Phew! Alright, where to start with this... Thank you for reading yet another Volume of Transcontinental, this time placing the primary focus on Nelly yet again!
Lem is quite the dear character for me, so I was happy to write him in, as well as placing the focus on his one sided crush. With this being the case, I feel like I might've played a bit too close with fire. Chances are I'm gonna give a ton of readers heart attacks with this one, but at the end of the day I have faith that they'll understand where I was coming from. I just write for fun, and sometimes that fun involves making ecchi or lovey-dovey scenarios between my characters. I did this a ton with Lune and even Ed back in the day, but it's painfully obvious that I can't just do the same with Nelly. In essence, the theme for this Volume was "rushing through adolescence in a post-steampunk era world where stuff like proper sex-ed isn't a thing".
Both Nelly and Lem made mistakes in their own right—One side underestimated sexual intimacy, and the other overestimated it. Nelly was wrong to assume that talks of doing it with your best friend wouldn't change how you viewed them as a person, whilst Lem was scared that not doing it would result in a perma-failure in terms of advancing towards his crush. In the end, both sides were very much anxious, unsure and scared, which is where the adults came into play. Cecily, who told Nelly to properly cherish her maidenhood, and Lune, who gave Lem an alternative to his plan.
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This is where I assume most of the issues are. The question most readers would ask—Why the hell would Lune not be opposed to Lem dating his daughter? Simply put, Cecily explains it in chapter 531—He's a dreamer that thinks there is a way to make everyone 'fit together' perfectly. He weighed his options: Either Nelly dates her best friend Lem whom she has a healthy relationship with (5 years age gap), gets her heart broken by Meil (15 years age gap), or the third and scariest scenario, Meil somehow agrees to date her. In the end, he banked on Lem being able to make her happy, though he did warn him of the repercussions of making her cry. Cecily, whilst opposed to the age gap, understands as well what Lune's dealing with, but she still frequently made sure to ask Nelly IF she was happy. I assume this is how a chaotic spontaneous family like the Grimhearts would deal with such a situation. As Ed said during the party argument, had Nelly been theirs, Lem would've gotten the boot a LONG long time ago, which I assume is how a normal family would deal with it.
In terms of changes from the original draft, this time there weren't many. Originally the focus was more meant to be on Cene, but you really can't write much about a widdle bitty boy, so I switched to talking more about the teens in the story.
That's about all I have to say. I've insured myself on this topic, so now all we have to do is wait and see how it unfolds someday. See you in Volume 24, this is Mikan Akai—Signing out!