Fridge / Saint Seiya

Fridge Brilliance

• People like Cancer Deathmask and Pisces Aphrodite seem out of place in the army of the goddess defending Earth from other gods. But think about it: Athena is the Goddess of War, with War intended as fighting smart (as opposed to Ares who is the God of War as in violence and bloodshed), and who are the Saints who fight the smartest and dirtiest, using respectively fear, the opponents' own emotions and the ability to teleport their soul directly to hell and the other using Deadly Gas?
• In the anime Shaina is among those people who see the Cloths who wish to exclude non-Greeks from being Saints. Thing is, she's Italian. Hypocrisy? No, for three reasons: first, the ancient Greeks spread around the Mediterranean Sea, and she may well be from one of the parts of Italy where Greek colonists settled; second, Italians are traditionally considered descendants of the ancient Romans (plus a few dozens other populations, but that doesn't matter here), who claimed descendance from the Greeks of ancient Troy; third and final, after taking over Greece the ancient Romans adopted a version of Greek culture and spread it through their empire, thus, technically, anyone from any region of the Roman empire could be counted as 'Greek'.
• Ophiuchus Shaina is considered the strongest female Saint, and one of the strongest Silver Saints overall. Her constellation is sometimes considered the thirteen sign of the Zodiac. Well played, Kurumada.
  • Confirmed and more with Saint Seiya: Next Dimension: Ophiuchus started out as the 13th Gold Cloth.
• Shaina and Marin's Cloths are infamous for covering very little, especially when compared to later female cloths. In the manga, all Cloths get better coverage whenever they're repaired (or, in the Phoenix's case, regenerate after being disintegrated). Those two Cloths have never needed being repaired, especially Ophiucus, as Saint Seiya: Next Dimension shows that it used to be a Gold Cloth and only became a Silver one, with its current form, after the previous Holy War.
• There's actually a very good reason behind Docrates' escape from the police: the anime indicates that firearms can actually hurt Bronze Saints (as shown when a Mook in a later episode shot at Seiya and he bothered to dodge), and the Greek police is heavily armed (their equipment includes even machine guns). He was expecting to face both four weakened Saints Saints and a small army with heavy weapons that could have actually hit and wounded him, not four weakened Saints and a force of policemen with revolvers that would have been too scared to hit him.
• Hades goes down pretty quickly after being attacked by both Seiya and Saori. In Greek myth, a god could be killed only if he was wounded by a mortal and then finished off by a god, or wounded by a god and finished off by a mortal, as shown by the Titans' inability to kill Uranus (who they scared off) or their non-Titan sibling gods (that they imprisoned), the Olympians' inability to kill the Titans (that they imprisoned), and the death of the Giants when Herakles (a demigod but still a mortal) was summoned by Zeus and Athena to wound them with his arrows.
• Sanctuary is strangely lax with Mu's silent rebellion, especially considering he's the Clothsmith and is in possession of the Caelum Cloth, whose tools allow to repair other Cloths. But there's also another Cloth with the same characteristics, the Sculptor Cloth. Maybe there's another Clothsmith, possibly the Sculptor Saint, who is loyal to Sanctuary, making Mu's rebellion tolerable as long as he doesn't actually take up arms against Sanctuary.
  • One in-universe explanation if Saga impersonates Shion, is that he likely doesn't want to risk blowing up his cover.
  • Also, helping matters is that Mu explicitly agrees to repairing the Cloths of whoever manages to come to him. He merely refuses to answer summons to the Sanctuary.
• The first assassin sent by Sanctuary in both manga and anime was actually chosen very carefully:
  • In the manga the first assassin is Hyoga, and was chosen for four reasons: as the apprentice of a Gold Saint he was automatically considered trustworthy until proven otherwise, even if he was an unproven rookie; at first he had not answered the Graad Foundation's call for the Galaxian Wars, so he had already proven his trustworthiness in a small way; as he was supposed to take part in the Galaxian Wars, his targets had no reason to suspect he was there to kill them all (and they're actually caught completely by surprise when he flatly admits why he came there after the Silver Saints started targeting him too); thanks to his mastery over cold his attacks could easily shatter a Bronze Cloth, no matter what its special abilities are, thus completely negating the toughness of Shiryu's shield and the defensive abilities of Shun's chain.
