Rottcodd

My current theory is that the author and his assistants (or maybe just his assistants and he quit bothering long ago) have a great big die with story tropes on each face and as necessary, they just roll the die and do whatever it says.

Since they finished the "sports festival arc," they had ro roll the die again, and it came up "study group."

And here we are.

Just caught up with this one last night, and it might even beat out the Harmageddon episode as my favorite so far. It was just wonderful - happy and sad and charming and bittersweet and chaotic and touching and, when all's said and done, contentedly optimistic..

And Yachiyo got her body back.

Her reaction when she first learned of the engagement was telling, though nobody really pointed it out. That was an emotional outburst at the thought of losing Ponko. I think she's a lot more human than anyone realizes.

That was great, but I have to admit I'm a bit disappointed they didn't do a display about her awesome stick collection. ⚔️

That was a great wrap-up — it settled pretty much every question I had about the story, and it was great to see Emi and Remilia face to face.

SAO was excellent here and there (Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer, The Black Swordsman, Mother's Rosario) and was at least decent all the way through.

It was just one of those series that became so commonly loved by normies that advertising one's hatred of it became an easy way to gain instant edgelord cred.

It's easy. The only difficulty is that it can't understand a link to a specific chapter - you have to get the link for the series and plug that in to Cubari, then go to the specific chapter on the list Cubari generates.

Yes. Yes she is.

Obviously this is entirely up to the instance owner, but it seems to me that, if anything, all of this actually makes our position stronger.

Scanlation's always been a sort of gray area. It's technically piracy - that part's black and white - but the publishers have generally turned a blind eye to it, at least in cases in which there are and will be no licensed translations available. The publishers appeared to generally see it, and correctly, as free advertising (and in fact, scanlation is the ENTIRE reason that manga has gotten as popular as it has outside of Japan).

So the basic rule of thumb for more or less legitimate scanlation has always been that if the series isn't licensed, it's fair game, and if the publishers take exception anyway, all they have to do is say so and we'll immediately "cease and desist."

In one sense, this is just a massive version of what's happened to MD all along. They've gotten takedown requests from the start, and just immediately comply with them.

The things that are notable about this one are the scale of it, and the fact that many of the titles do not have and likely never will have official translations, so it seems to be entirely vindictive. The publishers aren't losing anything by allowing scanlations of titles that they'll never license anyway, so they're not protecting themselves from any nominal loss - they're just being dicks.

And that's undoubtedly what's rattled MD - it's not the fact of the takedowns, which have happened from the start but the seeming vindictiveness of them.

But their response has been to formally shift responsibility to the uploaders. They're saying not just tacitly but explicitly that anyone who uploads anything effectively claims to have the legal right to do so, so if they don't, that's their problem and not MD's.

Which actually removes us even further from any liability. From our position, the uploaders claimed to have the right to do so, and MD accepted their claim, and all we're doing is taking everyone else at their word.

For whatever that's worth.

According to their credits page, Harmless Monsters is going to stop uploading to Mangadex. They're going to continue all of their series, but they're going to post them somewhere else to avoid "potential legal issues."

Is that the future of scanlation? We've gotten sort of spoiled, since the primary sites - Mangadex and before that (the original) Batoto got left alone. Is it going to become whack-a-mole now, like anime? Instead of being able to depend on one site, we'll have to move to a new one every few years?

We got some great animation with the random sentai group that showed up.

That was especially awesome, and it impressed me that they manged to be appropriately stereotypical without matching specific recognizable individuals/franchises.

Then finally, a really touching gesture between two very non-emotional creatures to end it on.

And with Ponko enthusiatically shipping them the whole way.

I'm really liking this, and this was arguably the best episode yet..

I originally expected this to be an iyashikei, but (starting with the oddly dissonant OP) it sort of shifted from what I expected, and started to feel more threatening and somber than that. And this episode started out the most threatening yet. But then there was such a complete and rewarding shift in tone from start to finish that it made it ultimately just that much more warm and uplifting. And to the degree that this has a central theme, that seems to be it.

This is essentially an iyashikei - it's just that it's not naturally or automatically that way. It's made that way by Yachiyo's kindness and courtesy that's tempered by quiet determination and a sharp sense of right and wrong. She's unstintingly kind and courteous, right up until the moment that someone steps beyond acceptable behavior, at which point she immediately shifts to brutally honest and unreserved condemnation, which lasts exactly long enough to clearly convey her opinion of things, at which point she just as quickly and easily shifts back to unstinting kindness and courtesy. And it works. It's made clear, even to someone like Harmy, that she bears no ill will at all - that her kindness is entirely sincere. It's just that she's also entirely honest and fair-minded and fearless, and when somebody deserves a figurative smack upside the head, she will deliver it. And they all come to respect and even admire that.

As do I.