The battle on the ice field marks such a sharp split in Golden Kamuy the same way that Abashiri does. The plot pre-Abashiri is strictly prisoner-oriented, the manga spends a majority of its runtime as an episodic adventure interspersed with cooking and other cultural education.
The characters don’t move much, don’t change much, and have little light thrown on to them that would have the effect of some sort of change. Shiraishi doesn’t fully subscribe to Asirpa and Sugimoto’s plan, nor does he have any opportunity to show it until they reach Abashiri. Even the Shiraishi rescue arc is late, late in the game. The plot also ticks over at a snail’s pace; most of the arcs are about exploring areas of the island and working in different hunting and gathering techniques; it’s critical groundwork for the plot, it’s all time spent telling us what the stakes are. Everything we learn from ch1-130 is what we risk losing if Asirpa doesn’t succeed.
Abashiri generally agreed to mark a change in what the manga does and how it works. I think that poor Kiroranke’s death is the same. Kiroranke forces a change in the main characters up until that point—separates Asirpa and Sugimoto, tells us about Asirpa’s paternal heritage, gets Ogata in the battle that leaves him hallucinating, reveals Tsurumi’s backstory (unknowingly). Once he leaves the stage, the pieces have all been set up for the characters introduced early on and the focus shifts to late additions / characters who were never in the original plan.
Most of Tsurumi’s faction wait until here to get the limelight, the shift in focus has us pretty much split between Tsurumi (told through various POVs) and Asirpa as the two poles of the story. Old hands Hijikata, Tanigaki, and Ogata become secondary, new blood Vasily and Sofia become relevant, and Ienaga and Kiroranke’s deaths close together mark this as the point where the stakes for readers become real.
With so much revealed, the plot increasingly leans on character motivations for fuel; we’re not just trying to collect skins, our protagonists have now worked with and been betrayed by a number of factions, it’s a race against time to try and use whichever new people they meet and figure out who’s going to kill them! The prisoner episodes feel extraneous (gold guy and Jack the Ripper, I do not like), events become increasingly connected, almost every scene directly pushes forward the confrontation between Tsurumi and Asirpa that is to take place.
That, and the setting becomes much more modern all of a sudden; Sapporo and Hakodate are both infrastructure-focused arcs the same as Abashiri, the steamboat and train showcase the tech of the time, and we never really return to the rural settings. It fits with Tsurumi’s increased presence in the story, after all he is modern warfare, he is the future, he is the rise of fascism, but it drastically changes the feel of Golden Kamuy when we leave behind the smaller towns and villages!
All that is to say that Kiroranke doesn’t single-handedly turn the story around, it’s the Sugimoto-Asirpa reunion that is the actual plot point happening here, but it’s still as big a change as the fracturing of the fellowship at Abashiri. Specifically, Ariko’s introduction happening theeee chapter after he dies marks that shift for me. Similar design elements to keep Noda happy (beard, bulk, prominent eyebrows, cool but serious) and a totally different role—an assimilationist rather than a preservationist, a man easily swayed, someone who betrayed his people for personal reasons of comfort rather than someone who gave up comfort for his ideals. Kiroranke doesn’t just die, he puts the ideological underpinnings of the Asirpa faction at stake because they’ve lost the last person who understood Wilk’s original plan. What do we do now without our guide ? What will happen as the forces of technology and politics close in?
