「ふいにコネクト」/「ものくろあくたー。」

It’s that day of the year again.

Kokoro Connect’s premise made a lot of people raise their eyebrows, because really, what good can come from body-switching shenanigans? Well, let’s think about this for a second. We have a group of five kids and every once in a while, at random, they switch into the others’ bodies at random. What does that sound like? That’s right, a permutation!

Interestingly enough, the idea of connecting body-switching with permutations isn’t new. The Futurama writers did it and apparently got a new theorem out of it. What differs in the case of Kokoro Connect and Futurama is that in Futurama, the body-switching could only happen in twos. These are called transpositions. Obviously, this isn’t the case for Kokoro Connect. This doesn’t make too much of a difference since it turns out we can write out any permutation we want as a series of transpositions, but that wouldn’t be very fun for Heartseed.

We write permutations in the following way. If we let Taichi = 1, Iori = 2, Inaban = 3, Aoki = 4, and Yui = 5, we’ll have $(1 2 3 4 5)$ representing the identity permutation, when everyone’s in their own body. If Heartseed wanted to make Aoki and Yui switch places, he’d apply the following permutation
$$ \left( \begin{array}{ccccc} 1&2&3&4&5 \\ 1&2&3&5&4 \end{array} \right) $$
While it’s helpful for seeing exactly what goes where, especially when we start dealing with multiple permutations, this notation is a bit cumbersome, so we’ll only write the second line ($(12354)$) to specify a permutation.

For the purposes of this little exercise, we’ll consider applying a permutation as taking whoever’s currently in a given body. That is, say we permute Aoki and Taichi to get $(4 2 3 1 5)$. In order to get everyone back into their own bodies, we have to apply $(4 2 3 1 5)$ again, which takes Aoki, who’s in Taichi’s body, back into Aoki’s body.

So let’s begin with something simple. How many different ways are there for the characters to body switch? Both who is switched and who they switch with is entirely random. Again, since the switches aren’t necessarily transpositions, this means that we can end up with cycles like in episode 2, when Yui, Inaban, and Aoki all get switched at the same time. This can be written as $(1 2 4 5 3)$.

But this is just the number of permutations that can happen on a set of five elements, which is just 5! = 120. Of course, that includes the identity permutation, which just takes all elements to themselves, so the actual number of different ways the characters can be swapped is actually 119.

Anyhow, we can gather up all of these different permutations into a set and give it the function composition operation and it becomes a group. A group $(G,\cdot)$ is an algebraic structure that consists of a set $G$ and an operation $\cdot$ which satisfy the group axioms:

• Closure: for every $a$ and $b$ in $G$, $a\cdot b$ is also in $G$
• Associativity: for every $a$, $b$, and $c$ in $G$, $(a\cdot b)\cdot c = a\cdot (b\cdot c)$
• Identity: there exists $e$ in $G$ such that for every $a$ in $G$, $e\cdot a = a \cdot e = a$
• Inverse: for every $a$ in $G$, there exists $b$ in $G$ such that $a\cdot b = b\cdot a = e$

In this case, we can think of the permutations themselves as elements of a group and we take permutation composition as the group operation. Let’s go through these axioms.

Closure says that if have two different configurations of body swamps, say Taichi and Iori ($(2 1 3 4 5)$) and Iori and Yui ($(1 5 3 4 2)$), then we can apply them one after the other and we’d still have a body swap configuration: $(2 5 3 4 1)$. That is, we won’t end up with something that’s not a body swap. This seems like a weird distinction to make, but it’s possible to define a set that doesn’t qualify as a group. Say I want to take the integers under division as a group ($(\mathbb Z, \div)$). Well, it breaks closure because 1 is an integer and 2 is an integer but $1 \div 2$ is not an integer.

