"Does she emit some special pheromones?"

Well that escalated quickly.

Yeah, the art has some issues but nothing insurmountable. The author seems to have no trouble whatsoever with scenery but is still struggling a bit with people I reckon.

Probably just Mirakurun being Serious Business

Dat Ass (⌐■⌓■)

Suddenly Grimdark D:

More not lizards obviously.

I don't think a legal definition is going to be very relevant here, unless Kohane decides to press charges and this suddenly metamorphoses into a courtroom drama...
Now that would certainly be one unforeseen plot twist.

Practically speaking it's clear what Aoi was intending to do; exactly how far she got before the cavalry arrived is probably somewhat irrelevant to everyone involved.

Well that husband has been dead for, what, 16 years or so. Even if you miss them you kind of get over it.
Plus I understand having a kid to look after does wonders for keeping your priorities (ahem) straight - you're plain too busy with everyday things and managing the household to mope around. (AFAIK it's been seriously theorized this is one reason women tend to be better at overcoming severe crises than men.)

...come think of it, back in the day babysitting Asuka may well have helped Akira deal with the loss of her brother too.

last edited at May 9, 2018 11:26AM

They're unlikely to definitively identify themselves as anything because they don't need to. Think about it as similar to the reflexive bond between family members with a reasonably healthy relationship; "because they're family!" "and?" "...because family."

I know I personally couldn't actually define that meaningfully more coherently; same way as I'd actually have a bit of a hard time giving a very detailed description of said family members' physical appearances because it's something you don't pay conscious attention to. It just is and you normally never even think about the whole thing.

Akiho and Fuyumi would basically be that but in the "functionally married childhood friends" edition.

And, yes, as already discussed they're probably not a very good reference for a "normal" relationship following the more or less standard progression chain. Natsuko's reaction to seeing those two in action (so to speak) tends to just amount to a awed if embarassed "...wow."
Incidentally, notice how neither Haruko nor Natsuko is ever actually so gauche as to really question them about this kind of stuff? Conversely they ask the adult couple some rather (amusingly) blunt questions pretty much on first meeting.
Probably not a coincidence that the latter are nigh certainly a far more useful example for themselves...

stronkest⑨subtext

This can't be just bait, or is it? Please tell me it's not and there will be development in their relationship

This level of bait would honestly be a commendable achievement in itself.

Konatsu pls, why are you so ungodly smooth even half asleep

So far Kanamori's the only prior member of the club who isn't at least hinted to have Some Issues™ while Aoi's already off the deep end, and given the rate it's been going I'm not holding my breath on the former either.

...on a completely different note what's with the MahiMahi expy Actually Not Identical Twins first-years?

10/10 break-room banter

...in Mahjong Powerlevels: The Verse?

Whoa what, was this series always this ghey? I need to go reread it from the beginning...

Fair. The less it comes up in the future the better, most likely. But at least they tried.

[yandere intensifies]
[heavy raping]
...wait, what? D:

Well at least there wasn't a(n attempted) scissor murder like I was half expecting... Not completely sure the described copulation mechanics really compute but eh. Author gets brownie points for at least having put some thought into the nitty-gritty of the matter instead of just handwaving it.

FWIW Akiho actually did get cold feet about following through with her teasing. One also notes the kissing bit was the only thing Fuyumi has ever expressed a smidgen of jealousy over, so it doesn't seem very far-fetched to assume the act holds real emotional gravitas to them both - quite possibly more than they realised before the matter was brought up.

Incidentally, Haruko by comparison... ( . )( . ) ԅ(≖‿≖ԅ)

last edited at May 8, 2018 3:59PM

Fuyumi seems like one of those people who's fine with solitude but enjoys company well enough, though (not unlike Haruko in that regard) - Akiho seems to have been the first friend she made and she didn't seem to be particularly troubled by the whole thing beforehand. She's also gradually starting to warm up to Natsuki & Co. and doesn't have any principal objections to widening her/their social circles so there's that.

Anyways. Those two for all intents and purposes grew into their particular relationship, given it started when they were still in elementary school. It's likely intuitive to them now in the same vein as their relationships with their family members; something you don't question, think about or need to specifically define or label unless you have some specific reason to (which usually means some level of unpleasant drama or strife).

