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From the Bookshelf: Bottom-Tier Character Tomozaki Lv.3
Plodding through the twenty-second “A Certain Magical Index” light novel with all the ambiguities accumulated over twenty-one previous volumes not given up on without ever quite articulating a good reason why, I might have at least been able to look ahead to an impending instalment of a different translated series I’d found easier to read with real interest. When I managed to order that new book, though, I bought the ninth (regular) volume of “My Youth Romantic Comedy is Wrong, As I Expected” too, and thought I ought to get that additional purchase out of the way first. The reason why there, though, could well have been anticipating it feeling sort of slow going as well. While from the time I first started watching its anime adaptation “Oregairu” might have felt as close to “a set-in-the-real-world, originally-in-English” story as anime and its associated source material and spinoffs have ever got for me (even with a few of the secondary characters seeming a bit more “anime-familiar”), that might only have added something to an unfortunate sense of its full subtlety going a bit over my head. Still, once I’d got through it I could turn to the third volume of “Bottom-Tier Character Tomozaki.”
“A high school guy whose one real talent of excelling at a video game manages to get him hanging out with an assortment of attractive high school girls while becoming more socially acceptable” did seem more familiar so far as source material for anime goes (even if the anime adaptation announcement arrived after I’d read the first volume), but where the third volume did begin with an already familiar setup of Fumiya Tomozaki and his life coach challenger Aoi Hinami going out on the town to keep polishing his real-life skills (and a colour plate before that of some of the female characters in swimsuits; in the endnotes author Yuki Yaku once more enthuses about artist Fly’s cover illustration), more male characters kept getting involved in the story to the point of their interactions skewing in a different direction.
Beyond that, Tomozaki wound up on a date with “bookworm” Fuka Kikuchi and instructions from Aoi to declare his feelings to her. As smitten as Tomozaki has seemed with Fuka from the first volume, he does push back against Aoi’s “gamification” of real life (without it feeling quite “out of nowhere”), and there I did feel a sudden spark of accentuated interest in the story. It’s an ambiguous thing even so, perhaps, in wondering about “fitting in with everyone else” as a declared goal, to think of a certain number of other stories striving to show up high school structures and see the risk of sliding into smug-from-afar assumptions of “the enforced conformity of Japan.” This sudden rebellion, however, doesn’t turn out that well for Tomozaki at first, but the volume concludes in a satisfying way I can imagine the anime adaptation wrapping up with (although I can also suppose that’ll depend on whether “three novels” feel “squeezed into three months’ worth of episodes.”) That I do continue to be so engaged with one particular translation from Yen Press is something, anyway.
“A high school guy whose one real talent of excelling at a video game manages to get him hanging out with an assortment of attractive high school girls while becoming more socially acceptable” did seem more familiar so far as source material for anime goes (even if the anime adaptation announcement arrived after I’d read the first volume), but where the third volume did begin with an already familiar setup of Fumiya Tomozaki and his life coach challenger Aoi Hinami going out on the town to keep polishing his real-life skills (and a colour plate before that of some of the female characters in swimsuits; in the endnotes author Yuki Yaku once more enthuses about artist Fly’s cover illustration), more male characters kept getting involved in the story to the point of their interactions skewing in a different direction.
Beyond that, Tomozaki wound up on a date with “bookworm” Fuka Kikuchi and instructions from Aoi to declare his feelings to her. As smitten as Tomozaki has seemed with Fuka from the first volume, he does push back against Aoi’s “gamification” of real life (without it feeling quite “out of nowhere”), and there I did feel a sudden spark of accentuated interest in the story. It’s an ambiguous thing even so, perhaps, in wondering about “fitting in with everyone else” as a declared goal, to think of a certain number of other stories striving to show up high school structures and see the risk of sliding into smug-from-afar assumptions of “the enforced conformity of Japan.” This sudden rebellion, however, doesn’t turn out that well for Tomozaki at first, but the volume concludes in a satisfying way I can imagine the anime adaptation wrapping up with (although I can also suppose that’ll depend on whether “three novels” feel “squeezed into three months’ worth of episodes.”) That I do continue to be so engaged with one particular translation from Yen Press is something, anyway.