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Start date: Nov 10 - 16
| Week | Page numbers | Page count |
|---|---|---|
| Week 9 | (Vol. 3) 142 - End | idk |
Well that got interesting!! Did not see that twist coming, and that was fun… But also that ending, like they didn’t get to say goodbye to anyone?! Wth is that?! Oh well at least they got back home. I guess most of the other characters were unbearable anyway
If I followed the twist right… They were both in love with each other, and the princess was deeply losing sight of her duties, so the actual reason she called them was to kill herself… which (after killing her beloved) somehow sets everything right??
Yeah, I really didn’t follow that… But I think I just wasn’t feeling 100% when I read it. It kinda reminds me of another plotline in a different CLAMP work
Anyway, I can’t exactly say I enjoyed this series, but I can’t exactly say I hated it either. It’s certainly my least favorite CLAMP work so far tho, between Tsubasa, xxxHolic, CCS, and Rayearth. So I won’t be joining for part 2. I hope everyone who’s continuing enjoys tho!
Well. I’m not sure what to think. Never could I have imagined that things would take such a stupid turn. I stand by my thought that this series needed one more volume; maybe then the ending wouldn’t feel like such an ass pull. Like, I see what they were going for and respect parts of it. Summoning the legendary heroes to kill you because the world’s logic doesn’t let anyone but off-worlders do it? Very neat, great gimmick and twist. Doing this all because you love some dude enough that you lose all reason and literally become a different person due to a chain of events you really could’ve prevented? 
I’m also not happy with how recently, while getting the robot suits, the whole deal was “let’s listen and empathize with the enemy”, while when we get to ザガート there’s absolutely none of that. “Why would you do such a horrible thing?!” “Look, I had my reasons, I really didn’t think…” “Die you monster!”
I still enjoy the series overall, but I’m quite sad to see an ending like this. Maybe the second series redeems it? Although I must say, if the authors hadn’t pulled that “lose my mind for a man” crap this would have been excellent. Killing エメロード, then ending on a shot of the heroines crying back home? Perfect. 
I hadn’t remembered why anything happens in this volume, just that it did happen so a lot of the why was pretty mid 
I think the biggest issue I had with the ending is like, how does this impact all the people we met along the way? Their belief system has been fully exposed as not what they had believed and we get nothing from any of them.
That said, earlier I had mentioned that I always forget that these are technically two different series and the ending to this series is definitely part of it.
Although, since I’ve only seen the anime up to somewhere in the middle of the second book and the first time I read the series I mostly was looking at pictures and just picking up snatches of dialogue here and there, I really don’t remember much of anything in the next series so I think that will feel pretty brand new to me. 
Could you expand on this a bit more? I was probably reading too quickly and didn’t catch this.
I mostly just mean that their world has エメロード姫 as the 柱 and outside of maybe kinda sorta what フェリオ said to them that 風 recalls at the end, no one has any idea that the world had been falling apart because of エメロード姫.
If I had a belief in what makes my world good and that was completely overturned, I don’t think it’d be like “oh, great job magic knights”
How does the anime compare btw?
Like I said, I think the farthest I got into the anime was them getting the first マシン (or maybe on the way to it…? it’s been a while) so I don’t know how they handle the end of the story.
I quite like the anime…I think because the story is so compressed that having a little extra time for each plot point actually lets the story breathe a bit. But it’s still the same story so if you weren’t a huge fan of the manga I don’t think the anime is going to do anything extra for you.
Annoyingly there’s no subs I can find for this and I think it’d be kinda annoying raw, so despite wanting a rewatch for a while, I haven’t actually seen it in a long time.
Cool to know. I feel like a lot of my issues were with execution though, so it’s possible I still might enjoy it… otoh they somehow made those 3 volumes into 20 eps… so on second thought, I’ll quite while I’m ahead
Really? I’d think now would be the perfect time to give it a go, since a lot of the language should be semi-fresh from just having read the manga. I also couldn’t find subs on kistunekko.net or jimaku.cc (which are the only places I know to look)
Every year or so I look for subs for this and ふしぎ遊戯 but there aren’t ever any that show up. I would have thought they’d be streaming somewhere and someone would grab subs but I guess not.
I don’t think I have it in me to watch 36 (?) eps only kinda understanding everything. They expand on the dialogue iirc (although the events stay the same) and I’d probably be more annoyed than enjoy myself without subs…
There certainly were subs back in the day – I used to have the complete run of MKR series one and two on VHS video cassette with fansubs…
49 episodes total, which is a wild expansion for something that was originally only six volumes of manga.
Oh I can find English subs just fine (last I checked it was streaming on Crunchyroll), but I’m looking for Japanese subs. 
Plot aside, I love the エメロード baddie transformation.
The ending is so random 
but that’s also why I’m so obsessed with it. Like literally the last 20 pages just subverts everything from the story and the plot just goes in the garbage can
I think it definitely would have benefitted from at least one more volume so some things could be teased out a bit more. Like it would be nice if they had done a little bit more “showing” of エメロード’s situation rather than her just randomly narrating it in the last ten pages before she dies lol.
Her situation reminds me a bit of the type of hopeless/despair/etc Sailor Moon/Sailor Cosmos dealt with in the future or final act of セーラームーン. Like I feel like エメロード had the potential to be a very interesting character in the world of magical girl but kind of flops at the end.
You know, I hadn’t really thought of that, but yeah, it does feel kinda similar. Maybe that’s why I have a higher tolerance for this nonsense. I’m used to Sailor Moon just dumping all of the backstory to a villain in 3 episodes and then everyone dies and then everything is better again 
Yeah I agree. Even something like a single panel of her looking ominously on would have been fine. I also think there are too many bad guys in this volume… like, I hardly even met one before we’re on to the next. This really needed to be 4 volumes.
This has been an interesting reread for me because the experience this time around is so different from back twenty years ago when this was my second [*] manga I read in Japanese and the first I read with no help from fan translations for any of the volumes. So the way I experienced the pacing when I first read this was very different. So I agree with the general comments here that it’s trying to cram too much in and the ending seems a bit out of nowhere – but as a beginner a short series with cool art and not too much exposition was exactly what I wanted.
Incidentally I’m not sure to what extent we can say that nobody knows why the world has been falling apart. I think it’s quite possible that at least Clef knows what’s happening and is deliberately keeping the magic knights in the dark, for instance. After all, if the power of will controls everything in Cephiro and the Pillar is the person whose will is strongest, the cause of the Pillar no longer doing their job of supporting the world can’t be anything external to them…
I do also wonder how much the authors expected this to stand on its own as a three volume series and how much they assumed that readers would almost certainly continue to the second series, given it ran immediately after in Nakayoshi.
[*] The absolute first was ミントな僕ら 1 | L20?? but I found a fan translation of the script online for the first few volumes and printed it out to follow along with. Not a translated scan of the manga, just the text of the lines…
Omg that’s so nostalgic!
My (Japanese speaking) friend was a big fan of 吉住渉 so I borrowed that and Marmalade Boy as some of my first series – both accidentally really good beginner manga
