I think they made Akechi's ears a little too rabbity. They're supposed more pointed at the ends.
Other than that, this is a perfectly believable event, given the characters.
GrimEater
Nov 6, 2018 10:50PM
Just horsing around, HEY, no harm
random
Nov 7, 2018 2:04AM
If memory serves the manga every now and then dedicates several panels to the topic of "how do clothes work with this kind of anatomy" so there's that.
Throbelisk
Nov 7, 2018 2:26AM
Mega Milk indeed
BugDevil
Nov 7, 2018 4:48AM
@RumpledForeSkin
Those are the Centaur's worries.
Bugpope
Nov 7, 2018 11:32AM
This manga was so good before it completely jumped the shark.
Nezchan
Nov 7, 2018 11:44AM
Agree there. Once it started to get into UFO conspiracies and alternate fantasy worlds and...robot were-tigers, was it? The series pretty much lost the more personal charm it did in the early days.
juanelric
Nov 7, 2018 12:26PM
@RumpledForeSkiin
And @Nezchan wow. That's really jumping the shark. lol
last edited at Nov 7, 2018 12:28PM
Yes_Cantaloupe
Nov 7, 2018 12:58PM
Gonna disagree, the mood whiplash is part of the charm of the manga. It's real good at being cavity-inducingly adorable, weird as fuck, and making interesting social commentary, and the fact that it does it all in back-to-back chapters about a kindergarten, isekai to centaur napoleon or whatever, and subtle ableism in classrooms is incredible.
Bugpope
Nov 7, 2018 7:51PM
Never said I didn't like the mood whiplash, that stuff was good, and you're putting words in our mouths. Yuri romance one chapter, gory historic drama the other.
But when they started travel in time and space, and the robots, it just got too stupid.
last edited at Nov 7, 2018 7:52PM
Blank Mage
Nov 7, 2018 11:46PM
I think what really hurts the tone isn't that it's so out there, but because the world building is SO good early on with how it presents racism and culture in a monster society, that the later chapters dropping it in favor of increasingly sci-fi or even cliche anime tropes kills the atmosphere the early chapters worked so hard to create.
I was fascinated by the rules put in place preventing even consensual centaur riding just by the sheer weight of the history involved. It made the background of the (actually very logical) enslavement of centaurs as beasts of burden and war way more real. The utterly foreign nature of the Antarticans was interesting because seeing the effects of isolation on moral values paired with their just-really-scary appearance made for Best Girl Suu.
Basically our suspension of disbelief went from zero to one hundred in the space of a single volume, when we would have been more than happy to see this story through the lens of it's diverse and likable cast, presented as a little microcosm of a huge and unknowable world. Time travel plots don't fit the themes the series was establishing, robots and laser guns say nothing about how relationships are affected by media (like Hime's fear of Suu based on a horror movie) or how stereotypes are sometimes based in physiology ('centaurs are good at sports' being something Hime kind of subverts).
last edited at Nov 7, 2018 11:56PM
Blank Mage
Nov 7, 2018 11:57PM
This has been 'Reading Into Things Way Too Hard with Blank Mage', tune in next time to discuss why Goku is a bad character.
last edited at Nov 7, 2018 11:58PM
random
Nov 8, 2018 7:02AM
The "enslave centaurs as mounts" thing might seem logical to a layman but to someone who's actually read up on how cavalry actually works (and doesn't) it's a load of horrendously impractical nonsense. Shortlist:
* they're actually on the small side by horse standards (meaning relatively low carrying capacity) and as sentient beings with long maturation cycles fundamentally unreceptive to the kind of selective breeding that IRL slowly pushed up domesticated horse sizes over, oh, three-four millenia or so
* the upright humanoid torso in front is going to get in the way of any meaningful weapon use by a rider a lot; it's also terribly vulnerable to enemy weapons, much more so than the neck and head of a horse are, and will need to be protected somehow 'less you fancy your mount keeling over about instantly - in practice meaning armour which both drives up operating costs and eats into the payload capacity
* to be effective in combat unquestioning trust and authority must exist between the rider and the mount (and even so IRL the more common causes of death and injury among riders stem from misbehaving mounts already outside combat) which is incidentally why cavalry horses have always been much more expensive and valuable than basic riding mounts and beasts of burden - not only are the physical requirements higher but they need a lot more training; trying to ride into a battle a sentient creature that almost certainly hates your guts and is entirely capable of actively plotting your demise is basically suicide. Same issues kind of kill the rider-mount coordination needed to effectively employ weapons on horseback. And hoo boy are you going to be but fucked going up against free centaurs - not only are the latter vastly more effective combatants but there's an only too obvious incentive for your own recalcitrant mounts to flip...
