![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerThe first translated volume of “Bottom-Tier Tomozaki” wound up appealing to me not just through “the novelty of a light novel that isn’t set in a fantasy world,” so when its second volume became available I went looking for it. Remembering I’d managed to read the first volume in bigger bites than I usually manage of other translated-from-Japanese novels, I tried to keep pushing through the second, and that effort seemed to help again.
Things pick up with the protagonist Fumiya Tomozaki continuing to take on Aoi Hinami’s “train yourself to face real life and resemble the people around you” challenges and make the pieces add up to something bigger by going out on the town. That another male character was part of the small group did help a bit with previous thoughts the story was “familiar enough” when it comes to “one guy serially hangs out with several attractive young women, seeding differing preferences among the audience all the time.” (So far as what’s at least got my attention, Tomozaki kept passing time in the library with Fuka Kikuchi, described in the character list at the start of the book as a “bookworm.”) It’s pointed out Tomozaki is improving (even as he gets asked if he’s “reading a book” on that subject), but the main plot of the volume sets in when, even with the quite competent Aoi having declared her candidacy for student council president, the “class clown” Minami “Mimimi” Nanami tries to run against her.
Intent on putting her full effort into her campaign, Aoi assigns Tomozaki to try and assist Mimimi, and he puts his own best schemes into that. I had contemplated the rest of the book amounting to that, but it turned out it wasn’t. Just as I was wondering where the story would go from there, it did close in on the characters and the recurring “even when you look successful by the majority lights of those around you, life’s still harder than it might seem” theme. All in all I’d like to say the back-and-forth dialogues felt a bit easier to take in the second volume than the first; whether this will help the promised anime adaptation (and whether it’ll amount to “the first two books” or squeeze more source material in) remains a question.
Things pick up with the protagonist Fumiya Tomozaki continuing to take on Aoi Hinami’s “train yourself to face real life and resemble the people around you” challenges and make the pieces add up to something bigger by going out on the town. That another male character was part of the small group did help a bit with previous thoughts the story was “familiar enough” when it comes to “one guy serially hangs out with several attractive young women, seeding differing preferences among the audience all the time.” (So far as what’s at least got my attention, Tomozaki kept passing time in the library with Fuka Kikuchi, described in the character list at the start of the book as a “bookworm.”) It’s pointed out Tomozaki is improving (even as he gets asked if he’s “reading a book” on that subject), but the main plot of the volume sets in when, even with the quite competent Aoi having declared her candidacy for student council president, the “class clown” Minami “Mimimi” Nanami tries to run against her.
Intent on putting her full effort into her campaign, Aoi assigns Tomozaki to try and assist Mimimi, and he puts his own best schemes into that. I had contemplated the rest of the book amounting to that, but it turned out it wasn’t. Just as I was wondering where the story would go from there, it did close in on the characters and the recurring “even when you look successful by the majority lights of those around you, life’s still harder than it might seem” theme. All in all I’d like to say the back-and-forth dialogues felt a bit easier to take in the second volume than the first; whether this will help the promised anime adaptation (and whether it’ll amount to “the first two books” or squeeze more source material in) remains a question.