Category: Book

The Banished Villainess’ Husband web novel chapter 1 (retranslated)

I don’t normally translate web novels. In fact, I don’t normally translate anything outside my day job. The reason I’m making an exception this time is because I’m currently a sucker for these generic “banished villainess” shoujo manga. The manga for The Banished Villainess’ Husband (追放悪役令嬢の旦那様) came out recently, but the story didn’t make much sense to me. I started to feel that it was a poor translation to blame when I saw this particular frame:

This was my clue that the translation was off. For all their flaws, Japanese manga usually have well-edited and logical scripts, so if a line doesn’t make sense, 99 out of 100 times, it’s the translator’s mistake. In fact, as a general tip for translators when something doesn’t make sense: do a ton of research, ask a lot of questions, look all over the internet before you conclude that the source text is at fault.

So anyway, I was curious about what the line really said, so first I checked the manga raws.

Japanese grammar/vocabulary lesson: The culprit here is the word “おろか”. It comes in two flavors. 愚か, which means ‘foolish, stupid’ or as the translator put it, “naive” and then 疎か meaning “not to mention …; needless to say …; not to speak of …; not only …” and that is what the translator should have used.

Thanks to all that investigative work, I ended up reading two chapters of the web novel. Somehow. And at the time, only machine-translated chapters were available in English from Foxaholic (though they have now cleaned them up somewhat). So I ended up re-translating the first two chapters. Why only the first two? Firstly because I just wanted to get the premise straight in my mind, secondly because after reading chapter two the series just seemed too stupid to me to be worth continuing. But I will explain why when I post the second chapter tomorrow or later.

Summary of The Banished Villainess’s Husband: “I” had the luck of being the one who reached out towards the young lady whose engagement was annulled by Prince Alephaldo, Elana. The day after the annulment, I was banished with her and married even though we dated for exactly 0 days. Well, it’s just a slow country lifestyle of banishment in the neighboring country! Or so I thought, but…? This is my story about becoming a banished daughter’s husband.(Mangadex)

Chapter 1 of The Banished Villainess’s Husband
Author: Komori Kiri
Web novel raw: https://ncode.syosetu.com/n8287fp/

Prince, are you serious?

My name is Eufran D’italie Bailey.
I am the son of a count. My father is the chief justice.
This is the story of how I was deceived by an incredible woman.
It all started when my “friend” the Crown Prince suddenly declared that he was going to switch fiancées and foisted his “ex” on me.
It was a confidential matter when he told me, so not only did his fiancée have no idea, but the King, her parents and my parents were all in the dark.
It sounded like a joke someone would make in a casual conversation, but his eyes were completely serious.
Moreover, the one who brought the topic up was the Crown Prince himself.

His fiancée was the daughter of a duke.
There was no problem with her status.
Meanwhile, I barely qualified to be a noble.
My parents needled me at every opportunity because I didn’t have a fiancée at my age due to my extreme pickiness.
If I didn’t choose someone quickly, I might be forced to marry someone past marriageable age, so I had nothing to complain about if I could get someone who was both beautiful and high in status.
Even if she was an ex, she was still the Crown Prince’s fiancée at one point.

The real problem was the woman the Prince chose as his new fiancée.
She was a girl who possessed the “holy radiance” and was loved by the Guardian Dragon.
The dragon was the protector of the nation. In times of war, it was both its spear and shield.
The Guardian Dragon loved and protected people who had a special magical power known as the “holy radiance.”

This meant that the country had to have someone with the holy radiance – the beloved of the Guardian Dragon.
If the beloved child was slighted or treated poorly, the Guardian Dragon would abandon the kingdom and it would be destroyed.
That is the kind of woman the Crown Prince Alephaldo has chosen.
And thus, no one objects.
They don’t dare.

…And that’s why I’m at my wits’ end right now.

