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krpalmerAfter reading two translated volumes from the “light novel” series Bottom-Tier Character Tomozaki in close succession, I went pretty much straight on to its anime adaptation. While watching it, perhaps willing to think “it’s good enough,” another novel in the series arrived. I set that book aside if not out of sight “to avoid direct comparisons,” although on finishing the anime I found myself plugging through a number of other translated novels as if “saving the best for later.” When they were out of the way at last and I picked up that sixth novel, I did indeed read it much faster than I’d managed with those other series. Bottom-Tier Character Tomozaki’s tale of “high school self-improvement through ‘game-like’ challenges, with plenty of cute anime girls around,” might well be as distant from any of my own life experiences as the “generic fantasies” it had first stood in distinction from, but its translation (credited in tiny type on the copyright page to Winifred Bird) seems to make a real difference for me. Even with that considerable advantage, though, the sixth volume does push back towards a tricker part of its main character’s “self-improvement.”
Regardless of how peculiar (and that’s a less loaded word than some that might come to mind) the series might come across in a brief description (including mine), the full setup in its opening novel still seems more agreeable to me. However, among Aoi Hinami’s first volley of “this is to make you someone well-rounded, someone I can accept losing at a video game to” directions to the main character and first-person narrator Fumiya Tomozaki, her comment that a “mid-range goal” is to “get a girlfriend” did wind up on my uncertain side. A few novels later (and right when the anime was wrapping up), Tomozaki did push back against doing that when she told him to in advance of him wanting to, which did something for the whole story in my estimation. As it turned out, that didn’t end their private discussions on specific goals for improvement, but as the sixth volume got under way (after a description of a video game clash a bit more detailed yet harder to push through than I can remember in the series before) Hinami is instructing Tomozaki to make up for lost time and decide just who among the assorted attractive girls who’ve been on the previous volume covers (including herself) he’s most interested in. One of those girls had wound up with a boyfriend in the course of the series, but Hinami declares breakups are always possible and adds that chasing more than one candidate offers “the reassurance of possible fallbacks.” She scoffs at Tomozaki’s objections and dismisses his idealism, as another character does later in the book while also mentioning that conviction seems to come from fiction rather than real life. Even so, Tomozaki does manage to kick that can a little further down the road, but is told to sign up for Instagram in the meantime and start posting specific photos to it, which can be recognized in the end as “getting to the point of steering situations.”
So far as the bigger goal of “deciding who he’s most interested in” went, another thing about the series that might seem atypical for me is that I wasn’t shrugging straight off and telling myself “those who try to anticipate how this sort of thing turns out seem just as likely to be setting themselves up for bitter disappointment as a gamble paying off.” Whenever Tomozaki interacts with Fuka Kikuchi (described in one word in the list of characters as a “bookworm”), he seems thoroughly smitten. Just as I was letting that thought settle in, though, I did manage to remember “one person’s ‘it’s obvious, can’t you see?’ can be an author’s ‘...too obvious,’” and contemplated how Tomozaki took a closer look at Minami “Mimimi” Nanami again in this volume (“Mimimi” is the first character to get on a second cover), and how Hanabi “Tama” Natsubayashi seemed a bit more plain accepting of a peculiar photo request and whether this might become more accepting in general. The thought did occur to me, though, that Tomozaki might have put Kikuchi on a pedestal, and even if this story doesn’t make “having to face someone isn’t as idealized and etherial as you think” a problem I was still conscious it might be.
In the meantime Kikuchi gives some fantasy stories she’s written to Tomozaki, and one of them is summarized over several pages, which did catch my eye. Discussion turns to adapting this story into a play for the school festival casting from the established characters, but when facing how she hasn’t finished the story yet (and gave it to Tomozaki by mistake) Kikuchi does muse how picking two characters to end up together means leaving one out, which did very much strike me as the story displaying self-awareness. She then just happens to bring up something very like the question Hinami had been needling Tomozaki with earlier, and all of a sudden Tomozaki has a new and unsettling insight on his unwillingness to decide. Not that long after something he had been dismissing with “it can’t happen to me” happens, and the story reaches a cliffhanger. It did turn out that in waiting to read this volume the next one in the series is just about within reach, but I do understand that book amounts to “short stories.”
Regardless of how peculiar (and that’s a less loaded word than some that might come to mind) the series might come across in a brief description (including mine), the full setup in its opening novel still seems more agreeable to me. However, among Aoi Hinami’s first volley of “this is to make you someone well-rounded, someone I can accept losing at a video game to” directions to the main character and first-person narrator Fumiya Tomozaki, her comment that a “mid-range goal” is to “get a girlfriend” did wind up on my uncertain side. A few novels later (and right when the anime was wrapping up), Tomozaki did push back against doing that when she told him to in advance of him wanting to, which did something for the whole story in my estimation. As it turned out, that didn’t end their private discussions on specific goals for improvement, but as the sixth volume got under way (after a description of a video game clash a bit more detailed yet harder to push through than I can remember in the series before) Hinami is instructing Tomozaki to make up for lost time and decide just who among the assorted attractive girls who’ve been on the previous volume covers (including herself) he’s most interested in. One of those girls had wound up with a boyfriend in the course of the series, but Hinami declares breakups are always possible and adds that chasing more than one candidate offers “the reassurance of possible fallbacks.” She scoffs at Tomozaki’s objections and dismisses his idealism, as another character does later in the book while also mentioning that conviction seems to come from fiction rather than real life. Even so, Tomozaki does manage to kick that can a little further down the road, but is told to sign up for Instagram in the meantime and start posting specific photos to it, which can be recognized in the end as “getting to the point of steering situations.”
So far as the bigger goal of “deciding who he’s most interested in” went, another thing about the series that might seem atypical for me is that I wasn’t shrugging straight off and telling myself “those who try to anticipate how this sort of thing turns out seem just as likely to be setting themselves up for bitter disappointment as a gamble paying off.” Whenever Tomozaki interacts with Fuka Kikuchi (described in one word in the list of characters as a “bookworm”), he seems thoroughly smitten. Just as I was letting that thought settle in, though, I did manage to remember “one person’s ‘it’s obvious, can’t you see?’ can be an author’s ‘...too obvious,’” and contemplated how Tomozaki took a closer look at Minami “Mimimi” Nanami again in this volume (“Mimimi” is the first character to get on a second cover), and how Hanabi “Tama” Natsubayashi seemed a bit more plain accepting of a peculiar photo request and whether this might become more accepting in general. The thought did occur to me, though, that Tomozaki might have put Kikuchi on a pedestal, and even if this story doesn’t make “having to face someone isn’t as idealized and etherial as you think” a problem I was still conscious it might be.
In the meantime Kikuchi gives some fantasy stories she’s written to Tomozaki, and one of them is summarized over several pages, which did catch my eye. Discussion turns to adapting this story into a play for the school festival casting from the established characters, but when facing how she hasn’t finished the story yet (and gave it to Tomozaki by mistake) Kikuchi does muse how picking two characters to end up together means leaving one out, which did very much strike me as the story displaying self-awareness. She then just happens to bring up something very like the question Hinami had been needling Tomozaki with earlier, and all of a sudden Tomozaki has a new and unsettling insight on his unwillingness to decide. Not that long after something he had been dismissing with “it can’t happen to me” happens, and the story reaches a cliffhanger. It did turn out that in waiting to read this volume the next one in the series is just about within reach, but I do understand that book amounts to “short stories.”