Nah, I don’t have any alter egos. Even though the thought of book/LN reviews as a vtuber crossed my mind. I love vtubers and I like telling people what I think about what I’ve read (I know hard to imagine…), but on the flip side I hate hearing my own voice and my heavy accent.

Nice week. It’s easier to just list the one I’m not going to read (Young Lady Albert Is Courting Disaster)

Lacey Longs for Freedom: The Dawn Witch’s Low-Key Life after Defeating the Demon King Volume 1 - Super timid and low-confidence MC. Think Watamote levels of low confidence. It’s also her only personality trait. It gets (slightly) better over the span of the volume, but for a good chunk of it, it’s annoying to read. It’s nice to see the hero being a good guy for a change, though. In the last couple of years, novels have been doing this subversion of expectation thing where the hero is a scumbag, up to the point where I now feel a good hero to be the subversion instead.

The Frontier Lord Begins with Zero Subjects: Volume 5 - Dragon hunting in the snow this time. I swear the volumes in this series are just flying by in what feels like minutes.

Same for me. The only crossover I have with manga are the bonus manga at the end of the Bookworm volumes.

If you are curious maybe read it.

It’s on my radar now.

The emotions and fantasy skills are split but thinking and consciousness are connected.

So they’re basically two separate entities now with their own thought processes operating at the same time but share knowledge in real time? Like A sees something and B knows what A saw? Do I get that right?

Reminds me a bit of an old novel about a unit of cyber soldiers that got their mind linked for the war and then lived with this mind link after the war.

How does this two-bodies thing work? Is his consciousness split between the two bodies, or does it switch between them? Or are there now two distinct consciousnesses that are a clone of each other at the time of reincarnation?

Easygoing Territory Defense by the Optimistic Lord: Production Magic Turns a Nameless Village into the Strongest Fortified City Vol. 3 - Just like the first 2 volumes it’s entertaining but it needs to get shaken up a bit with the actual plot. The entire volume is basically “and then I build another house, and then another, and over there I build some more houses…etc.”.

Victoria of Many Faces, Vol. 1 - Beautiful, sweet and overall great volume. Incredible MC, loveable sidekick, and a sweet romance with a likable love interest. The author is really great at writing the type of Slice of Life romance I enjoy just as it was in Soup Forrest. The volume itself feels completed with everything but one minor plot thread neatly finished and wrapped up. But Goodreads has it with 3 volumes already. It’s a bit like how Bookworm finished one part of MC’s life and left open the option for a continuation when a new chapter of her life starts. Looking forward to the next one.

A Young Lady Finds Her True Calling Living with the Enemy Vol.1 + 2 - After enjoying Victoria of Many Faces so much I picked up this series by the same author. It’s another hyper-competent heroine story and you can see a lot of the same broad strokes as in Victoria - just a bit more rough around the edges. The second volume was extremely rushed and the romance had hardly any space to breathe and grow. The content there was rushed so much that it could have easily filled 2 or 3 more volumes if it had been paced like the first volume. And the extra space would have done the romance aspect well. It honestly feels as if the author had planned content for more books but got told there would be only one more and now he had to get it all into this 2nd volume somehow.

The Frontier Lord Begins with Zero Subjects for the ongoing and Ayakashi and the Fairy Tales We Tell Ourselves from the new ones for me.

Damn, didn’t check if I had the topic already. :(

And speaking of Hitchhikers Guide, that reminds that I was thinking about re-reading Discworld.

My favorite novels are the eternally unfinished Kingkiller Chronicles Trilogy by Patric Rothfuss. Sadly it doesn’t look like it will ever be finished so I can’t really recommend anyone to get into it.

Instead I’ll recommend the Finovar Tapestry Trilogy by Guy Gavriel Kay. I think this series is what cemented my love for isekai stories long before I started to read light novels. Many of the usual isekai tropes we see today were already there 40 years ago. The only thing missing are cheat skills and video game mechanics.

[META] The good Myne seems to work this week and if we don’t get repeated topics in the coming weeks I’m happy.

The trailer looked so great, but it’s by the studio that messed up the Zombie anime. I hope they’ve learned some lessons from that production and can deliver on Witch Hat Atelier.

sidenote: Honestly, I wonder who decides which studio gets which series. As I understand it Witch Hat Atelier is extremely popular and well-received, so how can a studio with a single anime under its belt (and with a botched production of that one anime) score such a high-profile series?

I see, like just looking at the broad strokes but not looking at the details. I.e. “MC sitting in room saying something” instead of “MC saying something while sitting at her desk with anxious body language and fiddling with a pen while the bin and floor are littered with crumpled sheets of paper”. I do that as well whenever I read a manga, but in Witch Hat Atelier I seem to linger on the details and zoom in from time to time to drink it all in.

And to be fair I often do the same with light novels where MC’s inner monologue is mostly rambling. I scan the pages for quotation marks and just read those when it seems like MC is going on an especially bad tangent.

or treating it like a novel and ignoring the drawings

okay, I have to ask… how?

Right now I finished 7 volumes and I think it’s so good that I am this close to buying the manga in physical form. <-- notorious physical hater

edit: I just finished volume 9 and I think I’m done with he series. Fuck it

Only one volume this week since I started with a Manga for once (Witch Hat Atelier).

To Another World… with Land Mines! Volume 9 - Still no actual land mines in sight. Not even a stray claymore. You get an out-of-context side story smack in the middle between two chapters though. There’s that… I suppose the story is mostly filled with filler and set up for a new arc that will start the next volume.

Maybe Victoria of Many Faces.

There isn’t a thread for Dahlia In Bloom so I’ll post here how much I HATE the voice of Volfred. He’s supposed to be the super strong and tough soldier that stands at the vanguard of a monster hunter division that laughs death in the face. And then they somehow decided to go with a breathy shota twink voice for him. I hope they haven’t ruined the LN for me.

Fair point. How can I change my name to Hartmut on Lemmy?

I thought the entire day about this and I don’t really can think of any isekai world I would reincarnate into when I don’t have control over where I end up and with what talent/skills/race/etc.

In the end I think I chose Konosuba’s world and you the Axis cult just to be on the save side. I always thought I would make a good cult member. And if I get lucky and get reborn into the crimson demon clan, I would make an even better chuuni.