are created.
(Chapter 72)
We know there were at least five of them (I'd guess there was one under Lambda 7214 too for Peter's convenience), but not whether the farms were constructed around the portals or if they were constructed and then the portals were put in later. My guess is the former, whether they're the result of the demon god purposely choosing their locations or if they were randomly scattered about with how the magic of separating the two worlds ended up playing out.
(Mystic Code Book Chapter 3)
We also only have confirmation of where Goldy Pond's elevator went since Emma's group doesn't physically walk down the stairs in Grace Field, the implementation of a new promise is involved, and visiting the Seven Walls was not required in James' plan to bring small groups of children over.
(Chapter 72 | 178)
It's still probably located somewhere in former New York City to explain why they end up there and how Mike Ratri reaches them so quickly, but for security and the transportation of goods, I doubt the Ratri clan would leave one unguarded on the beach they end up on.
This proximity also provides an explanation for why the children from all the other farms end up in different locations.
(Chapter 178 | 179)
So it's possible James didn't have complete control over the location of the path and just had to work with what was available.
