You see? As he’s always said, Marumaru doesn’t have a problem with drinking. He could stop at any time, if he wanted to. But his alcoholism isn’t a flaw, or a problem…it’s an irreplaceable memento of his time with the Shinsengumi. It has great sentimental value for him, he can’t simply give it up. It would be a betrayal of his friends’ memory if he did.
And, yeah, there’s a bit of a chronological issue here, since membership in the Shinsengumi would make Marumaru at least 170 years old. But…by B-movie standards, that’s barely a rounding error, isn’t it? If you can have dinosaurs which existed tens of millions of years apart fight each other in a B-movie, what’s the issue with having a 170 year old ronin teach at a modern-day high school? Back when I went to high school, it sure felt like some of my teachers where about that old and that far out of touch. XD
And the Shinsengumi membership just fits in so well with the roving ronin stereotype, and is such a staple of Japanese popular fiction in general, I simply couldn’t pass up this opportunity. I made the haori rather small, though, so Marumaru could have been a teen at that time and a scout rather than a warrior…that saves me, like four years or so. XD
The principal, by the way, is an understanding man…he knows that teens are damn hard to keep track of, and he’ll not get on a teacher’s case over one or two going missing without trace. He has noticed, though, that parents often have some sort of special attachment to their own one or two teens, and fail to grasp that bigger stochastic picture. So he feels he has get involved when the rate of attrition exceeds a certain level, and Marumaru might not be too far away from that, following some incident(s) I’ll never elaborate on.
More on Monday.