Jamie Marchi, Katrina Leonoudakis. Not “tried”, “did”.

That’s a field I can answer in a professional capacity (my work involves translations for almost 20 years now). MTL is a great tool if used by a translator. A tool that provides a rough draft for a human translator as a starting point. If used as such, it vastly (I cannot stress this enough) speeds up the translation process without losing the quality of the translation.

CR, on the other hand, seems to use it as a replacement for the human translator, where the MTL is the end product.

Personally, I feel very conflicted about this. Obviously, I want good and accurate translations as a best-case scenario. But between human translators using the platform to inject their own views and agendas into the script, and broken and faulty MTL, I take the latter.

Here’s my super-mega in-depth review of the first volume of the light novel.. TLDR: Meh.

Easygoing Territory Defense for me this week.

<The Otome Heroine’s Fight for Survival: Volume 5> - My favorite murder-hobo is back with a new arc. Good pacing so far, but I feel like there are too many reincarnators amongst the side characters that affect the story negatively. The pace of the volume itself is very fast, and there is a lot happening, including the deaths of long-time featured characters. And then it ends on an interesting setup/cliffhanger for the next volume. Great series.

<The Twelve Kingdoms Book 1> - I hate MC. It goes beyond just disliking her. I think she is battling it out with the Mushoku Tensei MC for my #1 spot for most hated MC. The problem with that is that she is suffering through the entirety of the whole book, and I don’t care one way or another. She could die right there at the end, and I would just think “great, next volumes MC is hopefully better”. And if it were the Rudeus type of hatred I feel for the character, I would at least be able to enjoy her suffering, but it’s more of the indifferent, annoyed type, where I just wish she would suffer somewhere else where I don’t have to read about it. The series is supposed to be great and a classic, but volume 1 here was a letdown. The world-building was only hinted at since we didn’t see much of it yet. Let’s see where this is going in the next volume. Maybe MC will even change after everything she had to go through in this volume and stop being such a whiny and passive damsel in distress.

<Witch and Mercenary Vol. 1> - This is a great classic fantasy-adventure story of two unlikely protagonists venturing into the unknown. The unknown turns out to be a lot more mundane than I hoped, but it’s still an entertaining read.

Witch and Mercenary Vol. 2 - It’s becoming clear now that this should be called “Mercenary and Witch” since the focus is very much on the Mercenary with the Witch locking herself away in her room for the longest chunk of the volume. It’s a shame since she is clearly the more interesting character.

The show’s art style works so well with the subject matter. Ruri’s energy is contagious and Nagi goes right into my favorites along with Fuji from With You and the Rain. What a great season.

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I wondered why she didn’t want to speak to her dad, but him being just a dog-lover was not on my list of reasons.

Magic classes are elective.

Here is where the marvel type banter starts. Right now it’s relatively tame since they only met recently but it is only getting worse from here. Great for everyone that likes this type of banter, bad for everyone else.

For everyone wondering about why Rio has a problem with the “Debuhi Empire”: the name translates to “Fat Pig Empire”. The light novel goes a bit more into it in that scene with Rio wondering if the emperor turned out to be fat and we get some more world building exposition in return from Abel.

This lacks all the charm of Yuru Camp and FMC is annoying.

This is the wish dot com version “The Quintessential Quintuplets”. Couldn’t even been bothered by giving the house a different layout.

I really dislike goody two-shoes main characters. When this was written, what was the reason to make the villains so unreasonably evil when the punishment at the end is so disproportionate mild? If the goal was for MC to just rough them up a little and tie them up the villains could just as well been written as thief’s that steal the targets weapons and armor instead of gang rapist that leave their victims to perish in the deep dungeon. If a writer decides to go with dark and gritty R18 for the crime they should not chicken out with a pg13 punishment. Keep it balanced. As it stands I’m extremely unsatisfied with this episode.

Another gripe I have is all the Japanese food and utensils in the otherwise western fantasy setting. It’s unimaginative. Looked good though.

Nope. Fuck that. They’re either get torn to shreds in the next episode or I’m out.

I would rather spend time with or talk to a person who has never read a light novel than one who likes a genre that I despise.

I dislike the driven archetype that is desperate to to win. Had some of them in my life for a while and they suck the fun out of everything. I had a good idea where this was going, so I was going to drop the show, but that end made me reconsider. Not at all what I expected.

A-1 is one of those coin-flip studios for me. I either absolutely love a show or I hate it with a passion.

Is it me, or should the title of this post have been in all caps?

thanks. Joshiraku was what I was thinking of.

It reminds me of the anime (can’t remember the name atm) where a group of girls just sits in the school’s tea club room, chatting about random topics. The topics in this episode fell flat for me though. I guess it’s one of those lost in translation shows. I’ll give it a episode more.

Still the funniest anime and it’s insane to me that we get sequels to the two top comedy shows in the same season after so long. Now if there were a second season alf Asobi Asobase I would start to question reality. The animation quality was also a good step up season 1. I can’t wait to see how the addition of the yandere sister will break up all the existing social interactions for season 2.