Mairimashita! Iruma-kun - Ch. 375 - A Normal Girl

[ZBoner]

Chima is just like me fr fr

 

[Tinker_OwO]

Say Gex

 

[IrregularPerson]

we're getting character focuses, I'm ready! appeal to me misfits, shine bright!

 

[bookwurm]

 

[cinophyl]

damn these demons gay, good for them, good for them

 

[Thrembs]

Extremely huge reach lmao. For one thing it actually was an empty space for the Many Ears, they didn't need to forcefully make space with violence.

that’s what I said. This time it actually is “a land without a people.

Also, they weren't violently persecuted by demon society, but enslaved for their physical traits.

A: That was servitude, not slavery.
B: we were the only group reliable to be able to read and do math for a long time. Didn’t even need to be trained by the government or church. That’s where the stereotypes began.

This puts the Many Ears much closer to a story like Liberia or American Indian reservations, which just like the many ears plot of land were deliberately assigned to barren low value places and the subject of attempted seizure if the subjugated group did anything good with it in spite of the government attempting to sabotage them.

Are Natives exploited for some physical/cultural feature of their people?

This is a good thing because if you were right here, it would be a morally repugnant thing for this author to do and I trust her instincts and values way too much based on everything else she's written to think she'd go there. Maybe if this arc was written further into the past but definitely not after this last year.

Lots of people are naive. Most people at my old shul were naive. “Morally repugnant“ I mean… yes, but wow that’s strong wording.
Lots of people just don’t get it. Like A LOT of people. These aren’t evil people, and even I was neutral (as in “this is too much of a mess for me to sort out”) until I there were claims made of shooting missiles at tunnels. What pencil-pusher came up with that?! That’s not how tunnels work!
”If they could buy missiles they could have built power plants.” That’s now how any of that works! Infrastructure takes tons of time and money and skilled labour by specialists and…

Also the other general stuff is because Kabbala has been adopted as a collection of fun western fantasy tropes for Japanese authors, just like Gnosticism and the Ars Goetica. This is possibly due to the influence of the Megaten series, which basically combines all three into one very blasphemous cosmology. Where you find gnostic references you almost always see the Hebrew alphabet characters used basically entirely without meaning, for example the Xenosaga trilogy from the 00s. They do the same thing with the Star of David, you see that all over the place in Japanese western fantasy settings as a generic magic circle design, like with Castlevania, which is otherwise very Christian in its intended setting.

I mentioned not the Mogen Dovid, which is just a basic geometric figure that demonstrates the non-intercursability of a hexagram.
As to the rest of it… yeah.
But there are degrees. This ain’t Angel Sanctuary with Christianity, but like I said, all you’re really gonna get from us is flavour.
But again, Kiddush cup.
https://ibb.co/KL4b1Dv
(weird way to start Shabbos)
I lost count of the appearance of them. I saw a few of the designs I saw on Judaica sites (wish there were a store up here)
Yarmulk-ears.

Unrelated: yay let's go lesbians. We've known Kuromu likes Gyari back since the end of the Evidol arc, she just thought a relationship where Gyari "won" her would kill the spark. This sort of peer non-competitive interaction is thus exactly what they need to get closer <3

Proactive lesbian Gyari is the least realistic thing in a manga that takes place in the underworld, is populated by demons and full of magic.

 

[hmmxst]

"Yuri Beam is super effective! Kerori has fainted!"

 

[Yuu3]

I ship them so hard. For all of Gyaru's quirks, she's so cool in a different way from everyone else. She totally got all the ML's line of a shoujo manga.

 

[Jetsetlemming]

Are Natives exploited for some physical/cultural feature of their people?

Yes, actually. On two levels: one is the assumption that darker skinned peoples naturally had more resilience and stamina than Europeans, or at least they told themselves that to justify horrific acts. This line of thinking still exists to this day with the idea that black and latine people have increased pain tolerance. One of the weirder ways this manifested for American Indians specifically is that some in the eugenics movement looked at them as a source of good physical genes without too dark of a complexion and thus kidnapped children and stole them away for white families to "adopt". A group of white families in certain regions (mostly the Midwest far as I know) have at least one Indian ancestor to point to and they're not all lying like Elizabeth Warren. Many of them are instead pointing at these stolen and sexually exploited children.
Two, they were simply not white and thus not seen as legally protected from abuse and exploitation like white citizens would supposedly be. This is mostly true for almost all of American history, crimes targeting non-white citizens, especially non-citizens, are almost never taken seriously or solved. It took until the 1980s for the schemes related to stolen children and the "Indian schools" used as clearinghouses for them to come to public attention.

