Silvachief

I'm just gonna respond to the first post here. I've actually just completed a collaborative discussion article on MLA with some other bloggers, if you're interested in checking that out. So...first of all, did that scene go too far? Part of me says yes, it really wasn't necessary. However, i'm guessing that scene brought out some pretty strong emotions in you. I know it made me incredibly angry and I don't think that feeling of violation on humanity's behalf would have been conveyed with anything less. I think the question of whether Sumika is somehow made lesser by having ended up enjoying that experience (at the time...definitely not retrospectively) can be answered with the explanation that absolutely any human being, male or female, being manipulated in that way would have felt the same eventually. It's incredibly scary to think about but the idea that our minds can be molded by the release or injection of particular chemicals is 100% true. Any person exposed to intense amounts of pleasure would become unable to resist it in time. For me, that made the extreme chaos that was Sumika's mind that much more believable and understandable. As for why she was acting the way she did before that story...imagine your childhood friend and crush being torn apart before your eyes and then being subjected to what she was subjected to...and then having a brand new person looking like your childhood friend appearing and saying that they love you. I think anyone would be confused in that situation and what she did was just one way of reacting to that confusion. On top of that, she felt dirty, violated and unlovable because of what the BETA had done. I don't think she was being an ass at all. Talking about the ending now, I think that feeling that the new characters introduced in Takeru's original world are not able to replace the others that had been lost in the Alternative world is intended. Imagine how Takeru feels knowing that the people laughing and smiling around him have died in horrific ways, how hard it would be to just sit be and accept that everything is over, that he can just go back to living again. It's sort of how I felt after finishing the VN XD While I did find the last act to be a little rushed in places I didn't think is was a bad ending; that final scene in the hive had me on the edge of my seat! It would have been far more out of place for humanity's struggle to suddenly be over with everything ending happily...it just wouldn't have fit in with the rest of Muv-Luv. I do agree about Takeru's reversion back to his previous whiny self, however. The BETA take up first place in my Hall Of Things I Wish Never To Encounter. Their sheer destructive and adaptive capabilities make them terrifying, before you even consider the experiments they conducted on humanity. When an opponent doesn't even recognize that you are a living organism...horrible, horrible things can happen.