7th Time Loop – 02 – Rishe’s Precious Riches

With the setup provided in the first episode, this second one is free to explore the person Rishe Imgard Weitzner is today: a supremely capable young lady with years of experience in multiple disciplines. In other words, she’s a catch. This is a status not achieved just thanks the time loops, but by her own hard work.

She declines Prince Arnold’s proposal at first, because it’s coming from someone who instigated a war that lead to her death in all past loops, and someone who personally slew her in the last one. It gives her a blind spot to the fact that this Arnold is not the bloodthirsty emperor of those past … not yet at least.

As a Crown prince, Arnold is used to getting what he wants. When he tells her he’s “fallen in love”, its an acknowledgment he’s never encountered someone like Rishe before. As such, he agrees to all of Rishe’s very specific conditions for giving him her hand in marriage.

Those conditions include hiring the Aria Trading Company for everything needed in the ceremony, a place to receive foreign guests, a separate residence from the emperor, and most importantly, leave to laze about and loaf about the castle. If anyone has earned a life of leisure, it’s Rishe.

Her final condition is that he not lay a finger on her, but when she’s asleep in the carriage leaning against his sword like a grizzle knight, she senses he’s about to touch her, wakes up, and unsheathes the sword. Noble ladies aren’t supposed to fall asleep on swords or sense movements while asleep and not being touched, and yet she can.

When some bandits attack the prince’s convoy, he locks her in the carriage for her own safety and joins the fray personally. When she picks the lock (a skill learned from her life as a maid) she sees he’s swiftly dispatched all of the bandits himself, but notably didn’t kill any of them, another sign this younger Arnold is not yet too far gone.

When some of the guards report numbness near their wounds, Arnold and Rishe both conclude it’s the work of poison. She even knows its composition, and tells the prince she can make an antidote with the plants she has on hand. When the soldiers hesitate to accept the balm, she cuts her own arm with the poison blade and treats it, which convinces them it’s safe.

Rishe later learns that the men are not just random guards but Arnold’s handpicked retainers, so chosen for their diversity of backgrounds and experiences. When she finds his gaze lingering on her, she asks what’s up, and he simply says he finds her “unfathomable,” and can’t wait to see what means she’ll use to “entertain” him. Rishe tells him it’s not her intent, which Arnold understands.

He then gets on one knee and bows to her in thanks for saving his retainers, explaining that they were wary because they knew her engagement was broken and still wondered what their prince was getting into. When Arnold notes that he told his father the emperor that he “stole” her, Rishe states that that makes her a hostage of the empire, which gives her that much more freedom to laze about like she wants.

Rishe is overjoyed to arrive in Galkhein’s imperial capital, where he gets a royal welcome and the streets are packed with smilng faces. Of all the lands she’s visited in her lives, this is the one place she’s never been. When Arnold reports that the villa where she’ll dwell is in no fair state, she is unbothered.

Donning simple work clothes and tying her hair back, Rishe once again calls upon her maid experience to clean the whole house herself. After all, it’s much more rewarding to loaf about in a home you yourself cleaned.

While fetching washing water from the well, Rishe encounters three maids bullying a fourth that they call a “novice”, while they all have three years of experience. Rishe, with five years under her belt, helps the novice up and ignores the others, then recommends they don’t wash large articles today as it’s supposed to rain. They don’t believe her and do so anyway, but it does rain. She then helps Elsie, the novice maid, properly wash her muddied outfit.

While admiring the city from the balcony as the sun begins to set, Rishe’s knight senses are set off by Arnold lurking inside. He is impressed, as he purposefully masked his presence only for her to detect him anyway. He tells her about the interesting buildings she points out in the distance, unsure why she values them, then notes that she’s unlike anyone he’s ever met, and possesses skills a “simple nobleman’s daughter” would have no need for.

Those words cause Rishe to remember what her noble mother told her: that personal feelings, academic studies, and pursuit of anything other than the art of maintaining appearances in social situations are immaterial to one born to a duke’s family. Her duty was merely to marry a prince and bear children.

Rishe tells Arnold that while others may deem the things she’s learned unnecessary to her station, she treasures them as riches she’ll always have. In other words, she is the one to decide what pursuits are “necessary”. To her surprise, Arnold is in full agreement, and declares that she should be free to do whatever she wants without constraints.

