Pirazy said:
Speaking of the Shinmei Ryu appearing in MSN, doesn't those two in the background in the bottom frame in the first pic look familiar? Motoko and Tsuroko perhaps?
However unlikely it is, wouldn't it be something if Setsuna turned out to be Tsuroko's illusive child? Then again she's part-demon and mentions later in vol6 that the Shinmei Ryu abandoned her..
But it'd help explain Motokos hatred for men if it turned out that the man her sister married was also a demon, or maybe a half-demon. Yeah I know it's almost entirely impossible (like 0.1% chance of happening) but i'd sure make things interesting wouldn't it?
An interesting idea. Notice that there are four people in the background there. The small girl is Setsuna, and if the other two are Motoko and Tsuruko, then perhaps the man is Tsuruko's husband?
However, there are some problems with this theory. Motoko is, as I recall, twenty-one when the Love Hina manga ends in the year 2005, which would mean she was born in 1984. Given that Setsuna was born in 1989, and seems to be roughly five years old or so in those flashbacks, that'd mean that Motoko would only have been ten or so then, and while those figures in the background aren't very well-defined, saying the middle woman there is only ten seems a stretch - notice that that figure also has her hair trailing down from what looks like a bun in back, which Motoko is never shown to do.
It's also a mild stretch, though not an impossible one, to say that Setsuna could be Tsuruko's child. Even leaving her nature as a hanyou aside (and that's a huge problem with that theory), the ages are a problem too. If Tsuruko is, say twenty-five when she appears in the relatively early part of Love Hina, that'd be the year 2000. Subtract eleven years from that to go back to 1989, when Setsuna was born, and you have Tsuruko giving birth at age fourteen! The theory becomes a little more viable if Tsuruko was thirty when we first meet her, but that'd still mean she already took over the school, got married, gave up the school, and gave birth, all by the time she was nineteen. Possible, but still...
In regards to her affiliation with Shinmei Ryu...in volume four Setsuna says that she became a traitor to Shinmei Ryu when she left them and went east to Mahora so she could continue to watch over Konoka.
Oddly though, at the end of volume six, she tries to leave again after having been outed as a hanyou. The strange thing (this may be due to an improper translation) is how she says that leaving is the "way of the tribe" (seemingly indicating she's not the only one in her family who is part bird demon) and that she's repaid her "debt to the Konoe family for the Shinmei Ryu training and taking her in," which suggests that the only reason she became a disciple of Shinmei Ryu is because the Konoe family sponsored her somehow.
