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Kirin
Image Comments 20 Nov 22:39
Tragedian%202
joined Oct 1, 2020
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Akko: While you were learning magic at school, I studied the nearest lesbian.

Tragedian%202
joined Oct 1, 2020

So, perhaps the church created the problem that it justifies its power by "solving." This still leaves us with, "church bad," but it adds to the developing complexity of vampires and aligns with the "everything is grey" aesthetic of this manga.

Yeah, this would be a great way to add some complexity to the series while still not putting the plot on vacation for a Bible rereading arc (I think FE3H also uses the trope to great effect, although the route structure muddles the flow of information up a bit).

Personally, I think there's two ways they could go about it, apart from the whole vampires-originally-enslaved-humanity angle that one of the posters above already mentioned-

1: The Societal Angle- Vampires are quite literally created by the church, in that it converted poor, marginalized people on the edges of society into mosnters in order to engineer a threat to humanity, and then brutally stomped them out in order to win goodwill and establish order. But the vampires either got too powerful to normally suppress, or the heads of the church decided to keep some of the main covens around in order to maintain the cycle of violence and prevent radical social advancement (basically like the human village in Touhou). This would tie pretty neatly into the history of vampire fiction- the two oldest vampires in English literature have been a lesbian and an immigrant respectively, so a big part of the fear of vampires was an extension of ye olde British fear of witches and the occult- God forbid (literally) that the non-privileged seize our power and shift the status quo. This would also allow for Dorothy to realize that her entire crusade is pointless, because there is no absolute good or evil, and so the only thing she has left to rely on in this bitch of a world is her hunger for cute chicks. Basically, she'll be gay and do blasphemy (bonus points if her dead mama is affiliated with the bloodsuckers).

2: The Religious Angle- The Church descends from angels and God, but the vampires are fallen angels as well, so they argue that they have a greater claim to divinity than a bunch of corrupt assholes. It'd be pretty unlikely for the story to take this route, especially since the religious doctrine in this manga seems to be appropriating Catholicism without actually drawing on its mythology, but I'm just putting it in here because I kinda want an Armageddon-type ending where the angels and the demons duke it out for good with crazy anime superpowers and in the end, society resets and we just have Dorothy and Maria chilling naked in the garden of Eden, snacking on each other's forbidden fruits and preparing to populate the world anew with soft vampire lesbians (a society I'm sure everyone would agree is utopian).

Tragedian%202
joined Oct 1, 2020

Also, this is not an inate problem of Sentais. There are several Sentai MC who are strong on their own. Vivid and Nanoha - the apex of friendship crap - is a good example of it.

Vivid and Nanoha aren't sentai protagonists, they're magical girls. Lyrical Nanoha was also specifically made to be more action-packed and cater to adult men who liked explosions, so it's extremely atypical even for a magical girl series. You're using the exceptions to criticize the norms, while also completely and totally missing the actual genre that the norms come from.

You read too much into it and read it complety wrong... Bringing up a genre I have no problem with. And no work is free from criticism and I should just accept a work because it's yuri? The tag says "action", so I gonna judge it because of the action as well. People give Citrus shit because of the forced drama not because of the yuri in it. I'm not gonna focus on one aspect of a series and ignore the other. They are both part of it.

Again, you're free to criticize the action to the high heavens, but it's not gonna change, because there is a market for it that clearly appreciates what Sometime is doing (or the manga wouldn't get a whole second arc). As stated before, your grievances are this manga's literal USP, so if you see it fit to criticize the 'action' for not matching your expectations, you'll just end up here every time a new chapter comes out, complaining about the same tired old issue. If that's what you want to do, then knock yourself out. I expect that people who appreciate the series for what it is will simply ignore you as time goes by.

Tragedian%202
joined Oct 1, 2020

France deciding that blocking Nhentai will help fight Pedophily.

The insanity of the current day is truly frightening. "Let's do this thing that has never worked in the history of it being used, because surely it'll work THIS time."

I mean drugs are still mostly criminalised everywhere...

You're thinking too broadly. I was simply talking about banning fictional writings.

I mean it's at least equally applicable. The Prohibition was such a smashing success wasn't it?

I am now afraid of whoever the heck might be the Al Capone of paedophiles.

