May Your Reading Days Be Filled with May Catchups!
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May has arrived, and with it comes new member catchups!
There are plenty of isekai stories out there where the characters don't get what they expected, but how many are there where the readers get the rug pulled out from under them? My Instant Death Ability Is So Overpowered, No One in This Other World Stands a Chance Against Me! has one of the longest English titles in our catalog, but it's also exactly what it says on the tin: Conspiracies and divine machinations mean nothing when our hero can literally kill anything with a thought! Check out the satire that some call "Isekai One Punch Man" now!
After a long hiatus, it's back! Dungeon Busters stars Ezoe Kazuhiko, an entrepreneur whose company promises just one thing - to clear the fantastical dungeons that have suddenly appeared all over Earth! Full of politics and real-world Japanese references, this series offers and overwhelmingly realistic dungeon-diving epic!
Kiara dreams of a mysterious world where a girl plays a certain strategy game. When she learns about her engagement to a viscount, she realizes that she's the villain of that game, and her fate is to die to the heroes! So now, to those heroes, she declares "I Refuse to Be Your Enemy!"
Finally, if you missed out on the Ascendance of a Bookworm catchup in April, or just want to travel back to Myne's early days as you're watching the anime, we have the Ascendance of a Bookworm manga for you this month!
Members have over 30 volumes of content to catchup on this month, so get reading!
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is Instant Death any good? a bit ago I picked a random volume and read a couple pages, and got the impression that its idea of humor is killing people for trivial reasons, which is not my cup of tea. Is that indeed how it is?
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@rkkn yes
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@rkkn - Yogiri (the MC) doesn't kill people for trivial reasons; he only ever kills in self defense. The main loop of the story is to introduce a couple of ridiculous monster antagonists, have them rampage for a while, maybe fight eachother a bit, then have one of them accidentally almost step on Yogiri. He erases them, the other one moves into the power vacuum and causes even worse problems, until it too accidentally steps on Yogiri and dies.
I won't pretend it's sophisticated, but there's a sort of implied moral that's easy to miss in the moment: because Yogiri's power is good for killing and only for killing, it always causes more problems than it solves. Even though everything he kills is a terrible monster that would have killed him if he'd done nothing, the areas he travels through are always disaster zones by the time he leaves them.
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The Bookworm manga is actually my recommended starting point for getting into Bookworm. It's more brisk in pace than the novels, which helps stop you from getting stuck in the weeds - but unlike the anime, it has the space for more of the little worldbuilding details that make the novel so great. Then again, that spiel is mostly for me trying to recommend Bookworm to people who aren't into LNs in general, which isn't really something I need to worry about for the folks 'round here :P And hey look, it's got Suzuka art! Yay! (Suzuka!Benno is best manga!Benno, fight me.)
Oh neat, I Refuse to Be Your Enemy has come back around ^^ I still agree with my loose description of it from the last time it was on Catchup:
masterlillyclaw said in No Need to Doubt These April Catchups!:it's like a more serious Bakarina (aka villainess reincarnation), with the characters being more competent and the overarching plot being more... existing.
I only read through the series the one time but I did quite enjoy it. And it's fully translated! Yay!
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@masterlillyclaw It's Fire Emblem. If you like Fire Emblem, you'll probably like I Refuse To Be Your Enemy.
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@rkkn definitely recommended. There are villains who as you said kill people for whatever reason, but the fun isn't watching them doing so, is knowing that they'll die when they meet the protagonist.
Having said that, you'll see a lot of people dying, so if you don't like that the series might not be for you. -
@rkkn - it's a dark comedy from the author of My Big Sister Lives in a Fantasy World. It's a bit like the old Monty Python TV show and movies where they'd have a sketch about a family selling their children to organ harvesters because they have too many (every sperm is sacred!) or a restaurant offering live humans killed fresh and cooked up for you.
Yogiri only kills bad people...but there is a bit of widespread collateral damage now and then.
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"Isekai One Punch Man" sounds like a special kind of hell to me. I will very, very hard pass on that one.
I might check out Dungeon Busters if I can find the time. It sounds promising at least.
I HIGHLY recommend I Refuse To Be Your Enemy. The plotting is vastly better than most similar tales, with her taking direct action to change her fate, the romance is fairly direct in terms of who she'll end up with, and at 6 volumes it's just long enough to tell a good story without getting tied up in knots trying to extend past where it should have stopped.
It's also one of the few series like this that I've read that treats war somewhat realistically. Characters do die and our heroes do kill, and have to deal with the emotional consequences of both.
And of course the AoaB Manga is the AoaB Manga 😊
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@xdrfiredogx said in May Your Reading Days Be Filled with May Catchups!:
"Isekai One Punch Man" sounds like a special kind of hell to me. I will very, very hard pass on that one.
I've watched and enjoyed the One Punch Man anime, and both the feel of and humor in Instant Death Cheat is very different. I'd never think to describe it as "Isekai One Punch Man," the only thing in common is that Yogiri's power kills instantly. It's free to try, so why not?
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Ya know, this month's catch-ups don't do a thing for me; I've already purchased and read all of them.
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As a big fan of Instant Death Ability, I'd personally describe it as a parody of the isekai genre. To be clear, I mean that not in the sense of the lazily written dross the parody genre has become (at least in movies) since Scary Movie, but more like the classics such as Airplane or The Naked Gun trilogy (albeit minus a certain deadpan comedy genius) where it has its own proper storyline and characters, not just making obvious jabs at specific titles, but still managing to make fun of a lot of the common tropes of the genre within that original story.
I don't think it'd be to everyone's tastes, but if you like parody, like isekai but don't mind a bit of fun being poked at it or you hate isekai and do want to see it be made fun of, it'd be worth giving it a go. Also functions as a good dark comedy as someone above mentioned. Of course, I love parody & have a dark sense of humour, so I'm totally biased.
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@thewickerman I love parody and tend to have a very dark sense of humor... I'm just infinitely tired of isekai. Though I might have to read a chapter or two just the same, simply out of respect for you using "dross" in your description. It's a criminally underutilized word, as is "dreck."
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@xdrfiredogx Haha indeed, it's the perfect descriptor for the likes of Epic Movie or Meet the Spartans.
To parody isekai you have to be an isekai of course so I can't guarantee it'll be for you. That's the beauty of the catchups of course though. I have several series I'm now purchasing premiums for that I wouldn't even have considered buying if they were from another publisher. I'd say the first 4 or 5 parts of volume 1 would give anyone a pretty clear idea whether it's to their tastes or not.
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