hello, i was late to the fandom so i might have missed out on this discourse but do we ever find out the real content of Ray's letter to Isabella? Is it something of a plot point the author hasn't developed in canon? If so, what would the plot be you think? Thank you so much!!
Same hat, anon 😎🤝😎 (coming up on my third anniversary of first discovering the series just this month)
Shirai has never officially, explicitly stated in an interview what's in the letter Ray writes in chapter 22/S1 episode 7, but I've talked about this before and personally find it funny how he made a big deal out of the mystery surrounding it back in a 2019 Jump interview (translated here):
When I feel most people’s first guess as to what was in it after the escape arc concluded was eventually confirmed in December 2020 with the release of chapter 181.3:
A farewell letter from a son to his mother that reveals their biological connection when headquarters purposely kept it a secret.
(Mystic Code Book Chapter 2)
It's meant to be such a huge revelation it stops Krone in her tracks and deters her from digging around in Ray's room further to discover the rewards he's been receiving for six years and the lighter fluid he's been stockpiling for five.
(Mystic Code Book Chapter 1 Q& A | Chapter 22; Krone evens whips out records she brought along in her suitcase from headquarters to corroborate what she's read.)
I've also talked before about how Ray's retaliation was threefold in its pettiness, and this letter falls into points 2 & 3. After years of bottling up his anger and resentment toward her, he wanted to incriminate her by implicating she at very least knew about the escape, potentially that she even helped with it, all because she knew of their biological connection and wanted him to survive (the same thing he wished she would have said to him back on his sixth birthday at the gate):
(Chapter 181.1)
He found it sickening how she could choose to prolong her own life by sacrificing all his siblings over the course of her tenure at Grace Field. With this, he thought he would seal her death at the hands of the demons she groveled before like a dog, while he would die on his own terms as a human.
(Chapter 14)
What he didn't count on was Isabella's prioritizing results over rules was something that was enabled by her mother, to the point they were willing to remove Krone from plant no.3 altogether.
(Chapter 23 | Chapter 181.3)
Ray assumed Krone did not have the means to contact headquarters like Isabella did, so she would keep the bait and bide her time until presented with the opportunity to reveal it to someone higher in the chain of command. Ray assumed Krone would still be at Grace Field at the time of the escape, and that after he was dead and the four other oldest kids were gone and headquarters was looking for an explanation for how a blunder of this magnitude could have possibly happened, Krone would show her hand to usurp Isabella's position.
It's why he's so caught off-guard when Isabella reveals she made a move first.
(Chapter 24)
As for why Shirai gave conflicting information about this, I'm assuming he wanted to leave the door open for multiple possibilities before his health tanked and he began aggressively cutting off story branches so he could still complete the series under his own power and maintain his sense of artistic integrity.
(October 2020 Series Completion Interview)
And that's how we arrive at the contents of the letter being what a lot of fans suspected from the jump.
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Past Fashion in the Demon World - First Bloods
Reminiscence of the past
Let us be clear: the founder race is dying.
Their previous king's sanity had declined past the point of denial.
Didn't even try to save his people.
The mad king's overthrow - was planned by collective force.
The war. the End. the plague of the land.
And those still alive, erased from memory and then eaten away by the disease. Locked and sealed in the dark.
Vomiting blood and bitter regret.
Like the Great Roman Empire - Idleness and Decadence led to their downfall.
The war had ransacked everything. Every element of the past, of the golden age of the Ancestors. Endzeit took the living and left only meaningless trinkets of memory.
Burai kept some of those and even more: Menae's dresses, some of her jewellry...
and a daughter as the hidden remaining evidence of an ancient time. An ancient world he had conquered.
The two last remaining Founders. First children of the Moon
Today protect body and soul, the last bits of their glorious heritage.
The founder race thrived in the centre of the demon world
cold, dry winters
quite pleasant summers and mid-seasons full of soft colours.
mountainous land (not to the level of the Adler's but still high enough so they could get fresh gusts of wind), they towered over the other territories.
