Why do these girls have to die?

The following post is graphic and contains spoilers for the following manga (Highlight to read the titles): Akame Ga Kiru, Omamori Himari. If you haven't read those manga, or if you don't want to be spoiled, please come back later and share my misery. At the time of this post, the Omamori Himari chapter mentioned here was not translated into English, so if you do not want to be spoiled at all, turn away now.



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So did you ever wonder why the heck was I all of a sudden active at Animesuki at the last week of June? A lot of that is because I returned to Jcafe after 5 years, looking for a particular project to work on (yes, what I said there is true, I am still in the "considering" phase of that decision), and I just had to see the Omamori Himari thread. I was interested in seeing how far the scanlations are from the current RAWs, when I saw Kuesu's name come up. Now, this is 5 years since I was last here, and I thought those spoiler tags held the links to stuff, but instead I saw the dreadful spoiler:

She's dead, man.....

SHE'S BLOODY DEAD. My favorite girl of the series is dead. Now you know why I stayed away from there for 5 years. 5 Bleeding years I stayed away from Jcafe because of things like this, and in my return, this is what I see? This is the reason why I had to blog about this, it hit me really hard when I saw this. Yeah, she is really my favorite girl of the series, the moment she first showed up, I had such strong sadistic vibes from her, my masochism overwrote my ponytail + boobies desires. Under normal circumstances Himari should have been my favorite girl, but Kuesu wasn't just love at first sight for me, she is everything an M like me would like, and even in the Anime I loved her, even when she had black hair I loved her (O_o), and till death, I still love her.

It doesn't surprise me though. It hit me hard, hard enough for me to go around the place making a fool of myself in the hopes of drowning out that misery, but I saw it coming, and I'm sure others did too, the moment the other Demon Hunters showed up in the manga, I always had this feeling, Kuesu's screen time was running low, and her place was being lost as the chapters went on, and then finally she's gone...

Foreshadowing is always there in manga. In Akame ga Kill, the MC's friend was killed very very early in the series. I don't know why the beautiful girl had to die, but something has to start the protag on his journey, and like every other protag, some kind of tragedy has to happen for the journey to start. "Flags" as they call it, conditions that, if you detect it, you will be prepared and it won't surprise you, but still touch you. Later on in Akame Ga Kill, the start of foreshadowing occurred when that odd Tengu rule was first mentioned, about "the clash of Tengu users guaranteed to leave one of them defeated", and once I read that, I just knew it wasn't going to be easy goings for the good guys right afterwards, and right on schedule, the first of the good guys to die was a girl:

Here's one thing I don't like: the nice quiet girl dies. Honestly, if you read this chapter, did you really think Main or the other girl was going to die? The key problem there was that the enemy girl had met up with the protag earlier, so she wasn't going to die just yet. Main wasn't going to die just yet either because she's tsundere. Er..... you'll have to be a seasoned Anime/Manga fan to understand that, but seriously, did they set a tone in the story for Sher early on? I didn't feel that way, and the unfortunate fact that her character leaned on the ditz/laid back personality didn't help her cause either.

It still hit me though because I don't like girls getting hurt or dying and what not. That's..... just how I am. I'm one of those fellows who grew up with the myths and legends of girls, and that violence against girls is just something you don't do. Even Tasogare Otome X Amnesia, I couldn't finish all of episode 10 because I just didn't like what happened to Yuuko-san, what she went through, and how she ended up, but in the end, that experience led her to meet someone special to her. And that's what makes these manga experiences special, while none of this is real, I still feel for these girls. How do I explain it, if you were around when KGNE (Kimi ga Nozomu Ein) came out, the simple best way I could sum up that series was that "I hate it so much I like it". I tell you I hated what happened in that series, I hated that Bakayuki, I hated that the ponytail was cut off, I hated how the whole thing went, not because it was poor storytelling, or that I don't like how the characters acted to each other, but that I hated how it all felt quite real, much of these experiences were real, so at the end of the series, I respected it, I liked how much it touched me, and I will never forget it even now.

And that's the same feeling I have here about these wonderful girls dying in manga. I hate how they have to die, and I hate that Kuesu no longer walks this Earth, but you know what? That's what makes me a fan of all this, and of the Omamori Himari manga. I felt love, hate, and other emotions. And if a work of fiction made me say "I love you girl!" followed by "NOOOOOO DON'T LEAVE ME", yeah, I gotta say:

I love this stuff.