LightNovels

| Date | Title | | --- | --- | | 31st Monday | Taking My Reincarnation One Step at a Time: No One Told Me There Would Be Monsters! Volume 1 | | | Perry Rhodan NEO Volume 14 | | | Hell Mode Volume 6 | | 1st Tuesday | Monster Tamer Volume 14 | | | The Misfit of Demon King Academy, Vol. 1 | | | 7th Time Loop: The Villainess Enjoys a Carefree Life Married to Her Worst Enemy! Vol. 4 | | | The Case Files of Jeweler Richard Vol. 5 | | 3rd Thursday | When Supernatural Battles Became Commonplace Volume 7 | | | The Troubles of Miss Nicola the Exorcist Volume 1 | | 4th Friday | My Friend's Little Sister Has It In for Me! Volume 10 | | | Backstabbed in a Backwater Dungeon: My Trusted Companions Tried to Kill Me, But Thanks to the Gift of an Unlimited Gacha I Got LVL 9999 Friends and Am Out For Revenge on My Former Party Members and the World Volume 4 |

Ps.: If someone has a good place with easy-to-compile upcoming releases it would be nice to let me know.

Post what you have read this past week (July 24 - July 30)

| Date | Title | | ---- | ----- | | 21st Friday | Stuck in a Time Loop: When All Else Fails, Be a Villainess Volume 1 | | | Reborn to Master the Blade: From Hero-King to Extraordinary Squire ♀ Volume 9 | | | The Game Master Has Logged In to Another World Volume 3 | | 24th Monday | The Invincible Little Lady Volume 3 | | 25th Tuesday|Asumi-chan is Interested in Lesbian Brothels! Vol. 3 | | |Ayakashi Triangle Vol. 4 | | |Secrets of the Silent Witch, Vol. 4| | |Banished from the Hero's Party, I Decided to Live a Quiet Life in the Countryside, Vol. 9| | |Didn’t I Say to Make My Abilities Average in the Next Life?! (Light Novel) Vol. 16 | | |Modern Villainess: It’s Not Easy Building a Corporate Empire Before the Crash (Light Novel) Vol. 3 | | |She Professed Herself Pupil of the Wise Man (Light Novel) Vol. 8 | | |Stars of Chaos: Sha Po Lang (Novel) Vol. 1 | | |Sword of the Demon Hunter: Kijin Gentōshō (Light Novel) Vol. 2 | | 26th Wednesday | Only the Villainous Lord Wields the Power to Level Up Volume 2 | | | Ascendance of a BookwormPart 5 Volume 5 | | 27th Thursday | The Mythical Hero’s Otherworld Chronicles Volume 4 | | | I Surrendered My Sword for a New Life as a Mage Volume 3 | | 28th Friday | Reincarnated Mage with Inferior Eyes: Breezing through the Future as an Oppressed Ex-Hero Volume 3 | | | You Like Me, Not My Daughter?! Volume 1 |

Post what you’ve read this past week (July 17 - July 23)

Title will be "Shokurakuen -Meshitopia- Hōshoku Society" and sounds to me like Shimoneta with Fastfood. Could be fun.

Post what you’ve read this past week (July 10 - July 16)

This post was originally advising kbin users that lemmy.ml has been shadowbanning all of kbin since the beginning of the month, but that was corrected earlier today (7/10).

Content from this community should begin flowing in again. As proof, you can see this post actually made it to the original instance, despite this post only being third one that is visible to kbin.social.

Post what you’ve read this past week (July 03 - July 09)

The Titles are:

I Want to Escape from Princess Lessons

Synopsis

Duchess Leticia Dorman has been betrothed to Crown Prince Clarke since age seven. She was once a rambunctious and free-spirited child, but the strict education she’s receiving to make her a fit future princess has really put a cramp in her lifestyle. Her only hope is that the prince might someday take an interest in someone else—so when Clarke shows up to a royal ball with an unknown woman at his side, Lettie is overcome with delight, presuming her dream has come true and her engagement has been broken off! She wastes no time retreating to an easygoing countryside life, but her newfound peace is cut short when the prince shows up and claims she’s still his fiancée! Clarke is determined to win Lettie over and marry her, while Lettie is determined to resist his charms and escape! Who will emerge victorious in this heart-pounding battle of wills?

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My Magical Career at Court: Living the Dream After My Nightmare Boss Fired Me from the Mages' Guild!

Synopsis

Magic is everything to Noelle. She loves it so much that she puts up with her horrible job at the Mages’ Guild to practice it. The hours are long, the pay is rock-bottom, and the boss is a nightmare! But as long as she has magic, she can withstand the hardships. At least, until the day she hears these dreaded words:“You’re fired.” Noelle’s hometown in the outskirts of the kingdom doesn’t offer many alternatives for a career in magic—especially now that she’s been blacklisted from guild work! Just when it seems like all hope is lost, Noelle’s old friend Luke shows up to give her an opportunity she never could have imagined: a job as a royal court magician. Now Noelle is living the dream, rubbing shoulders with the kingdom’s greatest magicians and showing off her skills. She has a beautiful new workplace and a generous new boss, but how will she cope with intense entrance exams, her marriage-obsessed mother, and the rules of etiquette? What awaits Noelle in her magical new career?