Associativity says that it doesn’t matter what order we choose to apply our operations in. If we have three swaps, say Taichi and Inaban ($(3 2 1 4 5)$), Aoki and Yui ($(1 2 3 5 4)$), and Iori and Yui $(1 5 3 4 2)$ and we want to apply them in that order. Then as long as they still happen in that order, it doesn’t matter which one we apply first. We’d have
$$((32145)(12354))(15342) = (32154)(15342) = (34152)$$
and
$$(32145)((12354)(15342)) = (32145)(14352) = (34152)$$

The identity means that there’s a configuration that we can apply and nothing will change. That’d be $(12345)$. And inverse means that there’s always a single body swap that we can make to get everyone back in their own bodies.

As it turns out, the group of all permutations on $n$ objects is a pretty fundamental group. These groups are called the symmetric groups and are denoted by $S_n$. So the particular group we’re working with is $S_5$.

So what’s so special about $S_5$? Well, as it turns out it’s the first symmetric group that’s not solvable, a result that’s from Galois theory and has a surprising consequence.

Évariste Galois was a cool dude, proving a bunch of neat stuff up until he was 20, when he got killed in a duel because of some drama which is speculated to be of the relationship kind, maybe not unlike Kokoro Connect (it probably wasn’t anything like Kokoro Connect at all). Among the things that he developed was the field that’s now known as Galois theory, which is named after him. What’s cool about Galois theory is that it connects two previously unrelated concepts in algebra: groups and fields.

One of the most interesting things that came out of Galois theory is related to the idea of solving polynomials. I’m sure we’re all familiar with the quadratic formula. Well, in case you aren’t, here it is:

$$x = \frac{-b \pm \sqrt{b^2 – 4ac}}{2a}$$

This neat little formula gives us an easy way to find the complex roots of any second degree polynomial. It’s not too difficult to derive. And we can do that for cubic polynomials too, which takes a bit more work to derive. And if we want to really get our hands dirty, we could try deriving the general form of roots for polynomials of degree four. And wait until you try to do it for degree five polynomials.

That’s because, eventually, you’ll give up. Why? Well, it’s not just hard, but it’s impossible. There is no general formula using radicals and standard arithmetic operations for the roots for any fifth degree (or higher!) polynomial. The reason behind this is because $S_5$ is the Galois group for the general polynomial of degree 5. Unfortunately, proving that fact is a bit of a challenge to do here since it took about 11 weeks of Galois theory and group theory to get all the machinery in place, so we’ll have to leave it at that.

「「私、気になります！」」/「Mirunai」

You can see my 12 Days posts as sort of the most interesting things I’ve seen or read over the year. And so you can probably infer the following.

The best anime of 2012 was Hyouka.

Why? There’s a lot of reasons, but basically, it was the show I was most sad to see end. Oh and I guess there’s this too:

@blkmage Totally not an excuse just to post a cute pic of Oreki and Chitanda.

— kViN (@Yuyucow) December 25, 2012

More generally, I think the highlights of my 2012 have been meeting up with people, something that I’ve begun to look forward to after being exiled in London. Of course, there’s the good old meetups with old university friends, some of which involved riichi mahjong. But this was the year that I got to meet some of the Toronto-area cartoon heads that I’ve been talking to on twitter for a while and it was great. And even the non-cartoon head Toronto council watchers were cool too, which is unsurprising, since Toronto City Council is the secret best anime.

Hopefully 2013 gives me some more chances to ruin your impressions of me IRL.

「氷菓」/「ぱち」

Hyouka is just lovely. I was pretty skeptical when the whole thing was announced and it started. Really, a slow mystery light novel with pretty animation, is that going to hold up? As it turns out, it’s not really a mystery, as things involving a bunch of bored high school students rarely are. Instead, it’s about a guy who, despite his best efforts, has the misfortune of being captivated by a starry-eyed girl and is dragged out of his shell. Like most of other shows in this vein, the enjoyment comes from watching how our protagonist slowly changes and see, by the end of it all, how far they’ve come.

