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Jackard posted:How could I ever overcome my disgust of spiders enough to read this? Gross! This should be the title of a web novel which is a crossover between Kumoko and Bookworm.
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Oct 6, 2016 04:39
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Tsubasa2004 posted:Harry Potter and the Natural 20 is the closest I've seen in actual webfiction. This was a real timely recommendation, as I'd come in here to ask if there was any fiction where someone from a world of real magic got sent to a world that also had real magic but all the magic followed a totally different ruleset, and I would have used LOTR+Harry Potter as a hypothetical example. It helps that this is actually turning out to be readable and kinda funny rather than insufferable, despite me knowing nothing about D&D other than what I've seen in Community and Harmonquest.
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Jan 4, 2017 07:16
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Jackard posted:I liked it too, especially the parts with the mundane policewoman against the magical world. Shame that it was abandoned during what seemed like the last book. I just finished it and by the end I was more invested in the policewoman unravelling the mysteries of the magic world and now I'm mad it was abandoned; someone please feed me stories about normal people sleuthing out the existence of magic/aliens/whatever despite a shadowy cabal of memory erasers repeatedly getting them. Web novel or not I don't care anymore.
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Jan 5, 2017 11:17
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owl milk posted:If we're talking about Harry Potter fanfic then you should read this series. It's fanfic in that it's set in the same world as Harry Potter but the characters are entirely original and it's set starting in 2007 I think. Very good but the author stopped after finishing the 4th book and has had "writer's block" since then. Still a great read imo. I finally finished all of this and I thought the overall story was interesting, but the main character is insufferable in a way that's completely opposite from the way HPATMOR Harry is insufferable; it's like in an effort to avoid making the character a Mary Sue the author goes out of their way to have the main character make one poor and uninformed decision after another. All things considered, it's too bad the author seems to have quit--I enjoyed it enough that I'd still read another volume, as the new status quo will probably make it easier to swallow the mc's neverending streak of terrible life choices.
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Jan 19, 2017 18:23
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Oh finally some Bookworm discussion. I'd also like to thank you; if you hadn't translated all the chapters you did, I wouldn't have been motivated to read ahead. I'm pretty slow, and it takes me about 3-4 hours (with copious amounts of help from darkgray and GG) to get through a chapter, but my reading abilities have improved greatly since starting, and I've learned about 250 new kanji in doing so (bringing me to a very meager 1050). I'm at chapter 64 now since I started reading ahead from 30, and I still use your translations to assess how well I understood whatever is going on. Only 700 more chapters to go!
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Jan 21, 2017 04:36
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Ytlaya posted:I wonder if she's ever going to come out to her parents like she did (after pressure) to Lutz. I can't imagine that going over nearly as well as it did wtih him. It worked with Lutz because he barely even knew Maine before her body was taken over by Urano, but her family would (justifiably) flip their poo poo if they found out she wasn't actually their daughter for the past year+. I subscribe to the theory she puts forward near the start that she was a legit reincarnation from birth, and her memories somehow got shocked back into her because of The Devouring, which would be less of a problem since it's more of Maine + weird memories rather than her completely overwriting the real Maine. I get really anxious for her to invent a new thing when it becomes obvious it's something she could and should invent--I'm close to the end of the first arc and she still hasn't even considered inventing upholstery! Future chapter title spoilers and from browsing some of the future chapter titles (that I haven't read yet) there's like a hundred chapters between her coming up with the idea of opening a restaurant, and actually opening the restaurant.
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Jan 23, 2017 05:12
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I love Bookworm and was excited to learn that this was an entire genre, but then yeah those others were nowhere near as good, for those reasons you mentioned. Bookworm does have an element of "show off how awesome I am by improving technology", but it by no means comes easily; Maine really has to work hard for it, and frequently screws up too. In all the other web novels I've tried, they're born as rich people with a lot of people swooning over them by default, and they keep inventing new things without problems--if someone wants to invent chocolate, they'll have it by the end of the same chapter they thought of it.