Because Alephaldo suddenly approached his fiancée, Lady Elana Ruthfett Forsythe, right in the middle of the graduation party, and pushed her out of the way, fully intending to break off the engagement. And thus he declared, loudly and proudly in front of everyone…

“You vicious woman! You think I don’t know about all the disrespectful things you’ve done to Rifanna?”
“Wha…?”
“I don’t even want to see your face! As of today, our engagement is over! And I’m going to make you pay for all the many times you bullied Rifanna!”
“Please wait a minute, Your Highness! That woman is the one at fault here! She may possess the holy radiance and be loved by the dragon… but Your Highness is still my fiancé…”
“Shut up! I’m saying I’m sick of that arrogant attitude of yours! Get lost! I never want to see you again!”
“Your… Highness…”

The woman in the purple dress who was pushed away, Alephaldo’s fiancée… no, ex-fiancé, Elana began to shake, fists balled up, biting her lips as she glared daggers at Rifanna, the woman Alephaldo had his arm around.

No one there tried to help her. Some of the young ladies could even be seen holding back their giggles behind their fans. Furthermore, some of the people behind her didn’t even hide their laughter as they commented, “The evil lady is finished now.”
The scornful laughter began to spread.
The scene seemed surreal as the King and the Knight Captain tried to restrain the red-faced Prime Minister who was on the verge of snapping.

In the midst of all that, Lady Elana, who had been pushed away, began to smile. She rose unsteadily to her feet… and curtsied beautifully.
“Very well, then. Since you are that determined, your Highness, I have no objections to canceling our engagement. Since I will be busy with the cancellation procedures, I must bid you farewell for today.”

With that, she tried to make a gallant exit.
Her heels clattered as she made for the exit, an unfading smile on her face.
However she suddenly staggered and lost her balance.
My body moved immediately to save her from danger.
Before I knew it, I was holding her arm and supporting her body.

“Careful there. Did you twist your ankle when you fell?”
“Oh!  W-who might you be?”
“Eufran D’italie Bailey. You don’t know me? We’re in the same class.”
“The same class? …urgh…”
“Hey, are you really okay?”

Lady Elana was holding her head. Her face grew paler and paler.
The number of eyes scrutinizing her rudely did not decrease.
I started getting angry at those people and glared back fiercely. In response, some looked away, others pretended not to notice, some began to speak to those nearby…
I glanced at Alephaldo while I was looking at them, but he was laughing away with Rifanna as if nothing had happened.

Hey, hey, Prince… are you serious?
You’re not even thinking about Lady Elana any more, huh?

I could see the furious Prime Minister glowering in this direction with the same death glare that Lady Elana sported earlier, so I bowed to him. This lady inherited the weirdest thing from her father.

“I-if you involve yourself with me, you will put yourself in a difficult position.”
“Hmm? Are you worried about me~? You’re so sweet~.”
“!”
“Don’t worry about me. You have to act tough till the end, right?”
“…”

She left the hall holding on to my arm, not showing the slightest hint of pain in her leg.
She even managed a magnificent curtsy at the end before leaving.
Once the doors closed, she sank to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut.

“… …”
“I’ll prepare a carriage for you. Will you wait here? Or would you rather…”
“I’ll… wait… in the arrival hall…”
“Okay. Hang in there!”
“Oh!”

She looked pretty surprised when I offered her my hand. Is it that rare for this lady to experience a gentleman offering his hand to a lady?

“…I cannot understand this. For someone of your position to…”
“I’m Alephaldo’s ‘friend’. And what my friend did makes me feel sick. If there’s a lady in front of me who can’t stand, I’ll give her my hand. I’m a gentleman, after all. Right?”
“…All right.”

She took my hand. She and Alephaldo were engaged to each other since childhood as a result of their parents’ decision.So I have danced with Lady Elana several times at social functions, but…

“Okay, one final push. Hang in there.”
“I…I know.”

She only had eyes for Alephaldo, huh? I didn’t make the faintest impression on her. That fact that she doesn’t even remember me… isn’t a good thing for someone who was supposed to be the Crown Prince’s fiancée. But I guess it just shows how obsessed you were with Alephaldo.

