Translated by JN Productions
194 pages
Published 2016 (English translation 2018)
Read from April 12 to April 14
Rating: 3 out of 5
It’s difficult to write reviews of long-running manga when I read them back to back like this. I’m still interested enough to read through this series (or at least what my library has of it), but it’s starting to feel like background noise. (Most of that feeling is due to the state of my country, though, to be fair.)
This volume has a grab-bag quality. Each chapter is its own little standalone story, all of them contributing to an ever more elaborate tower of worldbuilding and backstory. Which is fine, I suppose, but it’s a lot of worldbuilding and backstory, so very much. The last chapter is a short story, published by itself years before, that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with Children of the Whales aside from commentary on authoritarianism and Umeda’s fixation on jesters and large women.
In case you had any doubts about the series’ overarching point of view, we hop back to the original generation of exiles on Fálaina, who prove to be rebels against the totalitarian control of a government that sucks away its people’s emotions. Said government is the ancestor of the Apátheia pursuing the Mud Whale in the story’s present day.
Maybe that’s why I keep reading this series: it serves as a gentle, emotional refutation of the sociopathy of authoritarianism.
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