C: The Money of Soul and Possibility Control 1 – Because Super Long Subtitles Must Mean Something, and I Am Offering An Explanation
For an opening episode, C did an excellent of setting up its world, detailing its characters, and opening the door for many potential avenues the show could take in the future. All that said, the most interesting part of the episode was its opening 5 minutes or so in which some poor sap who loses a battle in the Financial District, for one reason only: The concepts of chance and collateral.
First, the concept of collateral, though I view it as more of a legal term. Generally, collateral is something you promise to give up should you fail to perform on a stated obligation. In the context of this show the thing that you might have to give up is your soul should you not repay the loan granted to you. Now this seems like a generally straight forward concept. However, if you combine some contract law to this show you can up with a whole bunch of different possibilities. The one I am hoping that the show utilizes in some way is the concept of a surety. Simply put, someone else, the surety, could promise to pay the debt of the debtor should they not have the money to pay back the loan to the lender, in this case the Financial District.
However, the Financial District doesn’t necessarily seem interested in money, but in souls, as the references to hell are plentiful in this opener. With that in mind, I am hoping that someone somewhere down the line will take the place of someone else’s obligation to the Financial District, if for nothing else, it would be a great storyline. Who this could eventually be, I don’t know. However, the show gave us many possibilities, most notably the missing parents who were never actually shown in this episode.
As for the second term, “chance”, it was mentioned a few times by the poor sap who lost the fight in the beginning of the episode (though he also referred to it as a gamble). First off, in finance, there is some element of being in the right place at the right time, but it is not something that people succeed at by being lucky as one might be with playing and winning at roulette. A good investor can put the odds in their favor, and beat the market should they put in the time. Alas, there are also circumstances in which the markets do not behave perfectly, and some people have insider information.
Given the nature of the relationship that was shown between Masakaki and Mikuni, it appears that Mikuni may have a unique edge over his opponents. While there is something to be said for experience, as the show stated, we have to consider the possibility that Mikuni has some sort of special advantage. This possibility is even more likely, I believe, as we are coming of the worst financial crisis in the world’s history in some eighty years, so the concept of fraud is fresh in our minds. Also, talk about some resentment for the world’s recent troubles directed at America in the opener, when compared to the industrious Europeans and Japanese.
While I doubt that the things I brought up in this post will actually play any role in the story, it is something to keep in mind given the financial nature of the show.