That evening, I took her back to her house and then left.
The trouble began the following morning.

As we were eating breakfast, my father sighed heavily and then said something unbelievable.
“Me? Marry Lady Elana? Huh?!”
“Don’t ‘huh?!’ me. The Prime Minister is absolutely furious. His Majesty is at a loss as well. Urgh, this is such a mess…”
“…”

I stabbed a piece of meat with my fork and brought it to my mouth.
Yup, that’s right.
It’s natural that Crown Prince Alephaldo has made a complete enemy of the Prime Minister after what he did.
Alephaldo is the only prince in this country. Since he has no other siblings, he was rather spoiled as he grew up.

I have five younger brothers, but the third son Courgan is the most talented. I’m sure my father wants to make Courgan his successor as well. In this country, heirs are designated, so you can make your most promising son your heir. However the second son Rooth is 13, the third son Courgan is 8 years old and my other younger brothers are 5, 3 and six months old. They’re all still kids.

I bet my father plans use me as a proxy for a while, then designate Courgan as the official heir once my brothers are old enough to be useful.
Or rather, that’s what he “planned” to do.
Right now he looks like someone whose plans have gone up in smoke.

“There’s nothing anyone can do about it because his partner is the maiden with the holy radiance, right?”
“That’s right. And that’s a whole new problem…”
“It’s not like you can cut her off at this point, either.”
“Argh… if you understand that much, why did you just sit back and not do anything? Couldn’t you have done something about her with your talents?”
“Come on, Father. You’re giving me too much credit. That’s way above my level as the son of a count. That would have been the job of his “study buddies” from higher-ranking families. And since Rifanna won them all over as well, there was nothing I could do. The end.”
“… Is that true?”
“Yes, unfortunately. Didn’t I report it to you, the King and the Prime Minister? Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten?”
“Oh! You mean that… I-I thought it was a joke!”
“…”

When I glared steadily at him, he had the decency to look apologetic.
He didn’t actually apologize, though.
Well, I guess it’s only natural.
Terrifyingly enough, Lady Rifanna had the ability to charm not only the Guardian Dragon and Crown Prince Alephaldo but also Starrett, Nicks and Cars, “friends” of the prince and future aide candidates like me, all of them from ducal households.
They were all sons of extremely highly-placed families.

Lady Elana and I were in a different class, so we had nothing to do with Lady Rifanna. However I did hear rumors that Lady Elana was harassing Lady Rifanna out of jealousy. I wasn’t interested in the truth behind it, because I also heard that apart from Lady Elana, the fiancées of Starrett, Nicks and Cars hated Lady Rifanna and bad-mouthed her.

But daring as they were, those women would not want to face the wrath of the Guardian Dragon. Neither would Lady Elana. So… either the fiancées or some other party whispered into the prince’s ear that Lady Elana was bullying Lady Rifanna. Just that would be enough to push the blinded prince to eliminate the “enemy.”

And since Lady Elana had the highest position among the noble ladies and was domineering and I heard no good rumors about her, she probably made a good target.
Yes, and if I didn’t get involved… I wouldn’t become a target as well.
There was no need to get involved.

[translator’s note: This part was poorly explained in the original as well (yes, I did check). Basically rumors were flying around about Rifanna being bullied and bad-mouthed. The fiancées panicked because the dragon might think the rumors were true, so instead of trying to clarify that they hadn’t done anything, they pushed all the blame for the fictional bad-mouthing and bullying on Elana.

Or it may have been someone else behind both the false rumors and the prince getting to hear of it. Neither the fiancées nor Elana actually bullied Rifanna AFAIK but either way Elana was framed and punished.]

“Back on topic, this talk of marriage between Lady Elana and I is kinda sudden, isn’t it? I just helped her up and sent her home last night, that’s all.”

“I told you, the Prime Minister is livid. So the King wanted to find another fiancé for her as soon as possible. When he saw you of all people helping her up and taking her away, you caught his eye.”
“Oh, really. Well, I don’t mind.”
“Aahhh…  I knew. That you. Would say that!”

