Pompeii is relatively weak to Arts damage so throw Mousse or similar (I lucksacked Astesia recently, but eg. Midnight's active should also work) at it too if you have them. And/or maxed-out Melantha for brute force & ignorance every player is functionally guaranteed to have access to. (An amazing number of problems in this game can be solved or mitigated by throwing Melantha at them; best 3* fo' realz.)

And yeah you want some serious healing saturation at the point of contact to cope with all the MILLIONS DIE IN FIRE the giant magma slug spits out, preferably AoE and multitarget - think Myrrh and Ansel for low-end examples.

So she really liker her sister... ?

You don't say. Seems to have accepted her loss pretty gracefully though.

...also guessing when Shizuku (essentially) begged Saori to "not leave her" she had no idea just how hellishly determined the latter could be about it. Sorta starting to see why Iori is lowkey scared of that kid.

Common Law jury-appeal bullshit. Figures.

Saori may not be winning prizes for self-awareness anytime soon but her read on Shizuku seems on point.

This is the trouble with today's youth - they're too pop-culture aware to buy the tsundere act for a second. o3o

^ lmao

Fucking Vigna was having way too much fun in that scene. Followed by the villain asking why his guards can't stop one little girl.

Tbh, if the author wants to test ideas out and shift away his or her comfortable zone, let him/her do so. It is a good thing actually. It is a hit or miss as the author is not doing what he or she does best previously, but this allows the author to discover new things.

Well sure, but doing it within a series is a recipe for disjointed narrative and thematic mood whiplashes as should be quite evident here.

Bully Squad plus dark pits x Crownslayer is the Arknights poly OTP, just sayin'.

I don't see enough art of it, but I read that Executor and Flamebringer gets shipped. Don't know why.

Edgelords unite!

There is of course, Doc x any of the male operators like SilverAsh for example.

I mean tbf the Silverdaddy makes every male suddenly aware of their latent homosexuality. :d

I giggled when in-story Ceylon went into full squeeing fangirl mode after Schwarz Heel-Faced and went all John Woo on the other henchmen present - with crossbows, recall :D

But yeah if she's an Uni grad (and capable researcher) at 16 either the place has rather different year lengths than Earth, a very different academic curriculum, Liberi grow up way faster than Earth humans, or she's a bonafide Wünderkind genius...

last edited at May 2, 2020 8:58AM

Mine was Exusiaiaiaia who seems pretty useful all around to kill small fries. But admittedly that's something a lot of chars can do so nobody too spectacular.

I lucksacked and managed to pull both Applepie and Silverdaddy on an account reroll, feels good man. :^)

Anyway, being a "high-speed" multihit conventional sniper Exu is gr8 against everything that isn't a high-Def tank - but then you'll want to use Arts damage and/or armour break type abilities (Meteor comes to mind, and she's a pretty common pull from recruitement search too) against those kinds of enemies in any case.

Speaking of quick tips, this site and particularly the recruitement tag viewer. Doesn't play nice with all browsers tho.

Edit of edit: oh it was already added to the OP. Well whatevs.

last edited at May 2, 2020 8:26AM

Eating Blue Poison cakes?

Personnel files say she's actually a pretty decent baker and cooking buddies with Gummy but "presentation needs some work", and her... area of expertise unsurprisingly leads to some prejudice.

Also, that was some lethal *JIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII*

last edited at Apr 30, 2020 2:07PM

I will say, yeah, it's good to know the guaranteed 6-star rule; ie for each gacha banner you get a 6-star roll within 10 rolls.

5* or higher, actually (read - 5* most of the time). They're not THAT generous. (The "+2% chance per 50 pulls without a 6*" cumulative pity bonus does apply specifically to 6*s tho.) :P

understand her situation is tough but she also doesn't want to help herself

Way to contradict yourself within a single sentence.

How is that contradicting? She has Rin, the sensei and Sakura trying to help her, but she opts to let her anger on Sakura instead.
There's a point where tough life situations stop being an excuse.

