I seriously cannot get enough of this series. What I love about 86 is that is always has something to say, and just when I think there nothing more to expand on Asato comes back to prove me wrong. And man, I could not be more grateful for it. More of my thoughts below, but please be sure to buckle up because this is going to be a long ride.

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Overview of Themes

I feel like I say this with almost every volume, but this one really does stand above the rest. It examines how people act in the face of their own powerlessness. It warns against ignorance in leadership, explores moral disengagement, and dissects the ethics of responsibility. We see soldiers blame their superiors, citizens blame their government, leaders blame their followers, but who is truly to blame for all of this?

And can this responsibility ever be escaped?

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Powerlessness itself is not dangerous. Refusing to accept powerlessness is.

At the beginning of the novel, Frederica is asked by Vika why she has such a stake in the Eighty-Six since they are "mere soldiers". In classic Frederika fashion, she provides an inflated explanation, stating that it her sovereign duty to maintain morale and it is her pride to "lead soldiers into battle". Vika probes further, asking:

"...what are you trying to protect? The soldiers, or your own conscience, which dreads abandoning them and hurting them? ... You must know that distinction. If fear of betraying your conscience leads you to insist on becoming involved when you lack the power to protect them, and your attempts to help fail and only result in you running away, then you'd have been better off abandoning them in the first place" (page 13).

This warning from Vika truly sets the stage for this entire volume, because it asks, are you helping people for your sake or for their own?

As a child, she has no combat training and experiences most of the war on the backlines, providing support with her Esper abilities. But her ability in and of itself is not enough to protect those she cares about. We see Frederica regret her own helplessness as an Empress to the citizens of her fallen nation, but also as the mascot and beloved little sister of the Spearhead Squadron. This comes to a head for later on in the novel:

• "They could tell she was hurting, because being powerless hurt" (page 125).
• "Am I not allowed to wish to help you even if I am powerless to do so?" (page 126).
• "If she was pretending to be a saint and reaching out to save people even though she lacked the power and resolve to help them, and if she was going to play the victim after failing to become a savior and abandoning the ones she wished to help, she would indeed have better of not trying at all" (page 126).
• "Her attempts to escape her own powerlessness would just lead her to take up responsibilities too heavy for her to bear" (page 126).

Frederica ultimately heeds the words of her dear friends. She chooses to move forward, focusing on what she can do to help rather than what she cannot: She understands her own limitations and it becomes clear that she accepts a painful truth: feeling responsible does not mean you are capable of solving the problem.

On the other side of this, we have 'Princess' Noele Rohi and the Hail Mary Regiment who functions as the perfect foil to Frederica.

Noele is a Federacy soldier whose primary motivation, like that of Frederica, is to help protect and save 'her' people. Her sense of duty to those under her command stems for her family's traditional duty as minor nobles to lead the 'serfs' of her home. She feels an immense guilt and a deep desire to do something about the death and suffering of those in her charge.

But unlike Frederica, Noele cannot accept her own powerlessness in the face of the horrors of the battlefield. She cannot bear the idea that people are dying despite her best efforts, so she begins inflating her own importance until she convinces herself she must be the one to save everyone. She convinces herself that it is her sole responsibility as their 'Princess' to take action, and naively rejects that death and suffering are a fact of war.

• "I won't let anyone else die. I cannot let my precious subjects shoulder this pain" (page 48).
• "Yes. This was wrong. It made no sense for people to die like this... But it wasn't too late to set things straight... Yes, it wasn't too late even now-even if she had to do it herself" (page 48).

She engages in her nuclear fuel bomb plot. Her ignorance to the consequences of nuclear power causes her own people to die and suffer, yet she still cannot accept her own powerlessness:

• "I've done nothing wrong. I'm right, so everything was supposed to go well!" (page 110).
• "It all should have worked out. It should have but it didn't. She failed... No, she wouldn't admit she failed. A proud noble of the Empire would not admit defeat this easily" (page 110).
• "We had to correct the mistake. I only acted to protect and save the others. So it can't be my fault. It isn't my fault! ... The fact that we couldn't make the nuclear weapon, that everyone ended up dying... I wasn't wrong. I was right! There had to be a perfect solution prepared for me! The world can't be that cruel... So it's not my fault I didn't find that solution. It's not my fault we couldn't do it!" (page 216).

In the end, she is gunned down right alongside the people she sought to protect. Perhaps if she hadn't done anything at all, more would have lived. But because she could not accept her own powerlessness and believed herself a savior, everything she sought to prevent from happening became inevitable.

In the end, Frederica and Noele respond to the same pain in radically different ways. Both desperately want to save others. Both feel responsible for suffering they cannot stop. But while Frederica learns to accept her limitations and focus on the help she can provide, Noele refuses to acknowledge hers at all. Convinced that she must become her people's savior, she pursues a miracle that ultimately destroys the very lives she wished to protect. She believes that because she cares, she must therefore be capable of fixing the problem. When reality proves otherwise, she cannot tolerate the contradiction and begins searching for someone or something else to blame.

