This page has been made compliant with the Spoiler policy that includes not putting spoilers on Fridge pages.
Fridge Brilliance:
- While Totori seems like an innocent girl, even acting the part as a struggling young owner of an inn, there is good evidence that she’s in the know about the town’s vigilante gang’s “100% Pure Water” trap they set on the map. Besides giving locals the directions to the water, she encourages visitors to rent a room at her inn along with taking any valuable belongings with them if they leave their room. This is good advice to avoid having valuables stolen from their newly rented room, but it also would be an easy way to ensure people who visit the trap set by the gang are only carrying valuable items when getting robbed.
Afterwards, anyone who was robbed would consider hiding at the inn to gather their nerves as well as retrieve their other items, so if they were carrying valuable items at the trap then the gang could rob their victims again at an already-known location. On the flip side, if the victims had few valuables when being shaken down (or were too vicious in a fight) the bandits could leave the victims alone and not bring more potential trouble on themselves should the victims have any weapons back at the inn (which Totori likely looks for, considering she searched Maru and Kiruko’s belongings while they were gone). This gives Totori more money on the side if the victims still decide to stay at her inn, not to mention it also gives her the opportunity to seduce any men who stay overnight if she knows they aren’t dangerous. - During the “Inazaki Robin” arc, Maru’s fight with the Chief of the Water Filtration Center, Inazaki Robin, had many confusing elements that were out of character with how Maru fights. Under normal circumstances he’s a Combat Pragmatist who goes for quick and decisive blows, but this time around he trapped Robin into a corner; kept throwing him into the wall and preventing him from escaping; all the while Maru refused to look at Robin, making it obvious Maru didn’t even need to keep clear eyesight on the latter in order to defeat him. The reason had to do with how Robin had treated Kiruko before the fight began:
- There’s a particular reason why Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil. It invokes one of the oldest fears in human nature - humiliation - in the sense that a rapist is controlling and dominating a victim against their will. Healthy sexual intercourse involves consensual love, but rape twists this into a criminal indulging their lust on a helpless victim. What makes it worse is if the victim trusted the perpetrator at first, which unfortunately is common in real life since it’s the easiest way for a criminal to make their intended target let their guard down.
This is why Kiruko, a hardened survivor who is vigilant around others, never once suspected Robin of being capable of raping them. They knew him in the past as a kind and benevolent figure who watched over an orphanage, not to mention in the present day he became the Chief figure of a water filtration plant that kept a local town running with clean water. So to have their trust betrayed as well as being gaslighted into becoming more submissive broke their will while he continued to treat them as a sex slave. Therefore it’s no wonder why Maru snapped and decided to toy with Robin first before beating his lights out: the former was making the latter find out what it feels like to be helpless before a person who is much stronger and can do whatever they want, whereas Robin had no choice but to keep taking abuse because there was nothing he could do about it.
- There’s a particular reason why Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil. It invokes one of the oldest fears in human nature - humiliation - in the sense that a rapist is controlling and dominating a victim against their will. Healthy sexual intercourse involves consensual love, but rape twists this into a criminal indulging their lust on a helpless victim. What makes it worse is if the victim trusted the perpetrator at first, which unfortunately is common in real life since it’s the easiest way for a criminal to make their intended target let their guard down.
Fridge Horror:
- Many fans were quick to note in the early Post-Disaster plot chapters that they were few corpses/skeletons in the abandoned cities, though as the Bird Man-Eater revealed in Chapter Four and Five they aren’t picky eaters when it comes to humans. Alive or dead, the monsters absorb their food whole, leaving it up to debate how many Man-Eaters there are that could leave many abandoned cities relatively corpse free.
- The Post-Disaster storyline deconstructed several common gender bender concepts seen in manga/anime, almost to the point of reaching Existential Horror. This was shown with Kiruko, who identified as male despite having a female body, due to the surgery performed by a doctor that put Haruki Takehaya’s brain in Kiriko Takehaya’s body when both of them were dying, leading to “Haruki” (who still had his memories) in Kiriko’s body taking up the alias “Kiruko” as a result. Overall, the post-apocalyptic setting makes things very difficult for them to survive, but it gets even worse when they had to tackle the concept of who they were as a person.