「おおかみこどもの雨と雪」/「ksw」

In Summer Wars, we’re introduced to a family that’s large and traditional from the viewpoint of an outsider. We watch as they go about their hustle and bustle to honour the matriarch that’s guided and anchored their family. It’s a very broad, macro sort of viewpoint of the family. In Ookami Kodomo, we go about things from the other side. We see the love between two people blossom and they start building their family. After tragedy strikes, we see the day-to-day struggles of the young family and follow them through their highs and lows until the children are grown up.

「いつか」/「八子」

Shingeki no Kyojin is a story about the human race getting screwed. In shounen manga, we usually get characters who pull off amazing feats and come back against all odds. Sure, they might get themselves into dangerous situations, but none of them are actually going to die, right? Well, no one is safe in Shingeki no Kyojin. Nothing good happens when someone dies. And death never comes in a blaze of glory. This cloud of danger, horror, and despair hangs over the manga in a Muv-Luv Alternative-esque fashion.

「となりの怪物くん」/「アン」

Tonari no Kaibutsu-kun is about socially awkward people. Our main couple is made up of a girl who knows everything and a boy who knows nothing. Shizuku is relentless and ruthless in her pursuit of knowledge and success. Haru is sharp but literally does not know how to interact with people. So you put them together and you’ve got two kids who don’t know how to deal with the other. Misunderstandings, the grease that keeps shoujo manga moving, happen because they actually misunderstand each other and not because they dance around trying to avoid each other for no reason. When they meet, they clash, but things work out quickly. And toss in a whole crew of other socially awkward people and the whole thing becomes a whole barrel of shenanigans with well-intentioned kids trying to deal with one another.

「【つり球】昼寝」/「まりめ」

tsuritama made me happy. It made me happy because the director made something that I liked and that he was good at again after [C]. It made me happy because it’s just so damned colourful and the characters were so happy. It made me happy because everything about it, from fishing to aliens to the secret organization fighting aliens were so goofy. It made me happy because it was so cheery and happy and everything is going to turn out alright.

「夏服(スマプリ♯11)」/「とろみ中華」

This was my second Precure and let’s just say Heartcatch was a tough act to follow. And well, it’s a good thing that Smile doesn’t try to out-Heartcatch Heartcatch. It’s certainly fun and everyone has fun. Even the villains don’t seem to be trying very hard sometimes, almost as if they knew what show they were in. So it’s not as punch-kicking, but it still knows how to entertain. Of course, it does get serious on occasion and the fun that we’ve had for the weeks beforehand don’t seem to detract from it. But really, it’s the best when it goes all out with its ridiculousness.

「二十分で色のせた」/「キサラしぃ」

A lot of people love Sword Art Online. A lot of people hate it, too. Yeah, Kirito is pretty hax, but I’ve been enjoying it largely because of that. It’s kind of like back when I had a playable version of Jedi Knight 2, sometimes, I’d just start it up and turn on cheats and go wreck things. I was also fairly hopeful that Asuna would be interesting, but that didn’t pan out as well as I’d hoped in later volumes. But after all that, I’ve kept reading it because in the end, I just want to see Kirito and Asuna be happy together (´・ω・｀).

「DANZEN!」/「ニセモン」

So I figured it was time to start at the beginning. And in the beginning, there was nothing but Black and White. No themes or gimmicks, just two girls punching monsters and holding hands and shooting beams. These were simpler times. And surprisingly, they were more dangerous times too. While the villains here didn’t really succeed any more than they do in the Precure shows I’ve seen, they felt a lot more threatening. Obviously, the villains in Smile are a bunch of loveable scamps, but even the crew from Heartcatch didn’t really feel quite as sinister. Maybe that’s why it always seems like Black and White have their work cut out for them.

「阿良々木家」/「黒沢かずと」

Nisemonogatari is kinda weird. In Bakemonogatari, for the most part, everything’s resolved fairly neatly. The supernatural stuff is dealt with and relationships are in the correct alignment. Here, we solve some of our supernatural mysteries, but those responsible end up walking away. The relationships we’re following are still in the middle of development. It feels very much like a lot of this was setup and so the ending comes and I’m feeling like, well, that’s it? But luckily, the most important part of the series has been largely unchanged (and this was something I was worried about because the ones responsible are real characters now): the preview quizu.

