Question about Altena's 'scheme'

[deleted]

It was Altena's intention for the final Noir to kill her.

Altena didn't want the "true" Grand Retour as in the Soldat legend. She wanted something different. The Noir in the traditional order are "the two hands of the Soldats", i.e. controlled by the Soldats in order to bring justice and protect the innocent. Altena didn't want that because she knew the current Soldats have been corrupted by economic and political power. So, she wanted a Noir that is "free from the bindings" of control so that they would kill whoever they deem guilty, INCLUDING those in the Soldat leaders.

So how to do that? By concocting hate against the Soldats. Mireille and Kirika's entire lives have been orchestrated by Altena to conjure up as much hate as possible towards those who have wronged them, and that includes the Soldats as a whole, as well as Altena's faction. Only when they absolutely hate the Soldats or anybody else they feel are guilty can Altena's true vision of the new Noir be realized.

The final test to see if they would fit the bill? To force them to kill Altena herself. That is why she was cajoling them to kill her by almost mocking those who were killed in the process. If they kill her, she believed it was the final step for them to take their thirst for vengeance towards the next level, i.e. the rest of the Soldat organization.

This is why Chloe was never a candidate to be the True Noir, despite what Altena has told her. Chloe was fully loyal to Altena, and would never kill her, simply because she doesn't have a reason to hate her, or her faction. She would have made a perfect Noir candidate if Altena was aiming for the Noir of Soldat legend, but she wasn't, and used Chloe as only a means to an end. This is why Altena smiled when she found out Chloe died, because she thought her plan was falling into place.

But her plan didn't end the way it was intended. Both girls were unwilling to kill her out of hate, because they knew there "would be no going back" if they did. When Altena forced the issue by shooting Mireille, first, Kirika showed her LACK of hate by jumping in to take the bullet, then, threw both herself and Altena into the pit, not out of vengeance, but out of love, because she wanted to protect Mireille and atone for her sins.

The reason for Altena's smile in the end is debateable. It could be said that she was seeing the birth of the Noir she intended. Since both girls survive, and Altena soon to die, she might think to herself that they will now proceed as she foresaw, that they will carry out the storm of vengeance upon the world ruled by the Soldats as she wished.

However, it can also be interpreted as that she finally, looking upon the last thing she will ever see, she finally sees the truth. She finally understands that the bond they have is not a result of a common goal of vengeance as she created, but a result of two people who found a connection through their then-unsaid desire to free themselves of the darkness. And she smiles simply in awe at the beauty of that, something she probably hadn't ever seen in her life.

If one considers what these same director and producers tried to convey with their next series, Madlax, each individual seeing the "truth" of their lives before reaching either their demise or their future, it is probably the latter conclusion that the creators wanted to show.

My interpretation? The Grand Retour was nothing but a game...a twisted game in which Althena tried to preach a false philosophy about the evils of love and how hatred saves people. Althena can never know love or understand love and since she can't die by her own hand, she wants somebody else to have her blood on their hands.

Possibly, this incident was a wake up call for Kirika and especially for Mireille who's had a chip on her shoulder ever since her parents got capped.