>I do hope that Mio doesn't hold back too much in her playful
>abuse of Ritsu when the latter deserves it, that running joke always
>gave a chuckle. Besides, Ritsu seems to enjoy it on some level.

Well, she'll at least be gentler about it. In the source she's really kind of disconcertingly violent. I mean, it's played as slapstick, but still, she routinely leaves a mark. Hereon, I assume the blows will be mostly symbolic.

>>"Yes, Ritsu, they do have boys here," said Kaitlyn patiently. "And others,
>>too. There are life forms at this school you've never even imagined."
>
>I wonder if any Hanar or Elcor turn up at DSM?

Imagine an elcor economics teacher with the voice of Ben Stein from Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Like that subject wasn't already hard enough to take seriously. :)

>Congrats to Yui on being adopted by an apex predator with a heart of
>gold. This also mean that if HTT had any notion of trying to
>keep a low profile until they got their bearings that's going to be
>utterly impossible now.

On the plus side, it means Yui is now totally invulnerable to the ISO Standard Anime Skeevy Dudes ("hey, little lady, looks like you got stood up. Why don't you come and play with OH MY GOD RUN FOR YOUR LIVES").

>>"Well, Yui, I guess you've got a cat and a dog now," said Ritsu with a grin,
>>reaching down and ruffling Azusa's feline spirit ears (which, it hadn't
>>escaped any of her bandmates, had been out pretty much full-time since the
>>end of the summer mini-tour).
>
>Background minutiae curiosity, is this from the original source,
>something from Legend of Korra that I don't recall/didn't see (I only
>watched the first season of that show, Korra was awesome but the
>rest... less so,) or something else, like a low power version of the
>witches' familiars perhaps?

It's sort of both of the first two. In K-On!, Azusa's resemblance in person and mannerisms to a cat is a running joke (their faculty advisor, who is a bit unhinged and into cosplay, sticks a cat-ears headband on her when she first joins the club, which is why Yui calls her "Azu-nyan", and she routinely does the thing where she protests verbally but takes no action to free herself when summarily cuddled); and in our extrapolation of the Avatar setting, spirits have been roaming the material world and occasionally intermarrying with humans for several generations by this point (following events that took place in one of the later seasons of Legend).

What this all boils down to is that one of UF-Azusa's grandmothers was a cat spirit, and she's inherited a few cat spirit traits, including the ears. If you look back through the earlier run of TFLF, you can see that she's spent most of her life trying to suppress her cat spirit inheritance (e.g., the ears only appeared when she was distracted or startled and couldn't consciously keep them hidden), because she found it embarrassing, but in the later part of the series she's been leaning into it more. As we see her in this episode, she's stopped trying to suppress the ears altogether.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.