#she sure utilized that technique to its fullest this chapter amiright

[rutilation]

Well Cairn, going off established precedent, you have to start by slowly accruing some highly symbolic gemstone prosthetics.  Just pretend that this is part seven of jojo and start competing with Phos to see who can obtain the most religiously significant body parts.  Whoever has the most by the time the seventh meteor hits wins!

So about this chapter…

The part of this chapter that really merits discussion is one I kind of have trouble parsing—so much so I ended up rewriting this essay a couple times. Neither Cairngorm nor Aechmea are very forthright characters, which means you have to chase after subtext in order to guess at what’s really being communicated, and this chapter seems to really lean into that approach to dialogue.  Which is to say, I’m kind of unsure of my interpretation of this chapter.  But if I just throw in the towel now out of fear of misinterpreting my favorite problematic rock, then Ichikawa wins, and I can’t let her and her vaguely menacing self-portrait get the better of me.

At the start of the second half of the chapter, Cairn seems quite content, but the longer the (rather one-sided) conversation goes on, the more distressed they become.  While it’s not made explicit what’s upsetting them, my take is that Aechmea’s attitude in this scene makes it harder for Cairngorm to manage their cognitive dissonance toward him.  I’ve mentioned several times before that a number of things Cairngorm says and does indicate that they realize that Aechmea is shady and perhaps not operating in their best interest, but they don’t want to admit that to themselves.  As long as Aechmea remains ambiguous, they can pretend that everything’s fine.  I think that Cairn’s steadily increasing dismay over the course of the chapter is because pretty much everything Aechmea says here threatens to clarify those ambiguities, and said ambiguities resolve themselves in a way that Cairn isn’t terribly pleased with.  Let’s take it from the top.

First, let’s address the initial stretch of the conversation.  Aechmea implies that he doesn’t actually see any value in the gender roles he’s been encouraging Cairn to adopt, seeing them instead as simplistic tools to keep the other Lunarians occupied—mere bread and circuses.  But while Cairn may not understand the implications of said gender roles, the fact that they made Cairn feel special and loved was enough to make them invested in the whole concept.  So, for Aechmea to imply that it was all an act designed to provide fleeting, cheap entertainment for the other Lunarians probably feels like a slap in the face to Cairn.

In the same breath, he gently tells Cairn that he plans on isolating them in a compound on the most remote of the six moons, and that that’s his idea of granting Cairn freedom. This makes it completely clear that what Cairn said to him in chapter 71 went in one ear and out the other: Cairn wants to finally have agency and can’t abide doing nothing while everyone else is struggling, and Aechmea responds by making a drastic decision about their life without their input, one which will cut them off from the conflict they want to help resolve.  As one might expect, Cairn doesn’t seem happy to hear this.

This next section of the conversation in which Aechmea tells them he’s loved them before they came to the moon also follows the pattern of being full of understated subtext that I apparently require two weeks to untangle and draw a conclusion from.  It’s seems clear from their distraught expression, trembling, and the fact that they incredulously bring it up again a few minutes later that what Aechmea is saying upsets them.  If I had to wager a guess, it’s because the implications are concerning regardless of whether or not Aechmea’s words are true.  His claim is ludicrous and Cairn doesn’t want to believe that he’d try to feed them a bald-faced lie, but if he’s not lying then the implications are equally unsettling.  I think Cairngorm is most comfortable believing that their meeting with Aechmea was a happy accident, because the alternative is that he was romancing them all while hiding ulterior motives.  (Not that it really needs to be reiterated at this point, but these pages make my skin crawl, especially when you look back on Phos’s first day on the moon—with Aechmea trying to butter them up by them by telling them how special they are.)

Anyway, let’s assume for the sake of argument that Aechmea’s statement wasn’t complete bullshit, and that he had some sort of interest in Cairngorm before meeting them. The fact that he kept their old arm indicates that there’s something to what he said, as does the fact that he feels the need to distract Cairn with creepy makeouts when they try and press him for answers on this topic a few pages later.  There are a couple of ways I could see it going, so I’m going to go on a tangent for a minute, and try to speculate on what might have piqued Aechmea’s interest in Cairn.  I don’t feel that predicting future plot-events is really my forte, but sometimes I can’t resist trying to decipher a good puzzle.

Everyone connected to Phos is of interest to him, including Cairngorm.  Several pivotal moments in Phos’s development have happened in front of the Lunarians, (I’m specifically thinking of the drama with Ventricosus and Phos’s gold arms.)  It’s quite possible that Aechmea took an interest in the fact that one of the seemingly static gems was rapidly changing, and I think this line in chapter 54 alludes to this.  As a result, he predicted that Phos’s path would cross his sooner or later, and didn’t dust their captured partners.  I’ve said before that it is really suspicious that he happened to have a “fake” piece of Antarc on his person when Phos got to the moon.  Even if it was artificial, there was no reason for him to have it made in the first place or for him to be carting it around unless he already had Phos on the brain. The fact that he apparently kept Cairngorm’s original arm makes me think that that piece of Antarc may not have been artificial at all, and that maybe he didn’t dust Antarc, Ghost, or Phos’s head in order to have some leverage over Phos later.

