Title: Queen’s Quality Vol. 23
Author: Kyousuke Motomi
Publisher: Viz Media
Language: English
Format: Paperback
Pages: 168
Genre: Sci-Fi, Romance
Publication Date: August 5, 2025
The Story
We open up with The Silver Snake having a heartfelt discussion with Takuya, who thought that he had been devoured. When Silver reveals that it wasn’t the case, he wants Takuya to hear his true wish. He refuses at first, but listens intently. When Silver finishes explaining everything, Takuya accepts his wish. Meanwhile, we are in the casket with The White Snake as she continues her explanation. She speaks of how she is no longer The White Snake of Despair. She fills in the missing pieces of the puzzle, and now we have the full picture of the three snakes and how the fourth Crimson Snake, aka Yanagi, came to be.
The White Snake then empowers Fumi with her powers, transforming her into The White Snake of the Middle Path. Her sole mission is to kill Yanagi and end the Crimson Snake once and for all. As they are talking, they have no time to formulate a plan because Yanagi is coming… and he’s coming alone?
We meet up with Kaede in Cat Form as their trap successfully lures Yanagi there. Kyutaro and Fumi show up, and it looks as if the final battle is about to begin; however, Yanagi pulls out a trump card to distract Fumi, which leads to Takuya showing up to intervene! How will this decisive battle play out?
Characters
We tied up the loose ends regarding Yanagi and the Crimson Snake. It seems as if he was the first snake, and to stop him, the White Snake was created using magic; however, it was Crimson all along, through possession. His goal was to acquire the White Snake, but things didn’t go his way. Now that he’s been restored, he looks to carry out and finish the war he started over 1,000 years ago. This leads us to all of the backstory we were told about Yanagi being Fumi’s father, why he’s interested in Kaede, as well as The White Snake and the Casket.
Outside of this, we learned a little bit more about how The White Snake no longer wanted to bring about despair and what she truly wished for. Because of that, part of her wish was to see Crimson destroyed once and for all, which is why she entrusted Fumi with her powers.
There might be a little more development in our final two volumes, but with the way things were wrapped up here, I’m not expecting much, if any. I expect this final battle to rage on until its conclusion, which would bring us to our epilogue.
Overall Thoughts
This was quite the powerful volume! Now that everything has been revealed, we can truly appreciate how this story has unfolded over the past 26 volumes (if you count the 3-volume prologue QQ Sweeper). Both dialogues between Silver/Yanagi and White/Fumi were very touching. Given the fact that the Black Snake also changed its views and helped Kyutaro, it makes you wonder if the snakes were truly evil after all. With the way Crimson was portrayed, perhaps their wishes were born out of a “must stop him no matter what the cost” moment, or if they were somehow manipulated by Crimson along the way. That’s just mere speculation and not an actual question raised by the series. I’m not sure if we would get an answer to that, but it is fun to think about. All I know is that snakes can change their ways, as we’ve seen it three times with the major snakes.
All that is left is to stop Crimson/Yanagi. This isn’t going to be an easy battle, but from what we’ve seen so far, he has a lot of aces up his sleeve, but somehow, Kyutaro knew about them ahead of time and had countermeasures in place. We’ll see how effective they are in the next battle, as we’ve only seen phase 1 of a multi-phase end boss-style fight.
I’m looking forward to seeing how this battle ends up!
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This item was provided for review by VIZ Media
