A few points on the ongoing debates over Shu, Souta, the effectiveness of the Void ranking system, and the effectiveness of a hierarchy system
in general:
1. Democracy is indeed the best form of all known forms of government, but only as a generality. In other words, for most imaginable situations, it's true. But it's not true for the very unusual circumstances that Shu and these kids find themselves in.
The core downside of democracy is that it's relatively slow (i.e. compared to the speed of a King or Tyrant snapping his fingers, and his commands happening right there, right now). Getting the informed consent of the people takes time. Time that you may not have when your resources are running extremely low, the enemy seems to have you outgunned, the enemy is entirely merciless, and the enemy is steadily eating further and further into your territory.
This is the sort of situation that even
democratic governments would probably declare
martial law over. The reason being that, in such crisis situations, decisions need to be made and implemented very quickly. Maintaining order is very important. Why is it important?
2. Episode 15 made it crystal clear why it's important to enforce a degree of hierarchy-based order during a situation like this one. If you don't, people (like Souta's F-Ranks group) can go off on their own, do whatever they want, and potentially make things much,
much worse for the group as a whole.
You can't afford much anarchy in a situation like the one that Shu's group is facing. You just can't. A well-organized military (like GHQ) will simply annihilate an unorganized group of civilians.
3. Now the Void ranking system... Yes, it does seem a bit off. Whether this is by intentional design (it's going to serve a thematic purpose later), or due to questionable execution in the writing, I don't know. We've already seen examples of how Void ranks don't necessarily correlate well to degree of Void usefulness. But suppose that they were tightly correlated. Suppose that F-rankers all had really crappy voids, and S/A-rankers had all the best and most useful voids. Then, sad to say, but the Void ranking system would make a fair deal of sense,
given the scarcity of needed resources.
Like it or not, Shu is right about how the current situation doesn't really allow for strict egalitarianism. That's the cold, hard fact of the matter.
4. I think that the scene where Shu denies Souta the needed oxygen tank is not to display the Void ranking system in action, per se, but rather to show how Shu has become a bit of a vindictive bastard.
If it was anybody other than Souta down there, I think Shu would have allowed the oxygen tank to be used.
Why do I think that? Because none of Shu's immediate entourage (most notably his two Secret Service girls, including one who even idolizes him) took action to stop Argo there, and only Yahiro bothered to even verbally defend Shu. That tells me that even they couldn't pretend that Shu's BS excuse made sense here (so Shu wouldn't use it unless it served an ulterior motive). Just because you have a hierarchy doesn't mean you take leave of common sense. Who's more likely to need an oxygen tank: F-rank divers scavenging for you, or A/S-ranks who likely never need to go underwater for long periods of time? The answer is obvious.
Yahiro backed Shu up here because I think Yahiro was simply thrilled at seeing Shu be a bastard for
any reason whatsoever.
Yahiro desperately wants Shu to be a totally cold, heartless Dictator. Even now Yahiro still considers Shu soft. Yahiro's overall philosophy is basically that of a Dr. Doom or a Lex Luthor. Yahiro is either
that far over the moral event horizon, or he's a mole working for GHQ.
5. Shu basically wanting Souta to die is the "real edge" to Tyrant Shu that I mentioned before. He's now become somebody you do
not want to earn the enmity of, which is quite different from how he used to be.
Anyway, that might have come off a bit long and incoherent, but I think it touches on every point I wanted to anyway.
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