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A Light Novel Worth Reading


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This is off topic, but, I just had to gush. Lately I've been reading this light novel called 'Overlord'

 

While some parts can get quite dark, and the subject is more adult than Academagia, I wouldn't say it is too much darker than something like Dragon Age. But there are a few parts which are.

 

The basic premise is that a level 100 mmorpg player gets permanently transported to a 'new world' after the game servers were shut down, and he and his NPC guardians cause pure chaos because there is virtually nobody there over say level 30. there's even an anime out of it although it only covers a small part of it and not in great detail like the novel does. There's also a lot of humor as the NPCs see him as some infinitely wise ruler when he's just an ordinary guy wearing a facade because he fears losing their loyalty if he doesn't 'measure up'. It helps that he's a lich, so he's got a mean poker face.

 

Here's TV tropes page http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/LightNovel/Overlord2012?from=LightNovel.Overlord

 

Here's a small clipping I chose from the latest volume's translation. Just a few pages' worth so you can see whether you'll like it or not. http://pastebin.com/yecTDqtK

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Perhaps I'm a tad bit jaded, but a lot of people don't like to read. Our Academagia friends can be excused because they rarely come on here, but I don't think the average person who came here for VB is interested in gobs of text to read and sort through. It's a sign of the times and imo a result of the quality of the mainstream media people consume these days, which is getting pretty trashy. Even I can't remember the last time I myself read a real book book. It was probably when I was still in the Navy, on deployment, and desperate for something to occupy my mind, I dug through the locker filled with books that was called the ship's library, and found some real gems including Helen Keller's autobiography. That was fascinating.

 

But when people are bombarded by drivel, their minds react as such.

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heh, Manga/LN are one of the few things that can hold my interest these days. The only games I'm interested in I've beaten, or have oversaturated my interest. Few movies come out that appeal to me, and even my one true passion of animation is hurting. Pixar is the only part of disney still worth paying attention to, and way too many anime these days are focused on fanservice or moe, or God help me some kinky fetish finds it's way in.

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Doubtful, seeing as how I'm just about the only person in the family that doesn't own a bookcase. An actual, physical bookcase with paper books, mind, not a tablet or...whatever it's called these days with files much too fanciful and modern to be saved as ol' reliable .txt files.

 

In my case, though, it was that I was actively discouraged from reading books. By being made to read books that, ultimately, were less meaningful and interesting than a newspaper on a slow news day.

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They were unpleasant, primarily because of subject matter. Including (but not limited to, these are just what I remember):

 

An elder man slowly succumbing to either dementia or Alzheimer, growing ever more distant from his increasingly apathetic/helpless family and ultimately dying;

An odd couple of lesbians who's relationship wasn't significantly important to the plot despite the book otherwise having no plot, which ultimately ended with setting up and betraying a male third party for reasons of wanting to have a child. The pregnant one was subsequently murdered;

The otherwise actually humorous tale of a kid with the soul of a cynical old man that could quote the exact hour that his family was most likely to engage in mass-suicide due to sheer boredom, ultimately reaching no resolution that I can remember...though that might just be me having an odd sense of humor...;

The life story of two friends who ended up going from reciting bad poetry as children to failing at the romance department and deciding to blow off steam in the local Red Lights district to marrying the first woman they could seduce (to put it politely) to realizing pretty quickly (after having four kids or so) that they don't actually care for their respective wives, and they don't care for their husbands in turn as made evident by one rather clearly having an affair. The book ended with one guy fantasising about a ten million digit prime number while the other mentioned how easily the first guy's wife could find another person to have an affair with (something he knew from experience I might add), so he didn't need to worry about his wife nagging him;

The story of a family who's eldest died and the long, painful journey to get to where the man wished to be buried, involving such fun as a forced barn tools aided abortion (and the alcohol-related events that necessitated it...);

The tale of a group of teenagers that got shipwrecked on a deserted island, only they weren't shipwrecked so much as left for dead by the captain (...or something), and the island wasn't actually uninhabited but the home of a group of pirates/smugglers/some kind of ne'er do wells, and also it contained some kind of old and abandoned military facility with the third nuclear bomb that would have been dropped on Japan if Nagasaki and Hiroshima weren't a clear enough message, only that ended up being fake...or something? That entire thing made no sense by the end of it, though I can't say whether or not that's my fault;

