Franken Fran/Headscratchers

• Why do I get the feeling this story is several times more screwed up than Herbert West - Reanimator from H.P. Lovecraft, much less have the story taken and have the Nightmare level cranked far up?
  • Because it is?
• There are several instances where Fran goes Shiva for an operation. Where does she keep them?
  • In the freezer. Seeing as how she's brought people back to life and turned them into cancerous blobs, sewing on a few extra arms before an operation would be an easy task.
  • She also usually wears a long robe that conceals them. But yes, at one point she does imply that she removes and reattaches her extra arms as necessary.
• Why on earth do people keep coming to Fran for help? Where is the publicity coming from? Surely not from her previous patients.
  • Many of those patients are in... well... no condition to say anything. She does have several good testimonials on her side ("Snow Light" comes to mind). She's partially Shrouded in Myth, as well. And finally, it's amazing what you're willing to try when you have no other options. Additionally, it seems that the movies based on her exploits are... inaccurate. On the other hand, when she walks into a hospital at one point, they do recognize her instantly and react with horror.
  • Perhaps there is time between the volumes where she actually does normal, life-saving surgery with no real drawbacks.
  • Chapter 30 pretty much confirms this. Also, Fran is able and willing to do things like making her clients superhumanly strong, no questions asked, as long as they pay.
  • Offscreen Hero Dark Matter?
  • The people of this setting don't seem to believe that a Fate Worse Than Death is possible, so they figure that anything Fran does can't be as bad as their inevitable death. More often than not they get proven wrong.
    • Some of Fran's intentional patients are actually looking for her father. In his absence, she tries her best, that's how i always saw it.
• While we're on the subject, why are so many people supposedly trying to kill her? It can't be "Because of what she does", because her level of notoriety is inconsistent.
  • Word of God is that despite some continuity, the chapters aren't arranged in a strict chronological order, and some are happening semi-simultaneously, like chapter 29, wich starts before Veronica first appeared in the house and ended far after it.
  • Also, maybe those people are enemies of her father/creator (and, as show in Veronica's introduction, he has lots of enemies). Since they can't kill him (most likely because, considering Veronica's abilities, he can make insanely powerful bodyguards for himself), they go after Fran and the reasearch lab, probably in an attempt to hurt him indirectly. Fran herself seems to think so.
• In the Tamako chapter (29), what was with the Scientist's baby? Was it supposed to have been some sort of stillborn? If so, it should never have made it to the chrysalis stage. Miscarriage? Why was it still a larva? Was it just some sort of non-Hoist by His Own Petard Karmic Punishment in some weird way?
  • I'm not sure, but it looks like the baby turned into a insect hybrid or something... the thing that comes out of the chrysalis looked like it had mandibules.
• In the same chapter (29), they could have solved the Obvious Beta by giving prospective parents a freaking fish tank.
  • No, the reason keeping it in an airtight container, as Fran said, would difficult is be because it would have to be airtight but also give a steady supply of oxygen.
  • This really bothered me, since such a product already exists - Neonatal intensive-care units. Why would you let your tamako/baby/maggot/thing loose so you that you could drop something on it? Couldn't NICU's be offered as a rental unit while the thing grows?
    • Cause part of the reason the scientist promoted it was so that responsibility for a healthy baby being born would fall solely on the parents, and not on the doctors any longer. Granted, she wouldn't promote it like that (probably more appealing to the parents' maternal/paternal instincts to see their baby grow). Either way, it would defeat one of the purposes of promoting this method if a NICU was rented out just for tamakos.
• Why does Fran seem to jump back and forth between "How Unscientific", "Techno Babble" and "Not something Science has figured out yet", and "A Wizard Did It"? I know the series is in anachronic order, so does it seem likely (based on author comments and interviews) that she will eventually have some sort of revelation, or has already had one in the series? If she already had one, I missed it.
  • Well, I guess chapter 41 can be considered the one where she had her revelation.
• Of course, raising people from the dead and recombining their organs is already a major feat, but Fran presents something really incredible in chapter 29: having an embryo grow to a baby outside of a person. This means that, among other things, that people who ordinarily couldn't have babies now could, such as women with frail physical condition or homosexual couples. The response of other scientists is not only disbelief, but repulsion. Yeah right, as if the picture of a baby born from a cocoon would send biologists and medical scientists to the toilets. It's especially weird since the parents shown later in the chapter don't seem to have any problem with it whatsoever.
  • It might have been the intermediate "maggot" stage that triggered their gag reflex. Or maybe it was Fran mentioning that the test subject mother was a human-insect hybrid.
  • It also doesn't make any sense that this procedure would be applied widely without tests or further research. For one, it turns out that the cocoons need to be kept in a sterile environment. That wouldn't have been too hard to find out, now would it?
    • Fran does state in her lecture that a sterile environment is crucial. The person who stole her ideas was just too short-sighted and greedy to bother with such details.
  • Put yourself in their place. You've just been presented with something that, even though it may be a medical breakthrough... just shouldn't be. Their reaction may have been as much out of fear as disgust.
• Chapter 2. How does the girl go from a cocoon to a praying mantis when she originally started as a caterpillar?! It doesn't make any sense! And why did she go through a human stage at all and not just from cocoon to insect?
  • Since we are in Chapter 2, a vital question: WHY THE HELL DID SHE TRANSFORM THE GIRL INTO A FREAKING CARTERPILLAR?! Surely she could have healed the girl, since she had only lost her legs and got hit by a bus!