* near as I can remember the centaurs, unlike real horses, are not gramnivores (grazing grass-eaters) - presumably they eat essentially the same stuff as the other sapients of the world (duly scaled up for their larger mass) which in practice means the logistics of feeding any larger number of the buggers are going to be quite the headache, doubly so if they're expected to be capable of strenuous physical labour. Incidentally should also make the bellies of their lower part slimmer than those of horses of analogous size due to the absence of the complex digestive systems needed to process cellulose...
All of which adds to the whole thing being a terribly impractical idea and blatantly inferior in every possible way to the buggers simply fighting themselves as, effectively, super-mobile infantry. In practice given the obvious advantages the centaurs have over the others in terms of mobility and sheer physical power they're far more likely to have formed (important part of) the warrior aristocracy basically everywhere they can survive ecologically, and there aren't very many corners of the world where I can think that wouldn't be the case outside the polar regions... Might've been combined with slave-soldier arrangements in places; the two are by no means mutually exclusive.
Note that they might well also have employed the historically fairly common cavalry practice of transporting light infantrymen who dismount to fight as close support; this has been used for both short-term battlefield purposes and longer-ranged "operational" forays, and parallel "escort" traditions existed with both war chariots and elephants (though the latter obv couldn't practically carry their close-support infantry).
This concludes today's installment of Applying History To Fiction With random-sensei; take notes kids, this'll be in the test.
last edited at Nov 8, 2018 7:03AM
Blank Mage
Nov 8, 2018 7:13AM
Nevermind then, I didn't overthink this nearly as hard as I could have.
random
Nov 8, 2018 7:38AM
I may or may not have spent excessive amounts of time and brainpower thinking about how warfare would work in diverse fantasy settings. >.>
BugDevil
Nov 8, 2018 4:36PM
Are you alright @random? I think you should look at this picture again and meditate on what's really important.
Melon
Aug 4, 2019 7:10AM
Okay, this is cute and all, but smh i am really bothered by the centaur anatomy... it just looks like a human with a really weird butt. Like some frankenstein attached horse butt... :/
RumpledForeSkiin Nov 6, 2018 9:20PM
How do you even start to put on those shorts?
Random Wanderer Nov 6, 2018 9:22PM
I think they made Akechi's ears a little too rabbity. They're supposed more pointed at the ends.
Other than that, this is a perfectly believable event, given the characters.
GrimEater Nov 6, 2018 10:50PM
Just horsing around, HEY, no harm
random Nov 7, 2018 2:04AM
If memory serves the manga every now and then dedicates several panels to the topic of "how do clothes work with this kind of anatomy" so there's that.
Throbelisk Nov 7, 2018 2:26AM
Mega Milk indeed
BugDevil Nov 7, 2018 4:48AM
@RumpledForeSkin
Those are the Centaur's worries.
Bugpope Nov 7, 2018 11:32AM
This manga was so good before it completely jumped the shark.
Nezchan Nov 7, 2018 11:44AM
Agree there. Once it started to get into UFO conspiracies and alternate fantasy worlds and...robot were-tigers, was it? The series pretty much lost the more personal charm it did in the early days.
juanelric Nov 7, 2018 12:26PM
@RumpledForeSkiin
And @Nezchan wow. That's really jumping the shark. lol
last edited at Nov 7, 2018 12:28PM
Yes_Cantaloupe Nov 7, 2018 12:58PM
Gonna disagree, the mood whiplash is part of the charm of the manga. It's real good at being cavity-inducingly adorable, weird as fuck, and making interesting social commentary, and the fact that it does it all in back-to-back chapters about a kindergarten, isekai to centaur napoleon or whatever, and subtle ableism in classrooms is incredible.
Bugpope Nov 7, 2018 7:51PM
Never said I didn't like the mood whiplash, that stuff was good, and you're putting words in our mouths. Yuri romance one chapter, gory historic drama the other.
But when they started travel in time and space, and the robots, it just got too stupid.
last edited at Nov 7, 2018 7:52PM
Blank Mage Nov 7, 2018 11:46PM
I think what really hurts the tone isn't that it's so out there, but because the world building is SO good early on with how it presents racism and culture in a monster society, that the later chapters dropping it in favor of increasingly sci-fi or even cliche anime tropes kills the atmosphere the early chapters worked so hard to create.
