Welcome back to another recap of Fushigi Yugi - your one stop manga that has love, betrayal, twins, monsters, mythology, kings, ghosts, wars, gods, murder, revenge, music, death, reanimated corpses, AU fantasy realities, libraries, exams, gender confused warriors and school girls!

So to get this out of the way two things happen that are diametrically opposite but serve the same point: being a priestess sucks.

Miaka learns from my fav Tai Yi-jun that oops well as a priestess ya gotta be pure so quit trying to make it to third with Tamahome. This creates unnecessary and ultimately stupid tension between the two.

THEN well Nakago convinces the grief stricken Suboshi to avenge his twin Amiboshi by...murdering a bunch of previously seen characters. On the plus side we meet Soi. A rather tragic figure all things considered.

I never liked Suboshi, he's too willing to jump at violence as his answer.

As both gals are abject failures as Priestesses, they both head off to Bei-Jia and Keisuke learns some horrible truths about being the Priestess. Thanks to Tetsuya who I also adore.

Miaka's mom makes a brief bitchy appearance. She's basically Joyce Summers in season 2/3 of Buffy.

Oh and hey Nuriko is a hot guy and this is where Watase sort of...muddies the idea of Nuriko a lot. We learn why (tragedy of course) Nuriko dresses as she does. We learn how comforting she finds it. She mentions her love for Hotohori a lot. Yet Watase tosses in a brief bit of Nuriko contemplating going back to being a guy possibly (or rather 'maybe it's time I lived again as a guy').

I wonder if she got pressure from folk to adjust Nuriko a bit (later, in Genbu Kaiden, there's a character who legit changes male to female to male physically due to his celestial mark, who's the main love interest, but that series was written almost a decade later after Watase was definitely a well known/sought creator). While technically FY isn't a reverse harem romance series, Miaka is shipped heavily with pretty much every Suzaku Warrior but Mitsukake & Chiriko. ( )

It was a solid 3-star book until the bit with Nuriko happened, and that part was (imho) handled so poorly and insensitively, I had to knock a star off for it. Although I wonder if Miaka's reaction to it was either a translator's choice or a reflection of her being a dumb, naive teenager who probably didn't grow up around a lot of LGBT folks. Chichiri is still best character and Tamahome is still worst, fight me IRL. ( )