So did Karai win in IDW's "City at War" arc?
 

So IDW's version of City at War ended with issue 100. Now that we're a few issues afterward, I can't help but feel Karai, "won."

- Karai took control of the Foot Clan again and became its leader usurping Splinter just like she wanted.

- All the new Foot recruits Splinter had trained are now part of her Foot army. And the ones that didn't change sides were killed.

- Splinter is dead, just like she wanted

- Kitsune is out of the picture, at least for now, and raising the dragon didn't cause Hell on NYC.

- Oroku Saki is back to life although we have no idea yet if he and Karai have met in the 6 months timeskip

- Ocho is dead, so him turning on her has no threat to her anymore.

- Bishop is dead, and while they never interacted, I think Bishop would have surely went after the Foot and her mutants after a while.

- She sends Koya and her enforcers to mutant town to get new mutants from Old Hob for her army

- The Turtles, at least for now, are depressed and scattered over the last 6 months and don't seem to be an issue for her anymore. Even Jennika who she nearly killed, doesn't seem to want to get her revenge on her for indirectly causing her to become a mutant.


The only thing Karai didn't get were the kid orphans she wanted to raise to new Foot recruits as they escaped to Dimension X, but besides that, Karai got everything she wanted. Splinter is dead, the Turtles are at their lowest point, she took over the Foot Clan just like she wanted, she has mutant enforcers, and for the most part nobody seems to be going against her.

Yeah, she pretty much did.

She gained power, she didn't lose face, several threats such as Bishop or Ocho were eliminated, and she lost her only rival.

B!tch came out a winner here. :tlol:

yeah she pretty much did. question is how many foot are left. she also lost her sword so that's one piece of power gone. the fact that she's going to hob to get recruits most likely also means recruitment is low.

She totally did. And I still wish we could see the clean-up effort it took the city to get rid of that dead dragon.

I can already see it now. Dragon in a can. Mm mm good.

That would certainly go a long way to solving the food shortage in Mutant Town... I bet Stockman just had a horde of Mousers chomp down on the thing.

I thought Shredder was technically in charge of the Foot now?

Anyway, no, she didn't capture the kids, therefore she lost. Her whole point in engaging a war with Splinter was either training the kids to be Foot soldiers or killing them, and she failed. There was literally no other reason they were fighting as far as Karai and Splinter were concerned. Splinter wanted to give Karai control of the Foot, he was done with it. He just wasn't going to let her murder a bunch of orphans. She failed in doing the one thing that Splinter and the Turtles objected to, therefore she failed overall in my book. Did she come out well in it all? Sure I suppose, though she I hope realized that she had been manipulated into the whole bloody endeavor.

Who won the war? Easy, Kitsune. She got her boyfriend back, with no negative consequences for her!

I don't think Saki will want anything to do with (leading) the Foot ever again. He's seen where that road leads, both for himself and for Yoshi, even despite the latter's nobler intentions. Plus, it's kinda hard to run a ninja clan when you're all the way out in the middle of snow-covered nowhere looking after its rival clan (and hopefully retrieving their runaway pet cat).

You bring up a very good point regarding Karai, but Kitsune didn't win per se. She already had her boyfriend before this whole mess where she kind of let him die on purpose. The whole point for her was to bring him back to life with her father's power. Something she very much did not accomplish.

I suppose, I'm just a little annoyed that the person who engineered something that killed, what, hundreds of people seems to get off with no consequences. One of the few things in the arc that genuinely bugged me, liked it a lot otherwise.

We'll likely see some follow-up on that in the Annual. While the aftermath of #50 was pretty much glossed over in a few panels, this is an occasion where the same thing definitely shouldn't happen. I very much want to see how Karai and Kitsune talked their way into, at the very least, coexisting with the Turtles after everything that went down. Even just a conversation between Jennika and Karai would already go a long way. Can't wait to find out more.

So does Shredder lose sense of purpose now that Yoshi is dead and he had nothing to do with it?

Nobody knows yet, Shredder hasn't really appeared post issue 100 yet.

It's possible that finding a new purpose in life is his arc now.

This is Oroku Saki's new direction. Losing the Gauntlet challenge changed him and the primary role he has served is as a personal rival to Splinter especially if Splinter is Hamto Yoshi and master of The Foot Clan. This humility is new for the character and an interesting concept to explore and can add more than the two above definitions to who Oroku Saki is.