Either way my actual gripe with the whole episode is that it's basically completely unnecessary on top of being handled so haphazardly.

LOL. Since you didn't buy my "Indou and Kagami are too cute to gore" theory, let's try:

• Boar-san wasn't really going for them all-out--it was just fucking with them to see the funny expressions they'd make.

• Boars always look more enraged than they actually are because of RBF (Resting Boar Face).

• The boar was distracted at the last second by the snake.

(But Indou and Kagami really are too cute to gore.)

It should come with a disclaimer. Don't try this at home, kids.

Yeah, it remains to be seen whether there’s a really good way to address that “The Majority of Awesome Romantic Leads in World Fiction Would Be Psychopathic Stalkers, Delusional Obsessives, Serial Sexual Assailants, and A Whole Panoply of Other Assorted Miscreants If They Tried That Shit in Real Life” problem.

We can start with Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights.

Many other media being even worse about it (compare Spider-Man's Epic Feats that make talking at any arbitrary length a Free Action to him) doesn't make it any better you know.

Sorry--I wasn't being clear. Comics don't move, so they don't have slow motion--they just break a given event into more panels. So the last panel on page 146 and the first one on 147 could be seen as near-simultaneous, and the bottom two on 147 definitely are. I'm not going to claim that the scene adheres to strict real-world time, but throw in some extreme foreshortening to get the slowly approaching boar into the same panels as the characters, and the plausibility meter barely budges.

Again, if you don't like how it was done, cheers. And you're right that boars/feral swine are no joke--they're very, very fast. I'd just assume that as it got closer the boar got a good look at how cute the girls are and let them off the hook.

Apparently Indou has a latent superpower to mess with the flow of time because from that distance the boar should've been on them in about a second, or rather less than it oughta taken for just herself to scramble high up the tree to be out of reach.
Those things are fast over short distances.

...I'm never going to understand why authors feel obliged to throw in these kinds of OMG dangerous situations and then totally half-ass the resolutions like this. : |

Movies are routinely way worse about “character development stop time” at a crisis—Kagami’s hand is already on the tree before the boar even thinks about charging, and the crook of the tree is fairly low.

So while the time and apparent distances are definitely fudged a bit, if you assume that several panels are near-simultaneous it’s not extraordinarily implausible. (Again, compared to, say, Korean dramas, where two people can practically exchange complete marriage vows while a semi-truck bears down on them.)

Sooooo she had fallen in love with her mother, but mother died, so she hopes to fall in love with her daughter?

There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever in the story that Kagami was in love with Indou’s mother.

Kagami says that she liked and respected her, and she explicitly says that her romantic attraction to Indou is not related to her feelings for the mother. (That’s particularly plausible since half the school also seems to be attracted to Indou without having any idea who her mother was.)

That doesn’t mean that it’s totally impossible that Kagami actually was in love with Indou’s mother; we may later discover that she was. But to say she was at this point is based on nothing in the text.

Its strange how they portray indou as dense about attraction but perceptive of everything else, and then also good with natural instinct. It doesn't feel like it really fits together wel

As others have said, Indou is exceptionally smart (her aunt says so, and she’s no flatterer) but untutored and unsocialized (so far). And we now know that she takes after her highly respected and competent mother.

Indou apparently has been raised in rural and poverty-stricken isolation, so she had no experience at reading anything like Kagami’s mixed emotional signals.

That’s a quality Indou shares with half the readership, it seems, who decided on the basis of Chapter 1 that Kagami was a demon from hell despite the blatant signals that, although she is sharp-tongued and strict on the surface, she is actually generous and kind-hearted.

I think the point here is that Miyu is a scared and withdrawn girl with strong defense mechanisms. She can't believe that Ao would like her, and she's afraid of being hurt, so she reacts defensively by impulse. The way she acts when confronted by the other girls really tells you everything you need to know about her. She's terrified but she also refuses to back down, and seems incapable of taking the easy way out.

