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From the Bookshelf: Bottom-Tier Character Tomozaki Lv.8.5
Since commenting on having read the second volume of the Eighty-Six novels in translation I’ve kept working through my accumulated pile of that series, getting well past where the anime adaptation left off. The setting has expanded along with the cast and the threats they’re facing, but I suppose I bumped into some mixture of how draining setting down my thoughts can get and the slight uneasiness that “it’s not healthy to try and show off an opinion about everything.”
Alternating between volumes of Eighty-Six and instalments of other translated novels did come to an end for the moment when I had a new book of a series I’ve managed to keep saying something about. The latest volume of Bottom-Tier Character Tomozaki did happen to be another short story collection and another pushing off of the resolution for a normal-life cliffhanger, but I at least hoped I’d find some things about it interesting.
This time around there’s nothing in the collection set after the cliffhanger even by moments, but I at least took note of an opening vignette set in the happier time between the seventh and eighth volumes. In it, Aoi takes note of the commentary-though-fiction Fuka provided with its “I’m not important enough to become a girlfriend; who you should wind up with is obvious” message and responds with an edge of “winding up in a relationship would diminish the self-sufficient magnificence of the ‘character’ you were trying to gratify.” There’s also a bit more of a backstory for Aoi that acknowledges a recent revelation about her past, although I managed to misread Fly’s colour plate for the story and the story itself as to just where she used to fit in only to be corrected by Yuki Yaku’s author’s afterword.
Minami winds up in full tragic heroine mode as she manages to admit something to Fuka, and there’s also a vignette involving Rena, the young woman entangled with the latest cliffhanger. While I did have to wonder about its intimation of just why she associates with video gamers (as opposed to the viewpoints of the characters introduced earlier, which at least counter “dangerous universal stereotypes”), it does happen to have rather more charge to it than the chaste stuff high schoolers can get stuck with in respectable commercial fiction. On either side of a happier moment with Fuka (who’s the viewpoint character here), there’s lighter stuff with the characters going out for karaoke (numerous songs are mentioned, at least a few of which I had some passing recognition of) and what I understood to be an audiobook adaptation. In it, the characters wind up in a virtual reality game of the “its immersiveness can be excused in a spinoff”; I did take notice of how much of it was driven by back-and-forth dialogue, although in going back I did notice it wasn’t an “audio drama adaptation.”
Alternating between volumes of Eighty-Six and instalments of other translated novels did come to an end for the moment when I had a new book of a series I’ve managed to keep saying something about. The latest volume of Bottom-Tier Character Tomozaki did happen to be another short story collection and another pushing off of the resolution for a normal-life cliffhanger, but I at least hoped I’d find some things about it interesting.
This time around there’s nothing in the collection set after the cliffhanger even by moments, but I at least took note of an opening vignette set in the happier time between the seventh and eighth volumes. In it, Aoi takes note of the commentary-though-fiction Fuka provided with its “I’m not important enough to become a girlfriend; who you should wind up with is obvious” message and responds with an edge of “winding up in a relationship would diminish the self-sufficient magnificence of the ‘character’ you were trying to gratify.” There’s also a bit more of a backstory for Aoi that acknowledges a recent revelation about her past, although I managed to misread Fly’s colour plate for the story and the story itself as to just where she used to fit in only to be corrected by Yuki Yaku’s author’s afterword.
Minami winds up in full tragic heroine mode as she manages to admit something to Fuka, and there’s also a vignette involving Rena, the young woman entangled with the latest cliffhanger. While I did have to wonder about its intimation of just why she associates with video gamers (as opposed to the viewpoints of the characters introduced earlier, which at least counter “dangerous universal stereotypes”), it does happen to have rather more charge to it than the chaste stuff high schoolers can get stuck with in respectable commercial fiction. On either side of a happier moment with Fuka (who’s the viewpoint character here), there’s lighter stuff with the characters going out for karaoke (numerous songs are mentioned, at least a few of which I had some passing recognition of) and what I understood to be an audiobook adaptation. In it, the characters wind up in a virtual reality game of the “its immersiveness can be excused in a spinoff”; I did take notice of how much of it was driven by back-and-forth dialogue, although in going back I did notice it wasn’t an “audio drama adaptation.”