Sep 01, 2023
To:IceDonut
[1/2]
(First off ... sorry for spamming 😶🌫️😅)
So this was it: The Love Sorceress who broke all the rules of the multiverse to get closure about a thing she did wrong 500 years ago. Taking bad conscience to a new level, huh? 😜😂
But I think this really was a great ending! The two are almost like a whole family, with Poochy as their little dog child ... wait, is it possible for them to have kids now? I mean would those kids instantly be world breakers as well then? 🤔😅
Okay, maybe let's not open up another theory, I think I had my fair share with this novel! 😂 Let's talk about my final conclusion and let the promised scathing review wash upon you 😈 (I'm just joking! But from experience, it will probably still be quite long ... 😅)
Just a few things beforehand: My review is based on the version of the novel I read, I haven't read the edits afterwards. I will try to put my critique into context and try to differentiate it as good as possible. Not every point will be sensible or even possible to consider and in the end I have my own approach to writing, that might be very different from yours. So try to keep that in mind and feel free to take my considerations with a grain of salt. It's only meant to help you identify weak spots after all 😉
So, here we go:
Firstly, I must really praise your characters! Claire, Jun, Mia (Amamiya), her dad, Toren (!) and even Duke Elvett to some degree. Every single one of them had their unique personality and quirks. Jun's character development throughout the whole story was very gradual and relatable. Even his more exaggerated character quirks were really fun despite being slightly annoying at times (I read you would still fine tune them, but I thought that they were fine already--a character does not have to please me all the time as long as it is balanced out in some way or another).
While all the characters had their own personal intricacies to them, I could also still recognize your unique handwriting. I will go into more detail about that later down the line. You also gave them enough room to breathe and weaved their character developments into the main plot line as it unfolded in a meaningful way.
In my opinion, especially Japanese media has a big focus on characters and their developments. So in that regard you're really strong, as well as in the plot itself. I think the way your story unfolded felt very complex, while it actually was still understandable. Looking back, we covered a lot of ground: Dimensional jumps, the star reading, The World Champions, the magic accident in Farelle with Janus Akaventus / Claires past in general + how it tied in with Jun and the Void Champions. So it was A LOT exposition, that you still handled fairly well, but more details on that later as well.
All in all, I really enjoyed your story. You're a very skilled writer and you know how to tackle complex plot lines. I like the characters and they all grew very dear to me. They felt like living and breathing beings. You used and evaded the right tropes of the genre and created a great and interesting mix of an Isekai that feels very much different from what one would expect from an Isekai romance.
And that leads us right into the more interesting part: What I think could be improved.
On the one hand, the Isekai genre in general is very much gridlocked. After this season even the vending machine Isekai got adapted into and anime (even though I heard it should be actually not that bad 🤔), I think there is nothing more that is able to shock me. It's just too much from stories that feel all the same and we finally need some fresh ideas in the genre (that don't include another replaceable aspect that is supposed to make the story quirky and funny).
But on the other hand a big part of its success and appeal probably stems from the fact that if you watch an Isekai to a big degree you already know what you receive. The execution and focus of a show might vary to a degree, but 90% are male power fantasies, harems and other wish fulfillment, that quite literally helps people to leave this world and live in a subjectively better and more interesting version of it.
We need fresh ideas and takes on this, that are not exact copy-cats of their predecessors, but I think that your approach strays slightly too far from the original Isekai formula to actively FEEL like an Isekai ... at least for me and I shortly explain in more detail why (others are of course free to disagree). This does NOT make this a worse story in any way! I actually think the approach you chose is a great one and suits the story! But ... it might betray some people coming to this story, expecting something that feels more like an actual Isekai.
But why doesn't it feel that way for me? For me, Isekai have a stronger sense of adventure. How I see the genre is, it wants to provide a way for people to flee out of their stressful life, where they feel stuck, lonely and unimportant. It opens up a wholly new world so people can experience all the different attractions of this world, like in a theme park.
And you had elements of that to some degree: The kelpie ride or when Jun visited the neighboring city, where he met Toren. But the whole plot remained mostly inside the small village, without embarking on a real adventure. Imagine Mia's father had been captured by Duke Evett and to safe him, the group had to hunt down a certain MacGuffin. During this quest they would have gotten entangled throughout the events.
This for example would have felt much more like an Isekai. But also disclaimer on this: I haven't watched the pharmacy and Café and all those more locally limited Isekai's. So there might be examples that disprove my point. Maybe I would have only liked to see more of the beautiful fantasy world ... so maybe it's only a rather subtle undertone with the way you approached this ... I'm not entirely sure.
Another thing I also teased above was your unique style. And I'm not talking about how you write, but about how the identity of your story as a whole feels. I think that your approach sometimes felt slightly rough or bumpy around the edges. Claires magic for example utilized a soft magic system. There are several approaches to this. I personally always struggle with soft magic, because it is easy to throw this off balance and turn into nothing but a mere plot device. The magic has to be its own character and that is what makes it hard to grasp.
I can see, why you decided to do this, though: The main focus was Jun and his development, but whenever there was a problem that could have even provided for small character growth moments, Claire entered the stage. We needed a nice tasting bamboo soup: Ask Claire to go shopping for instant soup; We encounter an issue inside a conversation: Pull out the magic gemstone and ask Claire ... I mean commune with the trees 🧐
Critics usually call this "lazy writing", which somehow implies that the author was too lazy to think of a better and more creative solution, but I think you rather wanted to save time. I also remember to have noticed minor hints for "lazy" decisions in other regards. The whole multiverse/world breaker/stars and so on explanation (that was probably meant to tie all the loose ends together) could have been more streamlined, for example.
I would already bet that you had this one very simple idea and then kept building stuff onto it and onto it and onto it. Suddenly, there was this whole convoluted mess, that you've partly grown attached to, and then there was the deadline. Untangling or rebuilding this whole argumentation would have taken too long, so you just used it. It wasn't half bad! Not at all! But there could have been a better solution.
Maybe you've been in such a situation as well. There is a charmingly simple solution somewhere, but uncovering it takes time and you had to make things work. So, you just kept it in the slightly convoluted way, because maybe it wasn't that pretty, but at least it worked. For writing stories without a deadline, I can only encourage you to walk this extra mile. An elegant and simple solution is usually the best one and sometimes you have to kill your darlings to find it.
