Damn, this place is so fascistic, I hate it.

Damn, this place is so fascistic, I hate it.

What part of "Military school" is unclear to you? Discipline is the basic of the army.

This school looks more like a "future officers school" than a school for grunts though. It's pretty tame actually. Teaching them maths, literature, history, science, etc... is pretty useless if you only intend to send them on some war front.

Still, I wonder if they will see combat, or the death of their comrades.

For now, it's just a pseudo-historic military twist on a classic highschool setting. Cute, but I hope it's more than that.

last edited at Aug 7, 2018 4:50AM

Damn, this place is so fascistic, I hate it.

My God, better stay away from Strawberry Panic!, then.

They have worse than drill sergeants—they have nuns!

OKAY NEVERMIND SHE GOT GROUNDED, YAAY

Ten bucks says she doesn’t stay grounded on Sunday.

OKAY NEVERMIND SHE GOT GROUNDED, YAAY

Ten bucks says she doesn’t stay grounded on Sunday.

I'll raise to 20 and say one of her two doting senpai will formulate an escape plan

Ummmm...

The protagonist sure is cute. But as a Chinese I just can't read this without some weird lingering feeling. If only this was post-WWII.

im korean but i wasnt even thinking about that since it hasnt really touched that stuff too much

regardless, yuri makes almost everything pardonable

I think many of us have agreed that there's just no way this (so far adorable) series can even come remotely near to touching on the real-life history of the Japanese military without the whole thing collapsing like a house of cards.

I guess it's possible to imagine something more historically unlikely than a Japanese military academy for female officers during this time period. But it's not easy.

So if you're going to do it, you might as well make it really cute.

I mean, moeifying a fascist military could be the source of discomfort in and of itself ala one of the pretty major complaints about Hetalia Axis Powers. I'd totally understand people being put off by an institution that committed horrific war crimes against your people being the backdrop for a cutesy romcom. Like, I don't think I could stomach a yuri story about characters in the Hitler Youth.

Damn, this place is so fascistic, I hate it.

My God, better stay away from Strawberry Panic!, then.

They have worse than drill sergeants—they have nuns!

I hate religion in general, so schools where religion is shoved down your throat are garbage also, not that the one from SP is that way, really. I don't like that series for a whole other reason, but I know it means a lot to a bunch of ppl.

Ohh! This is going to become a great series, I can feel it!

Reminds me a bit of Daiteikoku, the AliceSoft sRPG/visual novel game. That re-writes WWII into space, with Japan defending China from evil Western capitalists (by invading it). Oh, and Hitler is some sort of pop-idol girl.

And I thought, "well, this is obviously comedy, someone just dicking around; it's got nothing to do with reality ..." - but I played it a bit and I just could not stomach it. Which feels a bit hypocritical if I looked around at all the incest, rape, loli stuff and whatnot else one might be outraged about; and of all these things some sort of parody thing bugged me?

But even knowing that I couldn't get over it and I fear this'll be exactly the same ^^;

Damn, this place is so fascistic, I hate it.

Besides what Nya-chan said - strict discipline kind of comes with the territory - this is an early 20th century school. By modern (Western, at least) standards period education systems were categorically hair-raisingly autocratic.
Hell.
This depiction is a lot milder than memoirs of real period civilian boarding schools I've read, such as Orwell's Such, Such Were the Joys...

This school looks more like a "future officers school" than a school for grunts though. It's pretty tame actually. Teaching them maths, literature, history, science, etc... is pretty useless if you only intend to send them on some war front.

Enlisted grunts don't go into fancy academies but boot camps so, yeah. They also start a whole lot older (around 20 was the typical early-1900s age requirement for draft or enlistement) except in dire national emergencies when the older youths are already all in uniform.
Maths and sciences are pretty important for eg. engineers and artillerists though - no coincidence such "technical" branches have long been the "thinking man's services" alongside the Navy. (The cavalry, conversely, was stereotypically the refuge of the... less cerebral... officers, demanding as it did more split-second decision-making and on-the-fly improvisation than diligent planning.) And officers are universally expected to be pretty well-educated; military history in particular has always been something of a focus in search of useful models and experiences to emulate. Incidentally Western and Westernized militaries during the "Long Nineteenth Century" had a raging hard-on for Classical Antiquity and the Napoleonic Wars as models.

last edited at Aug 7, 2018 8:00AM

Forget it, random—we knew it was inevitable that in this one rough-and-tumble courtship play was going to be read as “bullying.”

The only “victims” I see here is that the whole school either has or is about to come down with a bad case of Indou-itis.