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Feb 23, 2017 02:49
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Bakanogami posted:Finally dove in to Ascendance of a Bookworm and people were right, this is really good. It's too bad the translations are so far behind. The story takes a pretty sharp turn shortly after where they're at, too. I just finished the first arc myself last Sunday, after starting on the raws in October, and am still enjoying it. I like that even though she technically does have a special power (generic "has magic") like other protagonists, as far as I can tell, it's only going to be used to solve problems related to magic--as opposed to a power which lets her cheat her way to making books. I'm interested to see where it goes with this new status quo too. I've mentioned this before but it's done a pretty good job of keeping me engaged so far despite my slow reading speed--at 3-4 hours per chapter (+30 minutes of getting help with difficult sentences) and taking into account where I can fit it into my schedule, it is going to take me another 5 years to finish it  But hey my reading skill has improved greatly since starting so thanks Maine.
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Mar 29, 2017 05:39
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I think all anime, manga, and web novels should be translated by the Ace Attorney localization staff.
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Mar 30, 2017 09:31
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The stuff about the family not knowing just how expensive things are will be addressed quite soon; within the next 9 or 10 chapters. As for saving money to stave off the Devouring, based on the first three chapters of arc 2, by the time Bakanogami's spoiler happens (which I haven't actually reached yet), she'll have access to relics that will let her unload her mana. Of course by that time she has other things looming over her that she has to worry about.
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Apr 10, 2017 17:16
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blastron posted:I wind up using Rikai quite a bit since my kanji knowledge is pretty lacking. My strategy for learning is to use it as a last resort; if I don't recognize something immediately but think I might know it, I give myself another few seconds to try to remember it, then once I look it up I repeat the word out loud to myself, etc., to try to learn it. It's not super great though, especially when topics don't tend to stick around for more than a couple chapters. What I found really helpful is a dynamic flashcard app called Wanikani. Nothing really beats nonstop drilling for learning tons of vocabulary. Does Wanikani have an advantage over Anki? I've been using Anki for my own reading, inputting new kanji as I come across them (well, if I evaluate them to be useful, rather than something like 簀桁). I've gone from 800 kanji to 1100 since starting a few months ago but I don't know if I can maintain that pace. The cards are already piling up, so lately I've been running chapters through a Japanese word count program and only memorizing kanji/words that occur the most frequently. I've been meaning to write some kind of program to generate a word list for me but processing unicode in Python seems to be 
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Apr 18, 2017 17:31
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Tamba posted:No, Anki can do anything Wanikani does and much more. I've been using this; all I want is a library that can tokenize chapters into words, and possibly stem them, then I can use that to find the words that are important in a chapter, words that are important to the arc, etc. blastron posted:If you're using Python 3 then all strings are Unicode strings! If you're using Python 2 all you need to do is write your string literals as u"foo" instead of just "foo" and you're more-or-less fine.  ok lemme see if I can do this.
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Apr 18, 2017 18:56
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I for one am now an expert on the phrase 溜息を吐く and many variations thereof. Also you could write a bot that detects when Maine is telling Benno something and automatically translates the next sentence as "Benno glared at me."
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May 5, 2017 06:41
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In Honzuki, the main character doesn't even know they have powers for a while, because it manifests as an illness. I'm not far enough to say if her powers are unique among the people of that world but nearly a hundred chapters in all we really know about her powers is "she has mana." She's successful because she's basically a walking encyclopedia, and applies her earth knowledge to stuff. Whether or not she's a nice person might be arguable, but she's not psychotic (although in the early chapters she had a yandere vibe that she eventually seems to ditch). She certainly tries to be considerate of others, at least, much to her own inconvenience. To some extent, it's still a power fantasy though the power of money 
Argue fucked around with this message at 18:28 on May 15, 2017 |
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May 15, 2017 18:26
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This was recommended in TBB, and isn't originally in Japanese (pretty sure the author is American), but I just binged what's available of The Wandering Inn, which has very clear influences from isekai novels; possibly Kumoko, and just a teeny tiny bit of Honzuki. On top of that though, there's also a lot that's obviously being drawn from Worm, so if any or all of those float your boat, you might be interested in it. It makes use of the level-up/class/skill system I hate in isekai novels, but it subverts this in an interesting way by asking _why_ levels even exist, and hinting that there's some sinister purpose behind why all thinking creatures have levels and classes--one character in particular is important because she's chosen to actively reject all levels and skills.
