This section requires expansion Cultural References, Differences in Adaptation, Soundtrack
Referbacks
After Esther strips her clothes in public, Hirumi accuses Esther of being the Stripping Lady in the city's urban legends.
Cultural References
Carved stone lid of the Palenque
Baghdad Battery
Jade Mosaic Mask
Stone spheres of Costa Rica
Sakafune Ishi
Orichalcum
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Prior to inviting Esther Rosenthal as supervisor of Hishigata Mikihiko's research team, several mysterious objects were taken from outside of the Academy City.
Differences in Adaptation
Esther's past with the Hishigata siblings is considerably expanded upon, but also differs considerably from the circumstances depicted in the manga.[1]
In the original manga, Esther is implied to have allowed people to die during the experiments or at the very least allowed corpses to be desecrated, their brains removed from their body. In this episode, Esther is complicit with the use of live humans, specifically, women who are so in debt they'll volunteer for it, to be used for the experiment to the point that they lose their sense of self, essentially mind broke. Esther says that she is used to tragedy as she is a necromancer, and only concerned that Hirumi might be participating in the experiment.
The circumstances of how exactly Hirumi died in the original manga was never explored. Here in this episode it is revealed that she committed suicide.
The episode takes away Esther's agency, having Taowu possess Hirumi's body on it's own without Esther performing a ritual to insert the spirit into her body, as with the case in the original manga.