Triela, Bears, and Time
I've seen a few Gunslinger Girl chronologies suggest that only a couple of years pass. My question yesterday about magazines and wine vintages made me wonder more about the passage of time, especially since Alessandro says that he quit Public Safety three years, nine months, and twenty-eight days (very specific!) prior to one scene, while Triela keeps acting in volume 10 like it's only been a year since she and Hilshire nabbed (and she let go) Mario Bossi in Naples. Then, I realized that there's a calendar visible in Angelica's room in volume 9, very deliberately placed in juxtaposition to scenes of Triela having trouble remembering who gave her the shotgun but also reaffirming the shorter chronology by her bears. The calendar has to be 2007 based on the visible month, March, starting on Thursday. Pinocchio died in 2004, so Mario Bossi was captured (and released) in 2003, four years prior to Volume 10.
I don't think the calendar is an accident: I think it's there to show objectively how wrong Triela's memories are and how she doesn't know what year it really is. Further, I think Hilshire sees this at the beginning of volume 10, when Triela mistakes how long it had been since their adventures with Bossi. This also contradicts online chronologies like the one on the Fandom wiki, which relies on misattributing a Triela quotation ("Last Christmas we were in Naples too") to Hilshire and then taking it as accurate, when in fact I think that it's a mistake on Triela's part that tells Hilshire (and the careful reader who saw the calendar) how badly her memory is failing.
Posted Aug 4, 2025, 4:36 PM UTC