- The initial Deconstruction focuses on Gender Bender Angst with Kiruko being forced to adapt to their new body in a world that didn’t care about them. Even if they told the truth about their Brain Transplant surgery most people would find it too incredulous to believe, even in a world filled with horrifying monsters who used supernatural abilities on a regular basis. Kiruko had to keep a low profile to avoid trouble, and just acted the part of a woman. And in Maru’s case, despite believing their story, he’s a fifteen year old perverted teenager who didn’t buy the idea that Kiruko was a man either, which caused no end of comedic perversion on his part despite being nice and well-meaning to them.
The Deconstruction turned ugly when Robin raped Kiruko. Since he knew about Kiruko’s brain surgery and they were still resisting him as well as screaming for help, he decided to gaslight them in order to break their will. During this process, he showcased another horrifying reality: even if a person (with a body assigned female at birth) considers themselves to be a man (and/or not a woman), that won’t deter a rapist who only sees a beautiful and well-endowed woman. Kiruko had believed themselves to be “Haruki” for so long that they never caught on to the idea, even with Maru’s antics towards them during their journey together, which is why them learning Robin watched over their sister and themselves in the past because “he thought they were interesting” made them realize they failed to consider the viewpoints of others towards them. Robin convincing them that they could be “Kiriko” who only believed they was “Haruki” because they were able to tap into their brain’s memories broke them as a result.
In the end run, Kiruko had to accept the Awful Truth that they didn’t know who they were. This meant that what worried them the most wasn’t their gender identity, it was their entire identity as a whole that they cared about. Robin’s machinations had taken advantage of their dilemma, leaving them to figure out the truth about what had happened on the fateful day that “Kiruko” came into being, having also learned they couldn’t trust him anymore.
- The initial Deconstruction focuses on Gender Bender Angst with Kiruko being forced to adapt to their new body in a world that didn’t care about them. Even if they told the truth about their Brain Transplant surgery most people would find it too incredulous to believe, even in a world filled with horrifying monsters who used supernatural abilities on a regular basis. Kiruko had to keep a low profile to avoid trouble, and just acted the part of a woman. And in Maru’s case, despite believing their story, he’s a fifteen year old perverted teenager who didn’t buy the idea that Kiruko was a man either, which caused no end of comedic perversion on his part despite being nice and well-meaning to them.
- Gaslighting is a notorious psychological abuse technique used by criminals when they need to make their intended victim(s) more submissive, like what Robin did to Kuriko during the “Inazaki Robin” arc. Due to being caught off guard by the realization that Robin had a twisted and sadistic personality the entire time, many readers looked back at previous chapters in an attempt to find any clues that could’ve hinted towards this development. Except… there was none; Kiruko had no reason to believe that Robin would be capable of raping them.
In the end run this disturbing turn of events led many readers to realize an important lesson about life: you’ll never completely know what others are thinking. Any “friend” you have could have an ulterior motive for being nice to you; many victims of gaslighting in real life reported their perpetrator was someone the victim knew personally, thus they had no reason to believe that the criminal in question had malicious intentions in secrecy. But while one should never live a life of paranoia and doubting everyone they know and care about, less they become a nervous wreck who lives in fear for the rest of their lives, the threat of someone you know turning on you when you least expect it is a very real possibility. - In the “Inazaki Robin” arc, the truth about what hid behind the door that Robin tried to keep locked up was revealed to be a woman who had been missing from the the local town for an unknown amount of time. Her limbs had been partially amputated, one of her arms was chained to a radiator heater to ensure she couldn’t escape, and she had fluid transfer tubes attached between herself and a Man-Eater. Even worse, her being naked indicated the possibility that Robin had raped her before beginning the procedures, considering he had raped Kiruko earlier. It’s also hinted he was the one who committed the experiment since it was revealed during the “Immortalites” arc that he learned how to perform surgery from Dr. Usami years prior. Finally, this opens up the chilling possibility that if Maru hadn’t rescued Kiruko they might’ve ended up becoming an “experiment” as well.
