#ITS ALMOST AN ISEKAI | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

understandableparadox · 10 months ago

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Bottom of the barrel Isekai review

Today we are looking at the following, "The white cat's revenge as plotted from the dragon kings lap."

christ thats a long as title.

anyways, do you have a friend? no? yes? maybe? how nice, how do you treat them? how do you speak with them? how do you interact with them? while you are filling out this survey, could you be as kind as to fill out those silly little digits on that odd plastic card in your mothers purse for moi~?

no? well fuck you to.

the flowers, the painfully average looking protag, the specific notation about the eye color? we are about to dive into the live of a special young lady and her mystical adventures through whimsy and wonder.

anyways the story is that ruri, are main charecter lives a rather average life with her super importent dad and her super model mom, as the image stats, how could her life ever be distrupted in any form or fashion?

if you guess that a random girl made friends with her and followed her for most of her life until they both got sucked into a fantasy world and the kingdom decided the friend would be the priestess, then you would be correct~!

"But dox!" you say crawling out of my airvent "thats huge gap in time, what happened in between?"

well asashi and ruri had a rather odd relationship. you see, everyone fucking loves asashi, they are all in on ensureing that this random girls life is as easy as possible but at the expense of asashi. they will all work togather to do make sure asashi is happy while also bullying ruri.

do you feel that? thats the worm in my brain slowly getting into yours as more and more questions about this specific dynamic arise. some of them will be answered, but they will only be answered in a way that makes sure the worm Burrows Deeper.

first question: its clear ruri fucking hates asashi, why do i say shes her friend?

second question: Why are they friends? why hasent ruri made her leave her alone if she doesnt like her?

well to answer those questions...

as asashi is appointed the new priestiess ruri attempt to discover things about this kingdom, she learns from a priest that there is no way back home that they know of, nor are their any stories of a person summoned being Un summoned.

anyways we cant get any plot done here! we need to roundaboutly kick shit off while also makeing this asashis fault somehow!

so she ends up getting kicked from the castle, forced to wander the woods for the rest of her natural life, her mulchcore attitude persaudeing her to lay down and become one with it all...

ok no thats not what happens, she walks around a little bit, learns she is the greatest mage alive

, wanders presumably without food and water for five days, yes im screaming at the overpowered mc cliche once again just ignore it, where in she meets a old lady in the woods

who of course unlocks her

Special eyes of destiny

which allows her to see the collection of fucking creepy fairies that constently surround and are touching her at any given moment of the day.

I am lead to belive due to the daisies drawn in the back ground that this is supposed to be a moment of whimsy and joy, this image fills me with a special dread as it fullfills almost every single one of my autistic fears imagineable. night mare night mare nightmare.

anyways magic is discussed for a vary long time but oh fuck, we havent complained about asashi in five seconds, time to make a horrifying point about her!

this conclusion seems to be that no one can truly love asashi as all the love she will ever feel is artifically grown because of her magic. this also means that if you have a strong heart and a good soul you cannot love asashi because you would naturally and rightfully find her as annoying as ruri would. this is because ruri is the only one that can see her objectivly.

if you hare undergoing a string of panic that comes from the fundamental question that comes from the doubt of love from the sources in your life, dont worry, Ruri says she is annoying and bad and the story belives her to be objectivly correct so everyone belives that if they are good. you are a good person right?

growing dread aside, more plot, the fairys bend to the whim of ruri, all faries, meaning that unless you are a motherfucking wizard, the one source of universal and public magic has been cut off. all villagers that relied on water and fire magic have been cut off. farmers that need earth magic are cut off.

of course this is not her fault because again she is an objectivly good person with a good heart so she tut tuts the fairies for depriving villagers of clean drinking water and easy acess to heat and light for a week and the story moves on.

she learns more magic, she summons the fairy of time and they platoniclly flirt because ruri is a completely heterosexual girl.

the fairy of time is a simp and donates to her only dimensional space. one item of which is a bracelet that turns her into a cat, fulfilling one item on the title.

she goes to the market, her special chosen one powers make her super duper populer and people naturally want her advice and to give her money

wait a second, what time is it?

OH FUCK, WE HAVENT COMPLAINED ABOUR ASASHI IN A BIT!

