noighd
joined Oct 9, 2021
There's so much to unpack this chapter, but the Seo reveal kind of blew my mind. It's very likely now that the student council had nothing to do with Miho's 2nd death and it was entirely masterminded by Seo.
We learned in chapter 34 she's been chatting with Michiru ever since Michiru met Miho. And she's the one who talked Michiru into using salad oil. Unless she worked with the student council, which seems impossible, all she'd have to do is swap the contents and Miho's dead. Why she'd do this, I have no idea, but the manga has already raised questions of how good or evil Seo is deep down. And how would the student council even know about Michiru's kinks to know to set this up in the first place?
While their reaction to Michiru's death is reprehensible as hell, this does explain an inconsistency in the student council's beliefs. Prez seems too driven by a sense of righteousness to justify manipulating an innocent girl and killing her to save himself. I mean he completely forgave Akira's misbehavior since he recognized she was a victim too. But if he doesn't know anything about Miho's 2nd death, Michiru just looks like an unrepentant psycho: exactly his kind of target.
There's a few other more speculative details. Killing Miho before she broke her promise not to bully Komachi seems weird. Prez had left her alone for a full year. All his murder attempts involved playing with the mechanics of premonitory corpses, but Miho's 2nd death was very straightforward. The corpse never changed. And if he wanted Michiru dead to cover up the truth, why let her loose for so long? Even leaving a trail with an unreliable 3rd party already seems out of character.
I could be wrong, but you don't have a full page lightning flash reveal for no good reason. It adds another layer to this arc illustrating how misguided the student council's moral crusade is; they just killed an innocent based on their own misunderstanding while Seo lives despite being a monster under the surface. If true, we have a 3rd major threat lurking around besides the student council and Akira's dad. Now we have to ask the questions of why she'd try to kill Miho, if she's really lost all her memories, and how harmless her sudden interest in Satsuki actually is.