Per wiki policy, Spoilers Off applies here and all spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned.
Alternatively the A.I could have already existed within Hermes before the original Kino fixed him, though it could have suffered some data loss.
The apparent age regression (the books, in particular, describe Hermes' voice as being like that of a young boy) is for shipping purposes, natch.
This is also why, in the Magical Girl themed Spin-Off Gakuen Kino, Riku the talking dog gets to be human, but Hermes is stuck as a talking cell phone charm (Kino doesn't even have a real cell phone) - he can't have anyone recognizing him.
Some of the towns and "countries" she visits interact, but there are way too many differences for most of them to be geographically anywhere near each other. She'll visit a medieval village one day and then arrive in a technologically advanced civilization the next, and neither will even realize the other is within motorcycle Motorrad distance.
It lines up with her restless nature and near pathologic wanderlust, it explains her immense combat and survival abilities, and it explains why all of the countries she visits are so eclectic (they aren't different nations but different planes). It also explains her disconnection with other people and her deep connection with Hermes, since only Planeswalkers, The Eldrazi, and constructs (like a sentient motorcycle) can cross The Blind Eternities. We also have a probable point of when her Spark ignited: her desperate flight from The Land of Adults. Possible Mana colors: Red (passion, freedom, creativity, destruction, fire), Green (life, survival, independence, tradition, nature), and/or Blue (intelligence, invention, engineering, stoicism, water).
Clearly, many of the places Kino visits are being cosmically and symbolically punished; but Kino remains untouched by it all. She's a badass Tourist enjoying herself.
No, being born in one of the freakish countries doesn't discount this theory; maybe that's how people arrive. Nevertheless, she has the Zen to appreciate it.
Karma did get her with Sakura's village, but she still had the Zen to learn from it. You can't tell us that wasn't some kind of karmic message.
- Or, to dovetail the above theory, the first Kino was Jesus administering to the needy in Purgatory. ....No, really.
- Remember, tropers, no anime is complete without at least one character under suspicion of being Haruhi. Take a sip!
- Or a Timelord...
- So Kino is Madotsuki, before the stuff she sees eventually properly messes her head up.
This seems to be a sliding scale, rather than distinct categories — some characters seem more abstract than others. Figuring out exactly which characters are 'abstracts' and why is left as an exercise to the reader or viewer.
The forests attack attachments. Those who travel either have those attachments stripped from their mind (including ones like the ideal of avoiding cannibalism and murder) or pull those attachments into themselves and fixate on them (the woman's flowers). Only those without attachments to other people, to ideals, or to goals can survive traveling and retain their sanity (if one can call that sane).
This is hardly wild guessing, but Kino clearly wants to avoid having any traits that mark her as anything at all besides a traveler. Through her clothes and demeanor, she defies any gender identity; and she refuses to be defined as either a child or an adult. This is most likely something necessary for her to remain the impartial observer that she makes herself.
They never explain what happened to the other child that was deported. Considering that the king's primary worry was the possibility of the throne being taken, sending Kino to the country he did makes perfect sense. She would grow up in a place where, once she became an adult, the only thing she would want to do would be to follow her adoptive parent's footsteps — and certainly not take his throne.
Shizu was sent to another country to prevent them from teaming up and causing trouble.
In the Coliseum episodes, the king did not recognize Kino because of her drastically changed appearance, which also explains his request to marry her. He didn't recognize Shizu without a makeover, so it makes sense that he wouldn't recognize Kino with one.
Adventure Towns. Schizo Tech. Planet of Hats city-states. Need I say more?
- Actually, Hermes talks to Riku the dog away from Kino. But maybe he wasn't really talking either!
- But he did, however, speak to the slavers, and they reacted with viable discomfort to what he said to them.
- Nymia, the young inventor girl from episode 8 ("Land of Wizards -Potentials of Magic-") talks to Hermes too. (Calling him 'Motorrad' and all.)
- The first movie, Life Goes On, seems to Joss this.
The land of Ooo was at the impact site of the bomb so it suffered the most changes from the radiation and is heavily isolated due to the wastelands that surround it.
Despite being neutral to practically anything she sees, Kino has her own standards and things she disapproves, she just happens to not impose them and will only show it if she is forced to. For example, during the colosseum arc, she is forced to fight many opponents. Despite being show to be clearly able to kill them, she simply opts to take them down by disarming them. At the end, she kills the king in a “stray” shot (Really one she did in purpose to hit him) and them writes a new law that allows the citizens to compete to become the new king. Since this new law states that anyone who doesn’t participate will lose their citizenship, this allows those who don’t want to enter this fight to get out of this madness, but this also guaranteed that madmans like the former king would all die in the middle of the fight. Basically, she not only freed an entire country of a tyrant when she could have just complied with his laws, but after killing him she made the choice that guaranteed that freedom of the citizens for the longest term possible and lowered the chances of another tyrant rising.
This leads to another act of her, the killing of the slavers. After discovering that the people she helped were slavers and that ate their prisioners, Kino initially complies to their orders to disarm herself... and then kills them all, not even trying to spare or disarm the slaver who was paralyzed in fear, despite sparing opponents before, including the ones forced to fight at the Colosseum. While Hermes question on whether or not Kino would still have helped them if she knew who they were is left unanswered, it’s clear from the fact that she killed them all without a second thought that she was disgusted by their acts and that she made sure that they wouldn’t be left alive to capture or enslave other people.
Lastly, the country where people are free to murder each other. The man who she first meets and admits to admiring a certain serial killer is from the get go an obviously murderous man who is up to no good. When he asks Kino to take half of his belongings ahead for him, she refuses, even though she has already done acts of charity before as long as she didn’t enter a conflict. Why? Because she disapproves of what he is doing, and even though she won’t go out of her way to shoot him, she dislikes his attitude and Ax-Crazy personality.
And that leads to the point of this WMG: Kino does have a moral compass beyond neutrality, and she does disapprove of killing without motive/against those who are defenseless, but most importantly, she dislikes those who take away freedom from others and force them to do things against their wishes, probably something she learned due to her own experience in her home town where when someone were to become an adult they were also forced to follow and do a mundane task for the rest of their lives. And while she won’t go out of her way to “impose” her own moral beliefs, as show in the countries that were in peace because they slaughtered the nearby villages, if she IS put in a situation where she is forced to make a moral decision, she will take the one option that leads to the least amount of deaths for those who are innocent and the most freedom possible for them.
- This is similar to another WMG above. Kino has morals and will stick to it but tried to be uninvolved and neutral as much as possible. Because she's just an outsider, a traveler.
- A lot of the settings are implausible even if it takes place in a fantasy world.