I feel like the people who get mad about everyone in HNK getting turned into Lunarians or whatever, is missing the metatextual point of the story. The question is not “why did they have to become Lunarians?” it’s “if thousands of immortal people with an idyllic society want to die, is it worth it for one man to subtly manipulate (but not push, coerce, or force) one child into unimaginable suffering?” It’s the classic trolley problem!... KIND of...

One of the first dilemmas which caught my eye was with Padparadscha. If someone is receiving help they do not want, is it okay for them to turn down the help, knowing that this will lead to many of their peers being hurt? Padparadscha decides no, and can’t even consider the alternative. Telling Rutile to abandon them is unthinkable, because it would then almost certainly cause Rutile to abandon all doctoring duties. The gems would be pretty screwed while a new gem gradually learns doctoring from the ground up.

Later Phos makes the opposite decision for them, stealing Pads from Rutile and taking them to the moon. With the added wrinkle that Phos knows they have more advanced technology there which would almost certainly provide an actual cure. Which is does indeed! Twice!! There’s so many layers!!!

And of course this is about Cairngorm cause everything in my life is about Cairngorm now!!! Is it better to force someone into altruism, or give them the freedom to be selfish? Most of you fuckers are like NO YOU FORCE THEM, IF THEY EVER GET HAPPINESS THEY’RE THE WORST!!!

And the idea that Cairngorm’s ENTIRE personality on the moon is 100% pure grooming is absolute cope. Aechmea makes such a point of encouraging her to make her own choices, and treating her well, and she’s ACTUALLY HAPPY as a girl!!! And she shows literally no hesitation or fear in talking shit. She’s always telling him how creepy he is and how bad he is at gifts and stuff. But she also actively chooses to show him affection.

She obviously doesn’t trust him but she obviously CHOOSES to love him anyways. Basically the same as with the earth gems and Kongo! Except when Aechmea yells at her (one time and only ever once), he doesn’t shatter her body into a million pieces. Aechmea is objectively better to be emotionally close to than Kongo.

As someone who sees the stiff anger in Cairngorm’s body on earth, the uncertain frustration etched into her face until she meets Aechmea, and then the bright bubbly joy she expresses most of the time then on... I know how that journey feels. I’ve felt it. And let me tell you; it’s no coincidence that “no they’re not really a woman! They’ve just been groomed into acting like it, in ways that are entirely speculative and not even slightly evident,” sounds pretty horrifically familiar these days. (It’s the same conspiratorial thinking, applied on the same topic)

It honestly seems like most of the hostility Cairngorm and Cairnmea gets is because self-absorbed fans think the main character is the center of all morality. But for me, someone to whom Cairngorm’s emotional journey is delightfully familiar. To whom her success is absolutely dreamlike in its beauty. I just don’t see these invisible shadows of abuse. The real, perceptible abuse Cairngorm suffered from was all from Ghost and Phos.

So...

Since AntarcPhos is pretty dead, I guess it's time to consider...

*drumroll*

PadpaPhos

Yeah. Just two bros chilling and bonding over their desire to peace out permanently. And also why not?

I could have a whole entire meta delving into how Padpa confided into Phos out of all people and how Phos and Padpa's red and blue oni dynamic was pretty interesting. Alongside with Phos pretty much yoinking Padpa to the moon to fix them and Padpa immediately being 100% down to do whatever for their cause. I'd say it culminates in the whole yanking out a nice hunk of gem flesh in front of Rutile but that entire hot mess also requires including Rutile and Padpa's complex (and technically unhealthy) relationship AND the kind of mindsets they have.

So yeah PadpaPhos why not amirite.

(Currently they can in fact chill out together as two lifeless bros seeing as 96 implies/outright bricks us in the face that Padpa is probably not coping too well with being an immortal banking on their mentally broken, mentally disintegrating junior to whole-heartedly desire salvation/nothingness for them. Like at least if they're shattered or missing a few hunks of their flesh they can sleep it out in the closest approximation of eternal nothingness (death lite edition) rather than spend a couple millennia grinding more points for apathy as ennui sets in with the speed of light.)

It feels like the pacing for this arc and past arcs after the “Phos Goes to the Moon” arc starts to go faster and faster so there is a lot to be desired in between. It feels like the story goes from A to Z without putting in the other letters in between. I really wanted to see how the Gems would react to becoming Lunarians, because their fast acceptance was something I just can’t understand why it was so easy to undergo such a drastic transformation without any qualms. There were also interactions I wanted between some characters that did not happen or were written in an unsatisfying way that felt like the nuance in them just disappears.

I understand that time skips with the length of decades to centuries to millennia means that Gems can change drastically, especially in the setting of the Moon, where the Lunarian world allows the Gems to have more freedom to find themselves and find their own resolutions. Now I just have to hope and pray “The Party at the End” book added in with the special edition Vol 12 preorder will give me some answers and explanations. But part of me also is expecting mostly Cairnmea content in it per usual.

