>Woot! I'm sure we all expected Fritz to make the choice he did, but I
>appreciate the bride's dress, definitely. I was thinking myself
>neither one really fit, but I sort of thought she'd go for the uniform
>anyway, and I'm glad she didn't.

Agreed. I hadn't really given thought to what she would be wearing, as much as I'd given thought to how the Kaiser was going to actually announce that "no, wait, strike that, switch brides!"

>I know I've spoken before about this being the sobering moment for
>Lucchini, and I'm very glad to see it begin to pan out this way. It
>was definitely time.

Lucchini's moments here were exceptionally interesting. A part of me is wondering if it's not so much the experience of Freiburg so much as the removed influence of her familiar. I'm not sure what the Eyrie idea of how a witch's familiars affects her personality if at all. But the other part is thinking along the same lines you are here, but with the twist that she has known for quite a while how to -be- mature and grown up and responsible; she just has never had to consider acting it.

>And now the word about Neuroi-chan is...well, not getting around, so
>to speak, but getting to the point where hopefully some real progress
>can be made in finding out just what the Neuroi -are- and what is
>going through their minds. (And, no, I have no idea what canon says so
>far about it. And I largely don't care. This is precisely the kind of
>issue where fanon is often better than canon, and Eyrie hasn't
>disappointed me on that front yet.)

Well, I don't know about the manga, but for the anime, the cannon is...well...entirely silent on the matter. As is mentioned several times, "Neuroi-chan" got vaporized during Operation Trajanus, and for the anime that appears to have been that. I think it was something like a plot arc that just got completely tossed.