I’m a white american, so I’m lacking cultural context

Isn’t it absurd how European culture (can’t speak about other cultures, I don’t know) is so dependent on documentation to create reality? Someone like Twilight who serves the state is so powerful not only because of his specialized knowledge and skills but because he gets to move outside of the documentation that the rest of us have to operate within. Whenever spies go rogue or whatever a great deal of their power comes from their ability to fake documentation and navigate the world without an identity affixed and reified by the state. Do we know ourselves in the absence of documentation? How much harm is it doing to our psyche to have papers and plastic cards that we depend on for our social existence? How much of the fear that sheltered city folk have of people who are experiencing homelessness has to do with their perceived anonymity and lack of documentation? Same with immigrants, regardless of “legality.” A subtle but consistent message in spy media is that when you throw away documentation you gain power over society. I’ve read about how documentation targets certain groups of people but not about what it does at a superstructural level to all of us. I’m so curious, it’s such a bummer.

Anyway there wasn’t much going on in this volume. I want to know about Yor rather desperately at this point. Hot ditzy expert assassin with a strong family orientation yay! No character arc other than learning how to cook boo! I’m already filling in her character in my head because I love the idea of her but Endo whiffed it so hard. There are hints that she is as vulnerable as Anya and Loid are to the precarity of their family situation, but without knowing about her job, why she does it, her experience of the world and the cold war, she is just a typical orphan-who-raised-her-brother super-mommy blase parent figure with no depth. Very hot, but no character growth. Fiona Frost is introduced here (more about her in my review of volume 6, forthcoming) and even she already feels more real than Yor. Ughhhhhhhhhhh