The story of a kid who got diagnosed with some manner of bone disease or another, and his slow, agonizing and entirely predictable journey to a pre-twenties grave;

The story of a group of friends who decided to play a game of "rob a bank", one of which actually took the idea seriously and the subsequent hilarity that unfolded, including at least one case of fast gun aided murder and one slow gun aided death-by-murder-victim's-self-defence (either bled out or died of infection or another complication from getting shot, I don't recall). 'Far as I remember the book ended with the last living member of the group having what little was left of her life entirely ruined and being branded as the "eiskalter Engel" - ice-cold angel.

 

 

Those last two, by the by, were German books that I had to read in German, because obviously having to literally piece every other word together from earlier context or rough similarity to a language you actually speak makes reading a much more enjoyable experience. Also a written and vocal book rapport - both entirely in German - presented in front of the entire class, because that was a language you could (supposedly) speak at that point. The good books I read, for those curious, included topics such as teenagers falling into drug abuse and the mess that it brings; bullying to the point of suicide; having their mother remarry to a man who's son doesn't take the hint that the mother's daughter isn't available and willing (mostly by not taking "no" for an answer and somewhat dense parents); a teacher that wants to be into one of his students way, way more than said student is comfortable with; having the protagonist's father die of a heart attack and the fun that it brings; and having your friends considerer you to be a wuss/bad friend/something else because Pfeiffer Syndrome demands it.

 

Like I said, I might as well be reading a newspaper.

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Well, to be fair, Overlord has a 13 episode anime that covers the first 3 volumes of the novel, here's probably one of the funnier moments. That's a REAL wizard doing buffs there! not shown is the part where he turns the combat area into a crater. :) To start the match. :)

 

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Overlord looks interesting, for a light novel.

 

I'm definitely more of a ...regular book reader. I love the ones that weave the story, heavy with details and those that do it well. Before my housefire last year, I had three bookshelves worth of books, and that's not counting the ones I've passed on to others over the years or re-sold. I love to read. lol And I definitely prefer to have the physical copy. digital just isn't the same..

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And fairly obvious, by my estimation. Though I am thankful that English is so widespread that I can communicate with so many around the world, I certainly appreciate the fact that it is usually a second language for a lot on the internet. I've been wanting to learn Japanese, and today my knowledge of it is greater than any other but I doubt I could pass even the most basic competency tests. :(

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It's just a nerve of mine that people will not read/play through something in English and instead wait for a translation. In this country you didn't get that choice way back when because practically no games were translated. Everything from Super Mario Brothers to Pokémon everyone here played through entirely in English, usually trial and error brute-force style, because nothing was translated and the kids those games were marketed towards didn't understand a word of it at the time. Of course that situation, during which most kids develop a coherent if not near-fluent understanding of English entirely on their own, got even worse in middle school when we got German and French classes as our intended third and fourth languages, as well as Latin as a fifth language if you were one of those "bright" students, but teachers couldn't provide an answer when they were asked "why can't we just speak English?" It ended up, I imagine unintentionally, painting the relevant countries as being populated by lazy individuals who were spoiled out of having to learn a language other than their own, and we were saddled with picking up both of their slack.

 

The truth, of course, is that those classes are simply part of the curriculum, which teacher don't have any say over...but try telling that to an angsty teenager. Besides which, even if they agreed that English should just be a standard second language the German and French teachers likely wouldn't advocate a policy that'd obsolete their job. In addition, while our games weren't translated back then there also weren't shoddy translations, or language-exclusive bugs/missing features. Unless the game was utter rubbish to begin with, but, well, that's it's own problem. And these days games marketed towards kids who shouldn't be expected to speak a second language yet are actually translated occasionally. Best part? Those kids will still learn English just as well and effectively the same way as their seniors did, because of the Internet being much more widespread and accessible...and just as English-dominated as our games were way back when.

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