I was fascinated by the rules put in place preventing even consensual centaur riding just by the sheer weight of the history involved. It made the background of the (actually very logical) enslavement of centaurs as beasts of burden and war way more real. The utterly foreign nature of the Antarticans was interesting because seeing the effects of isolation on moral values paired with their just-really-scary appearance made for Best Girl Suu.
Basically our suspension of disbelief went from zero to one hundred in the space of a single volume, when we would have been more than happy to see this story through the lens of it's diverse and likable cast, presented as a little microcosm of a huge and unknowable world. Time travel plots don't fit the themes the series was establishing, robots and laser guns say nothing about how relationships are affected by media (like Hime's fear of Suu based on a horror movie) or how stereotypes are sometimes based in physiology ('centaurs are good at sports' being something Hime kind of subverts).
last edited at Nov 7, 2018 11:56PM
Blank Mage Nov 7, 2018 11:57PM
This has been 'Reading Into Things Way Too Hard with Blank Mage', tune in next time to discuss why Goku is a bad character.
last edited at Nov 7, 2018 11:58PM
random Nov 8, 2018 7:02AM
The "enslave centaurs as mounts" thing might seem logical to a layman but to someone who's actually read up on how cavalry actually works (and doesn't) it's a load of horrendously impractical nonsense. Shortlist:
* they're actually on the small side by horse standards (meaning relatively low carrying capacity) and as sentient beings with long maturation cycles fundamentally unreceptive to the kind of selective breeding that IRL slowly pushed up domesticated horse sizes over, oh, three-four millenia or so
* the upright humanoid torso in front is going to get in the way of any meaningful weapon use by a rider a lot; it's also terribly vulnerable to enemy weapons, much more so than the neck and head of a horse are, and will need to be protected somehow 'less you fancy your mount keeling over about instantly - in practice meaning armour which both drives up operating costs and eats into the payload capacity
* to be effective in combat unquestioning trust and authority must exist between the rider and the mount (and even so IRL the more common causes of death and injury among riders stem from misbehaving mounts already outside combat) which is incidentally why cavalry horses have always been much more expensive and valuable than basic riding mounts and beasts of burden - not only are the physical requirements higher but they need a lot more training; trying to ride into a battle a sentient creature that almost certainly hates your guts and is entirely capable of actively plotting your demise is basically suicide. Same issues kind of kill the rider-mount coordination needed to effectively employ weapons on horseback. And hoo boy are you going to be but fucked going up against free centaurs - not only are the latter vastly more effective combatants but there's an only too obvious incentive for your own recalcitrant mounts to flip...
* near as I can remember the centaurs, unlike real horses, are not gramnivores (grazing grass-eaters) - presumably they eat essentially the same stuff as the other sapients of the world (duly scaled up for their larger mass) which in practice means the logistics of feeding any larger number of the buggers are going to be quite the headache, doubly so if they're expected to be capable of strenuous physical labour. Incidentally should also make the bellies of their lower part slimmer than those of horses of analogous size due to the absence of the complex digestive systems needed to process cellulose...
All of which adds to the whole thing being a terribly impractical idea and blatantly inferior in every possible way to the buggers simply fighting themselves as, effectively, super-mobile infantry. In practice given the obvious advantages the centaurs have over the others in terms of mobility and sheer physical power they're far more likely to have formed (important part of) the warrior aristocracy basically everywhere they can survive ecologically, and there aren't very many corners of the world where I can think that wouldn't be the case outside the polar regions... Might've been combined with slave-soldier arrangements in places; the two are by no means mutually exclusive.
Note that they might well also have employed the historically fairly common cavalry practice of transporting light infantrymen who dismount to fight as close support; this has been used for both short-term battlefield purposes and longer-ranged "operational" forays, and parallel "escort" traditions existed with both war chariots and elephants (though the latter obv couldn't practically carry their close-support infantry).
This concludes today's installment of Applying History To Fiction With random-sensei; take notes kids, this'll be in the test.
last edited at Nov 8, 2018 7:03AM
Blank Mage Nov 8, 2018 7:13AM
Nevermind then, I didn't overthink this nearly as hard as I could have.
random Nov 8, 2018 7:38AM
I may or may not have spent excessive amounts of time and brainpower thinking about how warfare would work in diverse fantasy settings. >.>
BugDevil Nov 8, 2018 4:36PM
Are you alright @random? I think you should look at this picture again and meditate on what's really important.
Melon Aug 4, 2019 7:10AM
Okay, this is cute and all, but smh i am really bothered by the centaur anatomy... it just looks like a human with a really weird butt. Like some frankenstein attached horse butt... :/