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krpalmerWith one thing and another, I lost track of just-released translated light novels for a while. When I caught up with a bulk order, I wound up with two new volumes of Bottom-Tier Character Tomozaki. Some ineffable mixture of good-enough translation, a fun-enough premise, and nice-enough characters had made that series one I’d read with interest. It might have been because of that, though, that I first plodded through two volumes of My Youth Romantic Comedy is Wrong, As I Expected. I don’t know if its translation is any worse, but something about it hasn’t grabbed me the same way; I got to considering “the sunk cost fallacy,” the collection of issues that get in the way of me reading novels originally written in English and presumably more engaging, and how I’ve gone from “reading that series because one day it’ll get past where the anime gave out” to “following where the adaptation went all the way to the end and still wondering if something about it goes over my head.”
Still, with that out of the way my interest in just where Fumiya Tomozaki’s efforts to learn through practice and analysis what everyone around him seems to do by instinct was still there. I did wonder a bit about how long it had been since finishing the third volume; Tomozaki did seem to be getting along well again with his life coach of sorts Aoi Hinami. By this point in the story there weren’t as many “small lessons” as before, just the big challenge of motivating a female classmate who hadn’t been featured in the colour plates at the start of the first volume.
I was a bit conscious the new anime adaptation of this light novel series was getting under way. Still stuck “waiting for every episode to be available,” I noticed some reactions to the early moments of the story that were similar to my own initial “there’s enough concern about ‘the world owes me video gamers’ out there” caution, but more vehement yet. Some reactions that didn’t just fixate on that sniffed instead “a good adaptation would have been more appealing.” Even so, by this point in the series I remained ready to think there was more subtlety to things than I’d first thought (including the cast being a bit more varied than “one guy and a gaggle of attractive girls.”) With that familiarity, I did contemplate how “solving the problem described on the back cover” hadn’t been quite the end of some previous volumes.
As it turned out, that was the case here too, and it just so happened the one female character in the first volume’s colour plates who had never quite seemed as easy to notice as the others throughout was getting caught up in the story ahead of the fifth volume. More than that, too, this fourth volume ended with something of a cliffhanger, the series doing well enough now that seems permissable. That I do have the fifth volume ready to hand is something, although I don’t know how it’ll end, and I’ve got other translated light novels around as well such that I can only hope they’re not all tough going.
Still, with that out of the way my interest in just where Fumiya Tomozaki’s efforts to learn through practice and analysis what everyone around him seems to do by instinct was still there. I did wonder a bit about how long it had been since finishing the third volume; Tomozaki did seem to be getting along well again with his life coach of sorts Aoi Hinami. By this point in the story there weren’t as many “small lessons” as before, just the big challenge of motivating a female classmate who hadn’t been featured in the colour plates at the start of the first volume.
I was a bit conscious the new anime adaptation of this light novel series was getting under way. Still stuck “waiting for every episode to be available,” I noticed some reactions to the early moments of the story that were similar to my own initial “there’s enough concern about ‘the world owes me video gamers’ out there” caution, but more vehement yet. Some reactions that didn’t just fixate on that sniffed instead “a good adaptation would have been more appealing.” Even so, by this point in the series I remained ready to think there was more subtlety to things than I’d first thought (including the cast being a bit more varied than “one guy and a gaggle of attractive girls.”) With that familiarity, I did contemplate how “solving the problem described on the back cover” hadn’t been quite the end of some previous volumes.
As it turned out, that was the case here too, and it just so happened the one female character in the first volume’s colour plates who had never quite seemed as easy to notice as the others throughout was getting caught up in the story ahead of the fifth volume. More than that, too, this fourth volume ended with something of a cliffhanger, the series doing well enough now that seems permissable. That I do have the fifth volume ready to hand is something, although I don’t know how it’ll end, and I’ve got other translated light novels around as well such that I can only hope they’re not all tough going.