Father’s head sank into his hands.
Mm, this meat is delicious.

“Listen to the full story! Prince Alephaldo is urging the King to banish Lady Elana from the country!”
“What, seriously? Does he have to go that far?”
“Apparently it’s to avoid angering the Guardian Dragon. I don’t know how aware the Guardian Dragon is of Lady Elana. However, on the off-chance that the story of Lady Elana bullying Lady Rifanna is true, not even the King and the Prime Minister will be able to protect her. Even I have no choice but to support the prince in this matter.”
“Hmm…”

In other words, if the Guardian Dragon gets pissed off, there’s the chance that it will waste the whole country because it thinks we dissed the maiden with the holy radiance.
This is the threat of that “chance.”
That’s why Lady Elana is going to be banished to curry favor with the dragon.
It’s only natural when you think of the importance of the Guardian Dragon to this nation.

The problem is that it’s not clear whether Lady Elana ever did harass Lady Rifanna…
Lady Rifanna never said anything about it. Isn’t anyone going to check with her?
As far as I know, neither Lady Elana nor any of the other fiancées ever bullied Lady Rifanna.
No matter how irritating they found her, the nobles wouldn’t touch her as long as she was the dragon’s beloved and had the holy radiance.

This is an outrageous suggestion but, could it be… that this holy radiance maiden doesn’t give a fig what happens to Lady Elana?

“… …”

Which one of them is the vicious woman, again?

End of chapter 1. And already the key problem with the premise arises: it’s just too unbelievable that they would suddenly marry the Prime Minister’s daughter, and the daughter of a duke, off to a random count’s son just because he helped her once at a party. And not just marry her, but set off together to parts unknown. She can take a random guy along, but no maids, retainers, bodyguards, nothing? Ridiculous. I’ll talk more about the logical problems with The Banished Villainess’ Husband after I post the next chapter.

The Other World Doesn’t Stand A Chance Against The Power Of Instant Death – read about 60 chapters of the web novel

It’s the rare manga that prompts me to seek out the web novel. And not just that but to read all the chapters available in English and go beyond to the original author’s page and keep reading for several more chapters. The Other World Doesn’t Stand A Chance Against The Power Of Instant Death (Sokushi Cheat ga Saikyou Sugite, Isekai no Yatsura ga Marude Aite ni Naranai n desu ga 即死チートが最強すぎて、異世界のやつらがまるで相手にならないんですが。) managed to hold my interest much longer than most of the other stuff I’ve read this year, and for that the author Tsuyoshi Fujitaka should be commended. Buuut, I still dropped it after roughly 60 chapters and I’ll tell you why in a bit.

Story: High school senior Yogiri Takatou was on a school field trip when he woke up to a dragon assaulting his sightseeing bus, with the only ones still on the bus being him and his female classmate, the panicking Tomochika Dannoura. Apparently the rest of his classmates had been given special powers by Sion, a woman who introduced herself as a Sage, and escaped from the dragon, leaving those that hadn’t received any special powers behind as dragon bait.

And so Yogiri was thrown into a parallel universe full of danger, with no idea of what just happened. Likewise, Sion had no way of knowing just what kind of being she had summoned to her world.

Turns out Yogiri has the power of Instant Death. And he didn’t learn it in the new world either, it’s heavily implied that he had it all along. Anyone he tells to die will die. Anyone he even thinks about killing will die. Heck, not just “anyone”,  anyTHING in existence – if it moves, if it works, if he wants it to die, it will die. If you play video games, imagine a boss with an unblockable one-hit kill move that he uses at the start of the battle before you can get a hit in. That’s Yogiri Takatou.

On the plus side, he’s a lazy slacker who doesn’t want to kill willy-nilly. He usually makes an attempt to reason with people before ending them. It just happens that he’s been summoned to a world where magic makes people crazy, so the opponents he faces can never be reasoned with. Since his power is so devastating, there’s not much room for fighting or lengthy battle scenes once he uses it, so eventually the web novel devolves into “How much time can we waste with other characters and unnecessary scenes before Yogiri inevitably ends everything with one word?”

