Okay, so you know in the first season of the anime, towards the end, when Yui goes unconscious and Reiji flounces off to go make a potion? Rejet did the lovely thing of actually showing three of the pages of his book, as follows:
Now, most would pass these over as filler. I did, the first umpteen times I watched it. However, I’ve taken a 12U Biology and a 12U Chemistry class (this here sentence also acting as a disclaimer because I’m no expert), and recognized the molecule in the first picture to be an organic one, redrawn here, to be more clear:
At first, because of the double rings, I thought it might be a sugar, and found it hilarious. Rejet was just trying to seem smart, poor Reiji is being reduced to making sugar water.
But no.
I did some looking, and this is actually very, very similar to the structure of a nucleotide. To explain, our DNA is made up of sequences of four different bases: Guanine, Cytosine, Adenine, and Thymine. The names aren’t really important here, but it is important to know that there’s two types: Purines, and Pyrimidines. Purines (Adenine and Guanine) have two rings, and Pyrimidines (Cytosine and Thymine) have only one. As such, Cytosine and Guanine will bond together in a DNA strand, where Thymine and Adenine will bond together.
Why is this important?
Looking at the structure, it’s just a neat little thing Rejet thought to include. Maybe they had a chemistry nerd on their team that wanted to have some fun and add some realism, except, one thing is weird and would never happen IRL.
These single bonded carbons. That’s really, really weird, and I consulted with my Biology teacher, who couldn’t make sense of it either. However… thinking back to the context of the issue, Why is Reiji making the potion?
He’s trying to force Cordelia out.
I hypothesize that those two separate rings are bonded together because Cordelia’s DNA has latched onto Yui’s. Those bonds, very, very breakable bonds, are desperately latching these two otherwise extraordinarily singular compounds together. And that’s really freaking neat. Furthermore, what does Kanato give Reiji to finish the potion? Cordelia’s ashes. Cordelia’s DNA. For it to latch back onto itself. For further hints, take a look at the second and third pictures.
The second (first in this repost) shows the inside of a cell going through mitosis, where cells split for growth, healing, etc. It’s showing DNA replication. In the final picture, it’s showing the DNA ‘ladder’, base pairs included and clearly marked (the little lines that look like rungs).
TL;DR: Rejet is smarter and more thorough than we give it credit for, and Reiji likes to fuck around with DNA.
Having finished my reread of all the light novels, here are some pages from Fifteen that I think abt a lot:
Bsd skylines go so hard
Voldemort: I can touch you now!
Harry: *Moans* Be gentle, it's my first time
Voldemort:
Voldemort: Why do you always have to make it weird?
Harry: If I stop being weird I'll literally die
With the bulk of the blood spilled by a Reaper’s Death Scythe producing the record of their memories, I would really like to know whether there is any relevance to the separatw spots of blood that are cast off filled with thwir own individual images.
Are they simply reflective of singular emotions that have 'splashed' free as a surplus from the blood producing the full reel? Are they singular memories that have been kept separate in the person's heart for a specific reason - a moment, or an individual, that they hold most dear to them?
We know that Rachel was the person that Angelina always felt closest to, and that she loved her sister the most deeply of all.
But if that does hold some truth to the nature of these individual orbs, then look at whose image Sebastian's blood held:
freak behaviour fr
You Taught Me Love
(THE BOOK OF BILL SPOILERS!!)
Thinking about Bill’s appearance at the end of the book…
[ID: BIll when confronting the Axolotl. He is shown in white silhouette, hovering in space, hovering neutrally. Notably, he has a massive crack running through his body, splitting him into multiple pieces, some of which are coming apart. /end ID]
When confronting the Axolotl, Bill is broken. The Axolotl even notes this: "Shattered, broken, not yet dead."
(Which, side note, makes me think Bill might have been lying about having been "kicked out of Hell," if he didn't actually die in Stan's head.)
[ID: Three pictures of Bill in the Theraprism. The first one shows him holding his hand against the side of his head in a dazed expression, sitting in a chair in a white padded room between a wizard with a clock for a face and Saturn (taken directly from the painting Saturn Devouring His Son). The second is a camera recording of him wearing an orange jumpsuit and kneeling in a cell, surrounded by arts and crafts tools, holding a pair of scissors, and beaming his thoughts frantically into a book. The third shows a mugshot of him staring blankly into the camera, his own name written on coded text below him. In all three images, he has a glowing scar where the cracks were, and is in one piece. /end ID]
When he's shown in the Theraprism, we see a glowing, static-y scar where the cracks were. The scar crosses his entire body (and even crosses to the other side of his eye without affecting it!), but he's actually whole, keeping himself together.
But then...
[ID: Two pictures of Bill from the last pages of the book. In the first one he is facing forward and holding up one finger, his eye reddened, his entire form glitching, and his crack is notably worse than prior, cracking through his eye, multiple smaller pieces drifting away. In the second one he is staring blankly at the viewer, his arms hanging limply, his eye wide and blank, the crack worse than the previous image, with more pieces floating away. /end ID]
In the last few pages, we see the scar is gone and the cracks are back, and even more of him is breaking away, including parts of his eye. It's especially bad in the last image, with even more pieces of him breaking away.
Also noteworthy is that the static texture behind him seems to be the same as the blood sample the US government took from him in the 1940s. He's bleeding.
We know from context that these images are meant to be taken somewhat chronologically. After dying (or nearly dying), Bill seeks out the Axolotl, who sends him to the Theraprism. While there, he writes the journal that he's beaming to us. The staff at the Theraprism catch onto this, and allow him to write out the last few pages, meaning those last few pages are chronologically the last of Bill we see.
This means that, after the events of the show, Bill was shattered... and then, upon entering the Theraprism, started to heal, his body coming together and scars forming... but at some point afterward, he started breaking apart again.
I'd made a post previously about Bill's development, how he views himself as a monster after the Euclidian Disaster, and how he continues to act monstrous afterward (and winds up agonizingly lonely as a result). I didn't really touch on this in the post, but I feel like after inadvertently destroying his home dimension...
Bill never left the denial phase of grief.
I could be wrong on this, but I get the feeling that part of his reason for acting monstrous toward just about everybody is because he sees himself as a monster, because "this is just how I am" is easier to accept than "I really really screwed up."
Bringing this back to his shattering... It's interesting to me that after entering the Theraprism, his body is scarring, which means it is healing. But then, at the end, as he's signing off the book, he's shattered again, and looking even worse than he did when talking to the Axolotl. When talking this over with a friend, they pointed out something that struck me:
Bill does not want to heal.
Healing means having to actually think through what happened. It means having to confront his past, confront destroying his home dimension, confront the harm he caused to others, confront the fact that he did not have to be this way.
And he refuses to do that.
He refuses to heal.
I'm reading Kino's route and I'm falling love with him. He really really loves Yui. Such a baby boy 😭.
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Human Vampire
sacrificial bride Queen of demons
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