I really enjoy how compelling Noda-sensei’s writing is (it’s really a strong point of this series) because (spoilers for ch177, I checked the Chinese version) you can just feel what he’s going to set up for the Karafuto arc and how shit is gonna go so down as a result.
Like, that incoming Asirpa/Sofia foil around Wilk’s character? It’s going to be so good because I bet whatever you want that Wilk and Sofia had a thing
(Kiro even said that Sofia should know more about Wilk than himself did) and, seeing ch177, I guess at least Sofia might have wanted a family with him (?)
but then she was arrested and Wilk & Kiro scrammed to Hokkaido.
And now Sofia will meet Wilk’s daughter that he had with his Ainu wife: Asirpa. Who is the only one who can, in theory, find the gold everyone is after.
The second thing is, this thrill is even more intense considering that the initial plan years ago was most likely for Kiro and Wilk to get the Ainu gold and return to Karafuto, except that “Wilk changed” (most likely thanks to being a father, so thanks to Asirpa), leaving Kiro to be a in a bind because he didn’t (and maybe that led to him framing Wilk for those Ainu men’s massacre).
=> Probably double backstabbing for Sofia I’d say (if they really had a thing and she hoped for a family) so I personally don’t envision her liking Asirpa so much.
The final thing is that Asirpa doesn’t know the truth about her father and believes that he really killed the Ainu men to steal their gold, in order to fight for the cause Kiro is still strongly advocating for. So whatever Kiro and Sofia will tell her about her father, she will just have to take as such, because she has no way to know.
However, one person knows the truth and is catching up: Sugimoto.
He took a bullet in the head because Asirpa trusts him more than anyone and Ogata guessed (rightly so) that Wilk had started telling him stuff he shouldn’t have, but he’s catching up (hang in there in the meantime, Shiraishi!).
I don’t know if Sensei is planning the big moments of this arc to be a Christmas gift, but damn, this whole arc is slowly building up to several amazing confrontations. I can’t wait to find out even more!!
Hmhmhm, reading ch179, since it turned out that Sofia voluntarily stayed behind and got arrested after Wilk and Kiro left, maybe she will not be made to foil Asirpa but Kiro after all?
I’m really moved by how close she and Wilk used to be and she seems very sad about his death even if it’s been years since they last saw each other
so actually I doubt she’ll be happy to find out (thanks to Sugimoto and co who will catch up one day) that Kiro asked Ogata to put a bullet in Wilk’s head…?
I guess maybe it all comes down to the way Kiro will present how the whole thing with Wilk went down? If he lies to her, then Sugimoto bringing answers later could make her turn against Kiro… On the other hand, if over the years the revolutionary part within her became more important than everything else (like it still is the case with Kiro), then she could still turn out to be Asirpa’s foil.
I don’t know which idea I like more, but I loved how the flashback presented Sofia. She appeared way more ruthless initially, but the flashback makes me think that she may have more in common with Wilk than with Kiro. IDK, I just love how children play into this for the three of them:
Sofia couldn’t forgive herself for thinking she possibly killed Tsurumi’s baby, so she decided to give up on her happiness “as a woman” (aka a life with Wilk) and spend her life fighting as a revolutionary
and now she’s about to meet another child, Wilk’s, who is stuck in insane circumstances because she’s the only one who can supposedly solve the mystery around the gold
Wilk went on to Hokkaido to find out about the Ainu gold, but everything went wrong and he didn’t turn on the Ainu men and their gold as expected, for something that I believe has to do with having had Asirpa, amongst other still unknown reasons
As for Kiro, he ended up marrying an Ainu woman too but having Ainu sons made him even more dead set on the idea that he had to fight for the freedom of minor ethnicities, no matter the cost.
This is escalating slowly but surely, I can’t wait for when it is going to unravel.
Because Noda Sensei wrote about the use of fortune-telling/divination plenty of time in the story so far and, so as not to judge the customs of Ainu people or other minor ethnicities from Karafuto who strongly believe(d) in this, he made it generally accurate when it came to following plot twists.
