As one might expect I nominated Ascendance of a Bookworm for (almost) everything but I would like to campaign for two of my additional picks in the Best Debut and Best Emotional Moment categories:

For Best Debut, I would like to tell you about “Zilbagias the Demon Prince: How the Seventh Prince Brought Down the Kingdom” which debuted in April. There have been 3 volumes so far and so far it does something special that I haven’t really seen anywhere else.

The basic premise is that in the war between Humans and Demons, the Hero dies in a failed suicide mission to kill the Demon King and gets reincarnated as the Demon King’s 7th son. With his old hero memories intact he vows to destroy the demons now from the inside. Where this series stands out is that with that “inside POV” both the hero and we as readers learn to like those demons. We learn about the demon’s society and their motivations up o a point where I would be genuinely pissed if MC killed the demon king. There are some traditional dislikable villains as well in the form of some of his siblings for example, but so far there hasn’t been much contact between them. We just see the MC’s psyche get torn apart bit by bit by the dichotomy of his past and present life. I find this aspect really interesting. For example, he has to kill human prisoners of war as part of his royal training but internally he justifies this with an eye on the end goal. But as he comes to respect and even like some of the demons those sacrifices are putting a heavy burden on his soul. And it’s starting to show. Frankly, MC is falling apart and the only thing holding him together is a devil residing in his soul that he contracted with as part of his demon upbringing. Those devils represent concepts and MC’s sidekick represents “taboo”. As such she is quite happy with someone whose every breath basically breaks some taboo but it’s unclear so far whether she actually cares for MC or if she is just stringing him along.

As you can see there are quite some compelling ideas in this series and I haven’t even started on the other side characters like a mind-broken high elf and the type of bloodline magic MC inherited. For a debut volume, I would argue that it is more than enough to win this award over the millionth otome villainess title.

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For “Best Emotional Moment” I was torn between the end of Bookworm and the last chapter of Enough with This Slow Life! I Was Reincarnated as a High Elf and Now I’m Bored. Bookworm was sweet beyond words, but here I would like to campaign for Slow Life instead.

I try to keep it as spoiler-free as possible but it’s impossible to write about it without giving at least some vague spoilers:

Last volume

As I wrote in the weekly threads several times already this particular series has an insane pace. It’s the entire 1000-year lifespan of a high elf in just 8 volumes. The series excels in making the reader care for the characters MC meets during his life. And even though they’re just a blip in the grand scale of his long lifespan it still stings when they ultimately pass away. That epilogue chapter was the passing of his oldest companion and lover, a look back on his life and everyone he met, and himself ultimately passing. Just writing about it now made me tear up a bit. It’s really something to make me care so much for characters where there is so little time spent on in the form of the actual page count, but this series still managed it.