Reviews August 2020: The Sequel

[alias_sqbr]

Dungeons and Lesbians, Loneliness, Beware of the Villainess!, Takane to Hana, I Hear The Sunspot

Games:

Dungeons and Lesbians: Short, silly visual novel/dating sim about a group of lesbian friends playing dungeons and dragons. It feels like it was thrown together pretty quickly, but the janky art and sugar-high humour works for the kind of story it's telling, and the one route I finished (the tsundere) was cute, even if I didn't feel inspired to play the other two. In the Racial Equality bundle.

Also, I would just like to complain that my android emulator has stopped working ENTIRELY. So no more mobile game reviews for a while I guess >:/

Books:

Loneliness: a relatively short Chinese m/m romance novel, with a complete translation. This was ok but pretty slight. The protagonist is a Cheerful Popular Guy who never lets himself get close to anyone. His love interest is his shy, passive, VERY SAD roommate, who has been pining quietly for ten years. And then protag realises they're in love, and they have a somewhat shmoopy romance with a bunch of inoffensive and clearly labelled sex scenes.

Comics/Manga:

Beware of the Villainess!: A korean webcomic, starts with the typical "normal girl ends up inside the villain of the cheesy romance she was reading" setup, but she decides being a Rich Mean Girl sounds like fun. She avoids the self-defeating and cruel things the original!villain did, but is cheerfully blunt, domineering, and violent in a way she couldn't be as an Ordinary Korean Girl. She also tells all the asshole LIs to stop hassling the original!heroine, which I found very satisfying. The protagonist is cheerfully oblivious to being in a love triangle between the original!heroine and an incredibly subby, sweet, obedient male werewolf. In short: silly, tropey fun that will probably end in het but is enjoyably femslashy in the meantime. The plot doesn't move very fast and isn't super far along, but I am enjoying the journey.

Takane to Hana: A shoujo romantic comedy about the weird, mutually tsundere relationship between a 16 year old girl and the emotionally immature 26 year old business man she inadvertently ends up quasi-engaged to. I think I liked it? Mostly? The age gap is certainly Something but it accentuated the "two weirdos who definitely shouldn't work but somehow do" dynamic, and somehow it feels less unbalanced than most shoujo het ships. Ongoing.

I Hear The Sunspot: gentle m/m manga romance about a cheerful hotheaded guy whose life is in a rut, and a lonely but more successful guy with hearing problems. I liked this to start with but it dragged on with a bunch of drama and I got bored. The disability stuff was handled moderately well in an Earnest Ally Who Has Done Research kind of way.

Comments

[lea_hazel]

Thanks for linking "Villainess", I've been devouring it for the past two days and I'm almost out of new chapters.

[alias_sqbr]

Excellent :D

[lea_hazel]

I'm always so surprised and impressed to find out that something I'm hearing about for the first time is its own whole sub-genre. I had no idea "repenting otome villain" was such a common trope that it already had subversions.

[alias_sqbr]

Not just that, it's in the intersection of the 'I transmigrated into/reincarnated into the villain of a harerm-y story and got the same sex original protagonist to fall in love with me but didn't realise because the original story was so aggressively heterosexual" and the "I, a woman, transmigrated into the mean girl villain of an otome and am going to fix the original villain's mistakes and live gloriously" genres. Both genres are huge, and there's at least a couple of other works in the intersection.

[lea_hazel]

Yeah, I've been combing their archives and am quickly forming Opinions. Although this one is top-rated for a reason, clearly! It has a charm that the other books I tried lack.