When she asks why, he says simply that he’s fallen completely in love with her, and that he doesn’t find her various skills pointless, but delightful “from the bottom of his heart.” Again Rishe, informed by her bloody past, suspects he must be up to something … but I don’t think he is. He is telling her the truth.

In all the other loops, the day arrived when Arnold killed his father and started a war. But in all those other loops, he’d never met Riche. Their fight in the castle when she was a knight doesn’t count, because he didn’t know her. This Prince Arnold may prove quite different, solely by dint of him meeting and falling for her. If only she realized she possessed that transformative power, she’d be a lot less wary in her dealings with him.

 

NieR: Automata Ver 1.1a – 02 – Blood and Lilies

In episode two, perspective shifts from the YoRHa in their pristine orbital headquarters to a battered but still operational Machine Lifeform (ML). Curiously, despite having apparently been created by “Aliens”, they have a very similar bootup and heads-up display as the humans’ androids.

This single ML unit starts to walk, creating a sense of scale and grandeur to the ruined landscape. Upon returning to a base, it finds a book, and in that book, a bookmark with the image of a white lily. Scenes of ML are interspersed with a childlike narrator telling the story of the MLs with colored paper compositions.

This particular ML develops an “emotional matrix”, deemed a critical error, and its red eyes turn yellow, denoting neutrality. It ;earns how to garden, and devotes its existence to growing flowers, gathering “followers” in the form of other yellow-eyed MLs.

The comparisons to WALL-E are obvious from the serene, gorgeous empty vistas ML inhabits to the way the storytelling takes place without dialogue (narration segments aside). But hey, if you’re going to borrow, borrow from the best.

Not far from ML’s growing garden is an embedded group of human resistance fighters led by…Lily. I immediately wondered if, like the stiff redheaded twin maintenance units assigned to the unit, she was an android in disguise. Regardless, she’s bitter about the “Council of Humanity” on the Moon ignoring all requests for badly-needed reinforcements.

Every encounter with the red-eyed MLs means at least one of her unit will be injured or killed, with no one to replace them. They’re ambushed when trying to gather resources to keep fighting, and have to abandon those resources when the MLs send in kamikaze units.

Little does Lily know that up in orbit, she’s about to get a helping hand, in the form of 2B and 9S. When 2B wakes up she tells 9S she finds the sound of his voice comforting, only to cooly head to the control room without him.

They may have just come back from a brutal battle that claimed 9S’s memories, but Commander White sends them back down to perform recon on the resistance unit. They had an android embedded with the unit, but there’s been a breakdown in communication.

2B and 9S can’t come soon enough, as a huge mass of red-eyed MLs trample and destroy the yellow-eyed peaceful bots and their garden on their march to kill the humans. Lily demonstrates that she’s a capable leader despite her youth, quick and decisive and maximizing the limited resources she has.

When they mine a bridge and lure the red-eyed bots across, the detonators fail to work. It’s here where Lily’s underlings spot the yellow-eyed ML we know and have grown fond of. He stands in front of the hundreds of red-eyes, seemingly to try to talk them out of further fighting.

But before he can turn any red eyes to yellow, the entire bridge is lit up by missiles from 2B and 9S’ flying mechas. 2B makes a characteristically stylish entrance, and Lily not only knows her as “Number Two” but is very shocked to see her, or indeed any Council reinforcements. That said, Lily’s bloody shoulder seems to confirm she’s a flesh-and-blood human, not a “tin man”.

As for our yellow-eyed friend, he didn’t die in vain, nor is he alone. Hundreds if not thousands of his kind are soaking up knowledge from the library of the civilization they toppled, and seem to be combining their amassed knowledge and brains into a single mega-brain.

While I’m not sure what this is quite about, from a visual standpoint I can at least guess that yellow eyes and books are, at least now, less of a threat than red eyes, kamikaze bots, and slaughter. The narrator also describes the yellow-eyed bot anomalies as “treasures”. Were they meant to evolve in this way, or was it just random happenstance?

Whatever the answers are, and even if they’re never revealed, I remain thoroughly intrigued, and the setting lends the show a welcome splash of color and life from last week’s largely monotone, industrial battles. The post-ED omake featuring a cloth puppet 2B and 9S answering fan mail provides humor and whimsy.