#Welcome to my Kurogane Museum

[completeoveranalysis]

[2]

Chapitre 192 - A Touch of Memory

Aka Broody Family Photoshoot Time!

The giant tree roots they’re posing with mirror a couple of other times this imagery has come up, but it’s looked a bit different each time. Let's see...

There's this time in Chapitre 43, which is still stunning, as well as Chapitre 100. There's also the two [redacted] standing on branches in Chapitre 161, and the two Sakuras doing the same in 181. Very fun that it was always branches before though, but now we're getting down into the roots of it all!

And gnarled roots at that! Were the bare branches in some of the earlier covers implications of a dying future, and now we're closer to the start of all that? Do the dried out and harsh looking roots mirror the fact that the PAST is also damaged, as we're finding out? Time is dying all the way through? The landscape behind them looks equally barren and Acid Tokyo-like, which was already a dying future caused by apocalyptic events.

Or do the roots themselves resemble the different timelines and dimensions? How they’re not distinct and easy to tell apart anymore, but mixed and layered and complicated to follow?

But trees aside I'm loving the black birds, leaving us with black feathers drifting down the scene instead of the usual white. What a change! Such Sakura-less imagery! Is that because she’s completely gone, or because she wasn’t quite the Sakura we thought she was? Does anything different happen with the feathers that were never collected now that Sakura is gone - do they work differently, or do they just keep working the same? Inquiring minds in Acid Tokyo would like to know! 

Or are these feathers more about the non-Sakuras left behind, and the fragments of themselves they need to put together to make it to the end of this all? Maybe they're a parallel to the actual feathers that are shards of Sakura’s memory, except these ones are like the scattered pieces of Lava Lamp’s backstory that we were never privy to until now. 

Meanwhile their individual clothing styles are still on point. LOVE that Kurogane and Fai’s scarves so clearly match the same arcs, like two halves of the same matching set of lines. They’re looking off in different directions but they’re BOTH looking to the sides, leaving only Lava Lamp to stare directly ahead, while his scarf is torn in two different directions.

I think you could probably also get some mileage out of their respective birds and how they reflect their past characterisation - Kurogane’s looking stoically ahead, Fai’s almost looking like it’s screaming at him while he looks conflicted and pensive, and even though Lava Lamp is battle ready his bird is all the way off to the side, completely separated from everyone else

Also the characters have small shadows themselves, though not very pronounced - but there is also a sort of shadowy root off behind the rest of them, visibly black while the rest of aren’t. Is that the secret timeline behind everything else, that we’re slowly discovering? Or is that Evil Wolverine’s influence worming it’s way underneath the fabric that makes up everything else? 

I would also just… like to have Kurogane’s boots. 

That's not a metaphor. They’re just extremely nice.