Licia > Uriko:

I finished two more routes of Aiyoku no Eustia now that they've been translated, Colette's and Licia's.  Both girls are beautiful but only one of them merits entry into my fictional character hall of fame, the Princess Licia.

Licia looks like a carbon copy clone of Sakura Yoshino, so I knew she just had to be Sakura's daughter.  The only difference is Licia wears finer dresses and more jewels.  Well, and perhaps her breasts are a little bigger.  In any case they were clearly made for each other.  Colette had all sorts of psychological problems that ultimately led her to attempt suicide, which I can't really countenance, but Licia's only problems were that she was surrounded by bad people who gave her bad advice.  Once Caim broke into that cordon and started feeding her good advice she quickly came around and turned into a decisive, courageous and compassionate leader.  She killed her tyrannical grand vizier with her own hands.  We need more royalty like that.

To make room I cut Uriko, the Half-Beast, on the basis that there isn't much to her character beyond cuteness.  This is the problem with all fighting game characters, is there isn't much characterization to them beyond their fighting mechanics.  It's a huge handicap when competing with a visual novel character who is the most fleshed out fake person in any medium.  (To Heart 2, for instance, is longer than War and Peace, that's how many words are devoted to visual novel girls.)

This let me move Satano Diamond to properly be the daughter of another beast girl, Aruruu, like all the other beast girls featured in my fictional character hall of fame.  It's good to complete cycles and not leave anyone out.  So this substitution generated a cascade of positive changes for the book.

Speaking of Satano, her and Kitasan are now featured in my beautiful anime girls permapost, their portraits hanging next to Tokai Teio's, thanks to the latest ep which showed them off more beautifully than ever before.  The latest episode was yet again another masterpiece.  I'm starting to believe Uma Musume S3 is the best series of the year.

Aiyoku should only have one main route left, Eustia's, after that it's just a bunch of ecchi appendix chapters.  I'm closing in on the emotional finale.

Meanwhile, two countries are moving in clearly opposite trajectories, and it should be clear to anyone which trajectory is for the better -- Russia just banned LGBT sponsorship as extremism, like pushing for Nazism.  This is exactly what I've been calling for as a preventative to a sweeping wave among the younger generations to being 20%, 30%, 40%, LGBT+, which is literally imperiling human reproduction and existence.  This toxic indoctrination is destroying half of our children's futures and soon enough it will reach 80%, 90%, 99%, there's just no telling how far it will go unless stopped.  It is the purpose of government to defend against collective calamities by pooling people's powers to contribute to each other's collective security.  Things no parent can do alone, like shield their children away from the siren song of LGBT propaganda, they can do together, by banning it at the governmental level.  Russia understands this and is thus the only civilized white nation on Earth.

Meanwhile South Korea is not pushing against the LGBT+ agenda and predictably their birth rate has fallen to a new record low, .7 per woman.  This isn't just some low in South Korean history or in the 21st century or something, it's the lowest birth rate anywhere in human history.  Babylonians did better than this.  This is what happens when you combine LGBT+ with feminism, you get a barren future inevitably plummeting towards death.  Obviously .7 will not be the bottom of this well, next year it will be lower, and next year lower still, because the fundamental forces driving these lower birth rates aren't being checked by government, but encouraged and accelerated.

There's a huge difference between people making a rational decision that South Korea is overcrowded and temporarily cutting back on reproduction until the swell of elderly die off and leave lots of free housing for the young.  I can understand and even endorse that type of thinking.  But these decisions aren't economic, they're cultural.  The birth rate will keep falling long after all economic indicators say it's a great time to have a child, because it isn't about the money.  South Koreans have plenty of money, more than ever in their history.  Unless South Korea reverses its culture of 'women should work, children should be fruity,' that .7 number is never going up again.  There's no telling how much further down it will go, but it will never go up.

Why can Russia understand these basic moral truths when nobody else can?  I feel like I'm living in an entire nation of blind people, blind to the most obvious truths, that they deliberately fail to see even though it's all staring them in the face.

You could make the radical argument that it's fine for the birth rate to trickle down to near zero, and the world doesn't really need more than a million people or whatever, but this too is flawed.  I could agree that if the million people were actually happy and fulfilled, then it wouldn't be a big deal, but the very meaning of a low birth rate is that children are growing up lonely -- with no siblings, fewer parents and uncles and aunts and grandparents -- and then leaving that family home to a life of perpetual solitude, with no wife or children of their own, or only one wife and one child very late in life, when it's already too late and people have already suffered through hell most of their lives.  Humans were meant to grow up in a loving community, a large group of at least 100 other people they knew and interacted with.  They were meant to transition from children to parents seamlessly, without a single year inbetween, going from your father's house to your husband's and then getting pregnant yourself.  That's the whole meaning of the wedding ceremony where the father escorts the bride up to the altar and then hands her off to the husband.

When you separate people from this natural, evolved, healthy way of life, their life outcomes are emotionally much worse.  It's so obvious it shouldn't have to be said, but living your entire life as a worker bee with a couple friends (I guess from work, since no one goes to church anymore) is a hollow and empty existence compared to the deep and meaningful feelings that transpire in the course of family life.  The birth rate is a barometer for the number of people living full and meaningful lives, surrounded by other people who care about them and they care about, who they can make a meaningful positive impact upon.  Nobody cares how many spreadsheets you filled out in your life, but your children definitely care that you raised them.  There's a touching scene in Aiyoku where Licia makes a flower wreath for her father the king and presents it to him on his birthday.  Nobody will ever do that for you as a reward for filling out a spreadsheet.

Meanwhile, Precure has announced a new season, 'Wonderful Precure,' with a dog theme.  I doubt it will be any good considering the previous two seasons of Precure pushed transgenderism.  Maybe this season will be about the wonders of bestiality.  Nothing would surprise me anymore.  But who knows, maybe it will be good like the olden days.  Anything is possible.

Also Card Captor Sakura has announced some sort of epilogue manga in March so it isn't over after all.