That certainly doesn't make them a very useful point of reference for someone going through the (relatively) regular kinds of teenage romantic shenanigans of course, since in that context considerable quantities of time and anxiety tend to go into worrying and fretting over the specifics of the relationship. A fair bit of common ground is missing from the respective experiences.

Going by the convo in-story at least this society is apparently fine with basically any match-up if the string says so, so there's that.

Mind you... far as we're told the string between any given pair is only visible to themselves so others will basically just have to take them at their word anyway.

EDIT: Also, you can imagine the epic cultural clashes that will occur when something like the European trade ships contacting China. When the system is worldwide, and the societies view the significance of the string differently, the resulting problems when strings start appearing across borders will be =/

IRL state borders in the modern sense didn't really even exist until about the 1800s to begin with, and only in exceptional cases do they form an insurmountable barrier to human movements. Practical economic concerns and the like are normally a rather bigger one (hence the earlier about problems of distance and the means to deal with them).
Hell.
Last I heard marrying a native is generally one of the easier ways to get naturalized.

In premodern context a far more relevant worry would be if the couple's respective relevant social units (families, clans, tribes, whatever) have some kinds of hostilities going... and I don't want to even think about what kind of sand this will throw into the gears of upper-class dynastic calculations. Probably just results in a widespread practice of adopting heirs if necessary, many IRL societies have run with that for a long time anyway.

last edited at May 8, 2018 12:24PM

They also kind of have warped senses, and have only ever said they do it because they enjoy it, so there doesn't seem to be any emotional element to it. Which is why I find it tough to define them as dating.

Akiho and Fuyumi pretty much jumped straight from "childhood friends" to "functionally married" without passing "Go" bothering with the various intermediate steps. To all appearances by now their relationship is such a natural and self-evident part of their lives they don't even think about it and would probably get rather confused if you asked them for some kind of definition.

Hell, Akiho keeps wanting to kiss other girls.

She's also a troll and would hardly be the only one curious about how widely applicable the bodyswap thing is...
Hell.
Fuyumi herself tested the matter with her dog. She STRONGLY DISAPPROVES of the idea of Akiho experimenting with other girls though.

Not necessarily - we know that a couple's strings don't appear at the exact same time, so if your destined partner is ten years younger than you, you'll just find that your string connects to an 8-year-old and they'll have to wait ten years for their own string to show up. That's... not really better, though. Actually, I sorta wish I didn't think of it.

As usual these fairytale gimmicks do not stand up to much scrutiny. I'm also tolerably certain the mechanism doesn't, and can't, account for problems of distance and only too likely lack of means of dealing with those on part of the people involved...
ʅ ( • ε • ) ʃ

Realistically it'd mostly be creepy af. Some kind of... unfathomable supernatural mechanism just pairing people up in practical terms at random?

It would not be randomly pairing 2 people and then 'forcing' them to love each other via magic or whatever, but more simply, you could look at it as the red string ties you to the one person you are most perfectly matched with? All it is doing is removing the need to search for a suitable partner. You still need to build your love / relationship up with them.

From a mere mortal perspective it might - and in reality may - as well be completely random because you have no idea what it's working off of. There is even less input of the relevant people involved than if they were consulting their damn horoscopes (or tea leaves); moreover the general tone in-story is that this arbitrary supernatural matchmaking is very much treated as gospel.

One does wonder how minor complications like couples falling out or widowers or whatever get handled by the "system"... Moreover, given that it appears to be an universal default that the effect fires on your 18th birthday (which is an utterly arbitrary trigger condition in the first place; onset of sexual maturity would make far more sense) the obvious corollary is that everyone marries within their age-cohort, period. And I can only too well imagine the sociocultural norms and taboos that would swiftly grow around this phenomenom...

Put bluntly all of this sounds rather disturbingly homogenizing and stifling. Dunno 'bout you but I'm kind of a fan of individual mortal agency in this sort of thing...

I'm just trying to figure out how twins were born a day apart. They were born at midnight?

That explanation would certainly seem to require the fewest supporting assumptions...