History Headscratchers / FromTheNewWorld

** The red-haired Akki is described to have monster rat tribal tattoos all over their body, and speaks monster rat. The diet and environment in which they grow up may also give them monster rat-like body odor. If any other rat-raised Akki have all the above, it would be easier to fool the Akkis into thinking "you're a monster rat too" when they are near each other.

* How was death feedback/attack inhibition instilled in humans? I assume it's genetic because people seem to be be born with it. But most people would not be willing to allow their genes to be altered to effectively make themselves defenseless and would fight against it. Someone without death feedback would easily be unstoppable to any group that advocates for it.

* How was death feedback/attack inhibition instilled in humans? You figure it's something people owuld be born with since I assume it's genetic. But at the same time most people would not be willing to effectively make themselves defenseless l]ike that and would fight against it. Someone without death feedback would easily be unstoppable to any group that advocates for it.

** She's not literally his grandmother. It may have been skipped over in the anime, but in the novel she tells Saki she's nine generations apart from Satoru. He has 1/512 of her DNA.

** Although it's not directly stated in the series, the Bakenezumi queens are capable of mutating their offspring in the womb for specific purposes, implying that they may have some latent psychic abilities manifesting, as well.

** Despite her age, she still appears to have an infantile personality. She's also obviously quite unhinged and prone to emotional outbursts, demonstrated when she saw her reflection in the mirror. It's pretty obvious she was raised specifically as a weapon against Aki users, not even allowed the time to socialize with others even other monster rats. It's obvious Yakomaru may have isolated and conditioned her since birth to regard herself as a fellow monster rat.
** She must be aware that not all queerats looks the same. Kiroumaru and Yakomaru/Squealer doesn't look alike at all, not mentioning footsoldiers.

** They are believed to be dangerous because they can't control their Cantus and have the possibility of becoming Karmic Demons, like [[spoiler:Shin.]]
** Saki's sister was in a weird social position - she was nonpsychic, and a non-psychic among the Kamisu could create a social distinction that might break the engineering separating humans and bakenezumi. Reiko's problem was lack of control as above. Mamoru was a different problem. It's not that his power was uncontrollable (he was a weakling but able to control it), but his emotions - he wasn't trusted to fit in with the system as an adult.

* I just have a hard time believing that the Monster Rat invasion was remotely possible. Satoru was 12 when he single handedly killed thousands of Earth Spider's. Why is everyone else in town so bad at deflecting arrows and counter-attacking?
** They attacked when the town was unprepared, in the middle of the night, and throwing a festival. They used new technology the people of Kamisu 66 did not understand. After that, the Messiah was largely responsible. After people found out that, people were too scared to fight back. Indeed, after the Messiah was killed, they did go on to slaughter the Robber Fly. And a bunch of unrelated colonies.

* The idea of using bonobos as a way of making the people inherently calmer and less aggressive is flawed. Yes bonobos resolve disputes through sex and are generally calm among each other, this is true. But we've seen through study that they are extremely aggressive and warlike to groups not seen as part of their own. Bonobos hunt in war parties, both male and female, and make intelligent surgical strikes against neighboring colonies of monkey and chimpanzees (and chimps are generally known as one of the most aggressive apes). They kill mercilessly and even take prisoners of war. So it doesn't seem right that putting bonobo mental conditioning in us would fix our aggressive tendencies, and you can't blame it on the time the novel was published, because we already knew this about bonobos at that point.
** Forget bonobos, what makes writers believe wolves have a way to avoid killing their own kind?! Wolves are opportunistic eaters, that don't shy away from cannibalism. Sure they are nice to their pack, but their pack is essentially family. It feels like writers didn't do their research, and used whatever justification. They could at least say that they engineered some kind of super-mirror neuron that connect to their parallel nervous system, causing organ failure and not base this on animals at all.

* Why did the scientists feel the need to impose both attack inhibition AND death feedback. Both aren't foolproof, but they contradict each other as fallbacks - it is the attack inhibition of those around them that makes Fiends so unstoppable. If there was only death feedback and no attack inhibition, most would still be deterred from killing, but it allows the possibility of people sacrificing themselves to kill fiends in true emergencies.

* Tomiko is Satoru's grandmother, yet the oldest she'd likely be able to bear children would have been over fifty years ago when she was between 200-210. We know that her aging speed is roughly 1/4th normal (assuming a straight line from birth - if [[ImmortalityBeginsAtTwenty her age only slowed in her twenties or thirties when she learned the technique]], then she'd have hit menopause earlier). This is all assuming that menopause is slowed by her immortality technique. So how does the math work?

** They may have wanted to avoid discomfort with the opposite sex. Also, it creates another layer of social conditioning to use as a tripwire - Mamoru's failure to participate in the Society of Love is part of what marked him as a likely weak link.

* I don't get why "From The New World" is the title. The premise is that Saki is writing this all down as a warning to future generations never to let these events repeat themselves. But in that case shouldn't it be called From The OLD World? Or TO The New World?

* Why did the scientists feel the need to impose both attack inhibition AND death feedback. Both aren't foolproof, but they contradict each other as fallbacks - it is the attack inhibition of those around them that makes Fiends so unstoppable. If there was only death feedback and no attack inhibition, most would still be deterred from killing, but it allows the possibility of people sacrificing themselves to kill fiends in true emergencies.

* If heterosexual relationships before the age of seventeen are so strongly discouraged, why do they have co-ed schools? The kids are encouraged to use homosexual sex as a pressure-release valve, of sorts, without being completely conditioned against heterosexuality (since otherwise they wouldn't procreate once they came of age). If they want to prevent the kids from experimenting with heterosexual sex as well, it would make more sense for the leaders of this society to simply limit interactions between boys and girls, and keep them in separate schools (like stricter societies have done for centuries). It almost seems like they want to work in lots of yuri fanservice, while keeping things status-quo in the end.

** Forget bonobos, what makes writers believe wolves have a way to avoid killing their own kind?! Wolves are opportunistic eaters, that don't shy away from cannibalism. Sure they are nice to their pack, but their pack is essentially family. It feels like writers didn't do their research, and used whatever justification. They could at least say that they engineered some kind of super-mirror neuron that connect to their parallel nervous system, causing organ failure and not base this on animals at all.

* The idea of using bonobos as a way of making the people inherently calmer and less aggressive is flawed. Yes bonobos resolve disputes through sex and are generally calm among each other, this is true. But we've seen through study that they are extremely aggressive and warlike to groups not seen as part of their own. Bonobos hunt in war parties, both male and female, and make intelligent surgical strikes against neighboring colonies of monkey and chimpanzees (and chimps are generally known as one of the most aggressive apes). They kill mercilessly and even take prisoners of war. So it doesn't seem right that putting bonobo mental conditioning in us would fix our aggressive tendencies, and you can't blame it on the time the novel was published, because we already knew this about bonobos at that point.