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Jun 11, 2017 13:40
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nielsm posted:Btw. blastron, maybe consider translating some of the side material with world-facts between chapters? I found the parts about currency and timekeeping/calendar very useful for one thing. The what now? Where can I read this? I'm at ch 90 of the WN. Also it's getting to the point where I need a UI while I'm reading this just to see Maine's current cash and transaction history because I keep reading her spending all this money and I'm like "wait, how can she afford that again". blastron posted:Also, on an unrelated note, I'm doing a re-transliteration sweep to fix names I'm not happy with my translation of based on some feedback I've gotten. I need help with the main character's name, though: it's spelled マイン, which is pronounced like the English word "mine"... but how do I actually write that? I've shopped around spellings and everyone I ask to pronounce the name Mine says mee-nay or mih-nee. Maïne is a real-world name that, as far as I can tell, is pronounced correctly for this case, but typing umlauts is a pain and I don't know how well people will actually parse that, though. Any ideas? Can you just do a find-replace after translating a chapter? Also, the names you've chosen for plants and such (tronbay, pomay) strike me as being off, but I don't know what the correct translations could be--all the other names in the WN sound vaguely German so I figure those things should be too.
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Jun 21, 2017 16:41
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nielsm posted:Arc 2 until around WN chapter 120: Temple Master; High Priest Ferdinand, his servant Arno; Main's servants Fran, Gil (pronounced with hard G like "give"), Deria, Wilma, Rosina; Main's chefs Fugo, Ella Wouldn't those be Delia and Hugo?
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Jun 21, 2017 17:25
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Ytlaya posted:That Harry Potter fanfiction is superior to most Japanese/Korean/Chinese web novels I've read, and I say this as someone who isn't a fan of either Harry Potter or D&D and never reads fanfiction (in fact, that Harry Potter thing is the only fanfiction I've ever read). Yeah, I have zero D&D experience outside of watching Community and Harmonquest, and was expecting to find it so bad it's good, but I read it and it turned out it was actually good. Somehow the author wove an incredibly dumb premise into something with a coherent theme and viewpoint. It also does a great job of making sure that both sides of magic are balanced; neither the D&D side nor the Hogwarts side are overpowered compared to the other. Wingardium Leviosa is an unthinkably high level levitation spell in D&D, while the main character can counter one of the unforgivables with a basic spell. Resurrection of anybody is extremely trivial in his world, but HP wizards can spam an unlimited number of instant death spells that can't be defended against. I wonder if the author being a DM (presumably) helped him to keep the narrative balanced so that it never felt unfair to either side.
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Aug 8, 2017 11:57
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Two of you on this page are talking about Milo from HP20 and the other two are talking about the one from the D&D isekai.
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Aug 9, 2017 05:22
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Cuddly-Wuddly Fluffy Fantasy
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Aug 25, 2017 17:33
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Bakanogami posted:I adore bookworm and it's a shame so little of it is in English, it takes some pretty sharp turns and a lot of its best material is in the second half. Like, while the first arc is good, it's also not very representative of the rest of the series. I'm not sure how to feel about this; it's great that it only gets better but I love the struggles to innovate in the first half and how much harder it is for her than for people in other stories of this genre. Also, it's surprisingly educational! I'm currently on chapter 113 and I now know various methods of making ink and also why some kinds of ink corrode paper!
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Oct 11, 2017 04:14
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Since you've read the translations anyway, you might be interested in looking up the raws, because in a rare confluence, the raw manga has reached exactly the chapter that blastron just translated 
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Oct 11, 2017 15:06
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Zeratanis posted:Newest chapter translated of bookworm. In a rare confluence of events, the raw manga just got to this chapter the same week! http://seiga.nicovideo.jp/watch/mg281046?track=ct_episode You know the chapter is serious business when the manga adapts it in its entirety rather than adapting two or three chapters at once.
