You're both making a lot of assumptions and seeing the surface level stuff, but MFauli wrote more so I'll quote that.

Quote Originally Posted by MFauli View Post
Ryll, my issue is that unlike Ironblooded Orphans (which I liked), the kids in this series show NONE of the skills that make any comeuppance plausible/believable. When the kids in IBO rebelled (and "kids" meant all the way to young adulthood, really), they had already shown their capabilities to sustain and support themselves. We saw them be active soldiers already, on top of being mechanics and whatever else.

Mercury shows us a bunch of privileged, spoiled children, YOUNG children, some of them being into engineering, but most of them just enjoying the riches their parents gave them. That's why I hate Miorine and can't take seriously your "she wanted to become a farmer on Earth"-argument: THAT Miorine would call for her butler the moment farming got "hard". Farming is nothing like her little garden, and unless she meant "becoming a farmer" in the same way she became a prosthetics manufacturer (by paying other people to do stuff), there's no way she would have succeeded. This Miorine is all about "I deserve it because I am me" and political games that rely on adults in this world being idiots where a 14-year old girl can outwit them.

And if it came to open battle, who would actually fight (and murder) enemy mecha? Stuttering Suletta? Or all the inexperienced students? Fact is these children have no means nor expertise to rebel. That's why everything comes off as children being childish, unlike IBO.

But that's a fundamental issue of this anime to begin with: Somehow children and young adults run everything in this world, with adults being DUMB business men and politicians in the background, only existing to hog money and make dumb decisions that allow the children to present themselves as smarter. sigh :/
Of course the setup of IBO was different. They were a PMC of child soldiers used and experimented on.

You're definitely letting your distaste of Miorine blind you from the details about her. Yes, she's a hypocrite for using the things her father's influence awards her. Elnora called her out on it, and it made Miorine furious. But Miorine ultimately decided that she needed to stop being a hypocrite about it and abandoned her personal goal completely. She stopped running from her father (while not really running from him at all).

Nobody else runs Miorine's hydroponics tent. No one. She orders the supplies and has them delivered to the doorstep (you can see the jugs of nutrients in the background shots, and she carried them in the first episode) and grows all the tomatoes herself. She was fully committed to getting smuggled out of the school and emulating her mother on Earth. Suletta rescuing her, and Miorine subsequently having her smugglers turn around a second time set her away from that path for good.

The rest of your paragraph is baseless assumptions. We haven't seen much, but we do know that Miorine was at the top of her Business class. Like I said, she's her father's daughter as much as she loathes the idea. Elnora called her out on that too. Chuchu does too. As does Shaddiq. What we have been shown is that Miorine actually has the brains to back up and would be more than just inheriting a position.

It makes the way her father treats her as an object and not an heir as an insult. But that may have changed since she stopped running and demanded he back her business plan.

Next, let's be absolutely clear. The school is a playground. The duel system is ridiculous. That's the writers playing with the Utena references. Duel systems for plot reasons are almost always stupid. Dueling historically in real life is stupid.

I'll repeat it, we are given a very limited field of view on what's actually going on in Ad Stella's setting. We see the viewpoint of kids in their playground, playing at being business owners, throwing around their wealth as weight. The most contemptable character is Secelia Dote (this bitch). She sits on the dueling committee, delivering snark. Never seems to do anything but insult others on the couch. She's the pampered princess you want to believe Miorine is.

Jeturk is constantly scheming to unseat Delling, he fails, because Elnora is constantly manipulating the entire situation. Blackmailing him personally, undermining him when he tries to slip away from her, making backroom deals with Peil and Grassley to collectively try to destroy Elnora's company, etc. We're shown this continually throughout the episodes. It's not the focus, but it is inevitably driving most of the events that are happening to the kids. Jeturk treats his kids like shit. Peil uses children they buy from Earth as slaves as sacrificial pawns for their own heir. Grassley treats his okay but doesn't respect them as individuals (Shaddiq's line revealing that that when he and Miorine did try to make their own way when they were very young and the way you're complaining about, their fathers stopped both of them and coddled them instead).

Shaddiq is being ordered by his father to steal Aerial. Elan #3 was also ordered to do the same. Shaddiq represents the attitude you think is happening, he was ignoring his father to try to get Miorine to ally with him (and then Guel as well) because he does think that their generation should take over now. All kids that age think that everywhere. And he's obviously also in actual love with Miorine in the childhood crush way. Guel was cast aside by his father for an AI because he didn't trust his son to actually win in their top of the line mobile suit.

The kids act like they're running the world because we primarily get their POV, but they're only running the illusion of one within the little garden they're kept in. The Spacian companies directly intervene constantly.