@Terabyte Seems like volume 3 will be the last one if google translated the description correctly:

This is the last one. You too are free. Live as you like.
The most terrifying supernatural power x villainess x loop fantasy complete!

Source: Amazon + Google Translate

@rkkn said in The Faraway Paladin Vol. 2 Discussion:

The only bad thing is I think he goes a little too hard on the "no one can ever see me being a good guy" deal.

In fairness, he's from a culture without TV, movies, or anything close to the number of fiction books we have, so he has no roadmap to tell him how to be the fake corrupt bishop that lets the rest of the church remain pure. He's winging it and has cast away any subtlety for the role, but it seems to be succeeding. The right people like Will can see through it while the corrupt are fooled.

That was a rather long title for the author’s next writing exercise. Not atypical for a light novel, though. :)

Enjoy your bad-end epilogue, Charlotte! Unless there’s a volume 5, you’ll be stuck there forever!

Part 5:

Yeah, I figured Tiona and Sion didn't get together in the Guillotine timeline, because beheading a princess is relationship poison. That's the event that broke Sion's justice, sending him down the path of darkness. Tiona, with her revenge complete, now had the time to think about if it was really the right thing to do. Neither of them could stand being in the other's presence for long, because they'd remind each other of their sin.

Part 7:

Poor captain. "Who the hell is this Miabel person? Citrine I can handle. Sure, she's a duke's daughter and the fact that she's walking around alone is stressful, but at least I know what she is. Miabel acts like a VIP and looks like Mia's close relative, yet I have no information about her whatsoever. The fact that I don't know what kind of VIP she is only makes it more terrifying."

"Lady Miabel, the capitol is mostly safe, but there are potentially dangerous elements, like the open market."
"Ooo! I want to see the open market!"
Fffffffffffffffffffff

"But the open market might have rare mushrooms!"
No! No! No! No! "I will find you some rare mushrooms." So can you please stay within my line of sight?

The MC's inability to mentally grasp all the favorable turns of fortune in his favor has largely described what it was like reading this volume to me; it's so heavily leaned into the power fantasy to the point where it's simply unrealistic to keep up with it, yet the setting demands for even more. I do appreciate a little that they put some awareness to the MC's mentals not being able to keep up with his skills, but the setting itself doesn't acknowledge it and keeps pegging him on... who's to say there won't be some kind of abuse of power to happen this time around?

I won't deny the possibility that this kind of setting really elevates how much I attempt to expect out of the story, and that I have a tendency to refrain from popular things, but I don't think following fads is always a good idea... though for the majority and for their circumstances that might actually be the best approach, due to how the content is treated. There's just so much that can go on in a fantasy setting... and even moreso if video game elements are implemented into the setting; I don't see them as comfort as much as it is a flawed nostalgia, but it's a big word where we live our lives among so many different kinds of experiences.

@pcj She'd have to Mia the place upside-down in order for the populace to accept it. Not impossible, mind you, but currently the country would sooner accept some random foot soldier as king.

One more volume of our protagonist's desperate struggle not to stand out, which she's failing miserably at; whether it's due to being hilariously overpowered, prone to panicking and acting without thinking, or making moves nobody else can predict or even understand because she's playing checkers when others are playing 3D chess. Also, it doesn't help that she, just like everybody else, is a bit of an idiot.

This volume takes a while to get going, but when it does, it's good - it's a silly, chaoic story where people's quirks run into one another at full speed, somebody is constantly getting dissed, all the great plans turn out to have glaring flaws but often work better than the originals, and no matter what happens, Mary becomes even more of a legend. The silly chaos is also the greatest weakness of its style - don't expect deep characters or meaningful story, or even things to make sense with anything but a cursory reading. This is no Tearmoon; things mostly just happen for the fun of it.

A big caveat, though: A large part of the plot this time, I'm sorry to say, is a cursed sex change artifact. It's not handled in a mean way, as boys being feminine often is in LNs, but it's also dealt with all the subtlety and nuance you'd expect a random light novel to have, which is to say, none. There are some interesting ideas there (The queen believing that as a future king, the prince having a personal experience with what woman's life is like is a boon to him and the kingdom both), but they're buried pretty deep.

Favourite character: It's a tie between Alice who finds all undead things cute, and Victorica who's the oldest and mightiest vampire with the personality of an easily distracted little kid. A close runner-up, the hydra with the speech patterns of an annoyed teenage girl.
Favourite moment: Repeatedly using Turn Undead on a vampire as a la la la can't hear you :D

Mia finds Salamandrakes
Citrina: It's okay, she obviously can't identify mushrooms, I can bluff my way out of this.
Mia: "Oh I know this one! This mushroom is so violently poisonous that it's even dangerous to touch!"
Citrina: Why is she competent NOW?

Miabel is the sweetest girl to ever exist. No matter how much tragedy befalls her, she's happy to simply be alive.

@Cidolfas Yep. I was actually midway through the book when I wrote that comment, before it was mentioned that he can't be addressed by the "Ka" name by most people. Now that I finished the volume, that last reason is obviously wrong. I guess the main reason for the name is to give Basen and Gaoshun something to call him since they can't call him "Jinshi" around the other nobles and they can't call him "prince" around Maomao.

It is a bit funny to think that everyone at the party except Maomao knew there was a prince there. I guess the other commoner staff might not have known, since the nobles wouldn't go out of their way to tell them? Even so, it's pretty likely someone would mention something about the prince in their normal conversation, since he's the star of the party and they have no reason to avoid talking about him. Maybe Jinshi was hoping Maomao would pick up on that idle chatter and figure it out so he wouldn't have to pluck up the courage to explain, hahaha.

The shark punching is definitely going to actually happen, isn't it.

