#kanitarou

Kai asks who gave the doll her tagchip. The doll doesn't know what he's talking about, and he says she's wearing one around her neck. She pulls out the tagchip that we've seen in her memories.

The doll doesn't know what it is or when it got there. Kanitarou gives the run down on tagchips: every human has one inside them and they give humans their freedom and rights. The doll is ecstatic.

The doll thanks Kai for giving it to her, and he explains that he didn't do it. The doll wonders where it came from for a second, maybe it was the ramen stall owner, but decides it doesn't really matter. She asks Kai to show her how to use the tagchip, but Kanitarou rains on her parade by reminding her that they don't work on toys.

Cue long explanation by Kanitarou on how tagchips are implanted that I skimmed because it hurt to look at. The doll gets pissed at him and complains that he always talks too much (I felt a sense of kinship in that moment). Kai wonders whose tagchip it is and why they removed it from their body.

The doll says it must have been the ramen stall owner again. On the subject of the ramen stall owner, she thinks of ramen, and then of the dream she had of ramen, and then the dream she had of the tagchip.

That train of thought leads the doll to her dream of the girl with the blindfold. Kanitarou calls her stupid because dolls can't dream. Kai asks her what the girl looked like and Eko brings her pot out so the doll can show her her memories. But before they can do that Eko notices that the tagchip is saying something and snatches it away.

The tagchip displays the image of a 5-star girl whose name is listed as Number 32, and says that she's dead. The doll notices that this is the same person who appeared in her dream and Bon notices that she looks exactly like Mizuha.

Gugu asks what happened to the Guardians, and Bon says that Mizuha dissolved them but the remnants formed Kaibara Cybernetics. Hylo says that Mizuha was dead by the time tagchips were implemented (meaning she couldn't still be alive by the life extension affect of the chips). Gugu asks if that means 32 is one of Mizuha's descendants, but Tonari says no, it's clone of Mizuha.

Tonari reveals that she learned of this some years ago, when she spied on Kaibara as a ghost and saw that they have a number of children who resemble Mizuha. She told Fushi, but they apparently already knew about it.

In order to keep Hayase's bloodline alive, they have a ton of Mizuha clones working at Kaibara as employees. Bon realizes that Number 32 means the girl is the thirty second clone.

Tonari wanted to get rid of the doll because Kaibara can track the tagchip to their location, but getting rid of the tagchip should work as well. Hylo and Messar agree with her.

The doll tries to get them to change their minds, because she needs the tagchip to become human. She believes that 32 gave it to her so she could do that. But Tonari asks her why she wants to do that in the first place.

The doll is taken aback and feebly starts to reply that it was because the ramen stall owner told her to, but Kanitarou butts in and declares that if Tonari, Hylo, and Messar try to take the tagchip, he'll stop them with his super arm.

March and Eko join him. Bon and Kai try to deescalate the situation, but March makes them join her. Gugu is still undecided. The chapter ends with the two teams facing off.

I'm never going to shut up about how Fushi spent the last two arcs feeling like they weren't allowed to be happy unless they were constantly helping others and now no one can be happy unless the people around them decide that they've helped enough to earn a good rating. Everything is so much worse now. With all my love to Mizuha and Yuuki, they fucked up big time.

I really like that we're looking at what lies outside of the star system along with the people inside it. The star system is presented like it's fair because it gives everyone an even chance. You don't get human rights unless you have stars, and how much of a human you are is dictated by how many stars you have, nothing else. Every human gets an equal opportunity to earn stars once they turn eight. But then characters like the doll and Kanitarou don't have a hope in high heaven of being human, because they were never part of the system.

Just spinning my gears here, this is all hypothetical but if human beings are being mass produced and tailored to each customer's specifications like we saw in Chapter 166.1, then they're no more "real" than Kanitarou and the doll are. Toys are made up of wires, not flesh and blood, but human society only functions with the chips inside each person's body. Both rely on technology to live. People can even end up looking less and less human as well, if they get a low rating. They might eventually end up looking like a toy, given that the ramen store owner and others assumed the doll was just a person who had one star. The qualifications for being human are very specific and very arbitrary, aren't they.

On a side tangent, it struck me that the powers ordinary humans possess are more like the Beholder's than like Fushi's. The ability to make things that weren't already preexisting, the ability to give vessels life, the ability to replicate tiny details like grains of sand and such, even the ability to stretch lifespans indefinitely. Together, humans and knockers have reached a new height where anything is possible, and it's terrible. It's true that if Fushi had taken on the Beholder's abilities, they might have been able to present this from happening, but it's because they were unwilling to exert control over others like Kaibara Cybernetics does that they decided not to. You can't be a good person while holding onto that kind of power. For Fushi, they wouldn't have been able to be a person at all.

Which begs the question, what kind of state are the five star people working at Kaibara Cybernetics in? Just food for thought.

Kanitarou and the doll have the start of an interesting character dynamic. Kanitarou is polite and logical where the doll is brutish and intuitive, but by the end of the chapter it's apparent that he's just as hard-headed as it is. I think it's interesting that he insists becoming human is a pipe dream but despite that, still has a strong sense of justice for toys and wants them all to be treated well. A little sad how he basically repeats what the boy who was torturing him said, that he and the doll are just programs. It's not any less hurtful if he says it nicely.

I don't think Tonari ever went by "Tonari Dalton," but this is nice confirmation that she's remembered by the place where she lived with her friends instead of by her father. Part of Tonari's character development in the previous era was going from hating Jananda and wanting to leave to taking over and protecting the people there the way she wasn't protected.