That’s the real Megane touch right there—the shy, bookwormish glasses girl we’ve seen a million times (and almost always thought was completely adorable—but I digress), BUT this one is also surprisingly tough, BUT the toughness hurts rather than helps (or at least makes things more complicated).

So, complex characters, atmospheric visual style, and open-ended or ambiguous plots. Not always what I’m looking for, but a very specific and distinctive flavor.

(And not in this particular story, but, in keeping with the author’s name, the glasses girl who is also a seductive hottie.)

Dense girls practicing kissing while their practice partner secretly likes them? I've never seen that before.

Next this author will probably blow our minds with a plot about two high school girls falling in love through their club activities.

What original plotlines will we see next? I can't wait to find out.

Getting annoyed with cliches about romance stories on an internet forum? I've never seen that before

Next this poster will probably blow our minds with another post about how their favorite story is so much better than the rest of the stories out there.

What original complaints will we see next? I can wait to find out.

Know what I’m sick of?—pop songs where the singer is in love with someone who doesn’t love them back.

Or even worse—they’re in love with someone who used to love them but doesn’t anymore.

C’mon people—SO CLICHE.

So what did everyone make of Kagami's line about "not caring about maidens or anything like that?"

It came off as a bit of strange thing to say, but I took it to mean something along the lines of Kagami basically saying I'm not a lesbian but I'm not going to let anybody steal you away?

Or something perhaps along the lines of I'm normally not into girls, but I am into you?

Well from previous chapters, "Maidens" comes off as a local school social phenomenon. Where an older student takes a younger one as their own. I'm not entirely sure how to put it adequately. I'd say it's less saying that she's not normally into girls, but more she doesn't care about what dumb school social status thing exists.

I think that’s right—it’s some kind of “petite soeur” thing (with strong lesbian undertones, to be sure).

Hell, with a cutie like Indou, if they didn’t already have such a custom, they’d need to start one.

last edited at Oct 15, 2018 6:34AM

Kagami reminds me a lot of "The Master" from My Master & Furry-eared Girl Mel

Now look what you made me do:

Scene: Indou by herself in the woods, having wandered off from her group chasing a [small animal of some kind] to cook and eat. She hears a noise from above—up in that tree, it’s Mel, having wandered off from the Master while following a pretty butterfly, then chased by a wild boar deep into the woods. She’s startled to see Indou—teeters, then falls, right onto Indou’s lap. She’s scratched, dirty, in tears—until kind, brave Indou takes her in her arms and comforts her as she sobs.

Scene: The Master, beyond frantic with worry, rushes around calling for help, encounters Kagami waiting at the edge of the woods for the cadets to emerge from their field exercise—the group does come out, but no sign of either Indou or Mel. Kagami and Master run into the woods calling for their cadet and maid, respectively. They search separately, then find each other again by chance and agree to stay together. It’s getting dark, but neither one has any thought of abandoning the search.

There will be a storm. There will be a deserted ramshackle hut in the woods. There will be clinging together in fear, and huddling together for warmth. There will be comforting. There will be disheveled clothing and the sound of heartbeats.

There will be, in short, so much cuteness as to threaten the integrity of the entire space-time continuum.

That’s all I have for now.

unless that's your jam, you unspeakable deviant

Did someone call?

Happy 1000 posts, random.

https://dynasty-scans.com/chapters/useless_princesses_ch07#22
.... How lewd....... Thursty slut.....
For real tho, dat development... its cute she thinks she's cute

Remember, kids, failing to wear your prescription swimming goggles when shopping at the water park swimwear shop can lead to premarital handholding, mutual blushing, and even . . . unprotected finger intertwining.

Don't let this happen to you!

^ Yep, another "Kouhai notice me" - Sempai setting

I'm wondering what Kagami was to Indou's mom in regard to that "maiden" business.

And I'm pretty sure that it's just a function of minimal variation in character design, but Indou's beloved aunt kind of reminds me of Kagami.

This is way too vague, and not just in the conclusion. It's annoying keeping track of who's talking and when/where things are happening. Mangaka seems like they're kind of half-assing the composition.

