tonic my water

first, both character come into a position of power after the previous people (director akikawa and sister julienne) are currently unavailable. in riko's case, director akikawa had to go to america for a while so she got appointed as the acting director. in sister ursula's case, she was the lead nun (?) while sister julienne and the others were in South Africa, and took over sister julienne's role after they came back.

next, both characters make big changes to their respective workplaces which yields negative reactions from the characters under them. in riko's case, she implements 'Operation Oversight' - where she oversees the umas' training schedules, meals, and even intends to monitor and interfere with their private lives, in order to reduce the risk of injury. she also cancels the Unity Cup, which upsets a few people - including Taiki Shuttle. in sister ursula's case, (from what i can remember) she shortens the time that post-natal checks are supposed to take to increase efficiency. by shortening the time, the midwives cannot properly ensure that everything is in order which is quite dangerous (obviously). she also changes the lunch from being a hot meal to plain sandwiches and removes the television, which pissed off sister monica joan.

also, each character's backstory gives an insight into why they act the way they do, and why they make the changes to the previous way of life at each place. in riko's case, letting her trainee have the freedom to make her own choices about when she wanted to train with her team for the Unity Cup, and not resting before her graded race in the Classics led to her trainee suffering a severe injury during the race that prematurely ended her trainee's career. in the backstory, we can clearly see her blaming herself for this - saying that this wouldn't have happened if she had paid closer attention to her. this is her motivation to have (as director akikawa said) total control over her trainees, thus her reasoning for implementing 'Operation Oversight' when she became the acting director - as she would now have a large amount of control over the umas' daily lives. this (in her logic) would prevent anymore career-ending accidents like the one that happened to her trainee. also, she does make reference to this when she talks at the assembly - with the hypothetical trainee who pushes herself too hard. that was her trainee. in sister ursula's case, it is explained that she used to lead (?) a small cottage hospital in the past. eventually, that hospital closed down and sister ursula blames herself for it, and so when she is in a leadership position at nonnatus house, she instills a culture of efficiency because she believes that the inefficiency of the cottage hospital was a large part in the reason for its closure. she does not want nonnatus house to fail like the cottage hospital did, so she is doing the most logical thing in her perspective to help.

link to news post

https://friday.kodansha.co.jp/article/438213

condolences to everyone at the farm.