SHE HAS A FUCKING NIGHTMARE OF ASASHI GIVING UP HER DREAM LIFE IN A FANTASY WORLD TO BE WITH HER, THIS IS CONSIDERED A BAD THING, IN ANY OTHER MANGA THIS WOULD BE CONSIDERED A ROMANCE TO END ALL ROMANCES

she decides to leave and go to the city of dragons because fuck it, thats a thing to do, she has to tell them she is the special chosen one with the blue eyes and blonde hair.

we cut for a second our lead.

as you can see the prince through his actions is a completely heterosexual man, one that loves Boobs And Vagina. as one can clearly Tell.

anyways the prince is creepy, he walks through town in disgues, happens upon ruri and without a second thought proceeds to do this:

gross.

anyways, the prince tells his homophobic advisors that he met a girl and they immeditly start a witch hunt for her while ruri enters the room as a cat to establish that again, she is the special chosen one of destiny.

anyways she meets the prince and nothing happens. the fairies threaten to kill everyone with the knowladge that ruri has apocalyptic plot armor.

now, to explain what a special chosen one is:

"hey dox, pre-emptivly asking a question, why would their ever be a chosen one? it seems their sole existance is to get a small scratch and make everyone die about it."

GREAT QUESTION, I DONT FUCKING KNOW, THEY APPERENTLY CAUSE PROSPARITY BUT I HAVE YET TO SEE IT, NOT EVEN A GOD DAMN DECENT 401K

anyways the prince gets Really attached to the Cat

Really Close.

this is explained through the fact that they have simalier wavelengths or similier magic types, meaning that they feel lonely without each other nearby.

the manga is astouindingly quick to stifle any comparison to asashi because remeber, asashi is Objectivly Bad and Unloveable.

Remember, Wanting to be friends with someone and not immeditly knowing if they like you or not makes you an objectivly Bad and Annoying person.

cut forward a bit, more werid cat flirting and she gets a job outside the palace... anyways she hears knews that the kingdom she was exiled from is wageing a war against the nation of dragons. this is handwaved as being something they just do when they find some cool magic shit.

but notably, the reason for the war has changed, as rumors have emerged that the priestess of the kingdom is supporting the war to save ruri who they belive to be kidnapped.

she gets sad about this and goes to the grandma to whine about it.

so we can see here a few things.

we are supposed to belive that its completely unreasonable for asashi to make the assumption that her best friend has been kidnapped.

that it is her fault for allowing a war to happen when we know that regardless of her support they would wage it regardless

ruri only considers asashi a friend when it is deemed attractive to her moral charecter.

yes this is the first time ruri has every said that asashi is anything resembling a friend to her.

she slips into the castle after some poverty porn about how evil and bad this kingdom is, we get a brief scene showing the king is planning on makeing sure both asashi and the prince die because he finds him annoying (I guess he has a strong and objectivly good soul)

"Man, isnt asashi awful, worrying about her friend like that? wanting people to help her find her? isnt she just the fucking Worse ever?"

im going insane, the worm has won, they have consumed any rational part of my brain and replaced it with the vast rot of whatever fucking bizarro verse this manga demands me to be within.

the two friends finally reunite after being seperated for so long.

we get a sob story about a time she broke her watch because again, asashis charm powers make people jealous of how close she is to asashi, so they bullied her and since asashi has literally never seen anyone ever act anything like that because again, everyone s magically forced to love her unconditionally, she doesnt belive her.

and of course she dosent belive her either but instead of just blindly saying no to ruri, she says she'll talk to them about it, when its clear ruri fucking hates that idea, and gets ready to leave with a little cryptic warning, she asks to flee with her

which again is displayed as a creepy and werid thing because she accidently uses her charm magic that we have established she has no control over. again, in any other manga the idea that while you may not belive what you hear, you are willing to give up any comfort to be with your friend, would be considered the most profound act of love. please feel free to contrast this to captian hair sniffer and Cat spooner.

I cannot add any more images so lets speed run this. asashi is shaken up so she goes to the king to ask him whats going on, he says "Mind control" which lets be perfectly clear, is an established and perfectly reasonable thing to belive can happen in a magical fucking world, asashi is shown to be dumb for belive this.

war happens and nothing happens, dragons win by a land slide and asashi gets captured.

she dosent belive the dragon princes words and all of her allies that got captured with her are placed in an anti magic zone and now hate her completely because again, without magic, asashi is completely and utterly unloveable.

ruri makes friends with another god and they learn that asashi convinced a guard to let her go because i guess that charm magic works whenever. but shes stuck in a dungeon and she may run into the soldiers who i guess the charm magic wont work on which leaves us with this haunting scene:

we are told that asashi legitamitly does not understand what the fuck is going on, she does not understand why they hate her, she just thought she was going to save her fucking friend.

Behold Your Antagonist.

it ends with that.

here are the questions.

"Is the underlying story, barring any other concept, good?"

Kinda. its vary bland and vary generic. its a romance that does not know how to present itself a romance. it is a romance that spends more time complaining about someone then being in love.

"on a sliding scale of min to max, how much is the author using this to explore fetish"

none, the few saveing graces.

"How many story crutches does the author use to explore the story"

an absurd amount, from the plot contrivances to the power cliches, to the physical attributes denoting specialness to ensure we and the charecters know to treat her in a special way.

