You're telling me. My personal view of the world and current events is getting darker by the day, and it's taking a serious toll on me, extending even to my physical health. At the risk of oversharing, I've got a whole host of aches, pains and, *ahem* irregularities in my bodily functions that I'm almost certain a doctor's visit scheduled for the end of the month won't turn up a single treatable cause for, because it is almost certainly due to enormous and growing stress around my job and the state of the world. I COULD just try to take a break from the news for a little while, but my issues with work still affect me every weekday, and a dry summer is already giving me MAJOR climate anxiety.
Sometimes I wish I could just drop into a regenerative sleep that would allow me to stop all input while I heal my overstressed constitution...
But if that happened I wouldn't get to enjoy color panels. So I GUESS being awake and aware has its perks.
Kagome seems to have cottoned on to the fact that this little bundle of... something was born at Mt. Hakurei. She demands to know what the baby intends to do with her, and he answers that he already said, repeating that she's the only one now who can see the Shikon fragments. Ominously, he says that he wants her eyes, a statement that Kagome is understandably alarmed by. His host Okugata-sama stands to walk over to her.
Abruptly, we're outside the castle again, where a guard had lifted his sword above his head in preparation to bring it down on Sango's skull, bidding her to go to heaven. I suppose he can't bring himself to wish a shitty afterlife on the pretty lady he's slaughtering, at least. She's not looking too worried about going to ANY afterlife, because in the next panel, one of her hidden wrist blades pops out and slices straight through the ropes tying her arms behind her back.
The onlookers stutter about her being a wench or something, because how DARE these people they rounded up just to murder DEFEND themselves?? The NERVE! While they're gaping at her utter audacity, Sango goes to cut Miroku's ropes real quick too, receiving a hurried thanks in return. A group of identical guards rush them with staffs, declaring that they be stopped. Because these aren't bladed weapons, Miroku is able to catch and wrench one out of the hands of an attacker, jabbing him in it chest with it instead. Sango slices through the middle of a staff with her wrist blade too, demanding these suspiciously under-armed men get out of her way. By the next panel, she's slid into a doorway, grabbing both her Hiraikotsu and Miroku's staff, but still holding that wrist blade aloft and at the ready, much to the alarm of the men inside the room.
Outside, there's still a group of "suspicious travelers" that are getting up to run at the encouragement from each other, but one of the executioners with swords lunges at them with weapon raised, calling them bastards. May as well be attacking a MIRROR, this one.
Sango is running back too, knocking a couple more dipshit fascists off their feet with her reclaimed Hiraikotsu while she's at it. When she reaches Miroku and hands over his staff, she comments on how UNREMARKABLE these dudes are. Miroku acknowledges the truth of this, but says their attackers are just humans following orders from higher up. Yeah, so were the fucking Nazis, but I suppose they should have just gotten a pass at the Nuremberg Trials because they were too chickenshit NOT to be war criminals? Miroku insists that not only CAN'T they kill the fascists, but they're also up against quite a few of them, so it might take a minute to defeat them by other means.
Back inside the castle, Kagome is still being approached by the Okugata-sama puppet and her little infant puppeteer, who giggles that he's going to make use of her eyes. He orders that Kagome's rope binding her arms to be cut, and Kagura looms over Kagome from behind, fan raised, but asking if he's sure about this. She receives no answer, but directs a small wind blade down to Kagome's wrists to snap the rope holding them anyway. Okugata-sama sits down again, and Kagura pushes Kagome farther toward her by the shoulders.
Kagome recoils from the grasping baby, but Kagura holds her in place, despite her protests. The baby teases Kagome, asking what exactly she's afraid of - that he'll take out her eyeballs and eat them? What, like being touched by your creepy little clammy hands wouldn't be enough for ANYONE to flinch? Kagome doesn't reply, and just has the little devil baby deposited into her arms. Her disgust is palpable, though she still doesn't speak.
She's understandably not inclined to punch this demonic infant in his little soft spot, so he's allowed to just zone out against her chest and, I suppose, examine her soul? It doesn't take long for him to think about how he can't seem to find any darkness in there (probz part of the reason he's not getting punched in that soft spot). He's sure it shouldn't be possible, because there's darkness in ALL human hearts, like anger and hatred.
Meanwhile, Kagome is wondering in alarm just what this creepy feeling is, describing it as like the inside of her heart is getting scanned.
Besides that, Inuyasha shouldn't NEED to save you, girl. You can totally take this thing out. It's a fucking BABY.
But that isn't her biggest concern, strangely - it's that Inuyasha is out searching for Kikyou. The extreme closeup on her eye in profile shows her eyelids have lowered a bit, and her continued rumination on Inuyasha is tinged with a depressed implication. By contrast, the baby's eyes are wide now, and he declares to himself that he's found it. Kagome appears to receive some sort of shock, and in the next panel the baby says he's grasped the darkness in her heart, nestled comfortably on her chest. She stares blankly at the floor in front of her as she's told she can't escape now.
The baby instructs her to hold him carefully.
Weird little calculating monster. I'm gonna call him "Gorkspace Sergeant Shnooky".
That's his name now. :)
Kagome closes her eyes, still considering Inuyasha, in a clearly painful way. This leads us, after a narrow sky transition panel, to Inuyasha, standing on a river bank presumably nearby Mt. Hakurei again. He's frustrated because he can't smell Kikyou, no one in the area has seen a miko, and he's wondering what's going on. Couldn't POSSIBLY be that the stranger you met randomly in a decimated village wasn't being truthful with you! Suddenly, his nose twitches and he looks up, curiously observing the far-off flying shapes of a few youkai among the clouds.
