"It's unraveling... all around me."
I have mixed feelings about Trinity Blood volume XII, and a lot of them come from Esther, Esther, Esther. I know that her initial role in the series was to be the newbie viewpoint character, the person the world and its rules needs to be explained to so the audience gets it too, and that her journey to whatever is going to be a big part of the series, but I don't find her a compelling protagonist and making her a saint just makes it worse. (If not for the facts that we're already talking about a far-future Vatican that sends armed priests and nuns out to kill monsters and is thus LOL!Catholicism, I would so be chanting, "Canonization doesn't work like this, and it can take decades to centuries! She'd have to at least be dead, you fools!")
Her talent just seems to be that she gets really attached to people. She's really passive, almost eternally just reacting to things going on around her. When she is proactive it rarely turns out well because she jumps to conclusions. (I also wonder if manga Esther will eventually get [spoiler] killed the way she did in the anime.) At best, she manages to take advantage of a lucky break, like in the incident near the fountain in volume III. Her record is so bad that when she's proactive and it saves the day, like in volumes V-VI, it comes off as OOC. And, really, she only went to help because she didn't want Abel to go to his death thinking she thought he was a monster and was terrified of him after the way she'd reacted to him as Crusnik 02. It's not like she knew a human was needed to stop the Iblis, either.
Aside from the focus on Esther, I found a lot of XII's plot rather "huh?"-inducing. How is being a saint supposed to help her do squat in a Vatican that lets lots of people be mutilated and die horribly and lets the pope be put in dire danger seemingly just for giggles since they already had evidence from paperwork two days ago and more recently the coerced confession of one of his underlings that D'Annunzio was up to no good? D'Annunzio didn't even go to trial. The Inquisition didn't even let their own director, Petros, know what they were doing. So, becoming a saint gets around all this how? In Albion Esther's just being used as a public relations puppet. So Schera's last act makes no sense to me at all aside from the mercy-killing part. It's not like everybody involved couldn't have just made up something anyway, since that's what they did otherwise.
Speaking of the Inquisition letting all this unfurl seemingly just for giggles, what the hell did they have to gain by letting all this happen? It really seems to have been done just to underline the Vatican being Evil.
I'll miss Schera. She was really making a man out of Esther.
Tres, of course, lies about Caterina's senseless kill order on Esther from volume XI and takes the heat for whatever blame the lying didn't cover. That's so him. Alas, we still don't have an explanation for what the hell Caterina was doing giving said order, which made little sense and was certain to be discovered by Abel, who would Not React Well. Are we supposed to blame her brain not working on her being so ill? She was really quite useless through the whole volume, even before her collapse, and it's not like her. I wonder what Tres would do if she died.
I really wish Abel didn't have so many moments of utter incompetence. Jeez. It's not cute.
Next issue: "Esther is on her own again..." Damn it, I follow this series in spite of Esther, not for her! With all the interesting freaks and weirdos in the AX, why do we have to waste so much time on its least compelling member?
Her talent just seems to be that she gets really attached to people. She's really passive, almost eternally just reacting to things going on around her. When she is proactive it rarely turns out well because she jumps to conclusions. (I also wonder if manga Esther will eventually get [spoiler] killed the way she did in the anime.) At best, she manages to take advantage of a lucky break, like in the incident near the fountain in volume III. Her record is so bad that when she's proactive and it saves the day, like in volumes V-VI, it comes off as OOC. And, really, she only went to help because she didn't want Abel to go to his death thinking she thought he was a monster and was terrified of him after the way she'd reacted to him as Crusnik 02. It's not like she knew a human was needed to stop the Iblis, either.
Aside from the focus on Esther, I found a lot of XII's plot rather "huh?"-inducing. How is being a saint supposed to help her do squat in a Vatican that lets lots of people be mutilated and die horribly and lets the pope be put in dire danger seemingly just for giggles since they already had evidence from paperwork two days ago and more recently the coerced confession of one of his underlings that D'Annunzio was up to no good? D'Annunzio didn't even go to trial. The Inquisition didn't even let their own director, Petros, know what they were doing. So, becoming a saint gets around all this how? In Albion Esther's just being used as a public relations puppet. So Schera's last act makes no sense to me at all aside from the mercy-killing part. It's not like everybody involved couldn't have just made up something anyway, since that's what they did otherwise.
Speaking of the Inquisition letting all this unfurl seemingly just for giggles, what the hell did they have to gain by letting all this happen? It really seems to have been done just to underline the Vatican being Evil.
I'll miss Schera. She was really making a man out of Esther.
Tres, of course, lies about Caterina's senseless kill order on Esther from volume XI and takes the heat for whatever blame the lying didn't cover. That's so him. Alas, we still don't have an explanation for what the hell Caterina was doing giving said order, which made little sense and was certain to be discovered by Abel, who would Not React Well. Are we supposed to blame her brain not working on her being so ill? She was really quite useless through the whole volume, even before her collapse, and it's not like her. I wonder what Tres would do if she died.
I really wish Abel didn't have so many moments of utter incompetence. Jeez. It's not cute.
Next issue: "Esther is on her own again..." Damn it, I follow this series in spite of Esther, not for her! With all the interesting freaks and weirdos in the AX, why do we have to waste so much time on its least compelling member?