Say it in Red | Episode 43: Fatal twelve (Part 1 of 2)

Say It In Red

The best proportion of coffee grounds to hot water for a single pour-over cup is roughly 1:16 by weight, or roughly two tablespoons to twelve ounces by volume. Scales are recommended for precision and large batches, but for a single cup I usually find that I'm fine just estimating and pouring the water slowly over the medium-coarse ground coffee so that it blooms and froths nicely. After that, it's just a matter of waiting a few quiet moments as the coffee drips down into the mug. It's a great time for contemplation in the morning, think back to that warm summer day a few weeks ago when you died in a horrific accident and then entered into a surreal weekly elimination tournament for the stake of your ongoing existence.
This month, and next as well, Runa and Sara are joined by returning podcast guests KT Kelly and Mari to discuss Fatal Twelve (2018), a yuri death game and visual novel focusing on twelve people who have already died. We follow Rinka, a second-year high school student at a prestigious all-girls school who hops on the train one morning only to immediately burn to death in a violent explosion. She awakens soon after as if it were a dream, but disjointed memories and the sudden appearance of mysterious books full of ornate cards aren't often kind auspices. The next week, at midnight on Sunday, she drifts back to sleep and enters a surreal space full of suspended gears and twelve podiums each arranged at the twelve numerals across the face of a massive clock. A small girl greets her and explains that she has most assuredly died, and now she's engaged in the process of Divine Selection - a contest to determine which of the twelve unfortunate souls here will get to live on, and which of those must return to the moment of their death and forgo the possibility of a future. This would all be a bit easier to navigate, perhaps, if Rinka's dear friend Miharu, a gorgeous girl who clearly has a tremendous and devastating crush on Rinka, wasn't also standing right beside her as a fellow contestant in this Death Game.
In this episode we covered the first five weeks of Fatal Twelve's story, seeing characters meet, clash, get eliminated, become racist caricatures, grow, completely miss the obvious signs that lesbianism is all around them, and learn more about the strange process of Divine Selection in which they're all entangled. As she continues learning about other contestants and trying to make headway in the game, Rinka starts to question the merit of her own life and whether she truly deserves to live if it means stealing the possibility of a future from the other contestants. Even more unsettling, there seems to be more behind this game than simply a benevolent goddess's whim to give one person another chance... Is life the dream from which death awakens us, or have we been made to dream of death to hasten its arrival?
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