Cut to Shippou, heart thumping loudly as he rustles through some tall grass, muttering about finally managing to get away. He opines that he got separated from Kirara and can't find Inuyasha anywhere, sweating profusely. He holds up an acorn, supposing he'll have to use it after all, before he's scared close to death by someone grabbing and lifting him by his poofy tail.
I'll tell you what he's NOT doing: getting taken in by a half-baked story about how his ex-girlfriend is totally alive and thirsty for revenge somewhere.
Shippou yells at Inuyasha in a rage not to sneak up on him like that, a rage that Inuyasha regards with boredom, at best. He turns at a shuffling through the grass behind him and identifies Kirara walking through the thicket toward them, remains of a minor youkai in jaws. Then Inuyasha hears and repeats the news that Kagome and the others were arrested and taken to some castle somewhere. He starts to piece together that given this was while he was looking for Kikyou, this might very well be some sort of plot.
YOU THINK???
Meanwhile, Sango and Miroku are smacking down castle guards left and right, only to have to hide behind Hiraikotsu as a shield as a volley of arrows descends upon them, looking haggard AF. Kagura observes the fight from behind the screen walling off the porch, commenting to the others inside that the priest and slayer are still alive. I mean, Kagura, if your shitty BOSS hasn't been able to murder them yet, what made any of you think that a few human fascists could do it? Kagura adds that the two of them seem to have no desire to kill any of the castle guards either, which she characterizes as "carefree". I don't know if it's particularly "carefree" to be fighting for your life while being particularly careful not to take the lives of the people trying to kill you, but if you insist, my girl.
In the depths of the room, Shnooky chuckles that they'll WANT to kill before long, because the castle guards want to kill THEM, and eventually that malice will be reflected, causing the humans to slaughter each other. Over an image of the rapidly exhausting Sango and Miroku, he says that peoples' hearts are fragile and hatred is born easily, claiming that Kagome, the girl he's possessed, is the same. What kind of armchair psychology bullshit is this?
Inuyasha, you have GOT to stop being so ready to leave behind your group to run sundry errands every five seconds. That's like 90% of where your current issues come from, dude.
So, what did I think of this chapter overall? I realize that I'm coming across as somewhat BLOODTHIRSTY in this one, and there's something of a POINT in that about what "Shnooky" said at the end of the chapter - malice begets more malice and hatred comes pretty easily between people when they've been convinced that the "other" is a threat. Yes, it was easy for me to say "fuck it, kill all the fucking fascists".
But that's because I live in a moment in history where fascism is making a comeback in a BIG way, and people are finding themselves fighting for their right just to LIVE. When I FIRST read this story, I was nodding along with Miroku and Sango, agreeing that since their attackers were human their lives should be preserved, but that was a time when Nazis were still considered to be the bad guys and the struggles of marginalized groups were still largely invisible to my privileged white ass. It's not the "fragility of human hearts", it's the MANUFACTURED contexts that people with power create to sow discord among regular folks for their own selfish gain. I don't think that Shnooky is WRONG necessarily, because hate is extraordinarily easy to spread when you know how to speak a certain community's language, know the specific ins-and-outs of their lingo and ideology, but where does that hate come from? There is a part of this scenario that has been suspiciously left out of the narrative we're given, and that's HOW this whole castle of people became so zealously devoted to taking orders to murder random people they don't know. I've already put forth a hypothesis about Mt. Hakurei's collapse and the youkai roaming around killing whole villages making communities much more paranoid and vulnerable to the suggestion that any out-group might be causing the chaos, but that's just it - it's a guess. RT isn't really bothering to mention HOW this castle was taken over and manipulated by Naraku in a matter of days to produce the amount of zealotry needed for THIS level of animosity, and if she did... well, as I mentioned before, this whole mini-arc might have an entirely different message.
Abandoning one's humanity to actively hurt and eliminate other human beings is actually quite a complicated calculation some people make, usually to save their own skins and ally themselves with the strongest authoritarian in the room. When Miroku cites their orders from higher up, he's refusing to acknowledge the DECISION that they made to be murderous pieces of shit because they're fucking cowards. He refuses to hold them accountable for their active choice to hurt others, even in his own mind. By all means, they should go after the man (youkai) behind the curtain, remove the dear leader that is behind the paranoid ideology, but never forget that there are some people who see the writing on the wall and decide that they can stand to murder strangers if it means they might not be on the chopping block themselves.
And never forget that "moral high-ground, killing people is wrong even in self-defense" perspective is a naive, privileged one that allows for the demonization of victims of bigoted violence when they fight back.
OKAY, now that I've gotten THAT off my chest, I will say that I really like Shnooky's concept as a villain. Having what would normally be the most harmless kind of person, an INFANT, be this dangerous manipulative monster is clever. Not only is it the last thing you would expect to be able to hurt or control you, but we all have an aversion to doing violence to infants. Everyone is going to hesitate hurting a poor defenseless baby, even when they KNOW that it's not REALLY a baby. The built-in counter to the inherent vulnerability of an infant form is a very powerful asset to something that clearly has to initiate physical contact with a host in order to appropriate the power of others.
Of course, Kagome was probably the least likely to hurt Shnooky out of course - she's not a trained fighter like most of the rest of her crew, and she's much less likely to take a defensive stance or attack first. He's lucky the one with the eyes for the Shikon shards is also the one who isn't used to putting up much of a fight herself. Not that exceptions to this rule don't exist, of course...
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