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8th Loop for the Win! With Seven Lives' Worth of XP and the Third Princess's Appraisal Skill, My Behemoth and I Are Unstoppable!

Synopsis

Master swordsman, sage, dragon knight... Remille can’t believe his ears when the princess lists off his possible futures. Born to a lesser noble house, he’s never been anything but a low-level adventurer. In fact, he’s lived that same life seven times—always forming an adventuring party with his friends at age fifteen, and always giving his own life to save theirs three years later. But not this time. The eighth loop is going to be different. After his most recent death reveals his friends’ treachery, Remille finally takes a different path that leads him to Princess Ciel, wielder of the powerful Eye of Appraisal that can judge anyone’s true potential. Will her wild claims about Remille’s future come to pass? With her guidance, can he really become a great sage or a rider of dragons? Is the adorable catlike familiar he’s tamed in past lives really a mighty behemoth, the strongest of the magical beasts? And will he really be able to escape the deadly destiny that’s claimed his life seven times already...?

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The Retired Demon of the Maxed-Out Village

Synopsis

After hearing there’s a demon lurking in a village near the border, Albrea, the kingdom’s strongest knight, sets out to slay the monster. When she arrives in town, however, she quickly discovers that all is not as it seems. It turns out the humble town of Montt has a lesser-known nickname—the Maxed-Out Village—and the mighty demon is a retired old man! Montt is also inhabited by a stew-loving demonic sword that likes to take the form of a young girl, a money-grubbing witch, and a drunken priest known as the Holy Fist... Just what are so many of the kingdom’s greatest defenders doing in such a remote town? Through her encounter with the kindly old demon and the rest of the Maxed-Out Village, Albrea will learn what it truly means to be a knight!

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Back to the Battlefield: The Veteran Heroes Return to the Fray!

Synopsis

The century-long war with demons was finally brought to a close by seven young heroes who slew the demon lord, routed the demon army, and ultimately led humanity to victory. The heroes then went their separate ways, and the land has been at peace for twenty-five long years...until now. Alan Granger, a former hero, enjoys a quiet life as a commander in the Royal Knights until the day he receives a report that shakes him to his core: the demon army has returned! He immediately knows what he must do—gather his old compatriots and face the demon army once again. But Alan and his friends are now all in their forties, while the demons are more powerful than ever. Do these veteran heroes have what it takes to leap back onto the battlefield and save the world a second time?

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Knight's & Magic

Synopsis

Kurata Tsubasa is not your average citizen. Sure, he’s a genius programmer and software engineer, but as far as he’s concerned, his most important trait is that he’s a hardcore mecha nerd. So, what happens when you take that nerd and reincarnate him into a fantastic world of swords and sorcery? Well, you’d think he’d be disappointed...but this world has magical giant robots! Obviously, Tsubasa—reborn as Ernesti Echevalier—now wants to devote his life entirely to these wondrous pieces of technology. But how exactly can young Ernie achieve his ultimate goal of getting his very own mech? He’ll have to rely on his imagination, uninhibited by the common sense of this new world, as well as his extreme dedication and focus! He also might just find help in the form of a rather interesting quirk...

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Fiancée No More: The Forsaken Lady, the Prince, and Their Make-Believe Love

Synopsis

Estelle Flozeth is the sister of a countryside earl, and her newfound ability to see others’ emotions through their mana has brought her nothing but trouble! Her life drastically changes one day when her childhood friend and fiancé is swept away from her by the daughter of a capitalist. Heartbroken, Estelle attends a ball and winds up meeting Prince Arcrayne, a wicked man who soon finds out about her special power and decides he must have her for himself! To that end, he proposes to her and begins acting like a veritable Prince Charming, pretending he fell in love with her at first sight—a charade that might fool everyone else, but not Estelle and her perceptive powers. Yet in spite of everything, she gradually finds herself drawn to the prince... Will their make-believe love blossom into the real thing? Find out in this reluctant Cinderella story fraught with political intrigue!

Post what you've read this past week (June 26 - July 02)

Post what you've read this past week (June 19-25)

First time looking at lemmy. But I hope this will be a fun place to use and the community grows here a bit.

Lets come to topic I guess. I would like to build up a proper datasource for light novels which can be used in different ways. Basically my idea is to collect as much info on light novel data as I can (stuff like authors, illustrators, release date, etc) and then contribute all of it to open library (a project of the internet archives)

On top of the open library other people then can built cool interfaces and stuff.

Right now I am working on gathering the info using some scraping techniques and just hit my head against the wall until it eventually crumbles lol. I had some success but I will only be able to get data on english and german releases of light novel, since I don't speak japanese ^^"

If someone want (or can) help me out gathering data let me know. Also if you happen to know websites that contain japanese infos let me know.

Post what you've read this past week (June 12-18)

Greetings from kbin.social! We can't see any of your existing four posts from our instance yet, so I figured I'd kick things off with a hot take to get people talking.