  • In the anime the first assassin is Ikki, and was chosen for three reasons: like Hyoga, he's supposed to be there, so his targets would have not suspected anything had he not decided to steal the Sagittarius Cloth and declare he was there to kill them all; being a mental attack, the Phoenix Demon Illusion Fist bypasses the physical defenses of a Cloth, also solving the issue of Shiryu's shield and Shun's chain; if things went wrong, he had a completely sacrificable army in the form of the Black Saints (renegades that the Sanctuary would kill in a heartbeat if they just were worth the effort, so if they were actually exterminated it would have been a boon as long as they recovered the Gold Cloth in the process).
• When one thinks about it, Poseidon in the modern times had no hostility toward Athena, and was acting in what he thought was self-defense against his bloodthirsty niece: when Kanon awakened him he was planning to go back to sleep until he was told that Athena was gearing up for war, he was still mostly asleep during most of his arc, with Julian executing what was Kanon's plan, and when he woke up he saw that Athena's Saints had invaded his realm, brought down most of the pillars, and wounded him, and tried to stop them from completely demolishing his home. Only after being sealed again did he realize what had just happened.
• The Gold Saint's fame as the strongest warriors of all seems exaggerated, as some warriors can actually match or even defeat them... But there's two very good reasons:
  • Every single Gold Saint has attacks that will hit any enemy, even bypassing the defenses of supposedly invulnerable enemies like Siegfried (Aldebaran has an unnamed technique that makes you explode from the inside after a while, Saga can brainwash them or trap them in a maze of illusions or even in another freaking dimension, Deathmask can send their souls to hell, Aeolia as of Saint Seiya: Episode.G has attacks that enters the victim's body before affecting them, Shaka can do his thing, Dohko has homing attacks and weapons that are just too powerful to be stopped, Milo's Scarlet Needle can bypass defenses, Aeolus had his arrow that's even more powerful than Libra's weapons, Shura's arms can cut anything, Camus can kill them with cold, Aphrodite has the pollen of his roses, and Mu and Shion have techniques that outright disintegrate the enemy). Some other enemies have an Armor-Piercing Attack, but the Gold Saints are the only group where everyone has at least one.
  • Only Gold Saints can use Athena Exclamation.
• Italian dub-only: Seiya can quote Dante's Inferno in spite of being an Idiot Hero and generally not too knowledgeable of literature... But Hades' realm is identical to Dante's description of Hell. He was being taught in preparation for an assault on Hades itself.
  • Also, the people responsible for the dub had evidently read the manga in advance.
• After Mu first repaired it, Seiya says that (as far he knew) the Pegasus Cloth is tougher than it had ever been before, even if he got it in prime condition. It had also been repaired with the blood of someone whose Cosmo is on par with that of the Silver Saints: as would later happen when the Cloths were repaired with the Gold Saints' blood his Cloth had indeed become tougher, even close to a Silver Cloth when he burns his Cosmo high enough, but nobody noticed because Bronze and Silver Cloths are multicolored.
• Misty's pride in his looks, his general arrogance, and the infamous naked scene make perfect sense when one takes into account that, to Ancient Greeks, physical beauty is an objective thing and often a sign of divine favor: he's fully convinced he has Athena's favor, and will flaunt it.
• Why did Marin not make immediately clear to Seiya she's not his older sister? Because, knowing that a Saint's training take years and that Seiya had been separated from Seika for months, she thought he had realized it wasn't true.
• Italian dub only: many Saints have been renamed after their constellation-that can serve as another name for them. Actually hinted at by Deathmask, who in his mission to kill Dohko, first calls him by his assumed name of "Old Master of Goro-oh", as he had been known until then, before asking if he should call him by his real name and calling him by his title as the Libra Gold Saint.
• In "Gigantomachia" is shown that the Coma Berenices Cloth, kept inside Mount Etna, acts as a seal for Typhon's soul and Mei removing it to become a Saint resulted in being possessed by Typhon. The trainer for the Coma Berenices Cloth is Deathmask, whose power set includes manipulating souls, meaning that he was placed there specifically so he could contain Typhon when the Cloth was removed... But Mei went and took his Cloth unsupervised.
  • Shaka could have also done the job, as he can manipulate evil spirits and is far stronger than Deathmask... But the area near Mount Etna is inhabited and what is really inside is to be kept secret, so Deathmask who is Italian and anyway more normal looking, was placed there.