Another possibility is that he took interest in Ghost and Cairn’s unique condition on account of those mysterious gem experiments that he was running before Phos got to the moon.  Since he was apparently trying (and failing) to create new gems by combing pieces of shattered gems with synthetic material, the fact that there was a gem who was a complete person despite being essentially a thin sheet of quartz may have been of interest to them.  The main reason I think this might hold some weight is because the Lunarians were rather particular about nabbing Ghost instead of Caringorm in chapter 37.  By the end of the fight, Cairn was completely wrecked, and the Lunarians could have easily taken them both before the other gems made it to the vessel.  But instead, they pushed Cairn off as soon as they had collected Ghost.  To compound this, they don’t usually try to sheer off the gems’ bodies in layers; they just try and shatter them.  Which makes me think that they were specifically trying to get Ghost in this scene and leave Cairn behind, and that Aechmea later decided to keep their arm on a whim along with the pieces of Ghost.  If this ends up being the case, then that begs the question of how the Lunarians could possibly know that Cairn and Ghost are two separate people; it’s not really something they could observe at a distance, especially since Cairn apparently rarely had control of their body.  If this ends up being the route this subplot takes, you guys on team Obsidian-is-a-Lunarian-spy may be able to add this to your pile of evidence.

Following this is the triumphant return of the Highly Symbolic Arm, the importance of which I’ve been harping on for a while now.  It’s also at this point in the conversation that Cairn is most visibly distressed.  I’m of two minds regarding what this sequence is communicating. They are clearly quite opposed to reattaching their original arm at the expense of their replacement, but it’s not clear which replacement they’re holding onto.  It’s possible that this is the same replacement arm they’ve had since their introduction, but it’s also possible that they got rid of that arm the night they came to the moon—it is after all a physical representation of their involvement in Phos/Ghost/Lapis three-ring circus.  This page in chapter 69 would seem to imply the latter.  That being said, Ichikawa has already established that Cairn’s replacement arm acts finicky whenever it has to be reattached—so it’s also possible that they still have the same arm they did before; the sequence of events is hazy enough that it could be read either way.

Needless to say, the sentiment behind Cairn being almost violently opposed to getting rid of their replacement arm changes significantly depending on whether or not that’s the arm Phos gave up their head to save, or an arm Aechmea gave them when they arrived on the moon.  At the moment, I really can’t say one way or another.  But I’m pretty sure this isn’t the last we’ve heard of Cairn’s left arm, so for now I’m content to wait and see.

All that being said, I think the emotion behind the action is clear: desperation.  Whether that arm is one that Cairn associates with Phos or Aechmea, they are clearly desperate to cling to the connection it represents.  Keeping in mind that just about everything Aechmea says in the chapter up to this point drives a wedge between himself and Cairn, I think that in this moment Cairn is forced to grapple with the idea of being truly alone, and out of all the characters, they’re the most ill-equipped to deal with that. I think I touched on this in my essay focused on them, but to reiterate: in spite of their desire for autonomy, Cairn cannot seem to envision themselves outside of another’s shadow.  Whether they’re acting like Antarc for Phos or like an anime-waifu for Aechmea, they’re never really acting like themselves—whoever that might be.  This is a bit of a tangent, but the way they’ve conceived of themselves in relation to Ghost is also kind of off-putting.  They referred to Ghost as their “other self” in chapter 67, and if you’ve gotten the official translation of volume 6, you can see that they also refer to Ghost in similar terms in chapter 38.  This has a rather concerning implication about their self-image or lack thereof. 

The point is, they find a sense of stability and self-worth in tailoring themselves to the desires of others, and they see reattaching their original arm and discarding the replacement and everything it represents as tantamount to abandoning the (terrible) coping mechanism that’s keeping them somewhat functional.

Which makes this a very ironic moment for them to decide that they want to disappear along with Aechmea.  I don’t know a whole lot about Buddhism, but I do know that one is supposed to let go of all attachments in order to attain nirvana.  But in this scene, Cairn is conceiving of nirvana as a means to an end in order remain forever attached to Aechmea (and in the short term: relevant enough to his interests to avoid being banished to the farthest moon.)

The way I see it, if and when Cairn becomes enlightened enough to have any hope of disappearing, they’ll probably have grown past the desire to follow Aechmea off a cliff like a lemming in the first place.  So I don’t see them getting what they want any time soon. What I am concerned about is the pattern of self-destructive behavior that lies behind this.  While reading this chapter, it struck me that whenever Cairn is presented with a stressful or upsetting situation with no obvious solution, their first instinct is to—as Aechmea so succinctly put it—relinquish themselves.  When a poor decision on their part ended with Phos losing their head, they wanted to give up their own head.  When Phos didn’t wake up, they wanted to throw themselves into the ice floes. When Phos ends up devastated in chapter 67, they want to renounce their own personhood and pretend to be Antarc.  This chapter also follows the same pattern: when faced with the upsetting possibility that Aechmea wants to set them aside like a toy he’s grown tired of, Cairn panics and responds with the most self-destructive possible solution to their problem.  I think that until this underlying malaise is actually dealt with, they’re just going to keep circling back to the same “solution” over and over.  It doesn’t matter so much that Cairn is currently about as enlightened as a cornflake; when the chips are down, they probably won’t let that stop them from essentially trying to kill themselves once again.

Well that was harrowing to write, but with all the melodrama out of the way, let’s delve into the real meat of this chapter. 

We know that gems don’t have teeth or tongues, but I’ve also wondered for the longest time…do gems have nostrils?  This shot from the anime makes it seem as if Phos does not have nostrils, but it’s hard to tell when everything is so stylized.

Thankfully, best boy Barbata has given us the answer.  Here we can see that light is pouring out of the orifices on their heads, but conspicuously, there is no light coming from their noses; ergo, gems don’t have nostrils.  No nostrils allowed in fanart from now on you guys, it’s now officially as much of a faux pas as drawing them with pores or teeth.