I've lurked in /r/lightnovels for awhile, and a common opinion that I've seen is that Disciple of the Lich is skippable because it is "another misunderstanding story with a dense and overpowered protagonist". I can definitely understand the burnout with those tropes, but I also think it's a selling the story's potential short.

To me, Disciple of the Lich is basically One Punch Man: RPG Edition. It takes the concept of an overpowered protagonist in an RPG world and plays it straight. The primary viewpoint character for this isn't the protagonist, but Pomera: the newbie half-elven shaman that he recruits early on. What is it like from a NPC's perspective to be power leveled against nightmare fuel enemies to the point where you are basically superhuman? (answer: recurring PTSD) What happens when an over-levelled healer accidentally uses her staff bonk on an average level adventurer? Exploring RPG meta jokes like these is what the series does well, and it functions at its best when it is being a genre parody like Konosuba instead of trying to tell a serious story.

Is Kanata dense? At the beginning, very. Like Pomera, he was power leveled in a small period of time. Unlike her, he wasn't born into the fantasy world and was misled by someone much more powerful than him into believing that the world is a scarier place than it actually is. The fact that his master still is more powerful than him anchors him to this mindset for two books. That's no small amount of time investment, and anyone who is already burnt out on clueless protagonists probably isn't going to have the time for that unless there is something else that grabs their attention. That goes double if they aren't a RPG fan and their ride isn't made any better by the genre jokes. Contrary to what some people have come away with, Kanata is not as oblivious to his master's crush as people seem to think he is, and I think the author recognized this sentiment enough to address it in one of the bonus stories.

Overall, I don't think Disciple of the Lich is perfect by any means, but what it does well it does very well. I just don't think it's the right series for everyone, and I say this as someone who didn't find Sword Art Online very appealing with how its main character was handled. I'm by no means a fan of protagonists who coast along through no real merit of their own, but I still like this series quite a bit. I think anyone who finds these bread crumbs I'm dropping interesting should give it a fair chance and make up their own mind. If you try it out on that basis and still think the series is meh, well, that just means I've got a strange attachment to it I guess. :)

I read around 200 volumes of light novels per year and generally, I really enjoy my time with most of them. But there are some things coming up again and again in many light novels that make me angry. I'm sure everyone here has some light novel pet peeves and I'd like to hear what they are. Here are some of mine and my thought about them:

• Extremely oblivious main characters: There are so many main characters, especially in isekai stories, that are ridiculously overpowered but somehow still behave like timid little lambs that are scared of every random trash mob. I have no idea why this is something I see so often. My working theory is that it is something related to Japanese culture where assertive personalities are generally disliked. Especially by the default target audience of those types of power fantasies. This would also explain my second pet peeve...
• Extremely passive main characters: I hate the terms "alpha and beta males" with a passion, but why oh why are so many light novel protagonists such hopeless omega males? Are authors really so scared to lose their audience if their main character doesn't let everyone trample all over them? I don't mind it if a character has a timid disposition but the extremes in which some characters are portrayed in this regard are just beyond the pale. I simply cannot fathom how anyone can enjoy reading from such a character's point of view. To me, it's just infuriating.
• Isekai element not used as a plot device but a narrative crutch: A.k.a. "Isekai for isekai's sake". Let me explain what I mean. Every now and then I read a isekai light novel and wonder why the hell it is an isekai in the first place. The only way they use the isekai element is as a crutch for newbie authors to help explain the world to the reader. Writing good exposition prose seems to be a hard problem to tackle. But instead of trying to write some good exposition I often get the feeling many authors just go the isekai route instead. After all, if the protagonist doesn't know anything about the world it's normal to have him question even the most mundane (mundane to the inhabitants of the isekai world) things. It's also easier to say "The monster was as large as a bus" than to explain it in fantasy-appropriate terms. Compare this to something where being from another world is used as a major plot device instead. For example, Myne using her knowledge to create printing presses in Bookworm. But this is also something that can backfire, which would bring me to my last point...
• Protagonists somehow having extensive knowledge about things outside their sphere of expertise: One example would be a isekai lightnovel (was so utterly forgettable that I can't even remember its name anymore) where some high schooler (obviously) could recreate modern weaponry and car engines from memory. Authors often think having a general knowledge of how something works is enough to recreate it with no problem. Using Bookworm again as a positive example I'd like to point out how much time is spent by her and the other characters in this story on R&D to turn her general knowledge into something actually actionable. But no, some protagonists can apparently just recreate a pump action shotgun because they've seen in movies how they are used. Who cares about the workings of the mechanical parts of the loading mechanism, the chemical compounds of the blackpowder (and how to get those in the first place) or how to create a firing cap. I mean, this is a fantasy story, why not come up with some random shit why it works? Like in Average abilities for example with the magic system build on sentient nanobots that figure out the pesky details for the protagonist instead of trying to sell me that a high schooler would have the knowledge to create something from scratch.

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I have a lot more pet peeves that trigger me but I'd like to hear yours instead of writing another wall of text.

Let's start out this community with the weekly thread from r/lightnovels.

Feel free to discuss what you have read last week.