>>10432 It is hard to discuss, as your writing seems to alternate between a serious story and WHOO YEAH EROFIC IT'S AWWRIGHT NO REPERCUSSIONS at the drop of a hat, and the latter doesn't really inspire any discussion beyond "hey anon what do you want to fap to next?"
As to the actual story... Red and Yukari are dead, crisis is pretty much over, as far as we know.
Mary and Renko are both unobtainable, since while they both want us they're also both determined to A. play footsies and hard to get with us and B. cockblock the other (so to speak) 100% of the time. Their longstanding friendship is quickly turning into a rather bitter rivalry, as both of them are realizing that what they really want is to divorce themselves from the other.
Renko's been pushed far, far away from her comfort zone and anything she ever originally wanted, she's basically cruising along letting herself be used by others at this point. We made her into a fighter, Mary's trying to make her into a lover (remember, it was Mary's idea for us to kiss Renko in the first place. We didn't even like her before then.). No one knows what if anything Renko herself wants to be. The only desires she's ever voiced are to return to the outside world and to "do whatever's best for Mary."
Mary, on the other hand, is fucked in the head. Quite literally. We will never have any way of knowing exactly how much of her is Mary and how much is Yukari, but given that this is This Shrine I would guess Yukari's percentage is slowly and inevitably increasing. We had trouble understanding her motives before - now she's completely incomprehensible and can't really be trusted to boot. The pragmatic thing to do would have been to kill her the instant she revealed she's hosting Yukari's mind, but, of course, we could never bring ourselves to do that. Chalk up a Just As Planned for Yukari.
Meanwhile, our own youkai side is an obvious threat. Options:
- Get in touch with it and embrace the murdersauce a little. Except that we don't have Reimu's support in this route, we'd lose Renko's respect entirely, and we'd be playing right into Yukari's hands and making ourselves a replacement for Red. Not very desirable.
- Avoid RAGE. Yeah, right, that'll happen. Sure. I'm shocked we haven't flipped out from the events in this thread. Renko can calm us down by essentially whoring herself out to us, this is obviously unacceptable unless it's genuine. As mentioned she's already very coerced, and if her feelings ARE genuine that just causes problems with Mary/Yukari. Not a viable long term solution, unless Mary/Yukari magically finds it within herself to give up and let Renko have us with no jealousy or scheming.
- Move to an entirely different situation, taking Maryukari and Renko out of the picture entirely. This could easily be accomplished by having Reimu send them, us, or both back to the outside world. Least dramarama would result from speaking to Reimu privately once she gets back and having her send just us back without telling the girls. They can then make their own decisions on whether to stay or leave. Once out, we vanish, spider into the dark night. Move somewhere else, leave our old identity behind so we can't be found if Mary and Renko try to follow us, and get a job as a knife instructor or something. Our youkai side is presumably weakened outside of Gensokyo, and RAGE is easier to avoid anyway in a cozy modern life than on Gensokyo's frontier. Find some other nice girl to settle down with.
This last is clearly the best option for everyone's long term health and stability, by far. The only problem is that most Anon will never pick a tearjerker vanish ending when they can hold out hope for a Ho Yay Threesome End, where the girls' jealousy and issues are magically handwaved into secret lesbian crushes and polyamory and everyone lives happily ever after with orgies at the shrine. Regardless of how illogical and shallow such an ending would be.
Thing is, though? They're probably right to do so. You let them have Reimu and Suika last time, after all, and have been strongly hinting that a Mary + Renko ending is possible here, so why not go for it? It doesn't have to make sense if it's what the audience wants to read and what you want to write.
That may sound a little pejorative but honestly there's nothing at all wrong with it. It's just a question of where you want to fall on the scale. Too far on the continuity side (MiG) flat out doesn't work with anonymous voting, you wind up with nobody satisfied. Too far on the fanservice side (most of Border Crossing, AAA) works better, you get a viscerally pleased audience, but serious discussion is really rather pointless. It's preferable to stick somewhere in the middle, where you give Anon generally what they want, but in a consistent way (SDM/kinda Youkai Mountain). The hidden cost here is on the author, as that's ridiculously hard to write. (See: Tetro's burnout) TS, as mentioned, is unique in that it tends to exist in a state of quantum flux, jumping between the two extremes rather than mixing them.
tl;dr
There's no discussion because nobody's sure if there SHOULD be discussion or if we should just pick [x] Threesome and unzip.
Me? I'm a heartbreaker.
[X] Tie the towel around yourself, wiping your hand on the floor or something else conveniently hidden.
[X] Find a back window or something and discreetly (but quickly) leave.
[X] Wait till Reimu gets back, ask her privately to send you back to the outside.
