I remember when I was a kid, and learning about historical oppression in school spurred discussions of hypothetical existence in such environments. There wasn't a single one of us participating that didn't KNOW for certain that we would have helped and supported the oppressed, while fighting the oppressors with them. Now I look around, and there is a disturbing lack of integrity to that childish proclamation; people are more than happy to waffle on about how they're fine with the peaceful parts of the protests but they can't abide the riot side of it. My own in-laws have bade my husband to stop posting anti-police pieces on Facebook, insisting he not piss off the cop (and cop's father) in the family. We're both told we should bow our heads and not make waves, keep our mouths shut for the sake of our privileged peace, peace black families don't get the option to have.
Unfortunately for them, I haven't forgotten my own childhood certainty that my side is with the oppressed, and I was never very good at keeping my mouth shut.
Fuck the police. Defund them. Abolish them. And Black lives matter.
Chuckling, Naraku remotely observes Inuyasha to see his choice; run away and preserve his life or be shot by Kagome's arrow. If he chooses the former option, Kagome's life will of course be claimed by the dark miko's curse. A shockingly simple dilemma; can't wait to hear how it sucks that Kagome is cursed and everything, but she shouldn't be pointing her arrow at Inuyasha. Clearly that's how we dismiss the duty of helping people in pain these days. Kagome is the only one around to do the dismissal, though, and urges Inuyasha through halting, strained speech to get away. Inuyasha just says Kagome's name with a pained expression.
It quickly turns to affront when he calls her a stupid jerk and insists he won't just run and leave her, leaping toward her as he does so. A tear squeezes from Kagome's eye at yet another command in her head telling her to kill Inuyasha.
Tsubaki comments that this Inuyasha guy seems to WANT to be killed by Kagome. Or maybe his instinct is to just run headlong into whatever is threatening him at the moment. That's certainly what he did to resolve the last arc. Tsubaki smirks at Naraku out of her periphery and tells him he's a very nasty guy to make the reincarnated Kikyou kill her beloved man yet again. As if he didn't know. Before he can respond to her weirdly flirty comment, though, his puppet body (no surprises there) is blown apart and Tsubaki's name is called from behind his exploding pieces.
"But, if you're over there, then who have I been cursing this whole time???"
Tsubaki is pretty alarmed at Kikyou's appearance, which is... understandable, and Kikyou just kind of glares at her back, starting some identifying statement no doubt. We cut away before it's finished, however, to Inuyasha crouching on the floor in front of Kagome, her hand still held aloft though the arrow has flown out of it. Inuyasha's bell sleeve has been ripped off his shoulder and is pinned just above the doorway behind him by that very arrow he so narrowly avoided. Close call.
Inuyasha says Kagome's name tentatively, and she loses her balance, all energy completely spent by fighting that mental command. Inuyasha lunges forward to catch her, calling to her out of worry again, but she's regained enough control over herself to say his name in return, and not even in a murderous way this time. A definite improvement. He asks her if she's okay, and she answers that she is, even if she's sweating pretty hardcore. The voice in her head has stopped at least.
It seems that Inuyasha has nothing to say at this point but Kagome's name, whereas Kagome is somewhat relishing her regained power of speech. She tells Inuyasha to take her somewhere.
How close IS Tsubaki? And if she's close enough for Kagome to sense the Shikon no Tama, then why did Sango imply it took her and Miroku so long to find her? Does Kagome have extended Shikon detection range right now for some reason? Is it because she's connected to the Shikon no Tama through the curse?
Yeah... Yeah, let's go with that.
Soon, Inuyasha is leaping through the air with a barely conscious Kagome riding piggyback. She mumbles that she's sorry, and after a short pause, Inuyasha tells her not to worry about it, since it wasn't HER that fired the arrow. The perfect segue back to the one who WAS behind the arrow; Tsubaki, who glares at the newly-arrived Kikyou with BURNING HATRED. But a small sweatdrop accompanies that rage. She asks Kikyou what the hell is going on with this girl Kagome if she's not actually Kikyou's reincarnation. After all, Kikyou can't exactly be reincarnated if she's not DEAD, right?