That's totally Ootomo Megane's style in both the writing and the drawing. I understand why people might not like it, but that's what this mangaka's work is like.

Shouldn't it be an age gap now?

It is only 2 years different so i guess it not that large of an age gap.

Really? I must have missed that one. Kagami surely looks like she's at least 18.

First year vs. third year.

Kagami seems to be a bit tallish (at least a half-head taller than Ooba) and Indou is definitely undersized (in the marching squad lineup at the start of the last chapter she's clearly the shortest) and probably also a bit undernourished--she doesn't seem to be very familiar with meat, for instance.

But not nearly enough difference for Very large size gap, and Student-Teacher definitely doesn't apply. Despite the military setting, it's basically just sempai-kouhai.

That chapter really put a new spin on Chapters 10 & 11. Chidori's response to Nanoha's cutely awkward confession isn't just her being shy and half-tsundere (although she is)--she's dealing with the pain of past emotional trauma and bravely taking the plunge anyway.

It also explains why Chidori, although looking like the quiet bookworm type, actually seems to be a bit more knowledgable about (or maybe just aware of) romance/sexual stuff than Nanoha.

So the possibilities for "Igarashi" seem to be:

• Chidori's past love trying to get back together.
• Another, unknown girl at the school with a crush on Chidori (perhaps having discovered that Chidori likes girls via the past love).
• An unknown boy from another school.

The fact that the note is addressed to "Chidori" rather than "Fujimiya-san" strongly suggests that it's #1.

Isn’t this the part too that Nanoha wanted to gave her a chocolate in valentines day? So, she really misunderstood that paper bag, that she thought Chidori will give to other and confess. I hope the next part would be the timeline before Nanoha confess to Chidori.

Actually you're right--Chapter 10, page 10 and Chapter 22, page 13 depict the same moment:

https://dynasty-scans.com/chapters/hana_ni_arashi_ch10#10
https://dynasty-scans.com/chapters/hana_ni_arashi_ch22#13

The chocolate that Nanoha thinks Chidori is going to give to someone else is actually the bag from the mysterious Igarashi.

Who's Igarashi, we gotta beat him up. Igarashi you better get ready to square up boi.

They go to a girls' school, though, so if it's a guy he snuck in and out of the shoe lockers.

Fujishiro never lies.

But hides her true feelings. She's extremely uncomfortable with the feeling that someone dares to be more beautiful than her with much less effort.

It's not even true that she hides her feelings, at least as far as Kurokawa goes--once they separate, Fujishiro suddenly realizes the implications of Kurokawa's makeover on the ride home and freaks out, but only temporarily. By the next chapter she's back to doing whatever she can to make Kurokawa look and feel cuter, with no suggestion of competitiveness or that she's still upset.

Everything Fujishiro is doing is with Kurokawa's explicit permission--one of the most important scenes in the story is when Fujishiro says, "If deep down inside, you really think I'm annoying, I'll promise to never bother you again." Kurokawa replies, "I want to be your friend too . . ."

And Fujishiro isn't just trying to make Kurokawa be like her; she's done a lot to make herself more like Kurokawa--she's toned down her look and is trying to find common ground with Kurokawa by reading manga, etc.

Obviously, Fujishiro can be bossy and impulsive (among other things), but you clearly hate the character to a degree that's simply not supported by the text.

And it's only going to get worse, because this is very, very obviously a story about two basically decent people who each have their own individual flaws coming to be better people together because of the positive influence they have on one another.

last edited at Oct 14, 2018 9:19PM

What do they mean by 'not allowed'? Legally or morally?

Well, that's the question. Fran quotes the teacher from the beastkin school:

"'In order to bring about a society where humans and beastkin can coexist, both must maintain acceptable mutual relations.'"

But that's pretty vague--what counts as "acceptable"?

Fran herself goes on to say (not quoting anything): "Being lovers goes too far, and isn't acceptable."

So Fran might be making her own assumption, or it's not an actual law but just a version of segregation-era prejudices that frowned on interracial marriages.