Overall Inkarmat was more right than wrong (Kiroranke, Karafuto, Wilk didn’t kill those Ainu men even if he was Nopperabou),
her own prediction she got from Mifune Chizuko also turned out to be correct (Kiroranke, the man she was after, stabbed her),
Asirpa was indeed betrayed by one of the three men who used to follow her (by two, to be accurate, but you get the point)
Since most of what Inkarmat predicted is half divination/half investigation though, that’s why Sensei ended up introducing the additional idea that “fate can be changed”, meaning divination doesn’t have to be the only truth. However, where Sensei could have let Inkarmat be the fake she initially seemed to be (especially when Asirpa didn’t believe in this kind of things), she ended up being given a lot of credits.
And that means that this reindeer’s shoulder blade from ch166…
is supposedly a good indicator that someone within the group who (unknowingly) received this prediction will die.
The most expected/logical candidate initially is Shiraishi because it’s his decision to keep on following Asirpa that changed the prediction from “someone is following you” to “someone is going to die” but as it is, well that’s kinda too easy to think like that. xD
Sensei could go for a double bluff (making us think it can’t be Shiraishi because #too easy, only to kill him anyway) but… meh. Besides, Shiraishi hasn’t really done anything wrong, okay he’s the Escape King, but he never killed anyone which is quite the difference with most of the cast, so killing him would be unfair.
When it comes to Asirpa, she ain’t dying or I riot. Nah but for real, she’s got one hell of a plot armor, being (in theory) the only one who can work out the code her father hid amongst the 24 tattoos, which is why everyone wants her.
Besides if she dies, Sugimoto will most likely annihilate the whole world and this wouldn’t help his character development or the story, so double nah. Final point, but eventually she also has to go back to her village, to see her grandmother again, so that Tanigaki can be free from that self-imposed duty (and so that he can go back home too) => so, not Asirpa.
Which leaves Kiro and Ogata, the two traitors. :))
And Kiro is the most likely candidate to die between the two, at least for me.
Firstly, so far, Ogata was the one who was hinted to have a possible chance at redemption
between the two, mainly through the concept of “guilt” he pretended never to feel but that he must feel regardless, if just towards the memory of his brother.
We may not know why he wants the gold, but he left nothing behind when he went to Karafuto, so he could definitely change his mind about the gold and using Asirpa, which is a huge difference with Kiroranke.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t think Kiro sees Asirpa as only a mean to an end (he’s not Tsurumi), but he’s still ruthless. For example, Wilk was his old friend, they even assassinated the Russian Emperor together, but he still ordered his death.
Besides, I personally think it’s likely that Kiro is actually the one who assassinated those Ainu men which is something Wilk took the fall for…
just like he’s the one who stabbed Inkarmat. Hopefully Inkarmat will survive this, but Asirpa still believes her dad murdered some of her fellow Ainu people and she’s bound to find out it wasn’t the case once she sees Sugimoto again.
For Kiro to hide a truth like that is not an element vouching in his favor or his survival. In the first place, going back to Karafuto is a real step back for Kiro, because it’s like going back to the past and as we know now…
…that past holds a lot of complicated elements that we have to take in consideration for the future developments.
Going back to Karafuto ties directly into Kiro’s motivations obviously, because fighting for the independence of minor ethnicities is all that he’s always been after and, as Sugimoto said to Wilk, sure it’s a just and noble cause, but it shouldn’t be at the expense of everything else.
For example, just like Sugimoto was angry at Wilk for apparently trying to make Asirpa this Ainu “Joan of Arc” (because it’s selfish as @sentrakk explained here), Kiro shouldn’t have gone to Karafuto without a single look back at the family he left behind (how many months has it been since he saw his sons?).
Again, don’t get me wrong, I don’t think Kiro doesn’t care about his family. On the contrary, having Ainu sons is giving him even more reasons to fight for the independence of Ainu people and other minor ethnicities, which is most likely why he’s even more ruthless now than he used to be and so why he even had Wilk killed.
But here’s the thing…
Kiro and Wilk were old friends, who fought and killed together, so for Kiro to have Wilk killed (just like maybe for him to frame Wilk for the murders), it must indeed have been because Wilk really changed when Kiro didn’t/couldn’t.
As for how/why Wilk changed…
…it’s thanks to Asirpa herself (just like it was the case for Sugimoto, Tanigaki, even Shiraishi and for Ogata next): Wilk’s plan and motivations regarding his daughter were definitely questionable, but at least it seems that he truly loved her and the Ainu people, to the point he wasn’t ready to keep going with the initial plan about the gold and that’s the major difference with Kiro.
