I am SO confused. I thought she was still suffering from the age regression curse! Did I miss something between the last chapter and this one?

It appears that in chapter 14, Lan Sha sacrifices her life to lift the princess' curse, so she goes on to break up with the prince in chapter 15, then weird timeline stuff happens (implied to be a fever dream of Lan Sha's player), and the whole story is reset, with the princess and the prince engaged again, and Lan Sha reveals herself as a witch to kill the guards sent to capture the princess, then giving her life to reset the timeline once more (then the player wakes up, meaning this "route" is just involuntary fanfiction).

EDIT: This story is a mess, like it's written by someone who has neither read enough good novels to learn story structure and pacing from example, nor ever looked up the most fundamental basics of outlining.

last edited at Dec 6, 2021 2:05PM

As expected, the bike thief is back. :3

That awkward moment when you stumble into the Yvonne route without realizing that Yvonne is you.

Theory: Not only is Elsa another reincarnated player, but the fact that Yvonne was reincarnated as a villainess is a (possibly unintentional) side effect of Elsa manipulating the game to create an (previously absent) Yvonne route. The villainess system of the game didn't know how to handle Elsa's inputs, so it summoned a player to deal with it and is currently machine-learning how to yuri from her reference.

last edited at Dec 5, 2021 2:44AM

Dang, this page gave me the heebie-jeebies. :-/ Is anyone here well-versed enough in horror tropes to explain to me what makes this kind of ghost depiction so unnerving?

I imagine the lack of defined facial features makes it all the more unnerving. Kind of an uncanny valley thing where it looks just enough human to make you see the resemblance but far enough away for you to know it's not and that something is very wrong. Some theorize the uncanny valley is an instinctual disgust for corpses; i.e. it looks like a living person, but its not and its dangerous to be near it so we respond with "EW!! GROSS!! GET IT AWAY!!"

Having thought about it, I think it's the combo of an eyeless face and an toothless open mouth that got to me. Uncanny valley all way.

Astra knew that Glamor attacks Liane, huh...

He also knows to use soft power (i.e. her massive daddy complex and her drive to succeed at everything) to gradually improve her antisocial behavior without putting unnecessary strain on their own relationship. I mean, he could have scolded her and said "You're a bad person for picking on your lessers", but instead, he framed it as a challenge for Glamor: "Can you be nice to this lesser and take her under your wing for a single evening?"

last edited at Nov 29, 2021 11:43AM

Dang, this page gave me the heebie-jeebies. :-/ Is anyone here well-versed enough in horror tropes to explain to me what makes this kind of ghost depiction so unnerving?

last edited at Nov 29, 2021 2:35AM

The last page really confuses me, though. The other girl comes into the bathroom calling for Lan Sha, but sees her supposedly dead body and freaks out because "witch". Does anyone have a good guess to explain this leap of judgment?

You know when magical girls cast spells, there's bound to be sparkling effects of some sort? Lan Sha's one are butterflies! You can see them surrounding her "dead" body and in the last panel. (As well as when Lan Sha uses forbidden magic and dies for Bai yueguang back in the very first chapter)

Huh, I thought the butterflies were just a special effect for extra drama, not something actually visible to NPCs. :-/

Yuina and Hikari are totally just Reiko's moms now, and I'm here for it.

This is the story of a young woman meeting an outgoing single mother of a special needs child and gradually developing a romantic and a maternal attachment to them, respectively.

last edited at Nov 25, 2021 3:57AM

So she used her soul to save her and then ended up dying? Is the game gonna restart?

It doesn't look like it: when the player character dies for reals, the game is usually over on the spot, but in this chapter, the princess is dealing with its aftermath, so the plot goes on. This makes me think that Lan Sha is at least not dead yet.

The last page really confuses me, though. The other girl comes into the bathroom calling for Lan Sha, but sees her supposedly dead body and freaks out because "witch". Does anyone have a good guess to explain this leap of judgment?

last edited at Nov 25, 2021 2:10AM

also lewd.

Thank you! I mean, how desensitized to lewdness have we as the community become to have let this... debauchery slide without a second comment??

last edited at Nov 25, 2021 1:58AM

What kind of person sees a bike parked somewhere and just... takes it? She deserves to be sued into bankruptcy.

Agreed, she totally just stole that bike. If she really didn’t have bad intentions she would’ve called the police to report it. I really hope that doesn’t get swept under the rug but I’m sure it will.

I disagree: if the author gives a character spoken lines on more than a single page, it is usually a foreshadowing of a bigger speaking role later in the plot. Therefore, Ms. Bike Thief will probably become a regular character, so some kind of reckoning is very likely coming for her.

last edited at Nov 22, 2021 5:33AM

Are lewd routes in wholesome games a thing now?

