As you may recall, six months ago I read Mushoku Tensei and greatly enjoyed the experience. So I decided to read another well-regarded web novel, Tate no Yuusha no Nariagari, or The Rising of the Shield Hero. From the title, you can probably guess precisely what is doing the rising.

It starts out similarly to Mushoku Tensei— a loser otaku comes to another world. This time instead of starting as a baby and “working hard” to earn his triple loli harem, he’s born as a hero except everyone hates him and everything is oh so unfair. He buys a loli tanuki slave and she’s the only one who truly loves him. Then it’s the same idea as Mushoku Tensei, he builds up a loli army in a loli village and saves the world.

If that were all I would have enjoyed it even though it’s trash. But… that’s not it. Know how I mentioned that everyone hates the main character at first? The lead in all this is the daughter of the king (named “Trash” throughout the book), who is literally named “Bitch” throughout the entire 300+ chapter book. Oh, actually, occasionally the author changes her name to “Whore”. This girl is the epitome of evil. She keeps trying to kill the Shield hero, tries to murder her sister, her father, her mother, sells the country out to the enemy, etc., etc., all by seducing men other than the hero. Then the hero executes her. There is an entire chapter dedicated to this brutal execution, with everyone cheering for her death. Then she comes back to life and she gets executed again, this time by graphically described and in fact videotaped multiple days of rape. As as if that’s not enough, she comes back to life and goes through a similar treatment again. Continue reading I am Trash Part II →

So, you may have noticed that I haven’t updated lately. That’s because I’ve been reading web novels. (Ok, fine, it’s actually just because I’m lazy.)

I really got into this one novel. It’s called Mushoku Tensei. I read all 25 volumes in a week.

And this novel is complete trash. It’s a horribly written piece of crap, and the translation is even worse. It’s barely at the point of being human language.

The substance of the novel is even worse. Some loser hikikomori reincarnates in a parallel universe with magic. His mind is 39 years old but his body is a baby. He goes on to molest a bunch of women. Including three year old girls. And it all goes downhill from there. He becomes the most powerful person in the world, marries three women (a childhood friend cross-dresser, a loli sensei elf, and a tsundere), and has multiple other women falling in love with him (including imouto maid and imouto student council president). It’s filled with unabashed pedophilia. It’s much more blatant wish fulfillment than Sword Art Online.

And I loved it. Couldn’t stop reading.

I am trash.

I’m starting a book club on twitter with some friends. We’ll read a book every month or two and discuss it as we read. If anyone would like to join us, go and fill out this form to vote on our first book. If you don’t have a twitter account I encourage you to get one, but anyone is welcome to join along in reading the books we choose.

Again, sign up here if interested.

You may have noticed I’ve been slacking off on blogging lately. That’s because I’ve been busy reading Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, as the last book came out this month. I read all fourteen books in a period of three weeks, so I was pretty busy.

I first came across these books around twelve(?) years ago. I got to around number ten over a period of a few years, and then they started coming out really slowly / the author died / I forgot about them. Since it had been about ten years since I touched one of these books, I forgot everything that happened except that the main character got the harem end, and I decided to re-read the entire series from the beginning.

What does this have to do with anime, you ask? Well, not much. I guess books and anime are both storytelling mediums, so you can extrapolate lessons from these books to anime. But I figure a lot of anime fans also like fantasy books anyway and I felt like writing something about this. I doubt anyone will actually read it, and it basically amounts to a random sequence of inane observations; hey, whatever.

I’ll start off without spoilers, and put a big warning once I get into spoiler territory. Continue reading The Wheel of Time →