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Slayers - Volume 14 - Chapter SS




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Bonus Translator/Editor Chat!

[Meg/ED]

I have to say... we’ve had a grim couple of volumes, but this one’s a standout for me.

[Liz/TL]

It’s an interesting one. (Do I always say that?) I think we’ve talked a fair amount in the last few volumes about guest characters dying in kind of shockingly and unceremonious ways—Dilarr, Aria, most recently Jade. It feels like death is getting closer and closer to the protagonists, like that plot armor is getting less and less reliable. And then... well, here’s where that leads us.

[Meg/ED]

This is definitely an escalation, to be sure—the unceremonious factor notwithstanding. Since we’ve now spent about as much time with Luke and Mileena as we have Zel and Amelia, I would classify this as our first real party death.

[Liz/TL]

Yeah, Luke and Mileena are definitely “of the party,” despite being kind of tsundere about it. Though maybe keeping them at arm’s length is meant to make this a little less gut-wrenching? If Kanzaka did this with Amelia, I admit, I probably wouldn’t ever forgive him (haha). I think Lina would be a lot more inconsolable as well. Of course, it’s hard to separate the feelings I’d have based on what’s written in the novels vs. what I’ve developed over 70-some episodes of anime. Still, is it fair to say that even novel-Lina has more protective feelings towards Amelia, whereas she regards Mileena as a cool and capable peer? So the tragedy is personal, with Mileena, but it’s still a little more abstract than it might be with the part 1 party.

And of course Lina has the line at the end about how she didn’t even know Mileena’s last name. That makes it sting, still, but not in the same way.

[Meg/ED]

That’s a really smart point. The certain distance we keep from Team Luke facilitates our understanding of Mileena’s death through Luke’s heart and not Lina’s. But that also adds a tragic element of not getting to know her. It twists the knife a little differently than Aria or Jade, whose motivations and story lines both we and Lina understood.

[Liz/TL]

Yeah, I think she carries a feeling of guilt... she knows Luke well enough to not want to hurt him, to feel a personal stake in stopping him, but not well enough to have the emotional power to stop him. When she tries, the best she can do is call on Mileena’s memory. She doesn’t say this outright, but I suspect she probably also feels keenly that she’s a being of destruction in a moment when a skilled healer was what was needed. That’s not to say she carries any actual blame for what happened, but I find that feeling of “I wish I had been the person for this moment” to be a deeply relatable one.

[Meg/ED]

I also felt that profoundly at the end of the third chapter when Luke asks Lina what she’d do in his position, and she simply can’t answer him. There’s a lot to read between the lines there.

[Liz/TL]

Yeah, that’s true. If Lina lost Gourry, who could talk her down? (Let’s hope that one isn’t foreshadowing for anything...)

[Meg/ED]

Her lack of an answer seems to suggest she’d be doing the exact same thing—or that the thought is so extreme that she literally can’t imagine being in his shoes. Either of which really makes you feel for Luke, I think. Especially when he admits that he knows what he’s doing is wrong, but there’s nothing else he can do. There’s a pitiable helplessness to his grief (murderous though it may be).

[Liz/TL]

Yeah, and when I think about it, I don’t believe Lina would actually go on a killing spree to try to feed the emptiness that comes with a loss. With Luke, we’re given the info that he used to be an assassin, and that wanting to be worthy of Mileena was what was helping him escape that darkness. But that sort of explains why violence and murder become the first tools he reaches for. You can blame him or sympathize with him, but he certainly feels helpless, like he’s been plunged back into this against his will.

[Meg/ED]

I don’t actually think Lina’s a killing spree kinda gal either—but I don’t think she’s beyond a grandiose act of revenge! If this particular storyline ever got an anime adaptation, maybe we would lean into that in a comedic over-the-top way. In fact, come to think of it, Lina suggests to Ryan at one point that the only way to sate Luke would be to bring Mileena back, so maybe we could’ve scripted a happier ending into an adaptation too. (And maybe even get a flashback episode of how Luke and Mileena met!)

