With New Years around the corner, we’ll be starting the next year with the end of this chapter.
Next week will be the last page of Chapter 7. Until then, I hope you are still enjoying your holidays 🙂
Bata Neart
Irish Magical Girls!
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Because reasons, dear Áine. Because reasons. Like electricity or indoor plumbing with hot and cold running water. 😛
Hope everyone had a good holiday and has a lovely New Year. 🙂
@Rawr: You are a horrible, horrible tease. 😛
@Azrael: I really have to disagree with you there. Modern conveniences like electricity and indoor plumbing are certainly very nice, but that’s all they really are: conveniences. It may seem unimaginable to live without them, but you’d actually get used to it really quickly. Fundamentally humans are still people, conveniences or not. Here are the things I’d think about when considering whether or not things are really better now than two millennia ago:
We’ve solved many of the basic problems our ancestors faced. It’s very rare for people to starve to death. People live longer, healthier lives because of modern medicine. We’ve dramatically reduced the amount of violence in our society from war, from crime, from ordinary personal conflicts.
We are no longer bound to the places we’re born. Not so very long ago most humans were born in small communities and lived their entire lives there, whether they liked it or not. Leaving was a huge step – you’d very likely never see any of the people you’d known your whole life again, and you faced a very real danger of dying striking out on your own. For better or worse that’s no longer the case. It’s better because people are no longer trapped in horrible social situations like they were and can find much more agreeable communities to live in, and it’s worse since that means a lot of people wind up drifting in a sea of strangers with little or no social moorings.
Information and communication. This is something that’s changed just in my lifetime. Each of us here now quite literally has more information at our fingertips than any single person in the history of our civilization. And sitting here in Philadelphia I’ve chatted with people on the US’s West Coast, in Alaska, in Europe, in Australia, in Japan. Unfortunately it remains to be seen if greater information will translate into greater wisdom.
And then there’s what I think is the most fundamental question of all: are we any happier? I think that as a society we’re still learning how to live together in huge communities of millions of people. I think that we’re making progress in learning how to live with others in this way but we still have a long way to go. How do we build communities that let everyone find their place but that don’t leave people behind, left alone in the dark places.
I’m guessing that Aine’s mentor is going to say is something along the lines of “Because you will be a Battle Witch at last”. Unfortunately, she was wrong. 🙁
Happy New Year, everyone.
@Kessy: Apologies for the teasing cliffhanger-y nature of some of my posts. I’d love to post Bata Neart twice a week to speed it up, but while Back Office is still running I can only manage 1 page per week so far. I’ll manage it one day though! (If I have any hope of finishing this story in my lifetime, I really should 😀 )
@Azreal: Because of reasons and stuff. Don’t forget the ‘stuff’, it’s the most important of all 😀
@Delta: She’d kind-of be right. Aine did become a Battle Witch thanks to Ashling, although that did involve a 1500 year wait, and Ashling sort of managed it by fluke 😉
@Farren: Heppy new year to you and everyone 😀
As ever I’m hoping that 2017 brings further improvement in my abilities to draw this comic and hopefully keep it entertaining for you lovely folk.
In the upcoming chapters we’ll finally be delving into my take on the whole ‘High-School Manga/Anime’ trope. Expect more culture-clash, old faces, new face(s) and if can pull it off; give you more of a sense of what it’s like to be an Irish Secondary School student….with magical issues….and an Aoife…
@Rawr: Now, now, I didn’t say that being a tease is a bad thing. 😉
@Kessy: That’s a relief, since I plan on doing it a lot 😀