Hagure Ningyo no Diana

[MangaDex]

 

[Random_Passer-by]

YES! It got serialised!

 

[HikaruNa]

Why the shota though ?
It would've been fine if the prince was at least a teen
But he still a child
Cmoonnnnnn

 

[KatoShuu]

This manga is related with this' chapter 3
"The Suffering of the Mermaid Princess"
https://mangadex.org/title/429cc2ac-f947-456d-8f77-6c209b79d39b/heartful
also, same mangaka

 

[KajurN]

It's a fun read.

 

[monkey123]

just look at this shit https://mangadex.org/title/df71eef4-99a0-4e63-beaf-9f7471afecce/endless-mermaid

 

[Pluveus]

Why the shota though ?
It would've been fine if the prince was at least a teen
But he still a child
Cmoonnnnnn

I mean, he's 14, so he's a teen.

 

[_ZenBoT_]

Meh shota

 

[Nixolas_Zinn]

Good idea, until the cutesy naive shota ..... yeah no that killed it for me

 

[LoliALF]

so they are technically using Danish languange, chp 10 shows danish, even oldie way of lastname

 

[OrionKaelin]

Compared to many of the oneshots by this author, including another featuring a mermaid (but not OG for this serialization), this is nice and wholesome.
A little worried the other shoe will drop and all this fuwa fuwa is just a build up for greater shock value when it twists...

 

[JustSomeGuyOnHisPhone]

I forgot this got a serialization, welp time to read it and get wholesome feels

 

[darktennisball]

The couple is so pure, they would make the cast of the New Testament blush

 

[DaVince]

This is about a mermaid, right? Is "ningyou" a typo? Even the Japanese title says 人魚 (ningyo).

 

[Pokari]

Why the shota though ?
It would've been fine if the prince was at least a teen
But he still a child
Cmoonnnnnn

Preface to everything else I'm going to say: The series clearly isn't meant to be taken seriously and is pretty much just cheerful junk reading for the intended audience. Talking about the morals of something like this is only worth as much as it's important to be able to step back and judge with a clear head what's right and wrong, or else to use fiction as a medium to talk about real-world morals in complicated situations; that sort of thing. Otherwise, as purely entertainment writing with no discernible message to it, it's pretty much just subject to people's random preferences in fiction (which can reasonably include things that might be broadly in poor taste).

With that out of the way, treating it wholly-seriously for the purposes of this discussion:

Spoiler: (small discussion of ethics and also the mechanics by which this series sweeps them under the rug)

Would it have been fine if he were older? Really?

For every year you make him older and wiser, the creepier the fact that he "cluelessly" opens by offering marriage to someone his soldiers kidnapped to offer someone else as a slave, just because she's pretty (doubly-so with the implication seemingly hanging there that he might otherwise have been like 'yeah, sure, send her sounds great'). Like, the plot tries to slight-of-hand it by saying "the place they were planning to send her was so much worse. so he's saving her, right???" and by having the attendant offer her freedom in desperation, but the fact remains that the protagonist for his own part effectively telegraphed "hey lady we captured, you're pretty, how about you marry me instead of being a slave to that other guy".

Basically, if we're looking at it objectively, the whole thing's fucked top to bottom.

Honestly if it were IRL, the age gap still seems like the lesser evil to me. 14 is certainly old enough to fall in love (or "love"); we can imagine this happening and hell, it probably more-or-less did at some points in history, at least in spirit if not in the precise details. He's a prince who can apparently make unilateral policy decisions on at least minor issues in a country where royalty randomly enslaving people on a whim (at least mermaids, which is what's relevant here) appears to be considered above-board, so the power-imbalance is sickeningly in his favour despite how much younger he might be. Worth considering: why age-gaps are considered bad? (Two wrongs don't make a right, tho)

 

[Shita-kiri_Suzume]

Well, it got DMCA'd. I hope HikaruNa is happy now.

 

[Yaniverg]

Man we should really murder everyone who uses dmca to remove content