Pumpkin Scissors

[JAhU]

I kind of liked the anime, so I decided to give the manga a try. Apparently only a few volumes were released in English and due to licensing\copyright mess those are not available anymore. Unofficial translation goes up to first chapter of volume 5 and the rate at witch chapters are released is very slow. I decided to give raws a try, even though I don't really know Japanese. At least the manga has furigana which helps greatly reading all those kanji. Still I gave up on that after about 20 pages (way too much trouble reading it like that). Instead of reading I just tried to figure out the story from images. I did that for all the released volumes (14 in total). I was able to follow with things that appeared in the anime, but I was more interested in rest and sadly I couldn't really figure it out at all.

Is anyone reading this manga in japanese (or other language) and can enlighten me on what is going on there?

There is this big arc with armored train and some city. Oland overdoes a bit fighting the bad guys and starts cutting them to pieces. He eventually snaps out of it thanks to Alice. I have no idea what was the general plot there. There was this girl with dark hair and guy who works with section 3. Both of them seemed to be important to the story.

There was this arc with some street urchins. Apparently Oland knew one of them. It was some girl who he was taking care of at some point in the past. There was even more stuff related to Oland's past. That girl seemed to act tsundere towards Oland (she hits him a lot and blush when no one is looking). And there was this catgirl brothel(?) and some other characters (the bright haired guy with glasses). In this arc Oland tries to not use his lantern during fights, but still goes berserk. This time the tsundere girl made him snap out of it (and he almost killed her there).

In another arc, there was some back story on the engineer lady and Martis (if I remember the name right). Apparently it explained what is the relationship between those two.

In other short arc there was something about Alice's sisters and their men (husbands?).

In the last and incomplete arc, there is some terrorist(?) group with scorpion emblem. There are some (at least) two new female characters introduced. One is part of the terrorist group (she welds a weird 2 handed saber), the other is part of some military enemy(?) forces (she hangs a lot with Oland in this arc). Also the young princess of some other country (the one who earlier had a date with Martis or whatever his name was) also seems to play some role in the story.

The weapons are quite a techniological mess in the mnaga (anime too). Characters use all kinds of firearms from 19th and early 20th century. Fully automatic weapons don't really appear (at one point there was a demonstration on weird looking machine gun, but thats all). I don't quite understand why the military forces utilize weird looking multi-barrel derringers while their primary weapon is a bolt-action rifle. Those two things are on very different technological level. How come they came up with bolt-action mechanism but didn't came up with better mechanism for pistols than multiple barrels. Some of the bad guys weld revolvers, semi-auto rifles, semi-auto pistols and pump-action shotguns while others use flintlocks, caplocks etc.. Also tanks are based on designs much more modern than the firearms.

The manga also starts to have bits of echii\fanservice in later volumes.

[MrAnime]

I liking this anime too so far. Didn't bother trying this one out until now. One reason why I didn't watch it was because I talked to someone about it and they said it sucks for them so bad they've stopped at the first episode.

I can already tell Oreldo is going to be my favorite character in the series. The dude is awesome.

[Kraken]

Hmm, I was thinking of starting this anime/manga, but I am somewhat skeptical about if it is worth it. from your post, I think I am going to start it.