Rottcodd@ani.social 2 days ago
Mmkay…
So we’ve now gone back to Yuki’s sixth or seventh or eighth game. And is that her agent as the 95 game winner? It’s sort of hard to tell when most of the character art is just lineless cel-shading. I’ll have to go back and rewatch the earlier episodes (something I planned on doing anyway).
I tracked down the tanuki reference (and kachi-kachi yama), but I can’t find an explanation for the stumps. I assume it’s also part of a folktale.
Interesting that the rabbits are all veterans and the stumps are all rookies, except for Moegi. That puts the focus on Moegi (quite starkly in fact), and I sort of suspect that that’s something that wasn’t done just for the purposes of the story, but was done in-universe - that part of the currently hidden reality is that the producers of the games have deliberately focused on Moegi for some reason.
Rottcodd@ani.social 22 hours ago
Okay - I rewatched the entire run up to here, and have a bit better idea what’s going on.
There’s a scene in an earlier episode - I forget which now - in which another veteran mentions Candle Woods to Yuki, and says she heard that that was a bad one. But it doesn’t seem that she’s aware that Yuki was in it - she just refers to it as if it’s a landmark game - as if the history of the games can be divided between before Candle Woods and after Candle Woods.
The Tanuki and the notion that Tanuki’s lose to rabbits is from the folktalke Tachi Tachi Yama, in which a Tanuki tricks an old farmer couple into eating a stew made from their children. That doesn’t bode well for this game, and the fact that the rabbits have to survive for a week to win.
I still can’t find a reference to a folktale about rabbits and stumps. The closest I can find is a sort of sequel to the White Rabbit of Inaba in which the hero is trapped and dies in a split tree, which I guess might sort of count, but he’s not a rabbit - he’s the hero who saved the rabbit in the original story. I dunno…
I noticed in rewatching the series that in the early games, Yuki’s eyes are both blue, and it’s only later that they shift to heterochromatic - one blue and one gray. I suspected that this game might be the dividing line, and sure enough, there’s a scene at the beginning of this episode when they focus on Yuki’s eyes and they’re both blue, but then there’s another brief scene later in this episode that’s apparently after this game, when she’s sitting in a chair watching film of the game, and specifically of a conversation with her mentor, and in that one, her eyes are heterochromatic.
And as I also sort of suspected - during the scene when Yuki’s mentor is talking strategy with the rest of the serious veterans, they focus on her eyes closely enough to see that they are in fact gray.
The next episode is going to be brutal.
hypertown@ani.social 17 hours ago
I’m almost sure it’s her master’s last game. Yuki will lose an eye and will receive one from her master along with a wish to win 99 games.
The premise of the game seems simple: Let’s put empty handed veterans against heavy armed amateurs. Just to be sure amateurs don’t lose instantly, keep one veteran on their side.
Food shouldn’t be a problem. People can survive quite a long time without food. There is drinking water so that’s fine too.
Now the real question, why is this game so significant. Possibly because veterans, no matter how experienced, don’t stand a chance against guns? I can easily see how the vast majority of the players die but would it be really considered so significant?
That’s the thing about this type of games. Once you have experienced enough of it nothing really seems bad anymore…
Rottcodd@ani.social 15 hours ago
Yeah - that’s pretty much exactly my prediction too.
Well yeah, but in the folktale, it’s not about starvation or anything - it’s just that the Tanuki tricks them.
Right - that’s why I assume there’s going to be something more to it - something even worse than a lot of people dying - because it’s remembered as “a bad one.”