「阿知賀編色々」/「Hitoto*」

Something that I found very surprising was that Saki was much more enjoyable after I learned how to play the damned game. As a Chinese kid, I had a very rudimentary understanding of how mahjong worked, with almost none of my knowledge being any use in the Japanese MJ context. If you have no idea how the game works, it just looks like cute girls doing cute things breaking probabilities. But once you know what’s going on, there’s a bit more to it than each of the girls being horrendously imba. Here, the girls are defined by their game-breaking powers and watching how the conflict plays out at the table becomes much more interesting once you understand how those powers match their personalities.

「Secret of the world」/「NorthAbyssor」

At the end of the day, I think I liked Little Busters more than I disliked it. After all, the important parts were good and that’s what really matters. It turned out to be pretty clever with how it worked in the game mechanics into its themes too. To be honest, my interest in the anime is purely because of this mechanical layer to the story: how is it going to translate? It seems like it’d be a lot tougher to wrangle than light orbs. And so, we wait.

「武御雷Type-00F」/「ひろぽん♪」

Just as we learned in Muv-Luv Alternative, it doesn’t take very long for everything that’s been going so well to just crash and burn. Six years after the promise at the end of Akane Maniax, we finally have ourselves a Muv-Luv anime. So it’s a sidestory, that’s okay, I can’t say no to more Muv-Luv. Oh, but it features a song by Koda Kumi. Also, it looks kind of bad. Also, the BETA look really bad. Also, it’s veering into really dumb territory. And the characters are unlikeable and stupid. Oh no, what does this mean for the future of Muv-Luv in animation? No. Please, no. Make it stop. Cue the piano.

「3話のキリトさんはダウナーかわいい」/「uki」

Another tradition returns with the arrival of the festive season, in which I post a bunch of posts that you all really should’ve seen throughout the year already, but hey, we can’t argue with tradition. And in case you were wondering, there’s actually only one day of snoitaminA, sorry.

「もぐもぐ」/「にぃと」

I started cooking out of necessity in my second year of undergrad, when I moved out of residence. So I started off with things that would minimally impact my time for more important things, like school or WoW raiding. I mean, the time investment in making better food just didn’t seem worth it. If I really wanted something particularly delicious, I’d just go out and buy something. All I needed out of my own skills was to be able to create enough to sustain myself and go meet up to try and down Vashj to save the World of Warcraft to save the world. And study, I guess.

But then, I eventually got tired of doing that. Or rather, I got tired of eating the same thing over and over and over again. It sounds like a brilliant idea at first, to min-max your cooking like that, but there’s only so much you can do with limited skills and constraints on your resources. Not soon after, I quit WoW for unrelated reasons and I took some of my newfound free time and to learn how to cook. It turns out cooking has the dual benefits of being pretty fun and improving your quality of life because you’re not eating crap every day. It’s the difference between cooking to not starve and cooking because it’s fun and to make something tasty. Nowadays, I split my meals evenly between buying because of time and trying to cook new things. It feels great to successfully make a thing.

The first time we’re introduced to Asuna after the real story (read: vol. 1) of SAO starts is after Kirito is trying to figure out what to do with a delicious rare rabbit that he can’t cook. Kirito mentions offhandedly that cooking is a pretty useless skill, so who in the world would max it? After all, what’s the point? The food that you eat isn’t real and if you’ve got time to waste on cooking, you should be putting more effort into levelling and clearing. Well, it turns out Asuna would, but why? Why would Asuna, famed progression raider/frontline clearer, max cooking?

