Thread:Shanethefilmmaker/@comment-397235-20140929045127/@comment-397235-20140930234956

Yeah, she's kind of a demented little locomotive. Of course, I've always assumed the reason her hand is all bandaged is when Keiko tried to stab her she grabbed the knife by the blade (something most defense instructors will tell you to do if you're cornered by someone with a knife).

Of course, my head canon for Takako has always been her dad's an officer in the JGSDF who doesn't quite know how to handle having a girl, which is why she tends to be so butch. It also works with my rationale for her turning everyone on Mei.

In a military situation, there's a magical thing known as the "initiative" which is basically the wherewithal to attack the enemy. The short version is you want to be proactive, not reactive.

All year Countermeasures has, by their very nature, been forced to react to the Curse. After all, there's no external enemy for them to actually be fighting: Death just...is. So when Yuuya tells them how to end the Curse, Takako starts trying to work out who the Extra one could be, and eventually lands on Mei. Now she has an Objective.

I imagine, at some point as she's in the process of working this all out, Keiko Numata shows up and tries to kill her. To Takako, this probably feels like the Calamity knows she's onto it and is trying to take her out of play (personally, I see the Calamity as an actual malicious entity and I do think it came after her on purpose, not because she knew too much but because it knew it could push her over the edge and take most of the class with her, in so doing gaining even more playthings).

Obviously Takako survived Keiko, and now she has a weapon. For all intents and purposes she has the Initiative. Even though the inn keeper is going on a homicidal rampage throughout the Inn, she doesn't try to warn her classmates; she ran into Izumi only by accident. She goes looking for Mei, because she believes killing Mei will accomplish her objective and end the Curse, meaning nobody else will be in danger. She never warns anyone about Keiko; she just tells them all to kill Mei. She's making sure the class maintains that initiative.

If you look at how she acts, she's not especially malicious toward Mei. It's more a matter of "Well, now I have to kill you" as opposed to "I really want you to die and I hope it hurts a lot." If you compare that to Tomohiko, Yumi, Izumi, or Takeru, they're all a lot angrier than she was (mostly I think she's just frustrated Kouichi and Izumi aren't helping her or staying out of the way). I don't think she sees herself as a murderer; this is the job she signed up to do, and By God, she's gonna make sure it gets done.

That works for the knife too. In the military, there's a tactic called asset denial: you take away from the enemy something which is beneficial to them, be it a hydroelectric dam, a scientist, or in this case, a knife. It's two fold: for one thing, Keiko is an immediate enemy whose weapon Takako has just appropriated; in a broader sense she is a direct manifestation of the Calamity, so disarming her is the same as "denying" the Curse that asset. And on a practical level, Takako is taking the weapon of the enemy to defeat that enemy, which is what asymmetric warfare is all about.

And then I realized I just made a psychotic fifteen year old girl sound like Tadimichi Kuribayashi...and on some level it works. -_- I may be overthinking this.