• ludrol@bookwormstory.socialEnglish
    3·
    2 days ago

    Myne have become the librarian she always wished to be: <Heroine? Saint? No, I’m an All-Works Maid (And Proud of It)! Volume 2> Please.
    Sudennly the solved plot is not solved with a bit of a retcon. MC takes a bit of a background role and it shows. The story becomes unoriginal with the power of friendship. The frequent 4th wall breaks quickly became unfunny. 4th wall break as a running gag that characters will be kept from meeting or solving the misunderstanding feels like a slap to the face to the reader.

    • NineSwords@ani.socialMEnglish
      3·
      1 day ago

      Yes she’s a good girl. Always striving to become better. When I find the time and motivation I’ll teach her to point out what’s ebook, print and audiobook as well. As it is right now it’s a bit confusing when there are 3 “1,1,1” listed.

      4th wall breaks in general only work when in moderation. The less there are of them the funnier it is when there is one.

  • TheMadChatter@lemmy.caEnglish
    4·
    2 days ago

    Obligatory not in the last week, but I read The Flowers of Buffoonery by Osamu Dazai earlier this year, if you’re looking for something “light” to read. Mind you, not light subject matter, not at all. It’s based on his time at a sanatorium after he tried (and failed) to end his life. Having said that, it’s somewhat upbeat by his standards: I found it darkly charming, and it became my favourite novel.

  • NineSwords@ani.socialMEnglish
    2·
    2 days ago

    <Management of a Novice Alchemist: Volume 4> - Not-Ryza is still at heart a cute-girls-doing-cute-things story, but in this volume, the dialogue is incredibly stilted, the general plot is fragmented, and the pacing is all over the place. One example would be the “sitting around the table flashback arc”. Imagine the girls sitting around the table and telling the story of what happened last week. Everyone in the room was there and involved, but they’re speaking like they are explaining what happened to an invisible listener (us, the readers). I can follow the story easily enough, but if you actually imagine that scene playing out, the dialogue between those characters would be so incredibly abstract and out of place. It’s like those instances where info-dumps are forced into a dialogue: “Hello, Gertrude, youngest daughter of my long lost brother Manfred, whom I secretly killed out of jealousy”. It’s the same here, just that a small sub-story gets delivered in this unnatural way. And going by how awkward the placement is, I would guess that this was something added after the fact as padding for the novel version. It does not fit into it, it breaks up the main arc, and the delivery is terribly written. I would rather they had made it a normal" bonus chapter at the end if they needed to fill a couple more pages. Bath time illustration btw.

    <My Quiet Blacksmith Life in Another World: Volume 10> - Winter sets in and the family is having some winter fun. They also get a new member in the form of a fire spirit. But it’s a strange volume since, for some reason, suddenly and without any indication why they seem to have become paranoid and start to set up traps and gear up for a potential attack. There is no in-universe reason for them to suddenly think they’re going to be attacked. From a meta point of view, the volume ends on some potential adversary starting to produce fake knives with the group’s insignia, so there might be some struggle on the horizon for which this gearing up was set up. The problem is that they didn’t know that yet, so it’s strange that the comfy group suddenly prepares for war.