I ended up enjoying this manga a lot more than I expected going into it.
It falls in line with a ton of typical isekai tropes, which is something I normally hate and believe indicates a lack of any actual substance, but this manga treats its setting in a way I can really appreciate.
So you have the most bog standard generic ass start possible with isekai protag grinding levels and then going to a school totally overpowered; with some more clichés of the world being a video game that the protag played in their previous life AND being medieval fantasy. The reason why I
...
like the setting so much in spite of this is that these isekai tropes are clearly not the bulk of the story telling in any sense. The plot of the original video game basically only comes up to explain inconsistencies with how some of the characters act. Alicia and her love interests are default aggressive to Eumiella because that's the games setting; Eumiella bullies Alicia. Whenever Eumiella breaks the original plot, the characters will react in a way that is later contradicted by their actions later in the story because of their attempts to reroute to the original plot. It's such a minor bit of world building but it does so much to sell the setting to me.
Another thing I appreciate a lot if the way Eumiella reacts to events contrary to her understanding of the video games plot. She just goes along with whatever's happening around her but its always accompanied with her own inner monologues fantasizing about what plot points she must've missed when she played the game in her previous life. It makes so much sense for her character to just write her own fanficts in her head about the original games story.
Finally, my favorite part is the love interest. Pretty much always in these "living in a video game" settings you'll see the main character have their love interests be someone from the original exposition. Some NPC they were intimately familiar with before entering the game world, or in this specific setting where they get isekaied into the villainess position you'd assume the love interest would serve to subvert the original relationships from the game world, be it one of Alicia's harem or Alicia herself, but nope. It's just some random joe schmo that just happened to be at the school and sympathize on a spiritual level with Eumiella's struggle of having black hair, which is something she pretty clear doesn't care about herself. I love this because it has nothing to do with Isekai, there is nothing about her being isekaied that made this relationship possible, its just something perfectly natural to the game worlds setting. This balance of respecting the original video game's script through brief but not at all out of place character interactions while also focusing on the nice high school romcom at the center it great. Every dynamic and interaction in the core story could be replicated in a normal high school setting, and the author knows that which is why everything relating to isekai and fantasy magic shit is done to make the stories aesthetic "cooler" rather than to make some neet ass loser this god king with a harem after he dies in a car accident. That's another thing I love about this series, they don't bother with the death scene because 99% of the time its pointless anyway and many a isekai have being completely ruined by them trying to force some actual story telling into their lame ass power fantasy via the past life, something that this manga hasn't even addressed at all yet, which again, great.
Ultimately this is what I want out of isekai. A story that stands on its own but uses the setting of isekai to make it more fun to look at and to give more freedom to the author in their medieval world building without having to put themselves in peasant/aristocrat mode to be able to write a sympathetic character, not something that hinges on appealing to power fantasy above all else.
TLDR: Why I like this manga so much is that it being "isekai" really only serves as an excuse to put an anti-social gamer girl in a medieval fantasy world; which is what isekai should be, rather than this trash subgenre of wish fulfillment first; story later. At its core this story is a nice slice of life romcom that happens to have world ending stakes just shoved to the background for the reader to chew on. This is doubly impressive considering that the story has this sublayer of thought-to-be important NPC's trying to course correct the story in small ways. Its able to both respect both settings (scripted video game and high school SOL) while not giving too much time to the original video game plot which can really only be relayed through exposition if they tried to tell us everything about it.
Jul 13, 2023
I ended up enjoying this manga a lot more than I expected going into it.
It falls in line with a ton of typical isekai tropes, which is something I normally hate and believe indicates a lack of any actual substance, but this manga treats its setting in a way I can really appreciate. So you have the most bog standard generic ass start possible with isekai protag grinding levels and then going to a school totally overpowered; with some more clichés of the world being a video game that the protag played in their previous life AND being medieval fantasy. The reason why I ... |