Just whisking it away with magic/Minecraft is lazy writing no matter how it's played out.
Would be fitting, though, the way it was whisked
into happening in the first place … Barely a handful of panels of casual lip service, and it was done. No mental preparation, no trauma, no residual pain, no nothing. Her trip
to Merinesburg wasn't even given a handwave. Instead: Discard horns, pursue horniness.
Horns do contain a significant stub of living bone and tissue that they grow off of, and those stubs only get longer with age. I'm not asking for this to turn gore here, but how was
that not lazy?
I'm also blaming the original author. This horn loss "arc" feels awfully like an opening of a can of instant generic drama solely for hurrying the plot along. Surely there would have been a dozen and a half ways to get the guys back together more naturally, no?
And I don't know about the LN, but those
I figured doing this might make you owe me
and
I calculated that part too
lines by the manga's writer? What kind of person infatuated with someone says such things?? She's supposed to be a shrewd and cunning politician, yes, but to give her such levels of emotionally manipulative motivations to the point of explicitly invoking guilt tripping is just jarringly excessive, and I doubt this is a mistake in translation.
Yes, she may have the hots for him, but she wouldn't have truly needed those lines, now would she? Kousuke is already on the side of the rebels, he's already trying his best to accommodate for their affections, if reluctantly so. Would he really not have figured on his own that it was only going to be a matter of time until her wool joined his linens? Why would she need to resort to such out-of-character extremes? Hellooo, dick-in-crazy alert, anyone? … Nobody??
And, naturally, as the societally trained and indoctrinated Japanese that Kousuke is (as well as the personified writer, artist, publisher, and original target audience geo), the spineless dumbass caves to such underhanded bullying when IRL one would do best to run away very fast from such psychotic, exploitative, blackmailing persons because given the chance they can and will ruin lives.
You show me anyone trying to sell this shitty writing for the sake of beating plot advancement into submission as character development and pacing and I show you a liar.