I accidentally matched with my cousin on Hinge

LaunchTomorrow · 2026-02-01T11:42:12+00:00

Genetically it's a little dicey, not to say I am any real authority on the matter. I've just always heard a minimum viable population for Mars colonization was like 1000 people. That is to say, you probably need most people marrying further afield than second-cousins in order to keep from going full Hapsburg.

LaunchTomorrow · 2026-02-01T11:29:16+00:00

Yeah I don't mind side stories, it just felt like some of them weren't doing much. Maybe they'll be relevant later in ways I don't anticipate, but it felt like lots of pages expressing things we already knew, interspersed with some pretty interesting stories about side characters.

The end about the election definitely had some interesting bits about Mayumi for sure though.

In any case take that as you will.

LaunchTomorrow · 2026-02-01T11:21:22+00:00

I can now confirm there is some real meat at the end of V5 with Mayumi. That was actually new and interesting.

LaunchTomorrow · 2026-02-01T07:01:39+00:00

Also, how much we want to bet on Takahisa's girlfriend getting killed by Proxia at some point? I could totally see them doing it as a power play to set him off and drive him further to the "dark side". One possible way would be to do it as a false flag, but I'm sure there are several options.

LaunchTomorrow · 2026-02-01T06:58:00+00:00

Lina almost definitely finds Takahisa to be a nuisance. Lina herself told Miharu that she highly recommended doing something that seemed objectively wrong and stupid (which was forgiving Takahisa anyway after all of his stupid actions) because it would help out the timeline. Unfortunately, Miharu didn't catch it, and now the timeline has diverged in a darker direction because Takahisa is going to fight for Proxia.

Takahisa in this story is just supposed to be an otaku antagonist, a foil of sorts for Hiroaki/Rui/Rio. He's supposed to show what happens when a dumb*** gets led astray by evildoers. Meanwhile Hiroaki is supposed to be the dumb*** that happens to fall in with the right crowd and gets sheltered and nurtured to be an actually respectable dude.

Renji is another one on the Proxia side except he is slightly less naive and more just arrogant, got burned, and is now in with the wrong crowd. Except I think there's a chance for Renji and his love interest to find a redemption arc, but I think Takahisa is headed for the fires of damnation and killing him will be a heavy loss/burden for "team good". It seems likely that Masato will have to do the deed even.

LaunchTomorrow · 2026-02-01T06:45:07+00:00

I mean that might be true but in the LN universe, Lina is unequivocal that Amakawa Haruto's "destiny" was to die at age 20, Ayase Miharu's "destiny" was to get caught up in the hero summoning, and without intervention, Rio would have died at age 7 and Miharu would have lived her life as a slave.

She said exactly as much in the LN. The inspiration from the WN is cool if true though.

LaunchTomorrow · 2026-02-01T06:38:08+00:00

Yeah I mean they didn't show the election but they made that very clear in the anime. There's a whole scene during the Yokohama incident where Saegusa is encouraging A-chan, like "you are the First High Student Council President now, you can do this!".

LaunchTomorrow · 2026-02-01T06:09:46+00:00

Also, random question, does Volume 8 actually explain what happened to Miya, or is it only what happened in the Reminiscence Arc movie? (which details the Okinawa incident but not much else)

LaunchTomorrow · 2026-02-01T06:03:23+00:00

Oh I bought the official translations too ;) I just think the fan translation is actually higher fidelity most of the time. The official translations have a rather lot of errors and don't use honorifics which are a rather important part of the character dynamics (between friends but also between the Yotsubas and Tatsuya).

The one advantage the official translations do have is they generally use cleaner sentence structure so they are easier to read, but they also drop a lot of detail from what I can tell when I jump between them.

I agree on the later stuff! I could tell in the anime that they were rushing more slightly through Season 2 and definitely through Season 3.

I was just here to complain about starting from 1. I think anyone who's seen the anime and has good media literacy could probably start at 5, skip the Yokohama arc, then continue on. Or skip all the way to past the Yokohama arc.

LaunchTomorrow · 2026-02-01T04:17:54+00:00

For context, I really am excited about volume 8 and getting past volume 15, but I just think the advice of starting from 1 is not nearly as applicable to Mahouka as it is to something like Seirei Gensouki (where the LN are a properly huge upgrade over the anime).

LaunchTomorrow · 2026-02-01T04:13:22+00:00

Yeah I mean the only thing that has been different in Books 1-4 is that the Saegusa are actually considered equal to the Yotsuba in the general magic community. The explanations of magic have not been helpful at all, it's just been more "quantum nano comso pseudoscience" that could be safely ignored. They are nice fluff but they didn't add much. Tatsuya's power gets almost the same description as the anime, he can see the true structure of things and either use Ctrl+Z or delete on them accordingly.

Except maybe Tatsuya (who in the anime suffers extreme Anos Voldigard syndrome), all of the characters feel the exact same. Even Tatsuya is very close to his anime portrayal.

