I’m currently reading <Flung into a New World? Time to Lift the 200-Year Curse!> and it has the worst writing style I’ve ever had misfortune to stumble across. around 90% is written in inner monologue. Let me give you an example of how a typical paragraph would look like:

Well, I have to write a MidWeek post but I’m drawing blanks. What? I’ve switched to an every-other-week schedule? Yes, that’s true but I hope people don’t think that I’m lazy. What? You won’t? That’s nice but I just thought of a question and throw in a bonus post out of schedule to keep you all on your toes. Yes, that’s really mean of me. Hey, why are you all leaving. No stop, you’re mean now. Well, here is poor me all alone talking into the void again. Oh woe is me. What’s that? There is still someone here. Well, welcome. Hope you have great time. What? You don’t like my bonus Midweek post? Too bad, I won’t remove it! Serves you right!

This is around 85-90% of the entire book. And If you think I was exaggerating:

It’s the entire thing in this manner. This is not a cherry picked page but just the random page I was currently on. It’s insane.

I cannot tell if this is sarcasm or not.

No, I mean it. It takes more to change my opinion of a character than to form an initial opinion of them. And each of the three volumes so far has made me change my opinion about a character. In each, it has a character that is unlikable at first, then you learn more about them over the span of the volume, and at the end, I actually like them and want to read more about them. The plot isn’t world-changing or anything, but for a character-driven story, it’s good. Unironically.

Looks like it’s time to sell all Villainess stocks and put everything into Maids.

Death March, Frontier Lord and Victoria?! Great week for me.

<The Unwanted Undead Adventurer> Volume 14 - After all the wait, Rentt has become a pushover goodie-two-shoes character. ::: spoiler Spoiler After a group of thieves attacks him, he takes them under his wing, buys them new equipment, and plans on training them up in the dungeon until they can sustain their lives on their own as adventurers. I hate that so much. Later on, a pickpocket tries to steal his money, and he takes them in as well. He’s the Mother Theresa of Vampires. :::

<They Don’t Know I’m Too Young for the Adventurer’s Guild> Volume 3 - I understand the author’s MO now. Introduce a new character and make him really grating at the beginning of a volume. Then work on him for the rest of the volume until the reader actually likes them. This really works for me, and I hope the quality of the series will continue at this high level.

<Easygoing Territory Defense by the Optimistic Lord: Production Magic Turns a Nameless Village into the Strongest Fortified City> Vol. 6 - another war-centric volume. I hope this arc is done now, and the next volume goes back to city building.

I absolutely love the art for the series

So-Bin is a legend. Head and shoulders above everyone else. It’s the difference between “illustrations” and “art”. I wouldn’t mind having a So-Bin print framed on my walls.

Character Visuals:

I think I have kind of moved on/[grew out of(?)] from light novels.

Happens to me every now and then as well. Currently I feel that way about anime.

One of these days, I’ll pick up the series again. When I stopped reading it I suffered somewhat from FUNA fatigue and the story arc I was in wasn’t the greatest so it just fizzled out.

Lot’s of new series. Especially The Amazing Village Creator sounds great for me. Anno 117 released last weekend and I’m very much in city creator mood.

<Isekai Tensei: Recruited to Another World> Volume 11 - Okay volume. Mostly padding between arcs with some setup for the next arc. Some strange things, though. For example, someone gets more or less pressured into an engagement talk by the bride’s guardians, and when the bride meets that person, they don’t even mention it in their dialogue. Not even a mention or acknowledgment that they are aware of the talks going on. It seems like the marriage talks chapter got added at a later time, and the meeting part didn’t get updated.

I take a mid AI translation every time over an ideology injected version.

Everything is going to be fine again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dj5eoZvK0U

That was quick after the long wait for vol 19.

Finally a new Zilbagias the Demon Prince. I really want to know how the story progresses here. Such an interesting concept.

<Isekai Walking>: Volume 4 Magic Nation Eva - Dungeon Arc – Good volume. I’ve got little to say about it other than that it was entertaining throughout.

<The New Gate> Volume 1 - Everything here was triggering a feeling of deja vu, and as it turns out, there was an anime of this last year. The show was so memorable that I completely forgot it even existed, and I had to look it up to see why I seemed to know the LN. That about tells you everything you need to know about the plot.

<Lacey Longs for Freedom: The Dawn Witch’s Low-Key Life after Defeating the Demon King> Volume 3 - Stupid. Lacey and Wayne invent a new technology called “lens”. Great. If only they weren’t interacting with a character just a couple of pages earlier who was wearing glasses.

No. The translator doubled down on twitter when this aired and people complained about it. She crashed out and wrote about it extensively. I think the account is deleted since (fled to bluesky) but there should be articles about this shitstorm still.

I talked about it in the past. My work is involved with translating or working with translators so I can speak from first hand experience on this topic.We don’t work with prose though. The quality of the translation tools and quality of the translated texts made such a huge jump in recent years that I don’t really see it any worse than what a human translator gives us most of the time. It still needs human correction and QA by us but how much of it needs correction is getting less and less in huge leaps and bounds. And those tools are improving at a scary pace.

How well does that work for prose? I can’t say. If we look at Tearoom Empire’s change of translators in volume 9 (iirc) you can clearly see that there is an art to translating prose, and I wouldn’t trust AI to translate at the highest level of translation the first Tearmoon translator produced. But it could easily see it producing a quality translation on the level of the second one. And if I think about all the light novels I’ve read so far, I would say that most of them are only mid at best in that regard. A computer can produce consistent quality where even the best human translator might just wing it here and there if they have a bad couple of weeks.

Then there is the problem with translators injecting their personal biases and political beliefs into the work. Just take the anime translation of Dragon Maid as an extreme example of what I mean.

I take a mid AI translation every time over an ideology injected version.

The only song of note for me currently is “Let’s Just Crash” the second OP of Gachiakuta. Everything else in the shows I’m watching is so generic that I’m honestly unable to match a song to a show if I hear it.

Oh wow. A new Unwanted Undead. thought the series was dead, to be honest. It’s been over a year. And a new Bookworm Fanbook that will only make me depressed that that one is over.

<The Twelve Kingdoms> Book 2 - Shadow of the Moon, Shadow of the Sea: Part 2 - the utterly unlikable MC goes through some character development and becomes tolerable in this volume. Seriously, the first volume did the series no good. It would have been a lot better if the first couple of chapters of this volume were in the first volume instead. That way, readers would not be left hanging with such a bad impression of MC. The worldbuilding in this volume is outstanding. Reading it feels like the first time picking up Made in Abyss. Everything is alien, and I’ve got a real sense of adventure. It’s great. MC gains a sidekick NPC that explains everything, and the isekai narrative crutch really shines here. We don’t know shit about the world, and neither does MC, so getting things explained that should be common sense in-universe feels completely natural.

<The Water Magician>: Arc 1 Volume 5 - Oh boy… since I’ve read the last volume, the anime aired, and in it, the banter between MC and sidekicks wasn’t nearly as bad as in the books. I’m pretty sure now that the translation is the problem here, and the anime most likely was translated by someone else. So that’s the first point that annoys me. The second point is the usual goody-two-shoes MC. Explanation will be behind a spoiler tag.