Through their parallel journeys, the novel argues that powerlessness itself is not dangerous. Refusing to accept powerlessness is. Good intentions, however noble, cannot replace wisdom, competence, or reality. Sometimes courage is not found in trying to save everyone. Sometimes it lies in accepting what you cannot change and choosing to do what good you can regardless.

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The blame of war is a burden no single person carries.

Who is responsible for the sins of war? There are many characters who blame themselves. There are many who blame others. This volume constantly rejects both extremes. On one side, there are people like Shin, Frederica, and Ishmael who are tempted to blame themselves for everything. On the other side, there are the members of the Hail Mary Regiment who blame everyone else for everything. Neither response is healthy and neither response is totally true.

What the novel seems to advocate instead is accepting responsibility for what is within your control while accepting that some outcomes are beyond anyone's control.

A thread running throughout the novel is the tendency of good people to shoulder responsibility for events they could never have prevented. The clearest example is Ishmael's advice to Shin:

"You can't assume the things you failed to protect are your fault. That includes Esther, the operation you just finished, and all the operations ahead of you" (page 78).

This directly challenges one of Shin's defining character flaws. Throughout the series, Shin routinely treats survival itself as a debt. Every death becomes another burden to carry. Ishmael's point is that failing to save someone does not automatically make you responsible for their death. Shiden reinforces this later:

"The people you can't reach, well, that's out of your control, so you shouldn't blame yourself... Some things didn't work out even when everyone tried their hardest. And that was no one's fault. So the only thing one could do was admit it - admit that it was no one's fault, and that it couldn't be helped" (page 95).

When asked if he was bothered being called the 'ace' of the Strike Package or if what was said during the Republic evacuation bothered him, Shin shook his head and said, "No, not really... I am not obligated to and I won't answer to other units' expectation, to say nothing of those of the Republic's people. I'm not arrogant enough to think I'm that important..." (page 101).

Internally, readers can see him recall what others had blamed him for during the evacuation: They died because of you. Why didn't you protect them? But, as a testament to his character growth, it is clear he understands that he himself is not to blame for what happened in the Republic.

But unlike Shin, the Hail Mary Regiment never reaches a point where they can understand how many forces contributed to their suffering. Their response to suffering is blame displacement. Every setback becomes someone else's fault. Every death becomes proof that the government failed them. Every hardship becomes confirmation that the world owes them something.

• "The freedom and equality he was promised turned out to be a far cry from wonderful. They were nothing but trouble and misery" (page 83).
• "That's right. It's all their fault. We have to take revenge for our friends. This is all their fault... if we can just kill it, the other leviathan will kill everyone else. The terrible legion, the Federacy, the officers, the nobles, and these guys who abandoned our friends. It will destroy everyone we hate and everyone that wronged us" (page 225).

And what is so tragic about the Hail Mary Regiment is that it is so deeply human. Their pain dictates their blame.

At the end of the novel, survivors of the Hail Mary Regiment begin to rush Shin, screaming with anger and hatred that everything his fault. It's his fault the princess died. It's his fault their comrades died. Understandably, Shin does not want to kill them. He hesitates to pull the trigger.

But let's pull back a moment. Something that really stood out me earlier on, was when one of the members of the Hail Mary Regiment witnesses Shin and the Strike Package in battle, and thinks:

"They were just like the self-important nobles and the superior officers. They were the kind that made fun of him. The kind that could do anything but would do nothing for people like him" (page 205).

The irony is palpable. The very people accusing Shin of abandoning them are demanding salvation from one of the soldiers working to save them. And bringing it back to the end, when the Hail Mary Regiment survivors are rushing Shin, they are screaming:

"You're strong, unlike us. You can do everything, choose anything, and act on your own choices. So why didn't you protect us, help us, guide us? Why didn't you save the princess?" (page 224).

They are effectively demanding that Shin, one of the people who has worked the hardest to preserve lives, to be omnipotent. They are asking him to bear responsibility for people he only just met. For choices he did not make. For circumstances he did not create. For mistakes he could not have predicted. Just like the Republic did.

The demand itself is unjust. Yet it is also profoundly human. When tragedy strikes, people desperately want someone to blame. If they cannot blame themselves, they look for another target. Shin simply happens to be standing in front of them.

At this moment, Ishmael is the one to pull the trigger and kill the Hail Mary Regiment survivors. Shin is left wide-eyed and speechless. Ishmael states:

"I told you, Captain. The people you cannot save aren't your responsibility... And that's especially true of idiots who had nothing to do with you until today, cause everyone trouble because of their ignorant stupidity, and then had the gall to ask why you didn't save them. Just because they demand that you help them doesn't mean you have to do it. You're not some kind of saint, you know" (page 228).

Ishamel isn't just talking about the survivors. He's protecting Shin from accepting another burden that doesn't belong to him as the 'ace' of the Eighty-Sixth Strike Package. Because Ishmael understands something the volume repeatedly demonstrates:

If a person accepts responsibility for everything, they will eventually collapse beneath the weight of it.

