Title: Queen’s Quality Vol. 20
Author: Kyousuke Motomi
Publisher: Viz Media
Language: English
Format: Paperback
Pages: 168
Genre: Sci-Fi, Romance
Publication Date: November 5, 2024
The Story
This was a major lore-building volume of Queen’s Quality! We start off with Fumi feeling a bit apprehensive around Tsubasa; however, it is determined that due to the possibility of Fumi having to fight K in the future, she needs to learn as much about her as possible. They feel that even if she says that she’s determined, she may not have the ability to go through with it due to basic human nature.
Fumi spends time trying to talk to Tsubasa; however, despite trying to be gentle, he cannot find the words to tell her everything in the way that he wants to. Kyutarou decides to talk to the Silver Snake with Tsubasa. Kyoutarou feigns that he’s going to eat the Silver Snake so that Tsubasa takes him and flees. Letting him escape was part of the plan. Tsubasa talks to the Silver Snake and says that he finally has a wish.
Meanwhile, Kyutarou tells Fumi he’s going back into his mind vault as he has a very important meeting. There, he meets up with the White Cat who decides to give Kyutarou the entire backstory on K/Kaede. Little does Kyutarou know (or maybe he planned on it), Tsubasa returned to the Genbu house and invited Fumi to his place to tell her everything about K/Kaede as well. The remainder of the manga is a major portion of the full backstory on K/Kaede, Tsubasa, and Yanagi!
Characters
Given that last paragraph in the story section, it’s quite clear who got the development in this volume. While I won’t go into deep detail, I will say that we learned the majority of Tsubasa’s backstory, the true nature of who K/Kaede was/is, as well as Yanagi’s origins as well. It was pretty deep and was well-told and even though we’re not done with things just yet, we have enough to see exactly where this is all going.
As for Tsubasa, outside of his backstory, we saw him open up to Fumi and how gentle he truly is. The fact that he talked with the Silver Snake and expressed what his wish was validates that even further. On top of that, we learned a lot about the Silver Snake, what he wanted out of the world, and how he was trying to do his part to see it all happen. He even talked about when he split his body into 100 different snakes all for the sake of seeing his version of the world come to pass. Both Silver and Tsubasa truly transformed into great characters in this volume!
Overall Thoughts
I felt as if the story pumped the brakes a bit here as far as advancement goes but it did so in favor of a HUGE lore drop. Character development at this point in the series should be huge with big moments being made to feel important and that is exactly what we received here. Queen’s Quality wrapped up in Japan with a total of 108 chapters and, I believe, 24 volumes so we are four volumes (19 chapters) away from the end of this series if there was ever a time to unveil a massive plot point like this, that time is now and it didn’t disappoint.
I would assume in Volume 21 we will wrap up the backstory and determine a way to move forward. Whether or not the final battle will begin in the next volume remains to be seen but I have a sneaky suspicion that volumes 22-24 will take care of that and give us a nice epilogue to wrap things up. Needless to say, I fully expect Fumi to take the news about K/Kaede and steel herself in preparation for that battle but I can also see her faltering as well. That’s why we have Kyutarou, after all.
No matter what is to come, you get that big fight feeling looming on the horizon so all we can do is enjoy the ride and await what comes… and I have to say after this volume, the ride has already been great!
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This item was provided for review by VIZ Media