2024 Lemmy LightNovel Awards Winners!

NineSwords · 18 days ago

2024 Lemmy LightNovel Awards Winners!

NineSwords · 17 days ago

The anime has adapted so little so far. With every new part the view of the world expands. Part one is just her little street and part of the Forrest. In part two her world expands a bit and now we see the commoner district. Part three will expand this to the noble district and the surrounding lands that make up Ehrenfest. Part four will expand this further to include the neighboring counties and by part five you get the whole view of Yurgenschmidt and a bit of more.

The world building is exceptional and you get it step by step as the pov of the protagonist expands instead of getting it force fed early on. And once you get the whole picture you see that everything was there from the very beginning. This is not something that has been made up on the way as it came up like in 99% of other LN.

Unboxious · 17 days ago

My issue wasn’t the quantity, but the quality. Things like the peasants living in super colorful housing even though paint is supposed to be expensive, or the peasants not knowing how to make pancakes despite having all the ingredients on-hand. The first one at least I could easily see being an anime-original mistake.

NineSwords · edit-2 17 days ago

I don’t remember anything about paint being expensive. Just about ink. And I don’t remember pancakes. Myne sells the recipe for pound cakes and only after sugar trickles down into Ehrenfest. I have never made pound cakes so I have no idea if it’s something that would be obvious to make but I think it’s believable enough to just run with it.

And TBH, If you’re saying those nitpicks are enough to disqualify Bookworm from that category then you’ll have to disqualify every other light novel as well, because I can promise you that I can find way worse for everything else.

Bookworm has fan books with tons and tons of background infos and world building that didn’t make it into the books. Its own Silmarillion if you so will.

I get it. Some people don’t like it. It’s a story about a female protagonist without any cheat skills that literally nearly dies from taking a flight of stairs. Not exactly the usual power fantasy many people are looking for in those this media. It’s also one of the slowest paced stories out there and the anime adaptation is an atrocity. All things that makes it understandable if someone doesn’t like it. But saying that it doesn’t have good world building is just objectively wrong or in bad faith.

Unboxious · 17 days ago

I don’t remember anything about paint being expensive. Just about ink.

It comes up about 13 minutes into episode 33, when they’re trying to figure out how to make colored ink.

And I don’t remember pancakes.

The pancake thing happens about 10 minutes into the third episode.

I get it. Some people don’t like it. It’s a story about a female protagonist without any cheat skills that literally nearly dies from taking a flight of stairs. Not exactly the usual power fantasy many people are looking for in those this media.

None of this has anything to do with my complaints. If anything, this is why I watched it in the first place. I was hoping for something with a bit more thought put in than most isekai stories get.

But saying that it doesn’t have good world building is just objectively wrong or in bad faith.

It’s subjective. In good faith, I’m saying I didn’t like the world building. I find inconsistencies like the paint thing very distracting when the supposed scarcity of these materials is supposed to be a huge driver of the plot. Maybe if you only compare it with other light novels it has good world building, but I don’t see why I’d hold light novels to a lower standard of quality than normal novels since both categories are competing for my time. And maybe the peasant housing is only painted bright colors in the anime and not the light novel, and the light novel does a better job with these details. That’s what I was hoping to find out by posting about this in the first place.

NineSwords · edit-2 17 days ago

IIRC the peasant housing is just dirty wood on top of dirty white stone. I would have to reread the first novels to check but I don’t think that Miya Kazuki would leave such an obvious error when everything else is so meticulously planned and crafted.

And apart from some real heavy hitters in the fantasy genre I don’t know many better than Bookworm in terms of details for the given scope of the series. This is an intimate story on a relatively small scale and not some globe spanning, end of the world epic. it has a unique and detailed magic system, unique and detailed class system, religious systems with their own pantheon that has his own individual story, unique and detailed political systems that don’t flip flop whenever it’s convenient for the direction the author wants to take. Systems that become important later on being introduced to the plot and explained 20 volumes earlier. Stuff like that is what makes me lose myself in a story. If there are some minor things that could be pointed out like people not inventing pancakes then that’s something that I can look past.

I2jgwh0hYtxrCZQ@lemmy.sdf.org · edit-2 17 days ago

I think in the Anime the houses are made more colourful to give more visual effects. I don’t remember paint or colour being mentioned in the LN apart from possibly the North of the city where the guilds and Bennos Store is. (The rich part)

The Pancakes / Parucakes were because the parufruits husks were used for bird feed as there was no taste. It’s because of Mynes knowledge that she combined the tasteless husks with the liquid to make a tasty food. As sugar is expensive there is only Paru fruits to use as sweetener, They also only come rarely in winter so it is not a common food.

Unboxious · 17 days ago

I don’t remember paint or colour being mentioned in the LN apart from possibly the North of the city where the guilds and Bennos Store is

Good to hear.

The Pancakes / Parucakes were because the parufruits husks were used for bird feed as there was no taste.

The issue I have with that is that historically it’s taken a lot more than that to stop poor people from eating things, and from figuring out how to eat things. In Nordic regions it used to be common to mix flour made from tree bark with other, less shitty flours during times of famine. It kinda felt to me like the author was looking down on peasants just so the main character could be cool or whatever.