Everything about this setting and dynamic is just hella uncomfortable. First you've got the whole "Imperial Japanese military as protagonists" which is its own can of worms. Then there's the fact that military schools are pretty much universally super creepy and abusive even in modernity. Finally, Kagami is kind of terrible. Not only is she so shallow that she only starts treating Indou with a semblance of civility after she discovers she's cute but any sort of pursuit on her part is a blatant abuse of the authority granted to her by the school's hierarchy. Like the text in no way attempts to gloss over the power imbalance between them and in fact goes out of its way to draw attention to it.

last edited at Aug 7, 2018 9:49AM

^Far be it from me to tell anyone that their feelings about a story are wrong, and there’s a grain of truth in all your objections. As in so many manga (especially ones with any kind of age gap/authority gap), we’re being asked to ignore (here, because they’re papered over with cuteness) a lot of things that would be uncomfortable, or worse, in real life.

But as others have suggested before, I think this is a misreading of what’s going on with Kagami’s reactions to Indou. At first, as in the eyes of almost any military person, dirty, ragged street-urchin Indou is just unacceptable—it’s Ooba’s Big Sis reaction that’s the anomaly.

And it’s pretty clear that Kagami’s affectionate side is sparked by seeing what Indou really looks like and realizing that she strongly resembles someone from the past who was very important to Kagami (almost certainly Indou’s mother, who we know was someone significant in the military).

So, yeah, there’s something inappropriate about Kagami’s feelings toward Indou (again, as there is in almost all age-gap/authority-gap yuri in a school setting), but those feelings aren’t based merely on Kagami discovering that Indou looks cute.

last edited at Aug 7, 2018 10:15AM

^Far be it from me to tell anyone that their feelings about a story are wrong, and there’s a grain of truth in all your objections. As in so many manga (especially ones with any kind of age gap/authority gap), we’re being asked to ignore (here, because they’re papered over with cuteness) a lot of things that would be uncomfortable, or worse, in real life.

But it's doing such a terrible job of papering over it which is my point. Like, explicitly making a point of Indou being unable to criticize Kagami in private correspondence with family does not help my discomfort with this dynamic it just makes me think "Oh shit, Indou has literally no recourse if Kagami abuses her authority over her." Her being unable to have private conversations with her classmates does not draw attention away from the unsettling authoritarianism of military schools. It's hard to suspend my disbelief about the implications of the setting when the writer keeps bringing me down hard into those same unpleasant realities.

Then there's the fact that military schools are pretty much universally super creepy and abusive even in modernity.

...you sure you're not committing the common confusion with "reform schools" - a form of juvenile prison - discussed here...?

last edited at Aug 7, 2018 10:32AM

Then there's the fact that military schools are pretty much universally super creepy and abusive even in modernity.

...you sure you're not committing the common confusion with "reform schools" - a form of juvenile prison - discussed here...?

I mean those are also super creepy and abusive but no. Grooming children to be soldiers is child abuse as far as I'm concerned.

OK. I shudder to think what the reaction would be to the depiction of anything remotely resembling an actual military school (or many actual girls’ boarding schools, for that matter) rather than the summer camp with cute uniforms and sometimes stern-faced but kindly young (and cute) counselors that we’re given here. But as always, YMMV.

I mean those are also super creepy and abusive but no. Grooming children to be soldiers is child abuse as far as I'm concerned.

Well go picket any number of institutions then, but honestly, at that point you might as well stop reading this series given it's more or less about such.

Bit like reading a story set in a monastery and then complaining about the characters being religious, y'know?

you might as well stop reading this series given it's more or less about such.

Oh, this is definitely the last chapter of this I'm reading, I just wanted to express my opinion on how it approaches its rather controversial setting.

you might as well stop reading this series given it's more or less about such.

Oh, this is definitely the last chapter of this I'm reading, I just wanted to express my opinion on how it approaches its rather controversial setting.

That's perfectly fine--as I said, many of your points have validity, and you're obviously not alone in your opinion.

I just wanted to point out that not only do manga of all types often put a happy face on all sorts of problematic things, but, given the actual state of Japanese cultural attitudes toward homosexuality/lesbianism, the yuri genre as a whole tends to be a fantastically benign gloss on a very different (and often abusive) reality (not that Japan is alone in that regard by any means).

But where you draw the line is up to you, of course.

https://dynasty-scans.com/chapters/a_love_letter_for_the_marching_puppy_ch01#27

"The cadet academy is a training school for army officials". So there. For officers.

In short, it's a high school preparing young girls for military college.

Its just fiction. Some ppl takes things waaaay to serious. Calm down

Damn, this place is so fascistic, I hate it.

Fascism turns people into gay

Damn, this place is so fascistic, I hate it.

My God, better stay away from Strawberry Panic!, then.

They have worse than drill sergeants—they have nuns!

oww. my sides hahaha

Fascism turns people into gay

Looking at the obliviously homoerotic propaganda imagery those kinds of regimes tended to produce this seems rather plausible. If now somewhat at odds with their professed reactionary values and rampant homophobia, but then consistency and self-awareness were never the strong suits of that particular ideological current...