He and Wilk used to have common goals, they used to be the same, but where becoming a father apparently changed Wilk, having sons didn’t make Kiro change his way of life/way of thinking: he just can’t leave the cause he’s been fighting for his whole life behind just to be with them.
And beyond the notion of this being “good or bad” (since the cause is indeed seen as just and noble), since Kiro couldn’t forgive/understand Wilk changing and had him (framed? and) killed for this reason, this difference between them is most likely what’s going to kill Kiro too at some point during this arc.
Personally right now I have no idea as to who might kill him or lead him to his death, hopefully not Sugimoto (who’s set up to confront Ogata) or Tanigaki (even if Kiro stabbed Inkarmat, because he should know revenge isn’t for him).
Maybe it’s going to be the Russians? Or maybe it will have to do with Shiraishi
one way or another, since it’s Shiraishi’s change of mind that led to this change of prediction in ch166.
TL;DR just my opinion, but I’ll be very surprised if Kiroranke were to make it back to Hokkaido somehow (unless he has a change of heart about everything, since “fate can be changed”, but it sure doesn’t look like it right now).
I personally think it is a very selfish ideal and that despite Asirpa recently wanting to find out more about him, she will have to reject him in the end and move on. At this point it’s hard to say what exactly happened with the gold and who killed the Ainu, but one thing that’s sure for me is that Wilk shouldn’t place this kind of burden on Asirpa. I’m with Sugimoto on this one, he shouldn’t just train her to become some Ainu Joan of Arc war leader from her childhood and do all of that with the gold, he is not taking responsibility himself, he is forcing all of that responsibility onto Asirpa who is still just a child despite her maturity. She really is just a kid and the fact that shes getting mixed up in this mess, because of her father is not okay.
In this manga the older generations and their obsession with war and conflict is a thing that makes the younger generations suffer they are only expendable things to be used and then discarded. This shows in everything, in Sugimoto’s war trauma, in the way Tsurumi manipulates Tsukishima and the rest of his men to work for him, how Asirpa is currently being tricked and used to find the gold, how the army system and Ogata’s father caused him to become the way he currently is… that especially works as a good example, because it and Ogata’s foiling with Koito shows how questionable this
It’s particularly interesting that Koito’s father’s speech here seems to be heavily influenced by Hanazawa’s suicide letter when we know that he never committed suicide, he was killed by his own son and Yuusaku didn’t really die in the battle either since he was killed by Ogata too. It’s not clear if that letter was written by Tsurumi or Ogata, but the line “his brave act preserved the honor of his utter fool of a father” is quite telling. It’s not Yuusaku’s responsibility to preserve the honor of his father, especially when we know that Hanazawa was the type of man who abandoned his other son to only care for the other so that he could be used for his own gain in the army. The entire backstory of Ogata is quite obvious criticism of the army system since his father sticking to it is what caused the unfortunate series of events to happen and it is the root of Ogata’s issues and trauma to this day. So basically Koito’s father speech about sending your child to the war and thinking it is a good thing to do is entirely based on a tragic tale of a selfish father and the army system ruining the lives of his family. If that wasn’t enough, he even references Wilk right after it:
Like sorry, but… that’s exactly what using someone is like unless they actually fully agree with your ideals, are not being tricked, manipulated or pressured and are given other options to choose from. Of course something has to be done about the Ainu situation and all the other issues in the world, but I doubt the message is that Asirpa should become a war leader. Asirpa is someone who is exactly the opposite of these older generations, she is against the idea of killing and cruelty and is the most empathetic person of the bunch. Asirpa basically embodies the optimistic themes of the manga with what she does and how she influences the people around her. This especially shows in her relationships with the two people completely ruined by this world, Sugimoto and Ogata, and how she is an inspiring positive and healing influence to them, she is the one guiding them away from the path of bloodshed, violence and their past trauma. I feel like Wilk’s idea of Asirpa being the future is meant to be a bit ironic since she will not be the future in the way he thinks she will be. I genuinely believe that despite currently being used to find the gold and wanting to find more about her father, she will eventually reject everything. My ideal ending would be the gold being left in the ditch where it currently is actually, because if it is found, I doubt it will be used for anything remotely good
I don’t know if there’s another good solution to the problems in the world, but then again war isn’t a good solution either. I’m pretty sure the message though is to condemn the idea of Wilk using Asirpa for his own gain and the same applies to all the other people like Hanazawa and whoever wants to use the younger generations cruelly like this.
midnight-in-town 