Remember, when we first saw Asuna in Aria of a Starless Night, she was chewing away on crappy bread until Kirito shared that cream to put on it and make it less awful to eat. Look at her attitude when she comes across Kirito lazing around in A Murder Case in the Area. Her attitude is familiar: why is he taking a nap when he should be levelling and clearing? Why is he doing pointless things when he has something way more important to do? It’s this little anecdote that sums up her attitude to life in SAO until she met Kirito, which she relays to the fisherman. Before, she was caught up in working relentlessly to achieve her freedom. But a person can’t do that indefinitely and at some point she realized this. And so she maxed cooking. Why? Because she likes cooking. And she likes it because she’s finally learned to enjoy her time in SAO.

It’s kind of interesting that something like the sense of taste would get translated into SAO. And apparently, high-level food drops taste better. There’s not much that we know about how food actually works in SAO, but given Kirito’s flippant dismissal of it, it seems like it doesn’t really serve that much purpose. Or maybe the return on investment in spending the time to level it up isn’t worth it.

In contrast to SAO, there’s WoW, where food does have some slight benefits. I remember back when I was progression raiding in WoW (during TBC), cooking was a pretty useful thing to max out for the food buffs. By the time TBC rolled around, Blizzard had overhauled the buff system for consumables so that the total number of buffs you could get was limited, in order to bring down the exorbitant costs of raiding. You could have either one flask buff or two elixir buffs and one food buff in addition to those. For me, it was the Blackened Basilisk’s 23 extra spellpower. Farming basilisk meat in Terokkar to cook myself was way cheaper and easier than buying Blackened Basilisk off of the AH.

But my favourite modelling of how food works in a video game is in The World Ends With You. There’s not much cooking in TWEWY, but there is a lot of stuff to eat. The neat thing about it is that, like WoW, eating isn’t strictly necessary, but eating could confer some useful perks. How it works is a lot more involved than WoW’s simple consumable and buff effect, though. For one thing, the rate at which you can consume food is limited. You can only eat so much at a time. Your characters have different tastes which affect the effectiveness of the buffs you get. And you get temporary buffs, which are kind of like increased productivity from having eaten well, and permanent buffs, which are kind of like the long-term nutritional benefits of food.

Of course, again, SAO doesn’t seem to have much of that. It does do one interesting thing with food, though, and that’s bothering to translate the sense of taste at all. The obvious things, like carrots and fish, probably taste like you’d expect them to, but then you have things that don’t have a one-to-one correspondence between SAO and the real world. You have things like Asuna being able to somehow engineer something that tastes like soy sauce.

So maybe food doesn’t really have any game mechanical benefit beyond filling a meter, but there’s still taste! How taste functions is interesting, because while hunger is governed by meters and internal mechanics, taste is something that’s purely personal. The game is telling you that you’re hungry and you need to refill you meter. But it’s you who really wants a friggin poutine with crisp hand-cut fries and the squeak of fresh cheese curds covered in gravy.

This goes back to the main question that Kirito, Asuna, and most of the players stuck in SAO are dealing with. Do they have time to be enjoying life when they should be working their hardest to escape? For me, this question isn’t that alien even though I’m not trapped in an MMORPG. It’s really easy to ask myself whether I should be cooking or blogging when I’m still stuck on a problem I can’t solve or if I’ve still got studying to do.

Working tirelessly for a few days might be fine, but when you start coming up to two years, it gets tiring. It’s doable, but it comes at the cost of not enjoying anything you do. Both Kirito and Asuna seemed prepared to do this at the beginning of SAO. Over the course of the story, they realize that they can’t and don’t want to. And so they try to make the most of their time in SAO and taking the time to enjoy things.

This is a big reason for why they’re cool with playing VRMMOs after they get out of SAO. The expectation that we have is that they’d be so traumatized by the experience that they’d never want to put on a NerveGear again. But to Kirito and Asuna, it’d mean denying a part of their life and experience because they tried to really live while they were there. And of course, it’d be doubly meaningful for them because it’s how they met each other.