Ending that particular tangent and thinking about that arc that just ended, I think it's pretty noteworthy that the antagonist group was called "border patrol". Considering how much of their actions are not patrolling any borders but instead doing internal secret police shit, they feel like a pretty "political" thing from the author.

 

[FlowerSlaughter]

I like these chapters, it's fun to have the plot bounce between characters a little during downtime instead of an usual timeskip, or long setup for short character arc

Don't really like Gyari ever since she first appear, but i can still appreciate what she is doing for Kerori

She reminds me of Sabnock

What's up in atlantis people commenting above me?

 

[Thrembs]

Yes, actually. On two levels: one is the assumption that darker skinned peoples naturally had more resilience and stamina than Europeans, or at least they told themselves that to justify horrific acts. This line of thinking still exists to this day with the idea that black and latine people have increased pain tolerance. One of the weirder ways this manifested for American Indians specifically is that some in the eugenics movement looked at them as a source of good physical genes without too dark of a complexion and thus kidnapped children and stole them away for white families to "adopt". A group of white families in certain regions (mostly the Midwest far as I know) have at least one Indian ancestor to point to and they're not all lying like Elizabeth Warren. Many of them are instead pointing at these stolen and sexually exploited children.
Two, they were simply not white and thus not seen as legally protected from abuse and exploitation like white citizens would supposedly be. This is mostly true for almost all of American history, crimes targeting non-white citizens, especially non-citizens, are almost never taken seriously or solved. It took until the 1980s for the schemes related to stolen children and the "Indian schools" used as clearinghouses for them to come to public attention.

Ending that particular tangent and thinking about that arc that just ended, I think it's pretty noteworthy that the antagonist group was called "border patrol". Considering how much of their actions are not patrolling any borders but instead doing internal secret police shit, they feel like a pretty "political" thing from the author.

That’s not “needed by the more powerful due to having skills they lack”.
That’s just “genocide”.
We had a few of those. They’re almost all the same. True evil is boring. Almost every holiday is “they tried to kill us. They failed. Let’s eat.”

So, my point stands. Skill needed by “the man”, because they can’t do it alone. We were doing pretty well on the Iberian peninsula with that, but then The Man (a woman led the charge if my stoned brain remembers correctly, but) made us leave, en masse. They had the power to do that, and it sucks.
We are nomads, with “host countries” which are often full of people that don’t trust us.
Some assholes got sick of waiting for Moshiach and tried to force the issue. What’s it gotten us? It’s not done anything for ME, aside make me worried my car will get keyed every time they pull some crap.
There are people that think that The State of Israel is actually the third kingdom, like, religiously. Nothing at all like any prophecy, but OK… World peace is supposed to start. Probably after pigs fly. Hopefully tomorrow.

They have heder and a yeshiva and a downtrodden, old-school rebbie…

I used Judaism to predict like half that arc. I called the showdown!

 

[Jetsetlemming]

Rereading the beginning of the Many Ears arc for the establishing details and yeah I just can't see this group as a particularly Jewish analogue. The biggest problem is that the land they're on is very literally a reservation in the American sense (a concept which became very popular with other shitty empires like the British and Germans). Mephisto picked a random plot of land that is completely barren and low value, gathered up all the Many-Ears, and stuck them there and told them to make it work. They had no say in the matter except to obey the state, and they have no connections, real or mythological, with the land.

Honestly though the more I think about it, the less comfortable I am pointing the Many-Ears at any real ethnic group, for the same reasons magical fantasy race metaphors for real life ethnic groups is bad. Rereading it I noticed more connections with the Ainu than anything else, but the Ainu are not physically legitimately a different subspecies from Japanese with unique abilities. The Many-Ears are immediately visibly distinct from other demons and have a real ability that makes them physically different as well. While there's been plenty of points in history where a colonizing group claimed such things, either about the subjugated or themselves, it's never actually true in real life, and using fantasy as a metaphor risks implying that racial propaganda had merit. There's no 1:1 fit a metaphor for the Many-Ears story even if we put aside the racialized difference, and I'd imagine that's intentional by Nishi Osamu because she doesn't want those real associations, which frequently come with a lot of hatred, misery, and accidentally racist implications attached, associated with her upbeat 12+ fantasy comedy manga. This deliberate care certainly puts her head and shoulders above your average fantasy writer (including science fantasy writers, I'm still mad at what those bastards at Eidos Montreal did to the Deus Ex universe with their "mechanical apartheid" bullshit).

 

[Nekoloss]

Honestly, although I didn't quite liked gyari when she first showed up, she's kinda growing on me after what she's doing for kerori
I'm all in If the Yuri ship really sails

 

[kucchi-desu]

THANK YOU SO MUCH...I REALLY LOVE THIS DEVELOPMENT !! more queer characters in mainstream manga please