Thomas

Land Of The Lustrous, Volume 10

This manga reminds me more and more of Fire Punch as it goes on. Every step Phos takes deepens his suffering and pulls him farther and farther from his old friends. He has almost achieved his goals - he's brought peace to the gems by reinvigorating lunarian society, but at the cost of being despised by the gems remaining on Earth, and discarded as a failure by the gems and lunarians on the Moon. Adamant is seemingly the only being in the universe who still cares for Phos, yet Phos' rage is directed at him as the ultimate cause of all his suffering. Is there any possible way out? Even if Phos succeeds in permanently annihilating the lunarians, he has no home to return to.   The most disturbing element of this volume to me is the new perspective it gives to the gems. In the worst ways, they're not really that different from the lunarians. Their deathless perspective and belief that their kidnapped friends would eventually be returned to them were understandable given their circumstances, but the way they so easily integrate into lunarian society is disquieting. Alexandrite is one of the oldest gems, and the loss of Chrysoberyl apparently drove him to an obsessive hatred of them, but he integrates just as easily as the others. Even witnessing the dust of their old friends apparently causes nothing but a transient distress to them. Cinnabar, ignored his entire life by everyone but Phos, is the one to suggest essentially killing him after Phos returns to Earth alone without weapons. The psychology of the gems is deeply and disturbingly inhuman. Phos is the only one for which it's credible that he would have misgivings about slaughtering the admirabilis living on the moon to return some of his friends to life. He is the only one with a true understanding of the concepts of loss and change. For all the rest, they're seemingly trapped in a stasis of thought, or mentally break if pushed too far (Yellow). The gem and lunarians are equally as disconnected from any humanity they might have once held. While there've been a lot of theories about whether the gifts of his legs and eye, or a human particle contained in the eye qualified him as human, I wonder whether it was rather a mental qualification the other gems and lunarians are unable to achieve. Adamant's servility and apparent cowardice do not come out looking much better, but they at least lend him a pathetic quality, lacking in the gems' (especially Cinnabar's) callous cruelty. Did the world Phos was fighting for have any true value to it at all?  Actually, a few of the gems demonstrate positive traits. Euclase makes an actual effort to communicate with Phos during the night raid, and was the sole voice of dissent against summarily executing Phos when he had already been pre-emptively crippled after appearing empty-handed in broad daylight. Yellow's mental breakdown suggests a far higher degree of inner conflict over his association with the lunarians than any of the other moon gems. That he needs to put himself into a deep delusion to function and is catatonically depressed otherwise shows he has a concept of guilt unknown to most of the others. Padparadscha is the only moon gem to maintain close allegiance with Phos, probably because Pads has, due to his condition, a view of life far closer to human than any other gem. Living in increments of only minutes, he would have a massively compressed image of the life of the gems, and be able to see exactly how static it is, and how in Phos' short life, he has achieved more than any other living gem.   Cairngorm is a weird case, and I really don't understand what Ichikawa means with him. He is the only moon gem to explicitly reject Phos, but his reasons at least have a basis in his belief that he was enslaved by his eyes. In some ways, I can accept Cairngorm explicitly and wholeheartedly falling in with the lunarians more than I can accept Alex quietly going over to them, or Cinnabar casually betraying Phos. I know a lot of readers really hate him for seeming to fall for Aechmea's lies of omission (fine) or betraying the concept of gender neutrality by becoming the moon's princess (stupid), but he's become one of the most interesting characters in the manga right now, right up there with Phos, Adamant and Aechmea. He hates to think he's being controlled by others, but so far he's shown almost no resistance toward Aechmea. Even when he found out about Aechmea's big omission regarding Adamant's prayers, he remains loyal to his prince. I imagine there'll be some big fallout if he ever has reason to believe Aechmea has betrayed him. Regardless, I have a feeling that he will probably play an important role in however things end up playing out, whether as an ally or an enemy of Phos.

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