  • Yeah, that bugged me a lot too. It was a forced twist ending even by Franken Fran standards. As to why she transformed the girl into a catepillar, I'd just guess that it's because Fran was out of body parts... or because she wanted to do an experiment.
    • "Did you think I remodeled you for my own entertainment? Well, maybe a little..."
    • I always just chalked that up to Early Installment Weirdness, since Fran doesn't really engineer such hopelessly dickish situations on purpose in the rest of the manga, generally preferring to mete out unintentional Karmic retribution.
• In Chapter 20, how does the whole cast and crew end up infected with the parasite? Fran says it's spread through direct contact with mucus membranes, and since Fran doesn't get sick when Nastasia's blood spatters all over her (but won't wear the skin directly for fear of exposing herself to the parasite, so it's not like she's immune) and Nastasia presumably wasn't spreading it around the set before she died, it's implied that it's not that contagious otherwise. Are we meant to infer that the director was having sex with everyone on the set?
  • I thought it was more like everyone on the set had sex with her after she died.
    • Not necessarily, if the director had sex with her corpse, then slept with Person A, then A slept with B&C, etc... It's not even sex, it could just be kissing or certain touching (The Other Wiki lists nostrils, lips, mouth, eyelids, and ears as well as genitals and anus having mucus membranes).

• So after reading all three Sentinel stories, it got me to thinking. Won't someone eventually trace the creation of all these guys back to Fran and want to have some words with her. To say nothing of the fact that she is technically responsible for all the deaths. While I'm at it, The third story seems to indicate that Sentinel's 1 and 2 not only met each other, but were working together at some point before 1 became a monster himself, and 2 started blowing up Orphanages. How did that happen exactly?!!
  • Ugh, the Sentinel stories are a nightmare to figure out. The first time I spotted that same confusion, I just Assumed this was a different "Sentinel 1", maybe one of those imposters that are mentioned. Then, figuring that Anachronic Order is in play, I thought this whole thing happened before he died. Also, the fourth Sentinel story shows that Sentinel 1 and 2 are working together...by burning orphanages. Well not literally, but they are shown committing acts of terrorism in order to "thwart" Black Lotus, exactly how Sentinel 2's story ends.
• Ch. 28, "A Very Lucky Man". STATISTICS DOESN'T WORK LIKE THAT!
• Anybody else detect a vague undercurrent of anti-foreigner sentiment? It could be just that a lot of the characters are jerkasses and/or have horrible things happen to them, but it seems that foreigners all tend to be particularly terrible people and/or have disproportionately horrible things happen to them. Off the top of my head, "God & Dog", "Cockroaches", the poor American doctor in Snow Light, "Steabie Jocks", and most glaringly, the anti-Japanese-whaling eco-terrorist group in "Sea Monster" whose members are inexplicably killed by the whale-girl for no particular reason.
  • not really, its just that a large number of people in Franken Fran are huge dicks, regardless of nationality.
• This more along the lines of a WMG, but, do any of you Tropers think, that somehow, someway, all of what Fran has done to these people, will haunt her in the future? Will the Karma Houdini be put aside, and all of her abominations will come back for vengeance? Just throwing it out there.
  • Since the series is very reminiscient of "Herbert West - Reanimator" that would be fitting.
  • Jossed. Fran's patients do come back, but only in a dream, and they party with her rather than hurt her.
• The whole Rolling World saga bugs me, as it doesn't seem internally consistent between appearances. In the first appearance, the then-unidentified theme park didn't even want living mascots, and rejected Nezura. The next we see, the park, now identified as Rolling World but only ambiguously the same as before is absolutely thrilled with living mascots... but they turn out to be infected with brain parasites that drive them insane if music isn't constantly played, and to have been since their introduction. In the second/third appearance, Rolling World is finally explicitly identified as the same theme park due to the reappearance of Nezura-san... but now the mascots are just fine and dandy with no parasites in sight. I can't think of a way to arrange these events together in any order that remotely makes sense.
  • Plus, the "Rolling World" chapter seems to have completely different mascots from the other two chapters. In "Attempted Suicide" and "Rolling World 2", they're human brains inside living mascot bodies, while "Rolling World" implies they're made from scratch with no human components at all.
• How do all these people manage to afford their operations?
  • One could assume that Fran skims the prices down a little, especially those who convinced her to perform the operations out of love or that she was partially responsible for (Chapter 2 comes to mind as an example of both cases and there is absolutely no mentioning of her charging them a single yen). Since she's constantly doing work for Yakuza and political figures, it wouldn't matter to her if she charged some people a little bit less. So long as the patient lives and there is a contribution to medical science to be gained, she'll perform surgery.
• There are times where Fran finds it perfectly ok to kill (such as when she has Adorea "collect" one mans payment, when she has Veronica pick off people to act as fodder during Gavrill's first appearance, and when she has a robot attack a civilization of intelligent cockroaches that she signed a treaty with simply because expanding in the natural instinct of all organisms). I was under the impression that her philosophy was "keep living things alive no matter what".
  • I'm sure that in the story with Adorea, their kidneys would go on to live long and productive lives. She wants to preserve as much life as possible. In that situation, the best they could do was save their organs. The brains were simply not included in that.
• Why hasn't Officer Kuho attempted to kill Fran by now? After all she's been put through every time she comes into contact with her...