Yesterday:
I finished 晴れのち四季部 vol 3!
Chiaki calls Azuma his 相棒! (Both in his head and to Azuma’s face.) And okay yeah I’m pretty certain he likes Azuma. I was thinking so this volume, and then we get to ch 14 (the xmas chapter), and their teammates say that he seems like the kind to take his s/o on a date to look at xmas lights, and he’s like, “Ooh, yeah, that sounds romantic!” and then immediately imagines himself taking Azuma on a date to look at xmas lights, but since he feels like Azuma wouldn’t be able to handle the cold very well, it quickly turns into them going back home and sitting under the kotatsu. They do actually end up going and looking at xmas lights—Haruno and Yamato had put up a xmas tree during their part of the chapter, and now Chiaki and Azuma go and look at it, and Chiaki has fun watching Azuma while Azuma has fun circling the tree and looking at the ornaments their kouhai had put on it. Chiaki’s a lil disappointed that Azuma’s fine with the cold lol
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, this series is just so cute. I really hope there’ll be a vol 4, though that’ll probably be in like 2 years `:'(
Today:
I finally picked up 魔法使いの騎士, and it's.. yeah. One I regret getting, unfortunately.
Apparently the mage can’t regenerate MP on his own (or at least not quickly…?), and… “草の民と交わればすぐ魔力は回復する.” And he means 交わる in the sexual way. So ch 1 ends with him falling asleep in the knight’s arms (he gave the bed to the kid in the knight’s care, so the two of them are sitting on the floor leaning against the side of it), his magic depleted, and ch 2 starts with the knight dreaming of an incident in his childhood and waking up to the wizard, who’s still leaning against him, getting banged by a wolf-man. Yeah. Lovely. Even if it doesn’t show anything, I still coulda done without that, thanks. Especially the bestialityfurry sh*t. Which I guess means that when we first met him in ch 1, with him in a sensual, fanservice-y pose with some magical vines or tendrils or whatever, that was a magical being he’d been Engaged with. Lovely.
lol it seems that, as long as they’re a being of magic (whether that be a magical creature or a human who has magic), anyone will do, so in ch 2 the knight thinks, “So if I had magic, then even I…? No, no, what am I thinking?!” He does take his job as a protector very seriously, but it also seems he’s started to come to care about this mysterious man, even though they haven’t known each other very long yet. (Before the start of the story, he and his charge had been sent by the king to find the mage and bring him back to become the palace sorcerer, and the mage refused. As the knight wasn’t allowed to return without him, the mage decided to hire him and make the knight his own knight, thus the title.)
So we’re kissing children now. On the mouth, and not just a peck. It wasn’t the mage but his evil twin, and it was to remove a curse/spell on the kid, but still, that didn’t need to happen. Well, I say “evil twin” because of the trope, but I’m not sure he’s evil per se or just not exactly “good” and also an antagonist. And actually, after finishing the book, I’m confused about if they are actually separate people or if they used to be the same person. Doesn’t help either that their names are literally only one letter different from each other: the mage is named クレド and his double is クレイド.
Apparently the knight is the king’s eldest son, but since he has no magic (and/or is illegitimate), he became (was made to, I’m sure, since it was from childhood) the knight of his younger half-brother the crown prince. Anyway uhhhh I hate the king. Not only does he clearly not care about his eldest son and would severely punish (even kill?) him for daring to return without the mage, but he was wanting the mage as his sorcerer to replace the previous one, the twin, who disappeared without a trace one day, bearing a grudge, and little wonder. He’d been the court sorcerer since childhood, and as he’s a mage rather than a human then he needs to have sex in order to be able to use magic. When he’s talking about his hatred for that kingdom, he’s like, “But if it weren’t for them defiling this body, I wouldn’t have realized I was a mage, so I’m grateful for that at least,” (and “them” is 彼ら, and the panel only shows the king, who was very much an adult at the time, so who else was there? Who else there had their way with him?) which uhhh very much implies that they’d thought he was a human child and raped him and that’s how they found out he was a mage and then made him the court sorcerer. クレド says that his feelings are more mixed than クレイド’s, and we see that he had someone he got along with and protected him, someone whom the knight apparently has grown up to look like (his uncle, I’m assuming??). But the knight only remembers there being the one sorcerer (and he has no idea why he didn’t recognize クレド despite him and クレイド having the exact same face; only their hairstyle and their personality are different) so are they actually the same person, just now existing as two separate beings??? I’m very confused.
This story doesn’t feel complete. There’s a certain amount of stuff that can be left open with the story still feeling contained/resolved, but his manga just feels like, “Why are you ending it there…?” The world seems interesting, even if I definitely did not appreciate some aspects of the story, but the ending is so unsatisfying. I definitely regret buying this.
I had intended to at least start ch 9 of 夜カフェ today, and I feel like if 魔法使いの騎士 hadn’t been so disappointing, I would have, but as it was, I just read a bit of my pile of English books. Didn’t get very far, though.
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My main purpose was to see how Gonta speaks in Japanese since I was curious (turned out to be pretty anticlimactic really, he maybe uses slightly simpler sentences than some of the others but definitely nothing like the English), but I did discover that Miu refers to herself as 俺様 which is just… incredible 
very on brand, love that for her. But yeah I could really just follow along at normal speed which bodes well for replaying the games in Japanese someday!
名探偵コナン (0% → 5%)
First Two Weeks of Challenge 
poor Mira has been through so much
Japanese found under the leaves 