Their hegemony was supreme, at first even quite brilliant. They were self-sufficient, feared but respected.
Not the slightest interest in human civilisations. For them, humans were slaves, food, and entertainment.
At the top of the hierarchy, Founders were the reference of good taste and what was fashionable at the royal court would be in vogue everywhere else.
due to similar weather conditions, some elements of the First Blood fashion could be compared to a strange mix of old European apparel.
which is crazy because the timeline is so fucked up we don't even know where to situate the founders existence in human history because they were ahead of their time: from the clothes silhouette to the fabric used and the skills of their tailors.
Let's dive into blood into a 'brief' description of founders' fashion.
Aristocrats' clothing. Because like everywhere else, the world doesn't seem to care about how the commoners would dress. We prefer rare silks and gold over anything.
But the shiniest stars are always the dying ones.
Anyways-
male fashion
can be sum up in four points :
18th-century "habit à la française" (I'm french but I only read it with a fake British accent it's terrible)
Imperial Russian court and military uniforms
Alucard from Castlevania (especially the one from 1997)
and Bloodborne
what? I should develop?
the 18th-century/Alucard style. soft ruffled shirt, large embroidered silk cravat, heavy linen pants with high leather boots sat on top, again a goddamn cloak...on top of a pirate coat-
founders men were responsible for the "romantic vampire aesthetic" but Karlheinz will never admit it.
they liked form-fitting clothes, slightly tight on the chest because they wanted to accentuate the strong lines of their necks and outline their shoulders to make them look broader.
yeah they're insecure like that😔
overcoats heavy with wealth.
it could be brown, it could be blue, it could be violet-You see what I'm doing here.
some buttoned, some buckled but all embellished with stitches of silver and gold
long hair was a genderless preference.
Well. Women were expected to keep them long because blablabla women and feminity blablabla but for the men who chose to have long hair (like Carla) it was perceived as a sign of power??
like they considered that you have to be particularly deft or confident in your magical abilities to be able to fight with long hair (they're not particularly wrong though)
but I prefer to think that they liked long hair because it contributed a LOT to their dark romantic aesthetic.
anything for the drama.
female fashion
a glorious mix of 18th-19th century russian court fashion and... 50s old hollywood dresses. (don't ask me, they're stylish and visionary)
beautifully designed, from the delicate shape of a butterfly sleeve to the way it embraced the line of the shoulders
distinguishing and elegant, the off-shoulder elongated the neck and the low neckline was lined with small almost-transluscent pearls and silver threads to capture the light and make their skin radiates under the fine diamond necklaces.
corsets obviously but we are far from the killing corsets Cordelia could wear to have one hell of a waist. In comparison, they were comfortable (again, their tailors were that good)
silk opera gloves, sometimes lacy ones to match the men's stupid shirts 🙄
layered skirts but not the bulky type (not the Empress Sissi style). Founder women didn't like the ballooning silhouette and found it unattractive as it didn't do them any favour.
preferred drawing attention to their waist and cleavage but also to their height.
skirts had to compliment and accentuate the length of the body as the First Blood women were taller than most female demons. (well see Cordelia. She's the tallest among the three wives and I suspect her to be actually quite 'short' for a founder woman.)
their silhouette is almost fae-like: lithe, lean and strong despite being overprotected and confined to that castle 😔
so the skirts were long, organza or taffeta draped the main skirt to give some dimension to the dress - no crinoline. maybe a bustle to add a little to their hips and bums
because the Founders can only be killed by decapitation, they provocatively exposed their necks a lot in their clothing style.
open ruffs (like a smaller Medici collar), off-shoulder, v-neck or sweetheart necklines...
Fate being a cruel mistress, this small game of silent provocation was definitely not what caused their ruin.
But you know what happened.
Now most of these lavish gowns and sumptuous coats are just crumbs of inspiration from an old system, left to be pecked.
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