the wages of sin don't adjust for inflation

I am 76 episodes into 189 and stuff is happening! Well, some stuff, and it is taking a while, and they are still repeating themselves as a soap is wont to do, but there's stuff!

A big chunk of this time was devoted to: Love Triangle Island, i.e. Aryana gets stranded on an island, and the boys stumble upon her when trying to find her, and the trio just... rough camp there, I guess.

Which is possibly the most stupidly indulgent way to highlight the love triangle and have both boys compete in being stupid over Aryana (one boy stupider than the other, admittedly) and funnily enough my only problem with it is that Aryana doesn't really react to it in an interesting way beyond telling both boys to quit it when they start beating each other up. I mean, this girl is happily spending time with both of them, and being affectionate with both of them, and although she's not encouraging the triangle per se and genuinely cares for both, she's not putting any hard boundaries for the two boys when that's something she's done before, and quite firmly.

Anyway this is them:
( This is not intended to be a YA OT3 but... )

A great status quo changer is that this mini-arc ends with Neptuna finally finding Aryana, Aryana escaping from her, and then Aryana being found by Queen Reyna and receiving the magical pearl, which magically gives Aryana legs! Aryana may still be a mermaid, but she can hide as a human now, as it were.

While Aryana was off being stranded on an island, I did like that they took the opportunity to rattle the Victor-Stella-Megan-Elnora status quo. Victor now firmly believes that Aryana is not his, while Elnora secretly still does, Stella has maybe been having an affair behind Victor's back, and Megan had a superb mini arc where she realized that Aryana has been living rent-free in her head and she can't pin her happiness on caring what other people think of her, which is surprisingly nice even if it is tinted with flaws inherent to that family.

I'm positive someone's made this joke before, but I just hit this bit in Cardcaptor Sakura and my immediate reaction:

( Screencaps behind the cut. )

I've been sloooooowly doing a Cardcaptor Sakura rewatch that started just before the latest season dropped on Netflix. I used to watch a Malay-dubbed version with my housemates when it aired on weekends while I was in uni, and it turns out I'd watched way more of Clow Card arc than I thought I did. A whole bunch of the earliest episodes are fresh, and although I'd missed a few here and there, I must've gotten all the way through to the start of the Sakura Card arc since some bits are familiar, but I think I must've stopped there or they stopped airing it on TV because everything's new to me now. I wouldn't be surprised if I'd stopped watching back then around this time because my interest has been petering out now, too. I just don't find the Sakura Card arc as compelling.

Anyway it has baffled countless people and in this rewatch it has baffled me as well, that there are multiple cases of teacher-student relationships with eerie age gaps in this show, that although it's only seen in a few episodes, every time it pops up I'm just like, why does this exist in this very cute, very light, very fluffy, very low conflict show? Is it because the story is so sweet and breezy that the mangaka had a compulsion to add something to give it some "edge"? That's a rhetorical question, I don't really want to know. But it baffles me, it does.