Today's the day for (the start of the week of the discussion for)
Chapter 4, up to page 226!
I'm so late this time! It's close to the end of the semester so school's starting to get really busy, but once it's over, I want to do a more detailed analysis or almost-essay of the going-ons in this story.
I think this is the part where most readers might start to think the story will make an actual attempt at making Hannu learn a lesson, which, y'know, doesn't turn out to be the case. When that part comes, it'll be obvious.
Some parts of this chapter are a little funny, but also that's because Hannu's just being really rude. If he said most of these things to a real person in the real world, he'd get a smack in the face. Not to mention that I don't think Hannu would be very well-liked if he were in a larger town, but also everyone hates everyone else here so... Oh Well
TM.
The moose is pretty interesting. Yup. Though I tried to find an equivalent in whatever's available on the English internet, and I couldn't find any mention of Hiisi who were so malevolent, unless you count the post-Christian-contact ones. I'll chalk that up to creative liberty or maybe the Terrible Fox Child just really wants the humans in the dream to have a bad time. Who dreams of problems they can cause humans, anyway? Also, the design of the moose is pretty underwhelming from a distance... it really is just a moose made of wood, the horror probably comes from the fact that it's trying to kill them.
Jouko's a pretty decent character, too. He's probably the only one I can tolerate so far, mostly because he does try smacking (or flicking) some sense into Hannu. Well, I mean, I hope he didn't do that when Hannu was younger, but Hannu's an adult and probably needs someone to smack some sense and existential awareness into him. And Mr. Moose is alright, too.
Well, that's all I can think of so far! Great art, though I wonder if Minna got tired of purple by around this point.
Maybe I misinterpreted something. I thought I saw something in the comments in which she said she was still in high school; but maybe I misunderstood terminology that's different than in the USA. I don't remember what page it was on; if I come across it again, maybe I'll quote it here and people can sort it out for me.
Meeeeeeh, I honestly don't think it makes much of a difference. Here in North America and maybe, maybe, also in many cultures, we're too used to our life stages all being approximately the same. Really, you're not a totally different person the moment you get out of high school. Being 19 instead of 18 or 17 doesn't make that much of a difference unless it's coincidentally a year in which LOTS changed for you.
Sorry if it came off like that! I know and have known teenagers who aren't/weren't like that at all. Like most other things about humans, it varies considerably. I meant more that some people who are like that as teenagers are not like that when they're older; though some take longer to grow out of it than others, some never do, and some people actually become more like that as they get older.
Nooo that was about Jitter's comment, but I agree that people are too different and change at wildly different paces to gauge or place on a timeline accurately.
Catbirds, it really is Science! Studies have shown that for example the mental capacity for empathy diminishes during puberty, although it of course returns later and develops further. And the confrontations are required to break free of the symbiotic relationship with the caregivers, most typically parents, but it reflects wider. So, it’s not only confirmation bias, the stereotype based on facts 
I did a quick search... I can't find any articles saying that particular thing, at least not in English, but several do say that empathy needs to be developed
throughout puberty and that it's not the same as childhood. But I'm not really a developmental psychologist, so uheehhh... I'll let this one go for now. Personally I viewed the confrontational side of adolescence as being more about the desire to stand up for yourself (in a generally unfair society), and a number of my friends were... not confrontational at all, but many others in my school were. If you can recall, when and on whom was the study conducted?
It still stands that clearly Hannu was more understandable to me as a teenager than me now, though, so there was probably still a decent amount of truth in what you learned on this topic!
I missed a lot of the angsty teenager phase, I think, both because I had a lot of what most people would nowadays consider adult responsibilities from late childhood on, and because until my midteens I didn’t live anywhere with enough people to have anything like a high school.
I agree and this was interesting to read, because it's pretty clearly the environment of high school that makes students
like that. Modern high school isn't a great place to learn, in my opinion, since it's basically mandatory even when some people aren't really interested in it and you spend over half your waking life involved in education and related activities, and to make it worse people cut funding so that the environment itself is terrible to learn in, even when the things you're learning are super important for understanding the modern world now. It might've been different like sixty or seventy or eighty years ago, but I wouldn't know!
And as to older people coming up with equally weird and vile themes: yeah, that happens, sadly. I haven’t seen it so much in my generation, since most people in their 80s have lived through enough real-world trouble to make them a bit more open and tolerant unless they have been really spoiled and sheltered, but the post-war generation seems more inclined to nastiness, especially the men, who were definitely more spoiled and sheltered in the aftermath of WW2, where so many boys were lost.
My experience with working with people older than eighty is that a lot of people with interesting stories to tell don't have the means or the physical ability to do it in any way other than orally, which is unfortunate because very few people listen to them. Though it's kind of terrible that two terrible wars happened in the first place...