As has been true all along, we know so little about the specifics of how this world works and what the legal/social status of the beastkin might be that there could be any number of explanations/rationales for a law/custom like Fran describes, and the author has only just begun to give us crumbs of information about such matters.

Aaaand we jumped the shark. Told you there would be "you're cute now that you don't wear glasses" nonsense.

She still wears glasses.

Wow so much drama suddenly. It looks like this will be different from doujin version. And I think Marie is in love with Mel

We're pretty sure that's true, so can Marie not speak of her love because:

• She knows that Mel is in love with someone else.
• Beastkin are not allowed to love their masters, and two beastkin girls are not allowed to love one another.

Which raises the further questions:

Are there even any male beastkin?
Are beastkin allowed to love humans who are not their masters?

Or are beastkin girls forbidden from ever loving anyone at all?

To which I say thee nay, nay, a thousand times nay! Mel must be allowed to love and to be loved freely and fully, for the moe power of Mel hath restored the frozen heart of her beautiful, kind, doting Master because Mel is the cutest thing ever to go on two or four legs, especially what with the fluffy tail and the big eyes. Plus the collar.

(The falling off things into the arms of the Master doesn't hurt the cuteness factor either.)

(ahem) But as I was saying--love must overcome!

Yeah, although Fujishiro starts out as, and to a considerable extent remains, a vain and shallow idiot, she's also shown herself to be brave and fundamentally sincere--that "The only thing I care to hear is what you want to do" scene is a classic "really a good person" trope.

Every signal in this story says that ultimately these two are going to be very good for each other.

Well, right, my point being that moral judgments about a hypothetical future Mel/Master romantic relationship generally assume some facts not in evidence, since beastkin don't actually exist in real life, and the story has been mostly silent on the nuts-and-bolts of what beastkin actually are and how they are integrated into non-beastkin society.

The most concrete evidence we have on such matters are Mist's anti-pedo warnings and Fran's "beastkin cannot be lovers with their masters," and although both Mist and Fran may turn out to be exactly right, neither one is exactly portrayed as a well-informed authority figure.

I personally would love to hear Colette's definitive position on the issue.

There is official art of them fucking.

Right, but it's pretty clear at this point (as it was not for quite a few chapters at the beginning) that this series is an entirely different continuity from the several different doujins (although I did not think so at first and even argued the opposite).

The "Master and Me" stories start out with Mel and the Master already in a "special," explicitly physically intimate relationship, and, while it was implied that certain aspects of their relationship should be kept private, even from Colette, there was almost no suggestion that it constituted any sort of major ethical, moral, or legal problem. (In fact, there was relatively little attention paid to much of anything outside the house itself.)

I suppose by a very large stretch of the imagination you could argue that those more sexually explicit stories take place after the events in this one, but I really don't think so--the tone and the attitudes of the characters are just so different, and this series has lately become considerably more continuity-conscious and structured on multi-episode arcs than it was at first and much more so than the doujins ever were. So whatever the ultimate relationship between the two characters turns out to be, this series is clearly making that relationship an important problem to be solved rather than taking their intimacy for granted.

i wont approve master x mel ship until mel's age is legal duh

What is the lifespan of beastkin, when do they reach sexual maturity, and what is their legal age of consent?

Nothing's been said that would indicate they live shorter lives than humans yet. And it wouldnt be that out of the question for the marriageable age to be lower since this is more of an olden days setting. The bigger limiting factor seems to be race.

Well, right, my point being that moral judgments about a hypothetical future Mel/Master romantic relationship generally assume some facts not in evidence, since beastkin don't actually exist in real life, and the story has been mostly silent on the nuts-and-bolts of what beastkin actually are and how they are integrated into non-beastkin society.

The most concrete evidence we have on such matters are Mist's anti-pedo warnings and Fran's "beastkin cannot be lovers with their masters," and although both Mist and Fran may turn out to be exactly right, neither one is exactly portrayed as a well-informed authority figure.

I personally would love to hear Colette's definitive position on the issue.