Kirin
Tragedian%202
joined Oct 1, 2020

Anything in a similar vein to Bocchi Kaibutsu to Moumoku Shoujo? Idk if its the monster girl angle, or the blind girl angle, or just the genuine amazing romance angle, but this is one of the greatest things I have read in a loooong time

If you're looking for fluff, try She Becomes a Tree.
If you're looking for drama, try A Monster Wants to Eat Me.
If you're looking for purely monster girls, try Isyuzoku Joshi ni ○○ Suru Hanashi.
If you're looking for ecchi, try I Am Not a Succubus.
If you're looking for amazing romance between those of different species, try Machikado Mazoku.
If you're looking for generally animal-themed cuteness, try The Moon is Beautiful Tonight.
If you're looking for chill monster girl SOL with subtext, try Ayakashiko.
If you're looking for high-speed gayness, try A Succubus Yuri Story.

Tragedian%202
joined Oct 1, 2020

So, just out of curiosity: Just how old is "Church is Evil" trope in Japanese media, and where exactly did it originate?

Historically, Japan has had a pretty tumultuous relationship with Christianity- Catholic missionaries from Europe had more trouble converting the Japanese than they did with people of other nations, owing to the highly-entrenched nature of both Shintoism and Buddhism, as well as the nature of Japanese as a language quite different from, say Indian languages (you'll have to read up on Francis Xavier for more details, since he was one of the primary missionaries involved in both Japanese and Indian conversions). Even after they got some conversions carried out and won Oda Nobunaga's favor, the religion was seen with considerably more suspicion by Toyotomi Hideyoshi and the Tokugawa Shogunate, to the point where it was banned as threat to national unity. Christians and Catholics were publicly murdered and even crucified, with the luckier ones only forced to convert, and later on, the Shimabara Rebellion only led to more oppression. After Japan opened up in the Meiji era, the religion was unbanned, but there was this general sense of bitterness and suspicion about the faith prevalent in the country. It was seen as a sign of colonial Europe, being thoroughly anti-traditionalist and alien. The westernization of later eras did soften these suspicions, especially since churches and Catholic schools started to be established and were often seen as places of high culture and prestige (you can see hints of this in Class S stories).

The point of all this is that Japanese media has an extremely odd, almost-contradictory view of Christianity- they adore the aesthetic and love to appropriate the symbols and terminology because it sounds exotic (as seen in everything from Neon Genesis Evangelion to Seraph of the End to Bible Black). There's generally little regard given to accuracy or history, because the Church embodies the aesthetic of aristocratic, rich Europe, while also being considerably more disciplined and mysterious than a standard monarchy. From a narrative standpoint, you can do a lot with churches- everything from ninja-monks to secret angels to chained-up gods. They've got fixed ideologies, a clear cultural association, and are what you might call 'stock institutions' in the same way as you have pseudo-Nazi governments or pseudo-Victorian societies- no actual historical context is dropped, but if you see a militant racist with an armband or a baroness in a frilly dress, you generally know what to expect. Audiences are saved the effort of needing to think about what a character might represent or contemplating the political ramifications of their existence, because they know that the pseudo-Nazi is a dick and that the pseudo-Victorian is stuck-up, just as they know that the pseudo-priest/nun is dedicated and possibly fanatical underneath a façade of kindness.

The Church being evil is, as Throbelisk above pointed out, a very realistic trope, and also your basic 'everyone apart from the characters saw this coming'-type of subversion. The audience expects the Church to be evil the moment they see a priest grinning sinisterly or spot a nun beating up a choirboy, so they're spared the effort of debating the ills and benefits of religion and can just eagerly anticipate the moment where the veil comes off.

TL;DR- Part of it is just good old-fashioned religious scepticism that you commonly find in modern stories, where anyone who's super-devoted to any kind of faith is assumed to be kooky; part of it is Japan's weird love for European aesthetics versus their disdain for European society; and part of it is just because it lets you simultaneously set up and invert a status quo without actually needing to do much worldbuilding, since you've already established the three-act structure of your story's evolution- Act One, the church rules, Act Two, the church is revealed to be bad, Act Three, we take down the church and build something new. I do wish that stories actually delved into what made churches work in the first place, though- they wouldn't be so powerful if they didn't offer large groups of people legitimate inspiration and faith. There's just so much ground to cover- optimism decaying into scepticism, debates over the idea of evil, the doctrine in scriptures versus the truth, the corruption in higher echelons versus the faith of new acolytes, and a million other fascinating topics, but nope- your standard Japanese story just makes churches shady from the word go, and only uses them to give characters Bible-themed superpowers so they can brawl things out on a chapel in the final chapters. But I guess that's what people expect and want- boring debates on theology in dusty libraries between disillusioned monks would probably be less entertaining than a plan to use Satan's femur to shoot God in the throat.

Tragedian%202
joined Oct 1, 2020

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMXRWurZenY

Can we appreciate how Shinra-Bansho made a better yuri story in five minutes than anything that's come out in the past year? If only music videos could get anime adaptations.