Which is exactly what happened to Noele.

But at the same time, Shin is not exactly chomping at the bit to accept this burden. In fact, he almost seems so far removed from the plight of the Haily Mary Regiment that he simply cannot understand their perspective.

At one point in the novel, he is described as someone who "never needed sheep to obey him, and for that reason, he never needed to understand how they thought, or realize the cruelty of that lack of understanding" (page 135). This is further reinforced at the end, as Shin is processing the brutal killing of the Hail Mary survivors:

"It made Shin's breath catch in his throat... Even though they all should have looked different from one another, when they completely discarded their individuality and moved in perfect tandem, when they spoke the same words, and were dyed in the same emotions- their faces all became the same to him. It was a terrifying moment. People who couldn't become masters of their own fate, people who harbored no fear whatsoever. Even people as powerless as that could still blame others. They were different from the Eighty-Six who'd been made into Shepards. People who, even through hatred, could not achieve anything. And for some reason that terrified Shin" (page 254).

This furthers the notion that powerlessness does not automatically make someone virtuous. People who possess no power whatsoever can still become cruel. They can still blame others for their circumstances. They can still surrender their agency. They can still hurt those around them.

Throughout the series, the powerless have often been framed as victims. The Eighty-Six were powerless. The oppressed citizens of conquered nations were powerless. The civilians caught between warring armies were powerless.

But Volume 12 complicates that idea.

The Hail Mary Regiment demonstrates that suffering does not necessarily produce wisdom, empathy, or resilience. Sometimes it produces resentment. Sometimes it produces fanaticism. Sometimes it produces people so desperate to escape responsibility that they willingly surrender their own individuality to a collective identity, allowing the group to think for them.

That is what Shin finds so frightening.

The Eighty-Six had been stripped of their rights, their names, and their futures, yet they continued fighting. They made choices. They accepted responsibility for those choices. They remained individuals. The Hail Mary Regiment does the opposite. Faced with hardship, they abandon their individuality altogether, trading agency for easy answers, collective validation, and someone else to blame.

For perhaps the first time, Shin is confronted with a kind of weakness he cannot understand: the weakness of people who refuse to become masters of their own fate.

Faced with people who surrender their individuality so completely, Shin realizes that powerlessness alone was never what frightened him. What frightens him is the choice to stop choosing.

Yet the irony of Volume 12 is that while Shin is horrified by people who refuse responsibility, the novel spends just as much time examining people who accept too much of it. Both are destructive. The Hail Mary Regiment searches desperately for someone else to blame. And even characters like Ishmael, whose wisdom and experience make him one of the novel's clearest voices on the subject, can crack beneath the guilt of survival and blame themselves.

Fresh off the second large scale offensive, Ishamel - as mentioned earlier - lost his second-in-command, Esther, and so many more of his people. In what he would describe as a moment of weakness, Ishmael expresses to Frederica quietly:

"'It's tough living with the shame. I wanted to save them if I could... But I couldn't, and I wished someone would punish me for it.'... No matter who in the clans died, which of his subordinates perished, how many of his comrades might fall, he alone had to go on, carrying the shame of survival - to keep living, bearing that sin" (page 154).

He, the strong commander who wanted Shin to know not everything was his fault, struggles with the shame of survivor's guilt and the emotions that come being unable to save his people. In response to this, Frederica shakes her head in denial and says "You are not pathetic. That is a legitimate way to fight'" (page 154).

Frederica, taking Ishmael's lesson to heart, had learned that being powerless does not mean you are responsible for what is at hand. She shows that sometimes the best way to fight is to bear witness and survive - that sometimes that is all we can do in instances of powerlessness. She says so to Vika at the end of the novel:

"Indeed, the only thing I would not betray is my own conscience. And my own consciences is also the only thing I can truly protect right now. True, as I am, I cannot protect or save anyone. But if I choose to abandon people, at that point, I would fail to protect even my own conscience. And in that case, right now not looking away is what I must do. I shall fight this war by watching how people fall and how destruction comes, never looking away. So that one day, when I am strong enough to protect others like you and Shinei, I will not let lives slip through my fingers" (page 229).

By the end of the novel, Frederica is no longer concerned about her powerlessness or preoccupied by blame. Earlier in the volume she is wrestling with responsibility. By the end she is wrestling with integrity. Instead of accepting that no one is responsible, Frederica arrives at something closer to: "Whether or not I am responsible, I still have a duty not to look away."

Volume 12 rejects both the impulse to blame ourselves for every tragedy and the impulse to blame others for all our suffering. The burden of war is simply too vast for any one person to bear alone. Yet responsibility cannot be abandoned either. Frederica, Shin, Ishmael, and so many others ultimately learn that the answer lies somewhere between these extremes: accepting responsibility for the choices within your control while acknowledging that some losses belong to no one. War creates victims, survivors, heroes, fools, and scapegoats alike. But, sometimes the hardest truth to accept is that tragedy cannot always be reduced to a villain, and that there is not always someone to blame.