#if this is too much i can delete this reply also np 🙏

[thedevilsrain]

i overall agree with you that his character suffered a big bout of degradation, but i'd argue it began even before that, around chapter 6-7. for me the turning point was simply when he stopped being competent and became a nuisance; in veni, vidi, vici (the italy chapter) specifically, where he's the reason dorian gets arrested and hit by the major and all that.

beforehand i think that though eccentric, as you mentioned, he was still a capable accountant and a funny cute little thing, but afterwards he became more of a nuisance to team eroica, where everybody is trying to get rid of him and calling him a "thing" so own and so forth — in a manga that's all about the realism of the cold war, it feels really jarring to go from real life political happenstances to "look at this funny man in a toilet" lmao

my friend @/kanhatomame and i had a discussion about james once, and i'm really fond of her idea of james as a tragic one-sided attraction story, that coming in first and the whole stingy guy coming in second as a comedic gag (sort of like klaus and his anger and dorian and Being Gay)

i think the main problem with eroica is that it was very much a development stage in yasuko aoike's ouvre for like nine years (where she was mostly focusing on research and drawing the thing more than anything) before she found out what she liked drawing best — medieval stories! every manga she has after eroica is a medieval story. so a lot of it can feel unfinished and disappointing, and imo nothing represents that better than james

Okay, Eroica confession time.

Y'all know that I love Mr. James. And I do, throughout the series, love seeing what he's up to, especially when the rest of Team Eroica aren't around. That being said, I think his character peaked in "The Alaskan Front" and went swiftly downhill from there.

Words alone cannot express how happy I was in "TAF" when I saw my favorite little gremlin go out onto the open ocean alone in his patched up little raft to go try to find Dorian by himself. It didn't matter that it was a very ineffective way to search for a Soviet submarine, it didn't even matter that the money printing plates he so coveted were also with Dorian. My little man was showing actual personal growth in the way he risked his own life trying to find his beloved Earl. And I wish that character development had stayed in the series in following chapters, but instead we get James agreeing to sell his allies out in the very next arc.

I'm not saying James has to be a saint. He can make mistakes that end up making things difficult for Team Eroica. And he can certainly keep his eccentric personality. But he can have all that and still continue to learn and grow and prove that he values Dorian as more than just a source of income or exploitation, or even as a romantic infatuation. But that just doesn't happen, instead his character development goes backwards for no reason, and it's really a shame, because there was a lot that could have been built off of what happened in "The Alaskan Front". There was a lot of potential there that was never used.