[Liz/TL]


They could certainly something-something with the Claire Bible if they wanted to. It’s hard to imagine why you’d bother to go here if you’re just going to undo it, though. Maybe they’d do a plot where Mileena is on her deathbed and they have to find a special healing flower to save her. That’s the sort of plot you’d usually see in a story like this, really, so the fact that she just... dies is what makes it shocking. “Someone dies because the heroes don’t (or can’t) act quickly enough” is not usually a mood writers of fiction usually go for.

[Meg/ED]

True! The setup and circumstances of the poisoning would certainly need to be fiddled with some. And on that note, it was nice of our old pal Zord to show up, wasn’t it? It could have been any random flunky to do the deed, really, so throwing in the callback to how we met Luke and Mileena was a nice(?) touch

[Liz/TL]

The fact that Zord is an established villain does give Mileena’s fate a little more gravitas than if he’d just been a bandit of the week, at least. Honestly, Zord’s appearance here occupies this really interesting space in the chain reaction of things that go wrong in Selentia... I should mention, I really like this novel a lot from a plotting perspective. I really like the sense of cruel inevitability to how things build up, how there are all these elements in play that are random but logical, how none of them are tied to any one person, yet they add up to this horrible perfect storm.

And then there’s the way that, after all this crew has been through, the mastermind of it all isn’t a lieutenant of Shabranigdu, it’s not Xellos, it’s not some other General or Priest, it’s not even a clever human-disguised demon infiltrator. It’s just some shitty little mid-tier demon working its shitty little demon tricks. It probably didn’t even realize how effective its plot was going to be. The little bastard got lucky.

[Meg/ED]

I also really like this volume. I didn’t want to, mind you. It could have easily been a cheap bloodbath and nothing more, but there’s a poignance to it that might be unparalleled in the series so far. Lina’s cold anger at finding out some two-bit demon was responsible for it all hit me harder than any amount of screaming and crying ever could have.

[Liz/TL]

Yeah, there’s a cruelty to it, but again, it’s combined with a sort of inevitability... and it brings it back to Lina’s feelings of guilt again, since she realizes Zord wouldn’t have gotten set off on his revenge quest if she and Gourry hadn’t shown up in town in the first place. Again, there are things in life that aren’t actually your fault, that you can’t actually control, but that you’re going to kick yourself for regardless. She was an unwitting part of this shitty little demon’s chain reaction, and that’s an awful feeling.

I also love the scene where Ceres stops Luke. I mentioned earlier the idea of being “the person for the moment”—and Ceres gets to be the person for that moment. But at the end, he doesn’t feel noble about it at all. He doesn’t seem to feel like he’s managed to do anything more than save his own life.

[Meg/ED]

Ceres kinda steals the show at the end! I also really enjoyed the scene of him stymieing the council meeting because it underscores how genuine his development is. Although... I confess that I initially suspected him when he was introduced and we were tricked into thinking this volume would be a self-contained mystery/intrigue plot. My bad.

[Liz/TL]

He’s definitely a character that could have gone either way. I think the fact that the mystery/intrigue plot was so well established is what makes the reveal at the end so effective. The best twists are ones you don’t see coming because the writer has given you something equally interesting to engage with, after all. I found the politics of Selentia itself to be just really well sketched and engaging, which is quite an achievement in books this short.

[Meg/ED]

I could gush all day about the subtle and not-so-subtle writing choices that make this series so compelling, even after all these years... but I’m scared of what comes next. I’m actually okay closing this story out with Luke running off into the night and Lina contemplating what we’ve lost in the windswept cemetery. Yet when I scrutinize how everything has led up to this point, I get the unshakeable sense that this isn’t really over.

[Liz/TL]

Well, it’s no secret that there’s one volume left in the arc. A lot of the previous volumes have ended almost in anticlimaxes without clearly establishing new stakes, so what could it possibly be building up to? It’s kind of unsettling!

[Meg/ED]

I have the foresight at this point not to expect a picnic. There are too many unresolved threads from the previous volumes for that.

[Liz/TL]

They weren’t able to establish if the mass demon spawnings were for sure connected to Graushera, for one.

[Meg/ED]

Ah, jeez. Well, shall we reconvene to bear witness to the finale of part 2 next time?

[Liz/TL]

Let us move forward with a determination to see this through, wherever it leads us.



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