Keith Palmer's Multi-Purpose Journal

It wasn’t until I’d acquired the second volume of My First Love’s Kiss in rapid succession after the first that I realised the cover was on “the wrong side.” I hadn’t started buying another “girls’ love” manga, but a “light novel” series. With the way I now try to track down what manga is becoming available for purchase, I suppose my confusion was explainable. Having read a girls’ love manga with the art provided by the illustrator Fly (who I first became aware of through the Bottom-Tier Character Tomozaki novels) played its own role too.
( Beyond the back-cover blurb )

In some fashion or another I became aware of a “light novel” named Qualia the Purple translated from Japanese, but long enough ago I don’t quite remember the specifics. I do have the impression some brought up Last and First Idol while mentioning this new release, which would have got my attention. There was also a bit of “positive recommendations that tried not to give too much away,” which I suppose always has me wondering if I just wind up being vague. Still, when I did get around to picking up the novel at last from where I’d had a copy waiting, I read it with growing interest.
( What do you see? )

It took me a while to sort out just where to order a copy of the tenth (regular) volume of Bottom-Tier Character Tomozaki. When I received that copy, I just happened to have started reading a different translated “light novel,” and that one pretty much in courteous nibbles. Those nibbles chewed through it in the end, though, and I went on to the latest instalment of a series the pieces of which fit together in a different way than with the other light novels I follow, but well enough in their own way for me to look forward to it.
( It's a trip )

After extracting the tenth Eighty-Six novel from my almost depleted pile of that translated series, I was a bit surprised by its cover and the back-cover blurb, surprised to the point of starting to wonder if I just might build a post about it after having read seven volumes of the series while supposing “it’s not good to push yourself to type out and share an opinion about everything.” My interest in the story continues to outweigh any possible objections about “this translated prose is tough to get through”; in the war against artificial intelligence weapons that have run amok and evaded their shutdown timers through ghoulish means, the main characters who survived the first novel have gone from nation to nation in “a world not our own,” pulling off dangerous missions, edging towards the possibility of winning the war, and managing some character development along the way. The tenth volume looked to return to the grimmer circumstances of the original novel and fill in the backstory of one of the most important characters, the ace-of-aces mecha pilot Shin. I did get to thinking about the series looking to do something more with a concept it had left behind early on; I suppose in retrospect there could have been the perpetual question of “when you have to weigh your own ideas against new ideas from the original author...”
( The first circumstances )

Another collection of short stories holding off the resolution to another cliffhanger didn’t diminish my interest in getting around to the ninth regular volume of the Bottom-Tier Character Tomozaki novels. As for one of the reasons I’m interested in this particular series, starting into it I did glance at its credit page, only to notice the translation credit had changed to Jennifer Ward. That left me wondering for a few pages before I’d decided the prose still read about as well as the previous volumes had. Later on, remembering a comment or two about how an editor can be as important as a translator in turning “translated text” into “readable prose,” I found the editor’s name of Anna Powers and checked back to see she’d worked on the previous instalment. (When I went all the way back to the first volume, though, there was no editor credit.)
( Twists and turns )

When I saw a feature on Anime News Network about an English-language young adult novel “inspired by the anime Darling in the Franxx,” I have to admit to the instant return of a familiar disquiet. Glancing into the piece, it wasn’t long until I’d seen the point made Xiran Jay Zhao’s Iron Widow had found indignant inspiration in the anime.

Darling in the Franxx is far from the first work of light entertainment I’m quite conscious I wasn’t offended by the way a good many other people keep making a point of. In this specific case, at least, it might have been just a matter of “since recent mecha anime provoking generally positive reactions are in short supply, I’ll still try to look on the good side here myself.” At the same time, though, “a new work inspired by something” does seem a better and more constructive response to me than “another putdown in passing,” “another screed,” or even “another fanfic that tries to fix everything just the way its author wants.” I went so far as to look for the novel in my city library’s ebook lending application; after looking up its title again, I found it. Less than a year after reading Django Wexler’s Hard Reboot and not quite ten years after reading Brett Patton’s Mecha Corps, which had quoted Gundam Seed (one more work of light entertainment falling in that unfortunate category I’ve already mentioned), I thought I could take a chance on another work of fiction in a similar vein.
( Once I’d started reading... )

Reassured reading the first translated volume of Eighty-Six I might not be “plodding” through an already-accumulated stack of later instalments, all the same I didn’t start rushing down that pile. Perhaps a bit more confident about the readability of “light novel” translations from J-Novel Club over Yen On, I went on to the second instalment of Otherside Picnic and read a bit past where its anime adaptation had left off (an adaptation somewhat less impressive than Eighty-Six’s). With that taken care of, I picked up the second volume of Eighty-Six, to the best of my understanding going into it still all material adapted.
( Filling things in )

Had I been clear straight off the translated “light novels” of a series called Eighty-Six were a “mecha story” at least so far as the young soldiers “stripped of their humanity” on the desolate front lines of “a war without casualties” were in fact piloting machines with legs (if four rather than a more humanoid and heroic two), maybe I’d have bought them one at a time starting with their opening volume. A few simple recommendations nudging me to to the point of ordering a bundle of the first six volumes was memorable in its own way even so. For one reason or another they wound up stacked and waiting while I watched their anime adaptation, but I remained aware my own track record with long series of translated-from-Japanese novels is spotty. By the time I’d been able to see the adaptation’s last two episodes I’d added another two volumes to the stack and had two more on order, to boot. I picked up the opening volume quite soon after watching the last episode (at which point “seeing where the story goes” might have become a bit less pressing), but with genuine uncertainty.
( First impressions and afterwards )

Every once in a while I do try to scale the high “free cross-border shipping” threshold of the online anime store Right Stuf by ordering other things than anime. Manga and translated novels do feel a bit less intimidating to work through than anime, even if rather often now I find myself reading in brief swallows and stretching things out that way. One omnibus of translated novels ordered, though, did find me a bit ambiguous in advance.

I recall the first episode of a science fiction anime called Crest of the Stars being shown back in my university’s anime club, even if it hadn’t been screened in my first years there. That opening had involved a boy’s childhood being interrupted by diplomatic conquerors from space. Some time after that I bought a collection of the series on DVD, but as with at least one other title I could name I was left wondering if the first episode had formed expectations in my mind the rest of the series had never quite addressed. All in all I’ve long been uncertain and suspicious and ambiguous about science fiction that just happens to include “interstellar governments where hereditary monarchies rule into perpetuity and common folk get no say whatsoever.” I do make an exception for Princess Leia in Star Wars, and for that matter I live in a constitutional monarchy with no personal desire to see it abolished, but the seeming shrugging assumptions in the “space empires” of science fiction do not appeal to me. Crest of the Stars did seem to amount to “become entangled in a system of hereditary rule, and get a thoroughly sublimated relationship with a cute anime space girl in the process.”
( One thing did lull me along... )

After 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.”
( The hardest game of all? )