That was the first thing I thought about when I saw it - especially after we didn’t manage to figure out what board game they were playing a few weeks ago! A 4x4 Rubix cube sounds super complicated - but I guess that is the point!
I got a little confused about the history of the rocket toy with the skips backwards and forwards in the story telling but I got there in the end…
I thought it was interesting that a 学ラン is a very specific style of school uniform.
Interested to know more about 桐生 now. The other boys referred to him as an institution child - the end suggested he might be living in some sort of foster home with all those little children his “siblings” - I assume we will find out more soon.
It’s been quite a nice portrayal of teenagers recently. I love Asumi’s shyness in talking about her feelings, and Kei’s aggressiveness in dragging it out of her!
Page 43, in case anyone’s mildly confused about what Asumi’s talking about in those flashback panels, her name could potentially be written in kanji as 明日見. (Meanwhile, her father’s name resembles the English word “tomorrow”.) Can’t believe she never told Kei about her backstory, though…
Thanks for explaining a bit more about that names panel!
So we got a bit more detail on ひまわり, now we can read the whole sign. 子どもの寮 - presumably some sort of orphanage/children’s home. I guess the term might be used for a boarding school accommodation as well, but that’s clearly not where he’s living from the other info we’ve had.
I liked the scene with Asumi and the younger children at ひまわり.
Chapter finale - what a smooth move - not just fixing it up but delivering it so nicely! Romance to follow? Or will their ideological differences stand in the way??
Two chapters with very nice pacing. I liked how 桐生 gradually got fleshed out.
So, Marika 1.0 was Lion-san’s childhood crush? I wonder if this is gonna play a larger role (ghost romance in the afterlife ahead?) or if it’s just one of those little backstory tidbits.
Yeah, that was weird. I thought that was common knowledge in their little circle of friends by now.
The real-world reference on page 71 is probably apparent enough that a link is unneccesary, but I’mma link it anyway: Pioneer 10. (Though I love Asumi describing it as being long before the kids’ births, as though it wasn’t launched thirty years before her own birth too.)
The pioneer plaque article on Wikipedia gives quite a bit of detail about the meaning of the different symbols on the plaque. There was apparently some controversy that the images of the humans showed details of the male genitalia but not the female gentalia. The manga version conveniently has a band of light that hides the male genitalia!
I liked the Twin Spica movie billboard in the background. Passed by with no comment from Asumi - I’m guessing this was an Easter egg rather than a plot point!
No notes this week. I pondered if Lion-san’s rocket was named after a real-world space vehicle of some description, but the only one I could find was the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, which wasn’t announced to the public until after this entire manga was finished. That said, the lunar module on the Apollo 16 mission, the final manned mission to land on the moon, was also named Orion…
Though that absolute brat on page 96, whose first instinct is to peg a rock through the house’s window, and then is surprised when the rock does go through the window.
I’m a little confused what’s going on in the flashback scenes, although I think some of it is still supposed to be a mystery. The boy is presumably Lionsan when he was younger. The girl has lots of similarities to Marika physically, and also the isolation/medicines - but can’t be Marika as she is too old to be Marika at the time Lionsan is a boy.
Also the names written on the ship are both surprising. I was expecting it to be Lionsan’s real name and the name of the girl from the flashback (which had been withheld from us so far). Instead we had Lionsan and Marika. I don’t remember if Lionsan called himself that when he was a child?
That’s why I assumed in my post about the chapter where we first see her that the girl is the original Marika, who “our” Marika is a clone of. What surprised me is that Marika 1.0 is also sick. I thought maybe Marika 2.0 has to take all that medication because she’s got health problems from being a clone. Back when Dolly the cloned sheep died, there was a lot of discussion if being cloned from an adult cell lead to premature aging, and I thought maybe the author had been influenced by this. But here, it looks like this Marika is suffering from something similar, since they’re both constantly coughing. One of the little snotrags says it’s a mystery super virus. But then, how did it get transmitted? Or could it be something genetic?
In either case, new Marika’s health condition seems to be getting really serious. I wonder why they let her into the space program anyway. Shouldn’t there have been basic health checks?
I don’t think we got Lion-san’s real name yet, and I don’t understand why it’s such a mystery. Afaik, there was a scene where his fiance called him by name and it was somehow censored.
I figure you want them to be as robust as you possibly can, since they’re escape pods (or at least they’re claimed to be), and windows are a structural weakness in any structure.