You end up acquiring a few things while living alone for the first time

Way back when, Honey and Clover was all the rage and everyone was writing about it. And so, I looked it up on The Internet™. One of the things that a lot of people said (not necessarily the people that were writing about it, since I didn’t read those until after I’d finished watching) was that it painted a picture of university life that resonated with them. It turns out being a student and having no money is a common thing. Well, as a student with hella well-paying software development internships, that wasn’t really the part of Honey and Clover that spoke to me.

But there is a show that paints a picture of away-at-school life that I do identify with, and that’s Hidamari Sketch. Of course, instead of moe wideface art students in high school, most of the people I knew were engineering and math students who are gigantic nerds. Which is fine, since I am not a moe wideface art student anyway and shenanigans don’t ensue only because one is a moe wideface art student. Whether or not that’d make a good anime is another question.

What HidaSke does is it touches on all the parts of living away from home that I remember fondly. See, now that it’s over and I’m living with random strangers, I really miss this part of my happy undergrad life. In the HidaSke comparison, I’d be Yuno, going off to school for the first time and not very outgoing. Luckily, I met a bunch of cool people who helped me along the way.

The most obvious cool people are the helpful upper years I met. Just like Sae and Hiro, they’d be checking up on us, inviting us over for food, asking about classes, and commiserating with us, because being engineer is suffering. And like Sae and Hiro to Yuno and Miyako, they became really good friends once I was able to figure the whole university thing out.

The various housemates that I’ve lived with are more like Miyako, who are cool but weird. I’ve even had one housemate that contains her, uh, spontaneity, who would disappear on adventures on his bike or surprise us with a cat. Most of my other housemates were just huge nerds, ranging from lesser weeaboos and general engineering nerds all the way up to the guy that can sing the Nico Nico Douga medley.

The reason I love HidaSke so much is because the things that sketches are centered around are things that I remember doing and vice versa. I bet you could make a HidaSke sketch centered around carrying a traffic light home and trying to figure out what to do with it. Or a sketch about what to do about suddenly receiving too many hamburgers. Or a sketch about learning to juggle. Or a sketch about tossing a cat around.

And that’s just people I lived with. My actual classmates are another whole ball of fun, although that one has some suffering mixed into it too. But that’s a story for another time.

「無題」/「みなせゆう」

Some observations on the serious business of anime high school student council elections.

Primaries

Generally, when I think of primaries, I think of partisan primaries, like those in the States. The idea is to have an internal fight to see which candidate your party will be picking to fight for real. The candidate gets tested and gets a chance to build support and a machine within the party. In Canadian terms (and probably in Australia and the UK too), this resembles nomination battles, but these are typically much less intense than primary elections (and they would matter more if it weren’t for leader veto).

In KoiChoco, we have nonpartisan primaries, since there appear to be no parties. However, there do appear to be formal factions of the student council, each of which are putting up candidates. This means that the primary is largely for sifting through the candidates and allowing only serious candidates through. At first, I thought this would basically look like France’s two-round presidential elections, where only the top two candidates go on, but then they mentioned a 10% vote cutoff, which means that it wouldn’t be a head-to-head fight. I’m sure we can all think of a few situations where a three-way (or more) race led to some electoral shenanigans.

Inside Baseball

I heard that KoiChoco is supposed to be about Japanese politics, which seemed kinda weird, since Japan’s government is a parliamentary system, not a presidential one. Coincidentally, someone made a Japanese politics thread on SA a few weeks ago and I’d started reading it and now KoiChoco’s setup makes a bit more sense in that context. That’s because the way the elections are set up resembles an internal leadership race more than a general election.

In a parliamentary system, governments are formed by members of the legislature if they’re able to hold the confidence of the legislature. Typically, this is the party with the most representatives in the legislature. There are no direct elections for the head of the government, which is why Japan can keep swapping out prime ministers like they do. So a direct election of the student council president doesn’t quite translate very well into Japanese electoral politics.