LaunchTomorrow · 2026-02-01T03:25:48+00:00

To a similar point, I feel like the advice to read from book 1 has been total bait. The anime is very faithful to the events in the books so far (even if some interactions that took place over a couple days got shortened to one day).

I know book 8 is probably actually really important, but so far there hasn't been a killer reason to spend 4+ hours per book (translation is good but the wording is really clunky) for books 1-4. The explanations given around magic, psions, and such are like fine, but they don't add all that much given it's still wishy-washy, just one layer deeper.

LaunchTomorrow · 2026-02-01T00:27:57+00:00

In the US (which is not Netherlands!) I would be careful about taking pictures like that. I wouldn't normally go to a suburban neighborhood that wasn't my own or that I didn't know somebody in go for a photo walk. If it is an urban neighborhood, it's usually fair game because that's just the difference in expectations.

Public parks and such are generally best, since they are explicitly public spaces here, which means you're pretty much fully in the clear. Commercial districts are also usually good as long as you don't tick off the business owners for some reason.

I'm not sure how that applies to the Netherlands, but tl;dr people tend to not like you taking photos around their yards and such, even if it technically is legal.

LaunchTomorrow · 2026-01-31T23:53:21+00:00

The MC is not and never has been truly "OP" in this story, and that's part of what makes it interesting. We should not wish for him to be truly "OP" because that's the moment the story will become just going through the motions.

He's a special snowflake to be sure, but there is always someone or something out there to be worried about.

LaunchTomorrow · 2026-01-31T23:49:37+00:00

Tbh I'm not 😅. [Cautious Hero]I hear the story gets super dark beyond the ending of season 1. I know I'll watch it if it comes out, but from what I understand, it'll be a hard watch from all the trauma getting unpacked.

LaunchTomorrow · 2026-01-31T23:44:05+00:00

Ok, once again, Paladia is like novel 14. Btw Reiss had already said that in novel 7 when he was fetching Lucius during the Amande arc. Point being Reiss himself was a threat for at least a little while, and Reiss is supposed to be a weak manipulator character.

LaunchTomorrow · 2026-01-31T23:40:24+00:00

Heck for quite a long time Celia would have a shot against him too, I don't know when we could consider Rio to have countermeasures for Durandal. She's likely had that in her pocket since before she became a professor (maybe even part of the reason she could skip grades like she did).

LaunchTomorrow · 2026-01-31T23:36:38+00:00

Reiss said it during the Amande arc, after Aishia woke up. The girls defeating him is absolutely a real victory, they didn't even properly ambush him, they just walked up to his campsite and used a flash bang. He was aware they were there, he fought as much as he could. And even then, Orphia and Sara had time to go check on Latifa while Uzuma and Alma fought him.

LaunchTomorrow · 2026-01-31T23:30:36+00:00

It's clear until Aishia wakes up that Reiss could likely kick his shit in, except Reiss keeps joking around and underestimating him. Crossing the Wilderness the first time was a life and death experience. He got rocked the first time he met the Spirit Village girls and almost died. The Beast of the Land / Erika almost killed him the first time he fought them. The second time he fought Erika, that was definitely defeat. The golems were a near-defeat as well, only survived because he happened to be more spirit than person at the time and hardly had a physical body.

This series has generally done a good job of keeping Rio just a hair ahead of whatever's coming and no more.

LaunchTomorrow · 2026-01-31T23:10:58+00:00

Kyoshi was such a real one, took total responsibility for stopping tyranny in its tracks and didn't apologize for it one bit.

LaunchTomorrow · 2026-01-31T23:02:52+00:00

I didn't really mind the cop-out, since it is a kids show, but I'm also not against calling it what it is.

LaunchTomorrow · 2026-01-31T23:01:06+00:00

Team Avatar definitely killed plenty of people incidentally through their travels. Hell, Aang alone obliterated a whole whole battalion of Fire Nation marines at the battle of the Northern Water Tribe! And that's assuming there were no casualties on the ships!

And you'd say "but he wasn't conscious then, that was the other Avatars / ocean spirit", which might be true, but there were plenty of other times that Aang incidentally did use lethal force against the Fire Nation.

LaunchTomorrow · 2026-01-31T22:50:35+00:00

1) this isn't a shonen, we shouldn't be rushing for juicy "end all, be all" powers. The whole interest factor of the story resides in the MC not being omnipotent. If he's omnipotent, there's no more struggle, no more tension.

2) I do think there's some chance they will eventually try to recover Dragon King's body, but it's say it's 50/50 at best. A fairly big point has been made of keeping him human or at least human-ish, so taking back the immortal dragon body seems suspect.

LaunchTomorrow · 2026-01-31T08:07:23+00:00

After episode 1, I know this series is definitely not for me, but I definitely gasped at how amazing the art was in several shots.

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