Headscratchers / A Centaur's Life

• So, who were Those Wacky Nazis Racist against in this verse? We see at least 2 different races in the TV special. Or is it just German Patriotic Fervor ?
  • There was a relevant chapter in the manga. It was still the usual suspects. There's a bit where Hitler gives a speech in which he preaches it doesn't matter if their centaur, angel, mermaid, etc but what matters is whether their a Jew, Slav, Homosexual, or whatever. The anti-centaur discriminations don't die easy though, which adds extra complication to the relationships between concentration camp inmates.
• And do Aliens really exist, or was that chapter just one giant Big-Lipped Alligator Moment?
  • Yes, and it's slowly becoming more and more relevant. VERY slowly.
• Just mentioned this under YMMV but... what the heck happened in the human-faced-dog side story. Mum was abusive and too busy sleeping with her boyfriend to look after her daughter - that much I realised. The daughter was ordered to get rid of the dog (which she refused to do), not to leave the house (an instruction she obeyed) and left alone in the house with no food. She subsequently collapsed. It's also clear that this happens regularly (the mother threatens the daughter with death if she tries to go to the police "again"). That bit's fine. But who did the dog go to for help? How did she find them? Was the daughter just faint from lack of food, or was something else wrong? Where the hell have the owner's family been all the time she was at the mercy of her mother, given that grandparents and (presumably) a father magically appear at the end?
  • The parents were obviously divorced and the girl was forced to live with her abusive mother who likely kept the girl, her daughter, around out of a petty desire to spite her ex-husband, the girl's father, considering how much she neglects their daughter. She essentially left the girl and dog to starve to death alone at home, only drinking tapwater, while she carouses with her lover(s) elsewhere, and the girl is forbidden under threat of violence from her own mother to even merely leave the house to just search for food. Her absent father, meanwhile lives with his own parents, his daughter's grandparents, and he can't contact the girl, his daughter, because of the petty spitefulness of his ex-wife, the girl's mother, in isolating their daughter. Their human-faced female dog either managed to locate her former master or went to the police, and led whoever she contacted back to the house where the girl was effectively imprisoned and had now collapsed due to lack of nourishment. The girl is then rescued and taken to the hospital. It is implied in the end that the girl is in the custody of and going to live with, her father and grandparents, and is not anymore under the control of her mother.
• Himeno's centaur fashions look lovely, but how does she put them on? There only seems to be one piece for her horse body, so how do they get over her legs?
  • In the anime, we see Himeno's younger cousin put on a swimsuit, showing how she puts on the bottoms and tops. (probably picked because we could see her put it own without breaking censorship laws), and presumably Himeno's outfits are similar.
• People's in-universe attitude towards Manami constantly puzzles me — one minute she's headed for great things, then her ambition is a bad thing and she should just be a high school girl. First she's too mature, then she's too needy. Everyone admires her for taking on a parental role, but then they accuse her of being too interfering/possessive. Is this supposed to be a commentary on how expectations can damage a person? Does the writer disapprove of her? Or does the writer simply have no clue what they're doing? And why, for the love of heaven, is her classmate not more concerned about Manami trying to seduce her own father??? They'll give her chapter and verse on how she shouldn't be so ambitious or so concerned about her sisters, but being attracted to her dad barely registers as a blip on the radar? Is there some odd in-universe nuance that I'm missing here?
  • I can't tell you much about it, but the way i see it is that the people have to see 2 faces of her, which contrast each other: Imagine that the most popular (but kind) girl in your class is really bossy and as the Student Council President she has some responsibilities to do; you would tell her to relax a little: "Sure, you can be responsible about it but at the end you are just a kid, try to enjoy before growing up". Which it’s a good rationalization in its right, but then you get that she is basically the only support from not so well family, how can you tell her to enjoy school life as a kid, if she is basically fulfilling the role of an adult; without each view interfering with the other. She acts as a mom in her house, and a bossy teenager in her school, creating 2 different images of her.
• For a manga that otherwise pays a surprising amount of mind to realistic evolution, the treatment of merpeople seems strange to me. Why would they have legs which part around the thighs, then merge into a fishtail around the knees? That doesn't seem to be very hydrodynamic. You'd think evolution would select against such a trait. Speaking of which, why are all the merwomen so buxom? That doesn't seem hydrodynamic at all, either. If anything, they'd be the ones most strongly inclined to have a smooth, androgyneous figure...
  • The manga does not pay attention to realistic evolution. It pays attention to internally-consistent evolution, there's a huge difference. The wings on angels and dragons are also unrealistic, since the wings are vestigial and there wasn't an intermediate stage where it actually served a purpose. And there's far too much phenotypical diversity for a single species. Also, the way merfolk are able to swim while standing upright with their bodies and most of their tails out of the water flat-out breaks the laws of physics.
• What's the author's point on racism in this series? Are they trying to say that a world where you can get sent to a reeducation camp for "accidental racism" because a centaur picked you up and carried you on your back after you became too sick to walk due to exhaustion or heatstroke is a good thing? Or is this some sort of exceedingly subtle rant about Political Correctness Is Evil? The latter seems unlikely given how little attention is paid to it, but the way anti-racism laws are enforced seems beyond political strawman versions of the world.
  • It's effectively impossible to tell. The messaging, if it's actually messaging, is so muddled, poorly-conveyed, and mixed up with the general strangeness of the series that aside from the author saying straight-out what they meant, attempting to make an assumption is futile. There's also the possibility that the author is in fact just being deliberately weird and threw in seemingly meaningful commentary that can't really be parsed just to be confusing.
• If six limbs became the genetic norm in this universe (aside from Antarcticans), why are there (still two-armed) catgirls? You can't tell me a tail counts for two limbs, especially when in our world it doesn't really even count as one.
  • Cat and goat-people are stated to have vestigial lumps on their spine where their two extra limbs would've been.
    • Though that itself raises the question as to why said additional limbs would evolve away when they did not in centaurs, angels, and the like. I'd figure two more arms would come in handy for survival, perhaps more so than cat ears and goat horns.
• Seriously, in which chapter does Manami "seduces" her father? Because it comes as a shock for me reading it here, since i don't remember nothing of it. And i re-read all of the chapter before asking here and i seriously can't find that chapter. Could it be that i was reading a bad translation? (But i did read various versions in various pages, just to check). Was it the one where she tells him that he can't be a good artist and a good father at the same time? Or was it Chapter 46, when she talked with Omaki about him painting and not calling it Hobby?
  • The end of Chapter 92, actually. She talks about it with Omaki in Chapter 99.

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