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Nov 8, 2017 07:56
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Anyone who's read the Honzuki raws have any idea what non-Japanese words (this won't even spoil anything but just in case...) ダプラ and ダルア might correspond to, if any? Most of the fantasy vocabulary in the book sounds like actual German words and names so I assume that's the case here too. It keeps popping up and they sound so similar I keep having to look up what the difference is but maybe knowing what those words derive from might save me the trouble.
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Nov 14, 2017 10:59
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Getsuya posted:Holy crap the climax of Bookworm 5! (Part 2-2 is book 5 right?) It feels like the story has just crossed a major threshold. I mean the previous books have had some intense climaxes but this was just on a whole other level. I think I'm really close to where you are. The chapters I'm reading through are where (pretty big spoilers for roughly... 128 chapters in) Maine accompanies Ferdinand and a bunch of knights to take out a giant kaiju tree, right? I'm at the part where Ferdinand arrives just in time to rescue Maine; I'm excited to see what's next but I can't read any faster at my level! But I can't wait for her to get rich and buy that snotty noble's house from under him. Speaking of, any idea how to romanize that guy's name? Ziekicoza?
Argue fucked around with this message at 16:11 on Nov 30, 2017 |
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Nov 30, 2017 16:02
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quote != edit
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Nov 30, 2017 16:10
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While not a Japanese web novel, I recall that it was this thread where a bunch of people were talking about fanfic and I learned about Harry Potter and the Natural 20, so I thought I'd give a heads up that a new chapter is out! ...after only what, 2 years?
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Dec 2, 2017 18:28
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Finally at the epilogue of Honzuki 2-2! The physical book actually rejiggered the order of the chapters so in the WN (which is what I'm reading) two installments of 2-3 come before the 2-2 epilogue. I agree with Getsuya, this epilogue and the chapters leading up to it are some great stuff right here! Ferdinand is so precious when he (kinda big spoiler) reacts to his dream-tour of Tokyo  Highlights: "Egad! That woman's knees are showing! If she can't afford the cloth to cover her knees, she shouldn't be spending money dyeing her dress!" "This book is absurd; there couldn't possibly exist any humans whose eyes occupy half of their heads!" Edit: lol @ the running joke about her lack of artistic ability and her refusal to realize it Edit 2: 
Argue fucked around with this message at 13:28 on Dec 10, 2017 |
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Dec 9, 2017 16:23
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Are you talking about "that" person?
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Mar 22, 2018 15:29
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For Bookworm/Honzuki readers, I got bored and made a playlist showing the how-tos for everything Maine's invented or encountered up to where I've read (currently 158). A lot of these are videos that helped me understand what the hell she was trying to accomplish, but for completion's sake I also included stuff like pancakes. If I missed anything, please remind me. I couldn't find videos for clay tablets and I can't be assed to find a video for how to make loving chopsticks. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOclVqhowNnUz-03DQRlinpp9G8RX-2Z7 Very annoyingly, I spent 10 minutes typing up annotations for where each video applies, only to find out said notes are visible only to myself. 
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Mar 22, 2018 18:49
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I really hate your comments section.
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May 8, 2018 10:40
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Yinlock posted:i know people love talking about food, it is literally impossible to post a picture of a pizza anywhere on the forums without starting a 3-page derail, but it is still astoundingly boring no matter how realistic it is It's one of the things I love the most in every isekai/portal fantasy I've ever read that has cooking in it khy posted:Pizza isekai when? Well...
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May 8, 2018 17:12
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Listen, it's imperative we make our voices heard when everyone else is objectively wrong about what the best food is (it's Japanese food). Tunicate posted:i ended up noping out of bookworm though once we find out this dirt-poor peasant family lives in a third story apartment with individual bedrooms for all their kids Yeah they live in essentially a shack and Maine has to share a bed with Tuuli. Lutz lives in one of those places you describe but he has no private space either; it's even a plot point.
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May 9, 2018 10:41
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Is there an isekai for someone who dies and is reincarnated as an SA forums account
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May 10, 2018 15:37
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sunken fleet posted:there's tons of "kingdom-builder" type fantasy stories where MC personally isn't very strong but makes up for it with his amazing knowledge of soy sauce or whatever I very much prefer this; what can anyone recommend that also has a good translation? The more detailed the explanation and narration is of how they recreated earth thing with magic thing (a la Honzuki), the better.