I dunno, part of me feels like Ichikawa is going through both burn out for this series and also wanting to move onto other projects aside from HNK, considering she works with Nintendo and is a character designer for Pokémon.

Agreed to a lot of this; the thing that bothers me the most is that there's so many characters that seem like they're set up to get some kind of development, and then the story kinda leaves it hanging, and for a while I had assumed there would be conflicts and resolutions and closure, but these issues dropped off the face of the earth....

The shift from the gems being hunted for sport for their entire existence only to be integrated among the lunarians, and nobody has hard feelings about it, everybody is happy to have left the earth where they've lived forever, everybody just kinda 👍 their way though it, fine we are lunarians now, okay we can restore dead gems because we changed our minds this is fine actually, whatever happened to Ghost and Lapis though, or whatever complex situation Rutile & Padparadscha had, or whatever are the ramifications of dusted gems coming back to life only to find almost everything they knew is gone and they have to live a new way of life without ever having asked for this :/

Not saying she shouldn't have done it at all, but the lack of extra time to introduce it made it feel pretty ooc to me. Especially given that "everybody has to die at some point" has been admitted as a plot point for a long time, so rushing it wasn't necessary at all. It also feels like there's a lot of missed opportunities...

That's not even mentioning things like the admirabilis, or earth stuff like the ice floes, but i'm still holding onto the hope there might be some more answers for that in the upcoming chapters. I'm also waiting to see if there's interesting stuff in the vol 12 booklet (though i'm not getting my hands on it, so i'm not sure if anything will be shared), but i'm not expecting much either though, but at least it might be fun!

+ regarding ichikawa being burned out, i'm not sure. I do think hnk is important to her because she put a lot of effort into it even when it's not necessary (cf artbooks, updated pages for manga releases, etc). If i had to guess, either she 1. happened to have a different vision of the story and she's fine with that, and/or decided on a deadline (ch108?) and eventually realized she was running late and had to scrap things/rush the story a bit and couldnt say everything she wanted to. The second option seems doesn't seem unlikely to me since hnk can only go so far with 20 pages per month, and she's trying to supplement it with additional material.

Either way yeah, i don't exactly know how hard hnk is on her since she takes hiatuses pretty liberally when she's working on other projects. A hiatus is still pretty different from a finished series though, so you may be onto something if she is trying to diversify her line of work...?

I love this manga so much I’ve followed it since 2017, but honestly there are some points where either it feels like Ichikawa’s writing is kind of waning or she just wants this series to be done and she can do other stuff. There’s a lot of points in the story where the mystery, theories and headcanons that fans have made that are alot better than what Ichikawa comes up with in the actual thing. I think the part of the manga where some stuff is just getting tiring is when Cairn becomes Aechmea’s wife and seeing so many characters become one note, or OOC, or we barely see the side characters outside of Phos’s POV so when they say or do something in the later arcs it feels like a very fast heel turn of their character. IMO, Ichikawa really should’ve worked on the side characters more than whatever the fuck she was doing making Cairnmea the star of the moon arc. I don’t even remember half of the gems without needing the wikia to help me remember.

yeah, lots of people have this same impression. i agree to some extent, hopefully this phase will be over with the hiatus

I made an Aechmea AMV, I tried my best so pls enjoy uwu

cairnmea.png

Cairngorm traits fit into the characteristics of the Rohini Nakshatra (From Vedic Astrology)

More posts from Rohiniposter (Rohiniposter said their star is Anuradha, but i don't know much about this vedic stuff)

good end: cairn sees what they did wrong and end up portraying their freedom in their own way

bad end: cairn asking to ‘die’ with aechmea because the lunarians goal is to pass on and cairn doesnt want to live without aechmea 

I needed to catch up with Houseki no Kuni and I am actually crying??????

I really love Cairn, okay. But the fact that they are fine with the idea of being imprisoned inside a kind of castle????? Because Aechmea wants them safe???? I don’t know but I’m scared and worried skkslwks. Also, the wedding was so cute ;;;;;;; but Aechmea keeps calling Cairn a “she” and I honestly get so mad.

Yeah. I still don’t like that guy.

can someone who reads houseki no kuni explain why cairnmea is supposedly problematic because I don't see it... I feel like people are thinking of Cairn as a child when, aren't they all centuries old?

Black vs white?

....I was bored and wanted to play with genetics. if you need any hints on who their parents are lets just say they both have a gem parent and lunarian parent. yes this is awkward but honestly I just wanted to make some kids.

Everytime Houseki no Kuni updates and i pray there wont be more cairnmea in this one but there it is folks.