I just don't understand how the quality of published media deteriorated this quickly on such a widespread scale. Once upon a time we used to understand that Mary Sue was, like, a bad thing? Something that should only be found in bad fanfiction? And yet a genre that only exists for the purpose of writing Mary Sues is now the most popular, mainstream genre in the wn/ln/manga/anime bubble. How did we collectively forget that this isn't good writing?

Oh, I find it very understandable that the demand for pure wish-fulfillment escapist fiction skyrockets in a climate of alienation, uncertainty, and impending existential gloom, especially among the young people who begin to comprehend a) how screwed they all are, b) that it, for the most part, wasn't up to them, and c) that there is very little they can do about it at this point.

last edited at Nov 20, 2021 4:37AM

Edit: I just reread this and noticed the bit at the bottom of Page 32 is referencing the beginning...
AHHH MY HEART

Yukino had planned out her romance all along. :3

I've always hated the almost parasitic nature of most systems in Chinese stories; appearing from nowhere and latching on to a person, going 'Host this' and 'Host that'; compared to the world-wide systems or silent personal programs you see in japanese novels and manga. It's even worse when they pop up in the middle of the story with no preamble.

Perhaps the parasitic system pestering a free-willed person into behaving a specific conformist way is a artistic expression of or, god forbid, a metaphor for something in the authors' lives. :-)

last edited at Nov 19, 2021 6:22AM

Dat twist ending tho.

3 is not even a swim suit. get that shit out of here

You're right; we should all vote for it to make the Demon King suffer.

Being Demon King is suffering.

I have no idea why Japan has this reserved culture though. Does anyone know where this came from?

Not a specialist on Japanese cultural history, but from what I've read, the Japanese society is generally extremely conservative, having been a rigidly regimented hierarchy isolated from the outside world for centuries prior to the (very recent) modernization. The country has been (nominally) liberal and equal-opportunity for less than 80 years (3-4 generations) at this point, so a lot of everyday interactions between regular men and women are still governed by old traditions or at least preconceptions, like that a woman must marry (a man, natch) before she is 25, so the only reason she enters the workforce is to find a husband. Despite all this pressure, traditional courtship rituals assign to her a strictly passive role, so a mixer is in a opportunity to signal her availability without violating "propriety" (i.e. to avoid slut-shaming) by hiding behind a collective presence (that's why it's a group event) and to give the men ample opportunity to initiate courtship during or after the event.

From what I've read, however, even this doesn't really help the Japanese society at large to keep the marriage and birth rates from falling. It's almost like an abundance of obsolete social rituals and norms produces endemic neuroses that make it hard to emotionally engage with other people, let alone with people of the opposite sex...

last edited at Nov 17, 2021 8:14AM

The vampire outright tells her that her kind hates garlic, and the the moeblob goes and buys a whole dish of it? Like, how self-absorbed and inattentive must a person be to miss all that? :-/

There is a weird charm to educational pieces whose practical examples have just enough continuity for the readers' brains to start connecting the dots, but not enough to actually form a complete story. It gives us the touchstones and then let us image our favorite story around them, one that no actual, written-down story can ever match in emotional impact.

last edited at Nov 15, 2021 2:25PM

Huh, so the isekai'd villainess is intentionally sequence-breaking by being nice to the heroine, and the system doesn't know how to handle it and instead pulls up story events that should have come much later in the plot (like her getting exiled after she had actually committed a crime)? In that case, respect to Yvonne for sticking to her guns despite being hurt by the very world she inhabits. No wonder Elsa ends up falling for her instead of the actual LIs -- a willpower like that is helluva attractive...

last edited at Nov 15, 2021 6:45AM

The source material... was definitely not what I was expecting lol

I've tried googling it, but I only found a dress-up game that looks like Pixar movies, which doesn't match the art posted by @Norainhere at all, so I am not sure that's it. :-/

It is the dress-up game lol; here's the wiki page for the elf lady: https://dress-up-time-princess.fandom.com/wiki/Salvia

Aah, I see. Thank you for clarification. :-)

The source material... was definitely not what I was expecting lol

I've tried googling it, but I only found a dress-up game that looks like Pixar movies, which doesn't match the art posted by @Norainhere at all, so I am not sure that's it. :-/

Kissing is the number 3 cause of spontaneous lesbian teen pregnancy after mahjong and IPS cells.

I really would have expected handholding to be in the number one spot...

Handholding cannot cause pregnancy by itself. It's just lewd.

Yaoyao is already getting so intimate with the general huh…

Oh yeah, she is definitely all over her. :D Still, while I agree that she is attracted to the young general, I think it is also a kind of self-defense. She obviously feels extremely vulnerable surrounded by angry cultists and enemy soldiers, and Lin Xiao is the only person so far who openly committed to her safety, so clinging to her may be her way of signalling to everyone "Mess with me and you'll make General Lin angry!"

Also definitely gotta add “you can die standing up or lying down” to my vocab lol

The Imperial Guard dies standing. In other words, the guy should listen to Lin Xiao, not to her dad.

last edited at Nov 4, 2021 5:54AM