You do realise you just shifted the goalposts from "help herself" - which was a self-evidently ridiculous demand - to "letting others helping her" right. Plus elementary psychology says someone in her position A) is reflexively suspicious of people and their motivations by default (and you can bet she's had zero reason to have any faith whatsoever in teachers etc. so far) B) accumulates quite the surplus of pretty justifiable resentment and anger on a daily basis, and people can't just hold all that in forever. Troubled teenagers far less so.

And have you even been paying attention to what she does to Sakura? Because it's extremely mild given her laundry list of grievances. There's a bunch of obvious emotional knives she could readily twist if she wanted to hurt her, like the flagrant favoritism she gets from their parents or her inability and/or unwillingness to clearly stand up against the bullying Ashima suffers at school, but what Ashima does instead is prod at their incestuous relationship - usually while indirectly and sardonically invoking her own social stigma as "the whore's daughter". (Which incidentally suggests that while Ashima is justifiably bitter about the blatant unfairness of the different treatments the two of them get she does not hold it against Sakura personally.)

Come think of it at least as far as we've seen the sisters never ever bring up such obvious elephants in the room between themselves. It's like they have an unspoken agreement to avoid the painful issues neither can really do anything about.

I used to be on the "the violence isn't that bad, it's poor slapstick at most!" side, but now that I'm seeing Minami /blame herself/ for being beat up by her partner /for being insecure/? I mean, if you needed a physical release or to "make her realise what she's saying", a slight flick on the forehead would have sufficed, Iori. I get the sensation of "you idiot how can you be saying this when you know I love you??", but I'd never muster up the energy to hit someone I love when they're clearly having a vulnerable moment. I've been in Minami's place A LOT, and I'd be pretty mad to get hit, tbh. (then again, I don't completely hate myself.)

Ya, this chap went way into the Dude Not Funny and Unfortunate Implications territory.

lesbians aside I've always found something kinda disturbing about the whole "morals committee" thing. recruiting kids to actively hunt down and squash other kids' attempts to express their individuality, for little more than a feeling of superiority over their peers? feels kinda, well, dystopian, yeah?
but I suppose manga as a medium is no stranger to the concept of portraying disturbing things as "moe"

I mean last I heard that kinda stuff was quite par for the course in Japanaland so. Recall this is the society where it's also not unusual for teachers, who totally don't have enough on their plate already, to be charged with afterschool patrols to enforce those go-straight-home (more practically, "don't loiter in our uniforms") rules...

lol

USELESS LESBIANS, in their natural habitat! Look at them, being useless!

Such majestic creatures.

"You will feel... 'numbness.'"

I understand her situation is tough but she also doesn't want to help herself

Way to contradict yourself within a single sentence.

and just passive aggressively wants to drag Sakura down too.

Near as I can tell Ashima's feelings about Sakura are one big conflicting mess. On one hand, she's one of all of like two people in the entire town, and only one in the family, who Ashima can think of as "being on her side" even if she really can't do very much to concretely help (Mayumi doesn't exactly count here since Ashima A) has basically lost all faith in teachers and the like to begin with B) currently perceives her as an intruder violating her one real refuge at Rin's). It's not like she doesn't appreciate the sentiment, and she does seem to return at least some of Sakura's Mochi Seal of Approval beyond-sisterly affection too.

OTOH, Sakura has the social and familial position that has been arbitrarily denied Ashima through no fault of hers and this is something their surroundings rub her face in daily at ever turn. Ashima's need to be the goddamn Buddha to not feel hella bitter and jealous about all this, and tempted to vent her misery at Sakura - who is pretty much the only one she can take her frustrations out on anyway - on occasion.

All of which practically appears to boil down to Ashima's treatment of her sister fluctuating wildly depending on her current emotional state. If she's been served a particularly stinging rebuke of the colossal unfairness of her situation, as with the shoe incident back when Sakura was first introduced, she's wont to pass it along by being passive-aggressively mean. If she's in a stabler mood (presumably having been left in relative peace recently), as in the most recent chapter, she's pretty friendly in her particular taciturn fashion albeit still prone to yanking Sakura's chain so to speak.