"Is the author attempting to use the story as a way to explain why he is not weird."

yeah, if you have any fucking trouble with social interactions or cant read people, then you are an objectively bad person, and if you are somehow populer, no one actully loves you, and they are being forced to love you.

#bottom of the barral #isekai #shitty isekai #manga review #read on your own time #its better as a hate read #I almost miss reading omegaverse romance isekais #at least there they pretend to be in a relationship of some kind

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always-a-joyful-note · 2 years ago

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Thinking some fandom thoughts and then about ORV's portrayal of an author-character-reader relationship with the story and realising how....lacking at times the whole death of the author perspective on media can be.

(Turned out to be long and rambly so I put it under a cut. If you like death of the author, probably not for your worldview? Also, beware major ORV spoilers if you care about that)

Like, perhaps I'm misinterpreting something here, but in ORV, we had these three characters plus an entire system that gave us a look into the relationship between author/reader/character. And focusing on the Han Sooyoung, Kim Dokja, and Yoo Joonghyuk dynamic, I realise that none of them really died. Pushing asides Joonghyuk and Dokja for the moment (as I am talking about death of the author), we have Han Sooyoung whose consciousness faded after finishing Ways of Survival.

However, I don't know if we can really call that death of the author, really. Because Sooyoung's whole purpose in writing ORV, her authorial intention, was to save Kim Dokja's life...which she DID. And even after the story left her hands, her intentions were imprinted into the story itself. Yes, Dokja realised that the system was lenient to him because of (spoiler alert) his status as the OD. But at the same time, I think that Han Sooyoung's authorial intent to keep Dokja alive with WoS can also be taken as a factor in the system's leniency towards our reader.

And just jumping from that back to my original point, while death of the author IS fun and can be awesome for reinterpreting stories that the author may have intended as problematic (to our modern standards, at least), to separate the actual story itself from its creator seems just....a tad disrespectful to the author.

Or maybe disrespectful isn't the right word. Like, say, even if said author is objectively the worst of humans, there remains the fact that the story in essence has part of them embedded into it. It doesn't make sense, at least to me, to only give "morally okay" writers the allowance of people who put a part of themselves in their works. Any writer, even those who are writing for money imo, can't help but put part of their own selves into their story...and to separate the story from the author just because we hate the author or hate their beliefs seems a bit counter-productive. You can't just say, after all, that this author's vulnerability in their writing is okay because it's Correct but this other guy's vulnerability should be ignored because it's chalk full of Problematic Content.

But again, that's not to justify authors you dislike or the deeply wrong messages implied in their works. Especially those that could easily be shooed away by employing death of the author. But I think I'd consider fanfic or analyses that ignore authorial intent and their message to be something...new entirely? (Best way I can say it is something something death of an author employed to help the reader create their own narrative inspired by someone else's story rather than it being used to ignore author intent and claim our interpretation is what canon actually meant).

I think there's a saying in music as well as writing that you could play the same exact score or write the same story, it's just that things will come out different depending on the player or writer. (That's not a perfect comparison because the player/musician who WROTE the score could be considered a reader/author relationship...the point is more that the same thing will look different in the hands of different people. And that just as the reader will interpret something in their own way when reading/re-reading (another ORV reference), the author also has placed in their own interpretation and intent in that own work...which should at worst be respected because they DID make that content (and then we proceed to brutally revise it to make something we like better xD) or at best be taken as "word of god" for lack of a better term)

Not sure if any of this makes sense, and I definitely don't have any factual evidence to back up this opinion, but it was just something I was thinking of.

TL:dR? Death of the author is FUN and actually pretty cool but I think the things coming out of it are new(ish) things/works entirely, and og author's beliefs/intentions are important to consider for that text they wrote in of itself.

#honestly this thought came from scrolling through the narnia tag and feeling slight despair over movies vs book #and also a bit of a surprise at how MANY people still believe in the problem of susan....like i thought we were past that?#and how many people dont seem to get or like that cs lewis' christianity deeply inspired it #or how much historical and cultural context we might need to understand some of the choices #like the pevensies whole isekai regressions #another example i can think of is lotr....and another is funny enough the bible #but those arent things i know well enough #but yeah....orv and narnia conspiring together for this nonsense of mine #again disclaimer this really isnt meant to attack anyone or say im right...its just another opinion to be lost in the sea of internet #but yeah....i did kinda get carried away xD...my poor rambles never get any good transitions #fandom spamdom #note's nonsense #things about writing #orv spoilers #another disclaimer i wrote this after having been awake for like....almost 19 hours coherence be gone #but yeeting it into the void nevertheless #i also think there was a post circulating once that talked about death of the author not being actually used in academic circles #excuse me rambling in the tags

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