If we shift focus into internal party politics, things are a bit different. Conservatives in Canada lament how the Liberals pretty much ruled Canada with an iron fist for the last century. When parties stay in power for that long, they become big-tent parties and end up containing a number of different factions vying for control of the party. Essentially, political skirmishes happen internally, rather than externally. In the case of the Liberals, this took the form of two main rival factions constantly undermining the other since all the way back when Pearson was prime minister.

This is essentially the case for the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan. The LDP literally ruled Japan from the end of the Second World War up until 2009. The result is that Japanese politics largely stems from the various internal factions battling with each other. From the main Wikipedia page for the LDP, there are three main factions listed. Of course, if you dig a little deeper, you’ll see that the LDP means business when it comes to factional infighting.

This is where the student council factions come into play. There are three factions in the student council: finance, general affairs, and security. Each faction has their own candidate and has a political machine backing them, except for the incumbent security affairs department, who have been barred from putting up a candidate. Obviously, they can’t just sit back while other factions are making a power play, so they move all of their support to Yuuki, the dark horse candidate.

This is the kind of thing that happens more with internal races than in general elections. There’s no reason for parties to support each other in a general election, but internally, the expectation is that you’ll get favours out of it. So people move delegates to support another candidate or they’ll drop out and give them their staff or something. And of course, there is the trying to undermine the other factions as much as possible aspect too.

Of course, this isn’t a perfect analogy. Based on my authoritative source, the Wikipedia page for the LDP, the leadership selection rests in the hands of the caucus, and, by extension, various powerful figures in the party. The KoiChoco system seems to be more analogous to a one member, one vote system, where party leadership is determined by the membership of the party, which in this case are the regular students.

Having been a member during the New Democratic Party’s recent leadership race, I can say that while OMOV races aren’t quite as drama-filled as delegated races (like the Liberals’ 2006 race), there were still plenty of shenanigans going on to make it interesting. And this was for a party that didn’t have many factional divisions at all.

Caucus and Council

So with all of this talk about support, I’m curious to find out how exactly this student council works. In a lot of different systems, it doesn’t matter if you’re the top dog if your council or whatever is going to ignore you. See Kevin Rudd for an example of a caucus dumping a prime minister. Or see Rob Ford for an example of a city council that can completely ignore a mayor. Yuuki’s running as an independent and he’s supported at the moment by a faction, but then what? How powerful is the student council president, exactly?

Typically, a leader is powerful because they can reward their supporters through various means to keep them happy. Usually, this is through stuff like appointments to cabinet or supporting friendly projects or something and the faction itself will have plenty of resources to access as well. But in Yuuki’s case, it’s the other way around. The current student council president says he has no intention of setting up Yuuki as a puppet, but without any real support, I don’t see how he won’t just fall into that role.

The Honourable Minister of Finance

This has nothing to do with anything, but I found it funny that the frontrunner to be president was the finance commissioner. Where have we seen finance ministers belonging to rival factions being frontrunners in a race to replace an outgoing prime minister before? Was it Canada? Or the UK? That doesn’t bode particularly well for Shinonome’s presidency, does it?

「地下鉄」/「Archlich」

I am the bone of my transit
Buses are my body and Subways are my blood
I have created over a thousand lines
Unknown to approval, Nor known to completion
Have withstood pain to create many plans
Yet, this city will never build anything
So as I pray, unlimited debate works.

「峰不二子という女」/「巖本英利」

So this week’s Lupin III/Fujiko show turned out to be Phantom of the Opera. Sure, operas are classy and this iteration of Lupin III is fairly classy, so why not? Well, it turns out the opera they used is one of the few that I had actually studied (to some degree) back in high school music. The opera is Tosca, by Giacomo Puccini, and is apparently near the top of the list of famous operas. That said, I think it’s safe to say that anime is near the bottom of the list of places I expected to hear an aria or something and make me go “Wait, this sounds awfully familiar”.

Tosca is about a famous singer, Floria Tosca, her lover, a painter by the name of Mario Cavaradossi, and Baron Scarpia, the chief of police and a guy who really, really wants Tosca. Basically, Tosca and Cavaradossi are in love. Cavaradossi also happens to be helping one of his Republican friends escape from the police. Conveniently, these two things make Scarpia hate Cavaradossi a lot. This causes a lot of trouble for the lovers. Spoilers: Tosca ends in tragedy.

