![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmer“A light novel not set in a fantasy world” got Sean Gaffney’s attention, and noticing his first-volume review on Manga Bookshelf piqued my own interest. An added bit of unusualness on this side of the Pacific was that the novel didn’t already have an anime adaptation to draw people into seeing how the story’s continued. Even so, I did go looking for “Bottom-Tier Character Tomozaki” in the bookstore; it took me a little while to get around to reading it, having been focused on an “originally in English” echo of light novels. In the meantime, though, I did run across another positive comment or two on the translated work.
I have to admit the book’s opening, with Fumiya Tomozaki’s first-person complaints about how “real life’s” much less pleasant than a well-designed video game, had me thinking of all those cautions about disaffected young men clicking the wrong links and being fed inflammatory content by “gamed” recommendation engines until they’re dangerous misogynists or worse. Tomozaki, though, did seem ready to suppose he had limitations outside of video games instead of falling into claims he’s the one oppressed, and like all fiction this story was able to arrange things its own way. When an up-and-coming online player in the game he’s best at asks to meet him “in real life,” he accepts the “how you’ll recognize me” description is of a woman; when that young woman happens to be one of his high school classmates and Aoi Hinami is much less pleasant than she appears when others are around, after an argument she’s taken it on herself to make Tomozaki a more appealing person in real life one little bit at a time. Even if those reading the book might not have an attractive young woman coaching them, the book at least spells out the lessons. More than that, perhaps, the translation really did seem to be coming across to me better than at least some other light novels I’ve read. With their “anime-manga-style” covers I don’t take those books to many places where I might read them without as many quick distractions to hand. Taking them in just a little bit at a time might have its own impact on leaving me less impressed, but this one seemed easier to absorb whole chapters at a time.
The first review had brought up My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU/My Youth Romantic Comedy is Wrong as I Expected/“Oregairu” as another “set in the real world for once” light novel series given Tomozaki’s grim take on life, and I have been plugging away at those books after having tried out their anime adaptation. I do have to suppose this new novel is a bit more conventional and “anime-like” than the previous series got my attention for seeming, though, given Tomozaki gets to interact with five attractive high school girls. There were times I’d see a name and flip back to the colour plates at the front of the book to remember just who was in the conversation this time, although I did get the impression one girl didn’t get as much page space as the others. That could, of course, be what future volumes in the series are for, which does have me pondering if there just might be an anime adaptation. The long conversations in the book would threaten to make an adaptation “talky,” but the moment where Aoi shows just what posture and expression can do for someone at least holds some “if animated well” potential. At the same time, I was aware how the colour plate illustrations were “going all-out” (a good part of Yuki Yaku’s author’s afterword was dwelling on how attractive Fly’s cover illustration was) and animation artwork would have a hard time matching up, even if the black-and-white illustrations interspersed through the book weren’t quite as extravagant.
One part of me keeps accepting it would be hard to match the particular combination of “things I’m interested in” of “Last and First Idol,” and another part of me is aware that, in looking in one place to become interested in a translated novel without a colourful adaptation I haven’t been looking in other places to become aware of novels written in English to start with. Still, that this particular novel worked better for me than others I’ve read in translation is something, and I’m at least wondering where the story might go from here.
I have to admit the book’s opening, with Fumiya Tomozaki’s first-person complaints about how “real life’s” much less pleasant than a well-designed video game, had me thinking of all those cautions about disaffected young men clicking the wrong links and being fed inflammatory content by “gamed” recommendation engines until they’re dangerous misogynists or worse. Tomozaki, though, did seem ready to suppose he had limitations outside of video games instead of falling into claims he’s the one oppressed, and like all fiction this story was able to arrange things its own way. When an up-and-coming online player in the game he’s best at asks to meet him “in real life,” he accepts the “how you’ll recognize me” description is of a woman; when that young woman happens to be one of his high school classmates and Aoi Hinami is much less pleasant than she appears when others are around, after an argument she’s taken it on herself to make Tomozaki a more appealing person in real life one little bit at a time. Even if those reading the book might not have an attractive young woman coaching them, the book at least spells out the lessons. More than that, perhaps, the translation really did seem to be coming across to me better than at least some other light novels I’ve read. With their “anime-manga-style” covers I don’t take those books to many places where I might read them without as many quick distractions to hand. Taking them in just a little bit at a time might have its own impact on leaving me less impressed, but this one seemed easier to absorb whole chapters at a time.
The first review had brought up My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU/My Youth Romantic Comedy is Wrong as I Expected/“Oregairu” as another “set in the real world for once” light novel series given Tomozaki’s grim take on life, and I have been plugging away at those books after having tried out their anime adaptation. I do have to suppose this new novel is a bit more conventional and “anime-like” than the previous series got my attention for seeming, though, given Tomozaki gets to interact with five attractive high school girls. There were times I’d see a name and flip back to the colour plates at the front of the book to remember just who was in the conversation this time, although I did get the impression one girl didn’t get as much page space as the others. That could, of course, be what future volumes in the series are for, which does have me pondering if there just might be an anime adaptation. The long conversations in the book would threaten to make an adaptation “talky,” but the moment where Aoi shows just what posture and expression can do for someone at least holds some “if animated well” potential. At the same time, I was aware how the colour plate illustrations were “going all-out” (a good part of Yuki Yaku’s author’s afterword was dwelling on how attractive Fly’s cover illustration was) and animation artwork would have a hard time matching up, even if the black-and-white illustrations interspersed through the book weren’t quite as extravagant.
One part of me keeps accepting it would be hard to match the particular combination of “things I’m interested in” of “Last and First Idol,” and another part of me is aware that, in looking in one place to become interested in a translated novel without a colourful adaptation I haven’t been looking in other places to become aware of novels written in English to start with. Still, that this particular novel worked better for me than others I’ve read in translation is something, and I’m at least wondering where the story might go from here.