Everyone is welcome to read at their own pace and post any impressions, theories, or questions at any time within this thread. Those of us starting together may loosely informally stick together, but please feel free to chime in any time!
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Participants
I’m reading along
I have finished this part
I plan to read but will start (significantly) later
I used the manga cover for part 1, but for part 2 the image I was finding seemed a little spoilery to me, so we’re just getting the nice portrait to gaze at now.
I wanted to let you all know I started this today! I’m going to be a little on and off with it, there’s always a lot I’m doing and planning, but I don’t want to outpace people too much anyway so that’s probably good. Might read more later but for now I read the prologue, about ~7500 characters, so let’s get started with some reactions! Fun to be back.
The difficulty level is first-rate
I love that he gives chapters an arbitrary difficulty rating that applies to the mystery, more or less.
So first off, George and Shannon are clearly meant to genuinely care a lot for each other and they’re sweet but definitely a バカップル . That said, the way George thinks just kinda bugs me all the time. He feels condescending. I think it’s intentional in the story that he is, and also that he doesn’t mean to be? I mean this story very clearly is interested in how women are treated by men.
All the talk about magic making them be able to be together has me totally thinking about fallynleaf’s prior thoughts on how magic works via people’s strong feelings putting meaning into something – it fit very comfortably into what Shannon was saying.
But of course then we get to that scene with the little 祠 and the way this VN has me on edge for mysteries I was ready to suspect it was anyone but Shannon there, given how it’s obviously implying it’s her, but we learn at the end of the scene it really is her. So the implication here seems to be that through a deal with Beatrice, she’s able to have this date with George and not just be in a secret relationship at best, if not held totally at a distance.
In the first chapter, the whole shrine was destroyed, if I recall right? It’s different but similar, and gives us a hint that messing with the shrine benefits (frees?) Beatrice, maybe?
Quick thought I had, about 5k characters into Furniture
I remember fallynleaf took note of this with Battler talking about Maria, but there is so much talk in this VN about people knowing something bad is happening and convincing themselves that they are unable to do anything about it. So what they do is either intentionally witness it or don’t. It happens here with Shannon (and the servants broadly) about Klaus being abused by Kinzo, just as it did with Rosa and Maria, and off the top of my head there’s also Kumasawa remarking on watching Natsuhi from the shadows. I’m sure there were others. I recall Kanon being kept in line by other people because he specifically hates watching Shannon’s treatment.
I have officially started! So far, even with some new settings and new associated vocab, it’s not too bad; I mined 75 words in roughly 7,500 characters. This chapter seems to have substantially less unique words than the previous, anyway, so I expect things to pick up once we get settled in.
Prologue
BIG MOOD. I found the date part kind of hard to get through, honestly. I was like “ugh can I fast-forward through the heterosexuality?” . And yeah, I think George has an issue where he’s both condescending and also seems totally unaware of the power difference between them… Some of the ways he teases her or like jokingly threatens her bug me because Shannon really doesn’t have any choice except to play along…
Even the choice to love him or not, is that really something that she has the free will to decide?
We got George’s perspective, which was just emphasizing how ridiculously lovey-dovey they were and showed not even a surface awareness of Shannon’s position, and then we got Shannon’s perspective, which was emphasizing how little control she has over anything in her life (and also her lack of faith that George would even believe her, anyway). She’s a shark stuck in a tank that is all she’ll ever get for an ocean.
And yeah, there is some dramatic irony in how George dismisses the magic stuff as like girly woo-woo superstition that men know better than to believe, but obviously Shannon very much does know more than him about how the mechanics of this world operate.
Yeah, I felt very validated, hahaha. We’ll have to see how this develops…
I can’t help but wonder if the deal isn’t specifically for the relationship with George, but actually for something else that just so happens to let her also have the relationship with him…
Yes, “ない！ない！” Though, now that I think about it, I’m not sure if it was the whole shrine or just the torii that was gone… But I had the same thought, yeah, that something like this probably happened to it in the first episode before Battler and co. reached the island. I wonder if it was a different person who broke the mirror then… (I’m still not sure yet where this episode fits in, like if it’s an alternate timeline or what.)
Interesting, too, the theme about how to gain something, you have to be prepared to lose something. That seems to be a recurring component of how magic works, with Kinzo’s whole thing about bigger risks equaling a bigger reward…
. And yeah, I think George has an issue where he’s both condescending and also seems totally unaware of the power difference between them… Some of the ways he teases her or like jokingly threatens her bug me because Shannon really doesn’t have any choice except to play along…