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May 17, 2018 11:02
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UberJew posted:if you're more interested about how to get technology and a fair society running than specifically technomagic i'll point to the 1632 series of actual-factual novels as a good thing to read in that genre, it counts as a WN imo since the first couple are available free online: http://baencd.freedoors.org/Books/1632/1632.htm Yeah I've read some of those. American recommendations are fine too actually! I did reach my limit with Wizard's Bane though; that was way too insufferable. (also as long as we're talking about that topic then I'm giving Ryan North's upcoming book a good faith recommendation as he's a good writer and as far as I can tell this is going to be the book to memorize if you're ever worried about getting stuck in the past without technology)
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May 17, 2018 11:48
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Thanks, I read through a bunch of Release the Witch and I think I'll read more. I have to say, being reincarnated as a noble doesn't do it for me because whenever this happens in a story everything just seems to fall into the main character's lap, but I'm enjoying the parts where he invents earth things with the help of magic users enough to make up for it. I don't think I'd want to try reading this raw though. Rirekisho is next but wow the translations of these first 6 chapters are awful.
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May 18, 2018 02:29
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It got pretty hard to read towards the end (particularly, all the side stories dealing with the aftermath), but I finally finished reading arc 2 of Honzuki! Just in time too; there's enough arc 3 manga chapters currently out to accompany my reading for maybe 6 chapters at least, so I won't get too lost reading descriptions at the start. I'm excited now that I'm entering what I hear is more GoT-esque territory where the cast balloons up exponentially and Maine starts getting embroiled in politics. I just hope the increased focus on politics doesn't mean increased difficulty in reading for me though 
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May 26, 2018 08:03
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Bakanogami posted:It might also be good to stay vaguely familiar with the gods/mythology stuff. I skimmed through it the first time, but they reference it all the time, including sometimes dropping stuff that Maine doesn't understand or interpret properly, leaving it to the audience to read between the lines. I largely skimmed over it when it first appeared and was glad when blastron's translations finally got around to that long creation myth; please tell me I don't have to memorize their lesser pantheon of gods and that I only need to know those main ones (I have a hard enough time remembering which of those are which because they translate to possibly real, possibly fake Germanic names which I have just as hard a time remembering).
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May 27, 2018 17:33
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So as recommended earlier in the thread, I've been reading a lot of Release That Witch and man, even putting aside the very awkward translations and usual tropes I hate (being reincarnated as royalty, etc etc), I still have a lot of mixed feelings about this. The stuff I like most of all is all the incredibly detailed and spergy science nerd-outing; the author seems to have thought of everything that a mildly scientifically literate reader might ask, and the results of their scientific investigations make sense. I even had to check the comments a few times to see if someone could explain or justify what was happening, and it all seemed to check out. I especially like when learning science unlocks the true potential of their powers, like when the witch with the power to preserve food realizes that her power is actually control over all microorganisms. Other things I like: the worldbuilding here has some interesting ideas that also feel well thought out, and I appreciate the effort the author makes to go out of their way to show that the witches are their own characters with distinct personalities and agency, rather than a harem for the very clearly monogamous and not perverted main character. But wow the politics of this can be iffy at times; at first it's cool because he introduces civil rights and ends witch hunts and does other nice stuff, which is great, but then he starts holding public trials and basically encouraging mobs to call for executions. Then at some point he invades an enemy kingdom but rather than give the captured officials real trials he seals himself in a room with them and then basically plays Saw with them (hell, he even says "let's play a game") where they're slowly whittled down and sent to jail or the chopping block as they fail his tests. Then sometimes he'll assert "even a non-combat witch with a seemingly useless power can best a trained combat witch", and I'm primed to expect that there's gonna be a duel where the witch applies her power in a clever manner to overcome the combat witch--but nope! Apparently the solution to that is to just give the non-combat witch a gun, problem solved! Anyway it's really annoying but I've gotten this far so I think I'm gonna make it to the end before I get fed up with it. After this I'm gonna read that other one you guys recommended, about a reincarnated peasant girl who isn't Maine.
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May 29, 2018 14:00
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