That’s the problem all stories with way overpowered characters end up with. Either they have to nerf the character to make it interesting or they have to take him/her off-screen and fill the time with other people and stories to delay the inevitable. You can see it in One Punch Man where Saitama only appears very rarely these days. When he does he rarely fights. When he does get into a fight, he stands around and gets hit for a while just to prolong the inevitable.

So it is in The Other World Doesn’t Stand A Chance Against The Power Of Instant Death, especially the further along the web novel goes. You have to read about boring side characters like Aoi and Hanakawa and Raineel for lengthy periods of time and you have to suffer through a loooong sequence of Yogiri and his team traveling through some boring tower. Once the tower was over I called it quits because these days I’m getting better at spotting dead-end series.

I’ll still read the manga because it’s amusing but there’s too little Yogiri doing actual stuff or making actual progress in the web novel to make it worth suffering through the author’s mediocre, unengaging writing style for it. He has a good idea and an interesting premise, he just has ZERO idea what to do with it.  The way the story is, he really should have planned it as a short three to five volume series with the battles and opponents all prepared before starting. Then he wouldn’t need to stuff a web novel with filler right from the second volume.

BTW, you may have noticed a busty brunette featuring prominently in the art for this series. Her name is Tomochika Dannoura. She’s ostensibly the deuteragonist – the second protagonist, as it were, so a lot of chapters are given from her perspective. But that’s just her cover story. Her real role is to look good on the covers to make it more attractive to buyers and readers. That’s why she never does anything of note in the story. That’s why Yogiri only brings her along because her boobs were soft. Yes, really. But don’t expect any romantic scenes because of that. It’s not that kind of series, at least as far as I read.

Don’t expect any detailed world building either. What you should read it for is how funny it is in the beginning when Yogiri kills stuff. And the vague hope of Yogiri killing the crazy Sage (who is later shown to be not so crazy but we don’t care because Yogiri is probably going to kill her anyway. The series suffers from a lot of that). The early chapters are the best before the author starts rationing his powers. I’d say check out the manga and given the web novel a miss unless you’re really into web novels.

TL;DR – The Other World Doesn’t Stand A Chance Against The Power Of Instant Death is great at first but stops being good pretty quickly.

Pure Dynamite by Tom Billington (book review)

I haven’t read a book in several weeks, so to get back in the habit I’m cleaning up random books lying around the house. Pure Dynamite – The Price you Pay for Wrestling Stardom will mainly be of interest to people who are/were fans of professional wrestling in the 70s, 80s and early 90s. If you’re not in that select category, you might want to give this a miss since it’s a not very well-written autobiography of a not very nice person.

Abridged summary

Pure Dynamite is a blow by blow account of the career of Tom Billington, who wrestled solo as The Dynamite Kid, and with Davey Boy Smith as half of the British Bulldogs tag team. Although he should have been a millionaire when he retired in 1993, after 16 years of professional wrestling, he had little but memories are scar tissue to show for it.

Now confined to a wheelchair as a result of serious damage to his back and legs, his years of steroid use have also damaged Billington’s heart and personal life. Pure Dynamite is as much a cautionary tale as it is a glimpse into the world of a wrestling legend.

If you watched the WWE (then WWF) in the early 90s then you definitely remember the British Bulldog Davey Boy Smith, most likely for his legendary Summerslam 92 match against Bret Hart. If you watched even earlier, you will remember he was part of the British Bulldogs tag team with his less buff, less fan-friendly cousin the Dynamite Kid.

I started watching pro wrestling around 1990, but there were plenty of tapes of earlier Wrestlemanias around. I liked the Bulldogs well enough – not as much as the Hart Foundation, but well-enough. Just not enough to read this autobiography by the less popular (but way more talented, seriously, just Youtube his early matches) half.

