Dec 12, 2025
Author's Commentary #105:
Time to talk about Chapter 105: Giraffe attack.
This chapter introduces Carol, who's essentially the American equivalent of Iori, aside from secretly being a psychopath. Her dialog is deliberately misspelled and full of grammatical errors in order to illustrate the fact that she's speaking broken Japanese. But in reality, it was all an act as she's actually very fluent in Japanese. She also has some Japanese lineage too as her great grandmother was from Japan.
キャロル・"シーシー"・クック (Carol "Cece" Cooke) is how her name is written in katakana.
Her birthday is October 6th. I chose the date at random so there's no real significance behind why this date is his birthday. However, it is worth mentioning that while I did choose this date at random, it is also the birthday of Armenian-American grandmaster, Levon Aronian.
Like Iori, her favorite piece is the knight, mainly because it can jump around the board. She actually watches lots of chess videos in order to learn cool moves, but has found that some of them can be easily countered by high-level players resulting in her usually losing games against them.
Speaking of the games, the inspiration for them came after I watched a video by Fischy Chess called "Every weird chess openings explain in 15 minutes (compilation)". I don't think the Omega Bongcloud is officially recognized, but it is similar to a crazy opening Magnus Carlson once played. Basically, the move involves you moving your king to d1 the long way by going first to f2 then looping around to d1. Iori was unable to pull the move off due to playing Mimoko.
The Giraffe attack on the other hand is in fact a real opening. It was actually thanks to the aforementioned video that I learned about it and the blunder white can fall into if they play the opening. This is also the first win by resignation game in the series. While wins by resignation are common both in real life and the universe this story takes place in, wins by resignation will be rare and won't occur unless it's a non-DESPER match. If I end up doing a proper tournament arc, that's where you'll likely see lots of wins by resignations. As for why Carol resigned, she would have been down a queen and against someone like Mimoko, that's game over.
As for the bet, both her and Iori were planning on doing it from the start and simply wanted an excuse to justify it as a punishment. Though if Iori played seriously, the results could have been much different.
That's all for this commentary. I hope you enjoyed it.
