Volume 16 (Premium Edition): A Bonus Short Story & Full Wraparound Cover Jacket illustration A Sweet Moment

It didn't click to me that this was the same producer that messed with the Owner before, sad they had to draw it out for me.

Still, nice climax to the volume!

Prediction: For the trip they're either doing Hokkaido or somewhere in the Ryukyus (but somewhere a bit more obscure than Okinawa, maybe Ogasawara, since it's about as far from Japan as you can get while being in Japan?)

@myskaros Kouki goes through character altering growth during the afterstory (ow which there are many hundreds of satisfyingly long web installments), possibly the most of all characters. Thinking back, I like the afterstory better than the main one.

@kilocron said in The Greatest Magicmaster Vol. 2 Discussion:

Tesfia still pisses me off

She's a walking cliché that could've wandered in from any number of anime series. Perhaps she gets less annoying in later volumes?

@kurzaa I finished Vol 2 myself and I'm starting to slow down. Loki continues to be best girl, however.

Volume 9 (Premium Edition): 2 Bonus Question Corners & Full Wraparound Cover Jacket illustration Question Corner 4 Question Corner 4: Bonus Section

Reading vol. 7 sadly reminds me a lot of what’s going on in the Ukrain the last weeks and this was written 10 years ago, ofc with the Gulfwars and WW2 in mind! Is humankind this predictable? Knowing history well I would say yes, and it seems no one in power has learned from the past. Just a personal thought while reading this wonderful series.

@rkkn Just checked. Should be eleven years. Looks like my brain added a number in front of it while reading somehow. I'll submit a correction and get that fixed.

@strangeattractor said in Tearmoon Empire Vol. 8 Anticipation Discussion:

@jazzyjeoff

Wonderful!

Reading these has brightened my 2 weeks. Bravo!

There’s nothing better than having a bunch of folks that you can be a little silly with! Thanks everyone who wrote stories—and everyone that read them!

Volume 2 (Premium Edition): High Resolution Illustrations

Seems to be a new volume of this out this week according to light novel reddit's weekly top 10 sales ranking. Not sure if it's a sequel or reboot or completely standalone.

Edit: Ah, I see now. It's part of a spinoff series.

@calibus the way I read it was that she killed herself before anything could happen. When Lily absorbed her body, some "trace" of her soul remained. Presumably Miho liked him even though nothing ever developed between them, so Lily answered Miho's dying regret, while giving into her own desires as a servant, and forced herself on him. Afterwards, that remaining part of Miho vanished.

I might have misread things. Certainly wouldn't have been the first time. But I like my interpretation which gives the girl some closure and makes her death a little less tragic. If you really want to gripe, consider that she abandoned her junior, Katou, to that horrible fate. Armed with a knife, perhaps the two might have been able to fight back.

@rkkn I hate exposition as well but the author has done a fairly decent job of making it tolerable.

I don't like the way the PoV side stories are handled though. I like them, but right now I am reading three stories of Gabera's in a row, all in the same setting, taking place one right out of the other, but with a slightly different topic in each one. This makes sense if you assume the story was published online a chapter at a time before being turned into a light novel. But when it was rewritten for publishing, all three chapters should have been merged into one scene.

well, I stuck this one out to the end but don't have much good to say. I kept reading because the setting and premise is interesting enough, and I wanted to see them level up. learn, grow, etc. but it ended up being mostly the ol' sudden dramatic level up during crisis trope. Well, it was to be expected given how tropey the rest of it was.

And speaking of crisis, when Sid first arrived to the dragon fight, he apparently had enough time to give the students an unhurried speech while Alvin was literally dying and could be killed by the dragon at any moment. And then again later when the other students join in, there was time for a touching unhurried farewell while these students that haven't even fully grapsed how to use Will hold off a dragon by themselves? I guess they got the crisis power up too? Also once Sid has his limiter removed, one of the first things that happens is the dragon's lower jaw gets cut off. So how is it biting at Sid afterwards? All the fight scenes are just terrible.

80 points for the goddess!
I really want to see what Kanata's scores are for Melissa, the king, and true form Zaggy

but dang, hard to believe that in that entire army no one had above a 9. This world is rough.
Speaking of which, it really is a pretty dark world. Apparently when you die the gods eat your soul? Geez. Rather unexpected given the tone of the story.

I think it's a power fantasy specific to women. A villainess character is powerful in the social sphere both personally and in status. She's also freed from certain societal expectations associated with "proper" women because she is assumed to be "Bad". Although in a lot of Villainess stories the characters end up being nice characters anyways, but they still have the excuse to be more forward and brash then female characters might usually be in Japanese works.

Nice. The alternate PoV was a fun read.
I hope to see Yuki become a kick ass mage after meeting up with Haruka and co

By and large I've enjoyed the Jessica Bannister series, but there's been two things that have been nagging a bit more recently. The first is a slight, incoherency, in when Jessica gets snippy. I don't mean inconsistency, she's been fairly consistent in when she gets snippy, but the way her attitude can shift to a brusque impatience often feels dissonant with a lot of her other internal thought patterns. I might simply not have as good a grasp of her character as I think I do, but at least a part of it feels like the author rushing a bit in certain parts.

The second, somewhat bigger issue, is some of the endings feel less like a solution to the crisis du jour was properly setup/foreshadowed/built towards. Case in point is this latest one, where Nadine just seems to, give up. It's extremely ambivalent as to what role exactly Jessica played, or how her prior interactions with Monique and her family helped resolve things. Maybe her presence in and of itself helped, but that impression was not a very strong one.

@rkkn I liked the web novel Death March, no matter how choppy it is. Can't bring myself to read the LN because of the changes.

BTW same goes for Slime, the author has dedicated entire LN volumes to what are (rightfully imo) minor, useless and irritating characters.

Volume 19 (Premium Edition): A Bonus Short Story & Textless Color Illustrations The Wolf Girl's Dream