#old commentary

     I’m honestly wondering as I’m getting ready to post this; how many people are going to remember the Sneaker Pimps!? I mean, this group did certainly achieve a short-term and red-hot level of success with their first album, Becoming X, and their ageless original hit Six Underground. However, after their first record came out, this group entered some tumultuous times, replacing the lead lady vocalist (Kelli Dayton) with lead male vocalist and the group founder (Christopher Corner, a very talented performer in his own right) for marketing and creative reasons. The music on their second album also took a much darker turn, replacing a somewhat upbeat and mainstream sound with a bleak and self-destructive tone. This musical change in sound, in my opinion, was the right call to make. Instead of trying to appeal to absolutely everybody, the tunes became much more personal and authentic. This is Low Five from their 1999 album Splinter, and it’s absolutely my favorite SP jam of all time because it is equal parts sad and beautiful. It’s also an anti-corporate anthem, clearly highlighting mounting internal frustrations and becoming uninspired by being put under pressure to produce their next big hit. The mere existence of this song proves to an extent that trip hop can actually be thoughtful, all while extending a solid middle finger at the lofty expectations of record labels who expect constant perfection from their performers to sell lots of records. On a final note, there are rumblings online that this group has reunited and is working on new material after nearly twenty years of literal radio silence. I, for one, hope this is true because I’d love to hear more. Smash play, and shoegaze so hard your head falls clean off your goddamn shoulders.

Because it’s been done already twice, in the form of vaporisation.

In the George Orwell book Nineteen Eighty-Four, an Unperson is someone who has been vaporized. Vaporization is when a person is secretly murdered and erased from society, the present, the universe, and existence. Such a person would be taken out of books, photographs, and articles so that no trace of them is found in the present anywhere – no record of them would be found. This was so that a person who defied the Party would be gone from all citizens' memories, even friends and family.

Rantaro is mysteriously missing from the pictures in the pre-trial, despite the Imposter showing up in DR2.

Rantaro is also missing from the funeral pictures in the outside world, the ones we see the first time.

No explanation is given for either of these instances, nor the missing person in Ouma’s group of ten.

Extremely suspicious, when you combine with the fact of Ouma showing up as a clue in Rantaro’s lab, and them sharing a lot of things in common. You can deduce that the intent is to denounce Rantaro from the picture, in order to de-legitimise Ouma, and Ouma’s group, to anyone observing the video. No one in their right mind would buy Rantaro being part of a laughable pranks group, given the dangerous stuff he is involved with. 

If he was there, Shuichi would raise his eyebrows as to what’s really going on.

He cannot use his self-destruct until he’s upgraded. It’s too damn dangerous to have on his person in general, and it’s in too convenient a place that it can be accidentally pressed, even by him. Besides, he’s not a battle mech in his usual getup. It’s just completely out of place.

What Tsumugi said here made next to no sense to me, because why would a human even be bothered by what Kiibo described? Why is she even reacting?

See, an Electrobomb wouldn’t affect a human in the slightest. If it wasn’t the Electrobomb, it would be the malfunction, if any. With those options, there’s nothing to really add from a human perspective.

(x) But it turns out he was asking the others if they thought it wasn’t the Electrobomb, and.. never even mentioned a malfunction. 

Tsumugi and Himiko’s responses would point out that it was more likely to be that, because neither of them felt bad from the air. Kiibo’s trying to convince himself that the others were just as affected by the air as he was, which is why he was even asking what they thought in the first place.

It was more like his complex about not being human, and denial of being a robot - something that’s quite prevalent through this chapter, and part of the next - that drove this exchange. It’s clarified here, when you find out that Kiibo is still bothered by what Himiko said.

Which is why he is just then coming to terms with the offending article being the Electrobomb - simply because he was denying that fact to himself, not because he’s slow to catch on. He again tries to convince himself (and Shuichi, for that matter) that a human could possibly have an allergic reaction from electromagnetic particles, despite the exact opposite being evident.

That’s just the background radiation, and again, it’s the thing he ends up turning to when he’s stuck more than anything. The influence of the voice may grow as the game goes on, when the situation gets more worrying and confusing, but it doesn’t change that his logic, emotions, and general reactions are still his own.

If anything, the ahoge-less Kiibo is the very same Kiibo at his most desperate. Which is why he ends up more cold and calculating- his ‘inner voice’ is suddenly cut off without a trace. He’s stuck having to maintain his humanity - in part, his sense of hope - on his own, while dealing with a horribly threatening situation and the need to fulfil Ouma and Kaito’s will.

There’s a point where his own memories were.. well, quite literally deleted when he ‘went berserk’. Or so that story goes. Who knows if he even went berserk, since all he got of his ‘pre-death memory’ was secondhand information (maybe his memory was deleted because it was simply too dangerous for him to hang on to, who knows), and we can reasonably infer that the ‘memory of his shame’ was used to manipulate him.

Speaking of that memory, it was a span of a few years- oddly, the exact same amount of time that the Ultimate Hunt was going on for.

As we know Kiibo was effectively a robot made to be as close to a human as possible, he was treated just as any other student. Thus, he was chased down for how advanced he was, too- also because he could blend in with them more than any other, and made for the perfect mole. 

You know, it makes me wonder what would have come of this situation if Kiibo had reached him. It’s sad, because he was one of those most concerned with understanding Kokichi, and his logic particularly.