Kirin
Vow discussion 20 Nov 04:28
Tragedian%202
joined Oct 1, 2020

Wow, this feels like a Touhou Tonari speedrun. Yukari and Yuyuko's relationship has always been highly mysterious, exacerbated by the fact that both parties involved are ridiculously secretive and obtuse on their own.

You'd think they'd at least be honest with each other, and maybe they are, but even the most intimate of outsiders can't tell, since they've reached a level of closeness beyond words. But in that case, you also couldn't tell if they were arguing. It's a nightmare for everyone involved, but there's something very self-destructively romantic about it. Unless you're Youmu, in which case, you only get migraines.

last edited at Nov 21, 2020 3:41PM

Tragedian%202
joined Oct 1, 2020

Interesting. I like the minimalist approach to horror- the panels drowning in darkness really build atmosphere.

Kirin
Assassin discussion 20 Nov 02:08
Tragedian%202
joined Oct 1, 2020

I'm grateful this tag exists. It's so specific, and yet filled with infinite potential.

Tragedian%202
joined Oct 1, 2020

There is more than 1 kind of strength. Honey is the one winning battles for her? If she hadn't won Honey over, the aliens would already be ruling the Earth. That's real power.

So she should just be a motivational speaker, then. She seems be better at that then fighting. If it wasn't for Honey, she would've been defeated and dead more than three times now. And yes... Rapid only wins because of Honey.

You do realize that this series is chock-full of sentai references? Heroes on your daily/weekly sentai shows never go full ape-shit on people until the last five minutes of an episode. Your average 5-10 year old kid isn't going to be able to comprehend complex plotlines (or at least, studios don't think they'll be able to comprehend them), so it's a lot easier to put in villains with an interesting design each week and run the same basic fight structure all over again. Sentai makes a shit-ton of money from merchandising, so the focus is much more on equipment than it is on moves- rather than having a whole set of skills or choreographing fights with unnamed moves, these shows just feature certain devices, weapons or powers that get activated at a certain point into the fight and wipe the enemy out in one hit. The reason you have big casts is, as mentioned by posters above, to instill in kids a respect for the power of friendship and cooperation, and also to create a larger cast of merchandisable characters with their own, individual merchandisable equipment.

This isn't just sentai-exclusive either- if you've ever watched a magical girl show aimed at kids, like Precure, or even pro-wrestling (John Cena's Five moves of Doom), you'll see a very set pattern to the fights. People want to see patterns, to predict the flow of fights, to boo when the heroes get beaten down and cheer when they pop back up, to sing along with heroic themes when they blast out, to say the invocation lines they've heard a hundred times before. People don't watch sentai to be shocked or surprised- they know it's predictable, and focus more on the emotional content (which, in this case, is our leading pair of lesbians).

The point is, if you're going into this series with huge expectations of thrilling fights, you're not going to be satisfied. Sometime is pretty committed to following a sentai-based story structure and using the tropes and conventions of the medium, which is the entire appeal. Audiences in Japan (for whom the story is intended), will probably lap it up and cheer every time they see a reference to something they recognize from their childhood. You seem to want the series to be something that it isn't, and although half-a-dozen people have explained this to you in various ways, the argument's still ongoing.

Basically, this is never going to turn into some kind of shonen battle series, because it was never supposed to be one in the first place. Your problems and complaints with the way fights are portrayed will never be addressed, because for the author, they aren't issues, but selling points. What you're doing here is the equivalent of criticizing a boxing match for not featuring piledrivers, or saying that a magical girl series is shit because none of the girls come up with 500 IQ plans to ambush the monsters that they know are going to show up each week. You're missing the point, and therefore, this argument has become pointless.

As a solution, you could either understand and accept what this series is trying to do with its fights and keep reading it for the yuri, or just drop it altogether if it isn't to your liking. This isn't like some arc or plot development that'll come and go- it's a vital part of the series' identity. Otherwise, this'll just turn into another one of those Futaribeya-type threads where one person criticizes the series for being something that it doesn't want to be and never promised to be, while others strive valiantly to explain an entire genre as good or bad storytelling.

Tragedian%202
joined Oct 1, 2020

"May the blue moonlight shine down upon you!" is just how werewolves tell each other that they're taking booty calls. It'd be hilarious if the kid turned into an adorable chihuahua on moonlit nights while still being as badass as everyone else, but I guess that's just my love for the killer rabbit from Monty Python speaking.

