LogFAQs > #957474451

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* Fun cultural touchstone: streetlamps are appearing for more or less the first time. Naruhodo is fascinated by the bobbies' job to light those.

* Van Zieks approves of the defendant reading. He also offers to "deal with" Sholmes. Would be fascinated to see that showdown...!

* "Could this man BE any more sardonic?" - Chananaruhodo Bingosuke

* Ryunosuke is quick to say that the beef between him and Fairplay is "water under the bridge." Easy for you to say, buddy... easy for you to say.

* "The London bobby is a man of honor." / "... and a man of slumber."

* This case officially exhausted any patience/amusement I had for domestic "humorous" female-on-male domestic violence, between the obviously awful Joan and Pat regularly strangling her husband and the despicable "convincing" argument of Juror #5 getting almost murdered by his wife in a fit of (unreasonable) rage. It's not okay, and it's also not really okay just because they reversed the gender roles. It feels in a way like an erasure of male-on-female domestic violence as well, and turning this into a joke is just... gross. Women in general just come off really terribly in this case, even moreso than in the typical AA case. It's even more of a shame because these are some of the more loving relationships depicted in the series.

* There is one major contradiction that is never quite examined at the end, which is that Pat states she was looking up at the sky and would have seen either a book or a knife come out the window, and that they couldn't have missed it. Well... they did. Without disproving that statement, that piece of testimony feels pointlessly false.

* Also, talk about loose ends. We literally never meet the victim, and the obviously suspicious other tenant... just never appears again? That has to be a setup for a later case, I guess? But what the hell. Valant in 4-3-esque.

* You must "de" very "dusy."

* For a game with a lot of great tracks, the Pursuit theme is pretty lacking. And I guess that makes sense given how unsatisfying it's been to nail everyone.

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All this aside, my closing thoughts on the case aren't really about the lack of murder or how much parts of it felt pointless/uninteresting, or about the cleverness of it... instead my biggest takeaway is about how this might be the most topical and relevant case AA has ever done regarding real-life issues.

There's simply a lot of sadness in this case inherent in the world. I didn't mention it much during the main writeup, but there is persistent xenophobia and racism throughout the case, starting with even the neutral/not-so-unlikable characters, like Gregson, refusing to learn any of the Japanese names. And there are some outright complaints about foreigners. Soseki's experience as a visitor is filled with a great sense of loneliness and despair and alienation. He came here because he loved the literature of the English, yet he couldn't bond with the souls who inspired these works. The happiest part of the ending is that he is going back to Japan to write on his own.

Beyond just the English-Japanese issues, there's a lot of class commentary in this case. Take the bobbies, who face constant overwork. London takes pride in them, yet we see the effect this can have on a person's health and morale and even sanity in the state and actions of Roly Beate. And he's so obviously underpaid - he had to work so hard just to get his wife a rose for her anniversary, and even then he couldn't stay awake for it... and was on call during it.

Then you have the inherent sadness in the Garridebs. I addressed some of it before, but Garrideb's story is actually one of loss as well. Losing his legs, losing his youth, losing his pride... we already know that Garrideb is confined to his apartment pretty much 24/7. Now we realize that he doesn't have running water. And he feels so much pressure to fit in that he can't even let his wife act like his wife around other people; instead class and appearances are so important that she has to pose as a maid. This was a very active person before; we see images of him with much more strength. Now in his frailty, Garrideb reads a lot of novels - not the worst ending for many, but he's only forty-six, and now his favorite novels have been burned in a fire by his abusive wife. We surmise that his pipe is sentimental to him, but we don't know exactly why. And as we learn in the trial, he now spends a lot of time whittling. There's just a lot of sadness and sympathy I feel for this man, who even through the abuse and his own handicaps, attempts to catch Joan when she faints - and is crushed under her.

AA sometimes makes me feel emotions, but often it's the main plot that gets me hyped, or nodding at its cleverness, or rolling with laughter. Here it actually reflects on real life in a meaningful and interesting way, and I'm not sure what to do with these feelings of melancholy! It all makes G1-4 a very uniquely memorable case to me, for reasons outside of the plot almost entirely.
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yet all azuarc of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness