Comments

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Got the game for Christmas and finally started playing it at the start of the month. My first Rune Factory, and first impressions are “Really great”. Only other farming sim I’ve played is the original Harvest Moon via NSO.

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Amogus123456789 said:
they are sooooooo coooooooooooool toghether

How so?

FRien said:

I was talking about it with a friend, but cutting the ear like this is extremely cruel. I think it might be even worse than branding someone's cheek with a red iron.

How so?

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AlsoSprachOdin2 said in comment #2590079:

How so?

Because the cheek, you can somehow hide it with a mask or long hair. It'll arouse suspicion, but you can try. The ears? The elves in Dungeon Meshi have extremely long ears, so any wound on it is immediately visible, and they'd be extremely difficult to hide, be it under a hood or with a prothesis, like they used after WWI to hide how badly disfigured some people were.
So an ear clipping would be permanent, almost impossible to hide, and you can never recover from it.
I'd have to re-read Dungeon Meshi to be reminded what kind of crime warrant that mutilation, but from the outside, it feels extremely strict.

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FRien said in comment #2590093:
So an ear clipping would be [...] almost impossible to hide

That would be the only difference from a branding. I don't think it's nearly so disfiguring that not being able to hide it is such a big deal.
If the criminal conviction is the issue you might want to hide then I certainly don't think this is an issue of cruelty. Making it easier for criminals to circumvent the whole point of these marks (letting people know that they've been convicted of some serious crime) would just be a way of subverting the intended function of the judicial system. If you don't think people should be able to tell from looking, then it's not the way of marking but the practice of marking in the first place that's the issue.