Tragedian%202
joined Oct 1, 2020

This was the first chapter of this manga that really clicked with me. I'd never really loved this series at any point before- the art was pretty and the content was fluffy, but it always felt like it was lacking a distinct, central identity. But since it was one of the 'big' yuri series currently serialized and also one of the earliest ones I'd read, I followed it on instinct, and boy, am I glad that I didn't give up.

Kino and Yori really come into their own characters this time around- they feel like real, breathing, anxious people, with all the fluffy little SOL bits of character-building reinforced on the date. There's a very realistic flow to their dialogue and thoughts that I couldn't find before, a sense of emotion packed into every panel, and you can tell just how much Eku's art and storytelling has grown from the first chapters of this manga, which felt rather like Kirara 4-komas in their odd, disconnected flippancy. Now that this story's committed to exploring the two as a couple and giving us a peek into their relationships while also fleshing out the musical world, I am extremely hyped for what's to come.

It's been a great ride, but I feel like the fun's just starting.

Kirin
Image Comments 19 Nov 10:32
Tragedian%202
joined Oct 1, 2020
9676377

Satori needs catgirls and birbs for therapy.

Kirin
Image Comments 19 Nov 10:29
Tragedian%202
joined Oct 1, 2020
66643541_p0

Tfw you want both a computer and a body pillow, but can only afford one, so you get a fox-wife instead. Yukari truly deserves her position as the CEO of lesbians.

Tragedian%202
joined Oct 1, 2020

This is the greatest story ever written. Rap Battle Touhou game when?

Tragedian%202
joined Oct 1, 2020

"hyper trans on" Every main character is trans, sorry authors word.

Based Melt giving transbians the power to have kids. She's the hero (villain?) we need and deserve.

Kirin
Image Comments 18 Nov 13:37
Tragedian%202
joined Oct 1, 2020
Elf4-stvcainsfy-orig

^ It's gotten to the point where FGO's characters completely overshadow the original figures in Google searches. I pity the lit and history grad students of the future who get into the Táin Bó Cúailnge and look up Scathach, only to find pictures of some anime lady in tights and links to an FGO wikia article that explains the 15 different ways in which she begs for the sweet release of death while calling you Master. Fun stuff.
Then again, most people probably wouldn't even know about these figures if it wasn't for FGO being more popular than oxygen, so as long they're mature enough to understand that FGO takes ridiculous liberties with the source material, I guess everyone will be fine. In their own pandering, waifu-baiting way, I guess Nasu and Co are doing a service to stories that would otherwise be ridiculously obscure.

Tragedian%202
joined Oct 1, 2020

This was great. Doremy being everyone's lax therapist/health instructor and passive-aggressively alternating between telling them to go ape-shit and just take a nap will never get old.

Kirin
Yuru Oyako discussion 17 Nov 23:27
Tragedian%202
joined Oct 1, 2020

A lil something I requested from /u/'s drawthread. I'm ashamed of how proud I am of this joke.

Excellent.
I am also now thinking of a MIL,F- a young office lady who wants to reconnect with her mother and have some soulful conversations, but keeps getting interrupted by phone calls from work before she can ask her mom to chat.

Kirin
Desire discussion 17 Nov 10:46
Tragedian%202
joined Oct 1, 2020

This was pretty dark. Eirin's motivations for concocting the elixir have always been mysterious, but I liked how this story presents a simple, shallow motive as every bit as destructive as something twisted or extreme. Eirin felt eerily human and vulnerable here, and Kaguya's spoiled, entitled nature is genuinely terrifying in its directionless toxicity.

Tragedian%202
joined Oct 1, 2020

They are the same height, but they also share the same density. -_-

Twins that swim together sink together.

Kirin
Maple Love discussion 17 Nov 02:35
Tragedian%202
joined Oct 1, 2020

Megacute. I like how smoothly the author conveyed the flow of time and the growing intimacy of their relationship. It didn't feel like there were any grand moments or events, but a general, slowly-blooming sense of affection, which is quite realistic. We've got tons of highschool and adult yuri, but college/university yuri also has a wonderful flavour.

Tragedian%202
joined Oct 1, 2020

The plot twist is that there's only one daughter who's desperate for both siblings and romance, so she created an imaginary sister who also wants to do her. The mother is disturbed, but also afraid of how her daughter will react if she points out that it's all a hallucination, so she pretends to be okay with the relationship.

Kirin
Yuru Oyako discussion 17 Nov 01:00
Tragedian%202
joined Oct 1, 2020

Yuuki: But the only way Queen Elizabeth II could exist was if one of the Queens Elizabeth married her mother and took her surname!
Sayaka: ......