“I didn’t know the world was such a wonderful place.”
Impression
“I’m Accelerator.”
Damn…and here I thought Misaka’s shock faces from last episode were painful enough. Accelerator really humiliated her during that battle – you’ve gotta remember that as a Level 5, there aren’t too many people in Academy City who can give her trouble, much less trouble when she’s properly angry, especially after seeing 9982’s corpse. She went straight from her iron sand to ripping off metal railings and chucking them straight at Accelerator with killing intent – there’s no way she was holding back. Yet it looked far too one-sided, and he even deflected Misaka’s Railgun like it was nothing. I keep getting reminded that the pre-Touma version of Accelerator is truly frightening and 100% insane…and at times, very cool. I still do prefer his mellower side after meeting Last Order, though. Anyway, Vector Change continues to be as haxxor as ever – from Misaka’s point of view, it must be insane to keep going after the absolute power of a Level 6 when he can easily toss around the 3rd ranked Level 5 like that.
“To me, the world is just a twisted, ugly thing…I thought she was far more human than I.”
I was glad to see Shinobu back – and it’s about time too, now that Misaka’s found out about the Sisters and the experiment. Lives are apparently given a monetary value now in Academy City, with one life costing 180,000 yen. That’s just disgusting. Arguably, what’s even worse is the justification the scientists are apparently using – a simple argument that it’s for the greater good. Shinobu’s example was of a possible cancer cure should you experiment with the lives of 20,000 guinea pigs, which I think many people would view as a justifiable exchange. I’m not going to go into the morals of sentience and self-awareness, but what I think Misaka’s trying to say is that a human life is most certainly more valuable – even within the Sisters, who have emotions stored as semantic data, can appreciate the beauty of the outside world. Isn’t it ironic that an artificial clone ends up displaying more humanity than a lab scientist? And unlike the cancer cure, achieving Level 6 is a dubious goal – it’s very, very hard to see the external benefit to society from having one crazy dude hold immense power. With the cost being thousands of human lives, it’s not hard to see why it was kept secret.
The stark contrast between Misaka’s dark secret and her everyday life was jarringly uncomfortable. Seeing Misaka enter her fancy bathroom or watching Saten play mahjong while on the phone was a complete turnaround from what we had before – though Saten was right in guessing that Misaka was with a guy xD It’s just that the guy in question has been killing thousands of her clones without her knowing, is all. I’m looking forward to seeing her take revenge on those scientists who tricked her, even if she can’t do anything to stop the experiments directly.