Ahhh, this comic and its absurdly complicated cosmology.
Instead of answering this question, because that would probably take all damn day WITHOUT snack breaks, she takes a look at Tsubaki's big snake hovering over the Shikon no Tama on its tray and asks for confirmation that there's a curse on Kagome going on here. She snidely remarks that it's futile with the scant strength of Tsubaki's spell, and Tsubaki scoffs, the scaly pattern reappearing over her eye. She says Kikyou shouldn't take her lightly, since she's not the same as she was when Kikyou beat her fifty years before. With some disgust, Kikyou tells Tsubaki her stunt of selling her soul to a demon to preserve her youth is incredibly obvious at just a glance.
Instead of the refutation of this claim this panel suggests, she starts to reminisce of that time when Kikyou threw her curse back at her using a mere gesture with her bow. Tsubaki thinks in a few disjointed half-sentences; counter-strike, my face, that time, in addition to attributing the whole curse to Kikyou now. Even though Tsubaki is the one who threw it in the first place. And Kikyou just threw it back.
Whatever. As she contemplates that time she first got her scaly eye and her first reaction of utter and complete horror, Tsubaki says that though she couldn't steal the Shikon no Tama from Kikyou before, she's joined with a youkai, gaining eternal youth and beauty. And the youkai's power too, as something of an afterthought. Seriously, how has living this long NOT given her some sense of priority? I mean, she's good looking to be sure, but that won't exactly win her any fights, which seems to be how everyone settles any issues in this world.
Kikyou calls Tsubaki foolish, and Tsubaki immediately snaps that this stuck-up jerk is in NO position to be saying as much, standing there looking exactly as she did in her teens. But suddenly she looks a bit clearer at Kikyou.
Took you long enough to notice, sheesh...
She also observes rather late that Kikyou's body is neither human nor youkai, but an imitation. Tsubaki asks if the merely dead Kikyou came over just to lecture her or something, but Kikyou smarms that she doesn't give a fuck what happens to Tsubaki. She just wandered in there to see what the origin of this radiating evil was. Kikyou then shifts her gaze to her periphery and says that "she's" on her way. No points for guessing who SHE is.
Tsubaki responds to a call to her - supposedly from the little altar she's set up for the Shikon no Tama, I think - by twisting around to look back at the jewel. She notes the small spreading clear spot in the stained black Shikon shard, remarking internally that it's being purified.
Inuyasha is still leaping along, Kagome on his back, looking a LOT better while she sits up straight and aims another arrow in her bow.
It's great when douchebags announce themselves so blatantly, isn't it? We've got a whole slew of them calling their own dumb asses out over here. Just glorious.
So what do I think of this chapter overall? I'm underwhelmed. Kikyou's presence seems to be simply based on her name being invoked, which she actually admits. She's showed up for no other reason than to poke around, which suggests that she really doesn't have much to do otherwise. What about all those injured soldiers that she's been taking care of? Or has she moved on to doing house calls for weird patterns of energy for no apparent reason? I know that Kikyou is literally not capable of having an anchor or purpose for being ANYWHERE, given her "frozen-in-time" dead status, but I feel this is a rather empty use of that horrible position. Kikyou may not have much reason or purpose in where she ends up, but RT does, and perhaps she could utilize her to SAY something about it instead of just vaguing about Kagome's strength compared to Tsubaki's weak curse? It's an interesting statement, perhaps something of a compliment on her reincarnation, but there's not much else there.
In addition, I'm a little disappointed about the opportunity to flesh out our current baddie that our author gave herself and subsequently ignored. Tsubaki's motivations are just confirmed to be as shallow as they initially seemed, even to the point of putting her youth and beauty before the power her youkai benefactor gave her. In a conversation about how she wasn't the same as the girl Kikyou beat in the past. You would think that power, the main difference between then and now, would be Tsubaki's main argument, but she prioritizes bragging about her ongoing hotness instead.
After how many unique and interesting female characters RT has written, I'm rather disappointed that she just shrugged her shoulders and put the evil queen from Snow White in her story almost 200 chapters in. Is she going to offer Kagome a poison apple at some point or what? How unbearably BORING.
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