Roasting Apple Black, Chapter 2 (Part 3)
Before Opal can get her -dere reveal, she dumps a pile of vagaries on Sano.
This manga is so fucking boring that I’m starting to wonder if Sano is gay or asexual or he’s a touch-starved bisexual disaster who gets nervous around Everyone. Not even for the sake of queer rep or shipping, because my only “ship” for Apple Black is everyone in this series x being doused in lighter fluid and burned to a crisp.
Everything’s been spoonfed to such a ridiculous degree, that injecting a sprinkling of surprise queerness would make this story legitimately more interesting.
We do also get more nods towards Angelo’s possible queerness.
As if dressing up in a military peacoat isn’t like, half of all tumblr sexymen. He’d have no problem getting a chick! So I guess next time he’s on screen, let’s make sure our gaydars are locked and loaded.
But back to Opal’s latest steaming pile of an infodump. “Did you really help stop that Banburi rebel? I saw the headlines on the Daily Garden newspapers.”
Here’s the headlines we, the audience, saw:
Banburi Rebel Captured!!
Is the trinity a hoax?
How vague is the newspaper being about Sano’s involvement? The rebel said that he has a “bounty on his head.” Do journalists follow a specific guideline that protects anyone with a bounty? I’d assume Opal can narrow it down since her class is so small, but I have a lot of questions about how the bounty system works.
When Willow Vitiligo went to school, I got the impression is was a goddamn free-for-all, and the first one to tackle her can yoink her wand and sell it for a hefty sum. Willow’s father gave it to protect her, and I can’t figure out if it’s a “Boy named Sue” situation (because this is essentially painting a giant target on her back), or if this wand is so kickass it actually will zap away any greedy pests (but she still got immediately kidnapped, so, there’s that). I think part of Willowdad’s grand keikaku was like, “hold onto this, so I don’t have to.”
They don’t say there’s specifically a bounty on her wand, but that does give me an idea how their tough-guy world operates.
There is also the issue that Harlem, Willow’s mother, assumes that if she’s missing, she could have been captured by slavers. Harlem is a formerly enslaved person. At the end of the book, one of Willow’s goals is to abolish slavery. There’s no other mention of slavery so far, but it is a problem in their world.
I know that’s a bit of tangent but I really am just trying to parse how their society operates.
Anyway, a few pages later we’re told more about the bounty system.
Was all that text hard to read? It was for me, too. I’d like to bring up the often-memed Hunter x Hunter page:
I took the text for both of these pages and ran them through a word counter.
So this page was only 44 words away from matching the infamous Hunter x Hunter page. I don’t want to bring the review to a crashing halt every time Apple Black gets a little too Mouthy. But I’ll keep this in mind, and if any Apple Black pages beat this record, I’ll let you know.