I think Miabel is in this timeline permanently. Her book is affected by the future changing, but her memories aren't, just like Mia herself.

@LeavesCat Apparently the Tearmoon Empress is also ferti— <arrow to the face>

@SpankySenpai said in You Like Me, Not My Daughter?! Vol. 3 Discussion!:

Subscribed to J-Novel for the first time just to read this. Ill report back after reading Vol3. Series melts my heart so far. I havent read multiple LNs in one sitting in a while.

Alright, done. Miu is too sneaky for her own good. Kiss at the end was pretty heartwarming, looking forward to vol4 :)

@LeavesCat Who are you, V4 Alicia?

@rkkn said in The Faraway Paladin Vol. 1 Parts 1-4 Discussion:

wows, I didn't know discussion topics used to be split up by part before

I wanted to comment on how long the afterword is, but this very old discussion is split across many threads, it seems

Ah yes I'd almost forgotten this phase.

My guess is that per part comments came about because the JNC part model was inspired (as per my interpretation of comments by Sam Pinansky such as those in this interview), at least in part, by fan translations that were written in chunks that each had their own comment space.

I think it got a bit unmanageable and people were responding in the wrong thread and there were too many series so by popular demand (or at least without any pushback that I can recall) the per part threads were dropped. It was probably also a lot of work having to create and link each part to a thread.

The reason it failed for JNC is probably because while fan translations had comment sections right below the translation, JNC had them on a separate forum.

And two more points:
First, it's a rare to see the first volume past the original cutoff start to get things going once again so fast. I had some suspicions in the early parts of the book, but by the time I read the afterword I've long forgotten that.

Second, it's really great that the series didn't in the slightest go back to Sieg treating Nicola like he did in the early parts of the first volume, but instead kept the wonderful respectful Sieg of the later parts.

I don't blame Carina at all for not stopping the reverse harem. Sure, part of her reason was to take a shot at Patrick, but I think the main reason is that fighting the protagonist on this would be scary. She's a rival character; if she resists the protagonist's actions, the game mechanics are likely to doom her. Instead, she did the logical thing; let the protagonist do what she wants, and aim for a victory after the end credits where the game is no longer influencing reality. In fact you could say that she did stop the reverse harem, as she protected all the girls and even provided a way for some of the guys to reform their engagements.

Lilianne however is just an asshole and an idiot. She could have had a perfectly fine marriage with any one of several guys that are designed to love her, but got greedy and threw it all away on the chance that she could steal the lover of a princess. She didn't even have a fallback plan.

@MrMonday said in Private Tutor Vol. 10 Discussion!:

@bobbyX2 said in Private Tutor Vol. 10 Discussion!:

Perhaps most importantly, we're 10 volumes deep into this thing- 15 volumes in Japan- and none of the other romance options have evolved past puppy love. Realistically there can't be that much story left.

It wouldn't be all that unusual either, assuming the publisher is willing to put up with it -- Bookworm is at 29 volumes right now in EN, Spirit Chronicles is 23 with no ending in sight, and I'm sure there are other things that I'm not currently reading that are quite long.

Eh, I guess I can see what you're saying. You're right, there are exceptions where some books manage to pump out 25+ volumes (Rokujouma is at 44).

That said, most of those other series are more popular. I'd be surprised if the author manages to drag this out to 25 volumes, personally. I know it's getting an anime soon...so maybe that'll boost it a lot. We'll see.

I suppose that's where my headspace is. Lydia has been built up since the first volume, and there has been 10 consecutive volumes of varying degrees of romantic development there. I don't expect that to suddenly change for the next 10 volumes.

But perhaps I'm wrong. Maybe the first ten volumes were a red herring. Maybe it really will last 40 volumes and we're about to embark on an epic Lynne arc.

@LeavesCat said in Private Tutor Vol. 10 Discussion!:

Like, why is Lynne making eyes at Allen when she supports his relationship with Lydia and is fully aware that Lydia would go completely nuts if she stole him? The harem shouldn't exist in the first place, but the author is writing it anyway, so I don't have much confidence that he won't contrive some bullshit excuse to make everyone magically happy with this. It doesn't help that he writes stuff in the afterword about giving Lydia a "turn" as if it isn't her turn forever.

Mainly he just wants to write "cute girls", and his definition of cute girls is "fawning over a guy".

Oh, I mostly agree with what you're saying.

I feel like, what probably happened was that the series was first introduced as a harem in Volume 1. But as it went along, Lydia emerged as significantly more popular than the others and got the focus...OR, maybe it's the opposite. The series wanted to focus on Lydia as the main love interest at the start, but the plot was considered mediocre by the masses, so it insists on continuing the low-hanging fruit of shallow harem antics in order to keep more people engaged.

I don't know, and I suppose it doesn't really matter. At the end of the day, Lydia as a love interest has been written significantly better than the others (Stella is the best individual character right now though, IMO), and her dynamic with Allen is the main reason I'm continuing the series. I hope the story keeps doubling-down on Lydia as the main love interest. Because I'd much rather read about the two of them and their adventures than to listen to these 13-15-year-old girls spending twenty pages arguing over who deserves to sit next to Allen at the dinner table.

i liked that little short story. They don't give extra endings like that very often.

@Leon_97
Maybe some of it is that the series was originally written in Japanese for a Japanese audience? So the names are written in a way that may have seemed broadly identifiable (and non-Japanese) to the Japanese ear?
Equestrians as sort of like Mongols—which are sort of tied to China—so they just went with Chinese names. Perujin sort of Persian or Indian. And Lulus are more of generic stand-in for any of the world’s indegineous tribes that have been encroached on. And names that just seem generic to the western ear, were meant to seem genericly European to the Japanese audience.