May 05, 2025
Author's Commentary #155:
Time to talk about Chapter 155: The Bertin meat shield.
Red Reaper is pretty much evil Subaru from Re-Zero, except he doesn't go back in time when he "dies", rather he flat out revives on the spot. This is why he's such a fearsome opponent, as if he's pursuing multiple targets, he'll happily "kill himself" just to get a new DESPER and challenge his opponent instantly.
One thing I will confirm is that despite being a grandmaster with a rating over 2700, he does not have Caïssa's blessing. Though he does have Assïac's curse, which is quite similar to it.
As for the game, it features a Bertin gambit which is arguably just as aggressive as the Muzio gambit. I actually wrote this game back in Season 4, but decided to use it now. I also wanted to demonstrate how ruthless Tsar Grigori could be. Speaking of which, lets talk about his opponent, Frieda Rhodes.
フリーダ・ロードス (Frieda Rhodes) is how her name is spelled in katakana.
Her birthday is November 1st, which is the day the European Union was formed. Her rating of 1993 is a reference to the year the EU was formed as well.
Her favorite piece is the queen. Which is ironic, since it was a queen that ultimately mated her and resulted in her losing her free will.
She is obviously a high-ranking European official, however, she was not the greatest chess player. Now she'll be Tsar Grigori's proxy, meaning he'll have even more control over Europe.
Speaking of Europe, in this universe, Germany has become the German empire of Prussia, thanks to Red Reaper conquering it. And speaking of Red Reaper, it's now a race against time for Okisato to get back to London and get the other members of the chess club out of there, since he's the only one capable of beating Red Reaper.
As for the timeline of events, I'll confirm that it essentially took Red Reaper 40 minutes to get back to London and get an active DESPER. This chapter actually went through a significant revision where I decided to have Red Reaper utilize his ability to warp to any secret puzzle cafe in the world. I still wanted to keep the game, so I revised things to have him willingly go with Tsar Grigori to trap Frieda, and had the warship warped to London at the start. It still took 40 minutes total, but now things make more sense.
One final thing I'll mention is that in the original draft, this chapter was originally Chapter 156, but I decided to move it up one space following the revisions. While Season 5 didn't get revised as much as say Season 4, there is still one very noteworthy revision which I'll discuss in the next commentary.
That's all for this commentary. I hope you enjoyed it.
