Board Thread:Speculation House/@comment-43757330-20191216191748/@comment-27745396-20191216205914

I don't think Neo and Cinder are already in Atlas. And honestly, in my opinion the idea of Neo disguising herself as some other character (I have seen some people theorizing Ren is currently Neo. Something about his eye????) is very unlikely one.

As far as we know, Neo is unable to speak. That pointed finger towards her mouth when Cinder wanted them to talk pretty much confirmed that Neo is indeed mute. And unfortunatelly, all new characters we have ment (ignoring some back ground characters and the "thirsty moms") have had spoken lines, so they can't be Neo.

The other possibility is that Neo would be able to diguise Cinder. This is also unlikely since when Neo tried to disguise their stolen ship, she had to touch it the whole time and the whole thing seemed to take a lot of juice out of her (though the size of the ship might also be the reason). Also, Neo's semblance is only visual so if one of the new characters was indeed Cinder disguised by Neo, that character would still have Cinder's voice actor.

In my honest opinion, the whole Cinder-Neo subplot from V6 should have taken place during this volume. We know that their story takes place 2 weeks after the main cast's V6 events, so it would have made things a bit clearer for the viewer. This would have also ceated an interesting mystery around Cinder when Salem claimed her to be alive. Plus, Cinder finally melting and killing the lady who tried to help her could have been a pretty nice V6 after credits scene.

Inserting Cinder-Neo story in between scenes like in v6 might not have been a good idea, though. It was messy then, and it would be even messier now. But maybe they could have given Cinder and Neo their own episode in the mid volume, show how they left Anima and then nothing until their arrival at the end of the volume or whenever they are going to drop in.