There are two pieces that were used in this episode.

Tosca Divina

Part of this piece was performed on stage when the spotlight fell on Ayan. Just like in the episode, Scarpia arrives and is looking for Angelotti, the guy that Cavaradossi helped escape. Obviously, with the spotlight dropping on them, they had to improvise, but the first two lines that they sing kinda don’t make sense. After that, though, is pretty much what happens at the end of that scene.

The scene in context is basically Scarpia tricking Tosca into thinking that Cavaradossi is cheating on her with the lady he’s drawing in the painting. Tosca’s line about being a prisoner of royal celebrations (è prigioniera dei regali tripudi) is the end of a bit about her coming to the church to tell Cavaradossi that they wouldn’t be able to meet that night. Scarpia’s line after that, about his poison working (Già il veleno l’ha rosa!), doesn’t make sense without the context, because it’s about him thinking about how she’s buying into his bullshit about Cavaradossi cheating.

Basically, Tosca is pissed. She talks about how their beautiful nest is soiled with slime (Oh mio bel nido insozzato di fango!) and then basically says she’s going to kill that cheating bitch (so to speak) who isn’t going to have Cavaradossi tonight (Vi piomberò inattesa! Tu non l’avrai stasera, Giuro!). Scarpia goes “In church!” (In chiesa!) because they’re talking in a church and Tosca saying how she’s going to totally murder that lady is probably something she shouldn’t do in a church. That’s okay, replies Tosca, “Dio mi perdona”, or God will forgive her, presumably because the cheaters deserve it.

So Scarpia successfully gets Tosca pissed at Cavaradossi. After the singing from just above, Tosca goes off to find Cavaradossi and Scarpia gets a guy to trail her. This, of course, leads to all sorts of unfortunate things later on. For now, though, Scarpia gets to sing about how much he wants Tosca with the undertone being that he’s super evil and all this happens juxtaposed against a church procession and the act ends.

It’s not obvious in this part of the episode, but there are a few interesting parallels that we can extract from this if we maybe read too much into this. Obviously, Fujiko is Tosca and Zenigata is Scarpia. I’ve never seen much Lupin before, but here, Zenigata seems like a terrible person, what with molesting Fujiko and all. He really seems to despise Lupin, much like Scarpia hates Cavaradossi, and he uses Fujiko to try and get to him. And after this the analogy breaks down, but, oh well.

Vissi d’arte

This is probably the aria that Tosca’s known for. It plays on the record player in the hideout when Ayan is explaining the reveal to Fujiko. At this point, Scarpia has Cavaradossi taken away to prison after having revealed his Republican loyalties. He takes advantage of this situation and offers to free Cavaradossi if Tosca gives herself to him. As he waits for her answer, she starts singing this aria, which is basically her crying out to God asking why she has to go through this.

The opening line is “Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore”, which is “I lived for art, I lived for love”. It could be fansubber cleverness, but Fujiko outright says that she gets Ayan “lived for love, but…” I think there’s more to the use of this piece in this part of the episode than there was with the first part. Here, Ayan talks about how all she wanted was to be with Darenzo but no one would accept it. Of course, the trial she has to go through isn’t as bad as Tosca’s and definitely ended up much better than Tosca did.

Actual spoilers for Tosca follow if you care about that kind of stuff. Shortly after Tosca finishes Vissi d’arte, Scarpia ups the ante by ordering Cavaradossi to be executed. Buuuuuuut, if Tosca gave herself to him, he’ll make it a mock execution. Tosca ends up agreeing, Scarpia gives the order, then Tosca knifes him. Everything works out, except that Scarpia is a pile of dicks and actually ordered the execution for realsies. Tosca throws herself over an edge in grief and to avoid the guys who just found Scarpia’s body.