Sakura, for her part, seems determined to grin and bear it all. Partly because she's gay for her sis obviously, partly, I suspect, because one of the very few concrete things she can do to make Ashima's legitimately shitty situation a bit more bearable is to accept some of the burden by proxy when the latter needs to unload. Plus she likely has one Hell of a nagging conscience about the whole situation and her own inability to do diddly squat about it, as well as her own in comparison quite privileged and pampered position. A way to make amends and even the scales even a little bit, so to speak.

All of which isn't really very healthy behaviour from either of them, of course, but then what do you expect in the context? They're two middle-school kids stuck in a situation that's practically psychological horror - "Hell is other people" as it were.

I, for one, am kinda disappointed that Hana's secret probably won't get revealed by Shion buying her an eroge for her "17th" birthday.

LMAO
tbf I don't think even Shion could look at Hana and think "an eroge would definitely be a suitable gift..."
thonking.jpg
...all bets are off with Tama though. Because I could totally imagine her giving one already for le shitz und gigglez.

This all suggests an altogether more subtle and planned-out long-term story arc than I thought was going on here, and a far cry from what I find most pleasurable about the story, which was the inventive way the author could ring funny changes on the theme of domestic connubial bliss between two quirky but essentially benign characters.

If we're heading into the psychological/behavioral abyss again, I'm not sure I'm along for the ride this time.

I mean it's also entirely possible - or even likely - the author just doesn't know WTF they're doing and the story is duly giving out unfortunately and horribly mixed messages. I just find it entertaining to put more thought into it by way of idle speculation than they probably did. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The Miyako-head plushies on page 2 are simultaneously adorable and horrifying.

I feel this is an accurate description of Matsumoto herself.

I'm starting to half suspect this is a deliberate deconstruction of Iori's character - she's more and more starting to resemble the old Shizuku, only without the latter's Freudian Excuse of legitimately horrible past, self-awareness and almost-desperate desire to reform.

I kind of thought of that, but that opens up the suggestion that Minami has some kind of supernatural power that makes people hit her. (I'm exaggerating, of course, but I don't see how you avoid some kind of victim-blaming in such a case.)

I mean. From what we've been told Minami should be quite physically capable of resisting such mistreatment if she wanted to, particularly in regards to Iori who as far as we know has exactly zero brawling experience. That she didn't and doesn't is thus presumably due to psychological/emotional factors, ie. a need for companionship sufficiently pathologically deep-seated she'd rather suffer abuse than risk the relationship.

Put harshly, she is to a degree enabling continued and in this case apparently escalating abuse from her SOs by outright refusing to stand up to them despite being fully capable of doing so.

This is in conspicuous and I suspect not at all unintentional contrast to the relationship between Shizuku and Saori, where the latter immediately made it clear she will respond to any misbehaviour ferociously and to the full (and considerable) extent of her abilities. Which if anything seemed to come as something of a relief to Shizuku who knows how seriously maladjusted she is and needs someone capable and willing to keep her in check while she's trying to work out this whole "decent human being" thing.

...I'm going to be so amused by the grim irony if this ends up with Iori just getting all the worse and eventually Shizuku of all people having to stage an intervention.

I'm starting to half suspect this is a deliberate deconstruction of Iori's character - she's more and more starting to resemble the old Shizuku, only without the latter's Freudian Excuse of legitimately horrible past, self-awareness and almost-desperate desire to reform.

I feel something is brewing... what is this uneasiness i feel ....( ಠ_ಠ )

Indigestion. :|

I don't recall seeing any indication whatsoever of Kamu desiring a "solution" to her "situation", by which I assume you mean the peculiar little ménage à trois she's got going with Eiko and Sensei, though.

I don't care if she desires it, I desire it, any good triangle can always be solved when a 4th girl enters the fray.

Uh, okay.