Rindou[輪堂]: “Ring/Loop + Temple/Shrine/Hall,” it’s pretty straight foward as a surname, although it feels kind of pertinent to this arc but I’ll get back to that in a sec*…
Atau[与ウ] is for some reason written with the katakana U[ウ] instead of hiragana…. I have no idea what that’s supposed to imply… But ataeru[与える] and ataru[与る] mean “to give” or “to be given/received”(and incidentally “to participate in…” as in “to have been received by…”) and I keep seeing English sources list “Godsend” in there somewhere, but I’m not seeing it pop up in any of the Japanese sources I’ve been cross referencing so that seems kinda odd… I assume in this context it’s meant to refer to his acceptance by animals, and/or his ability to gift life to his sword’s shikigami.
His outfit immediately made me think of a buddhist Kesa[袈裟] or Rakusu[絡子], particularly with the block pattern, although the way he wears it isn’t quite the same… But with the pockets it’s more like an artisan’s apron/smock of some sort. A printer? Painter? Something to do with paper like his sword? Or a butcher or taxidermist, tying back to his animal motif, albeit grimly? His animal thing, in con junction with his division, also feels like it could loosely tie back to Komamura, specifically because…
*The “Ring/Loop” thing seems to echo the new enemies’ design element, and more broadly they both kind of harken back to the Buddhist Hell being part of the cycle of reincarnation –Christians are very about the “eternal damnation” thing, but Buddhist hell is a place of penance more than punishment. You go in, you suffer, but you are expected to come back out via reincarnation, although if your crimes are severe enough that may take a while, and you may not always come back as a human…
So, is Atau (“The Gift, of the Ring Temple”) from a family that tends to a temple where people revere or worship the wheel of reincarnation? Is his affinity for animals tied to an awareness that souls can reincarnate as animals as well as humans? Will he be a source of exposition when/if this Hell thing goes on? I’m eager to find out.
AAaahhhh!! As an artist it’s always such a joy to see character sketches as those can give out details that might have been hard to figure out when watching the finished work or just seeing additional stuff…omg.
Does anyone have translations of the notes on some of them?