What made me get Pure Dynamite? The promise of an honest tell-all book in an industry filled with soft-pedalling books full of “eat your vitamins and say your prayers” kind of talk, that’s what. Nary a mention of drugs or steroids even though we all know they were a big part of wrestling particularly in the 90s. Apart from Bret Hart’s book which laid it all on the line, even allegedly honest books like Jericho’s and Mick Foley’s, while being excellent reads for the wrestling fan, didn’t really expose the seedy underbelly of the WWE in the way the gossip fan in me wanted to see. They were also suspiciously light on the self-criticism. Pure Dynamite, I was told, was written by someone with nothing left to lose and thus was the place to go if you really wanted true dirt from that era.

Brutal Honesty?

Well, was it? Alas, no, though it is indeed much more honest than most of the other books I’d mentioned. In particular Tom Billington makes no secret of what a horrible, horrible person he was – without meaning to, actually. He’s a sociopath through and through who can’t see what might be wrong with setting someone on fire in a McDonalds. Or cuffing someone for ignoring him. Or beating someone up because they might possibly be angry with him.

If you’re interested in reading about wrestling “ribs” i.e. backstage pranks, this is definitely the book for you. Just realize that what Billington considers “ribs” are physical and mental abuse and sometimes outright crimes, stuff that should have landed him in jail 200 times over if anyone had bothered reporting it. Reading it you really wonder if this guy has normal thought processes and feelings, he’s just so amoral and blase about it. This happened and that happened and then I did this (completely immoral) thing.

Billington is also honest about the different drugs and steroids that sent him on his downward spiral. He straight up names those who first gave him speed, where he got his steroids from. What he took, when he took it, why he took it, why he quit both steroids and drugs, the sequence of physical punishments he put himself through that landed him in a wheelchair, it’s all explained frankly and clearly in this book.

Dynamite Kid also wrestled for or with most of the key wrestling figures in Canada, Japan and the USA in the 80s, so his book is a veritable Who is Who of wrestling names. Antonio Inoki, Giant Baba, Andre the Giant, Giant Haystacks, Tiger Mask I and II, Terry Funk and on and on. It seems he tangled with just about everybody who was anybody back then, and he’s not shy to let us know what he thought about all of them.

Spoiler: he thinks the world of all his friends and everyone else sucks. Oh it’s not quite that bad, but there’s a pretty obvious bias towards those he likes while those he dislikes are quickly dismissed with backhand compliments at best. Still, he’s not afraid to name names or criticize even popular wrestlers, so it might be worth it reading Pure Dynamite just to see what Billington has to say about your favorite old school wrestler. The biggest surprise for me was that Vince McMahon was actually portrayed very positively. Guess Dynamite doesn’t want to burn all his bridges, eh?

Dynamite Hypocrisy

That’s not the only place where Billington is shady and hypocritical, however. It’s particularly glaring if you’ve read the autobiographies of Bret Hart and Diana Hart and know the truth behind the dissolution of Dynamite’s marriage. Billington tries to play it off as “we just grew apart” but his years of abuse and outright torture of his wife are well-documented.

He tries to paint himself as a hero for not contesting the divorce and giving Michelle everything he had, but after the hell he put her through, it’s the least he could have done. And he talks about how proud he is of his children while admitting he almost never saw them and that he got a divorce even before his third child was born. There’s something missing here. It’s hard to call this an honest book when Billington won’t come out and admit the wrong he did to this woman – and to her friends if one particularly lurid anecdote by Diana Hart is to be believed.

Billington is also inconsistent in his preaching about his wrestling philosophy as well. Several times he states that he always tried to give everyone he wrestled with a good match. After all, if you make someone look small and pathetic and beat them, you’ve beaten a nobody. All good and nice advice, but in between the philosophizing he also recounts at least two incidents where he and his partner intentionally no sold opposing tag teams (the Nasty Boys and Los Guerreros) for no good reason. There’s really no reason, he just didn’t like the look of them so he was a jerk. That’s a pattern you’ll see a lot throughout this book.

You will also have a lot of unanswered questions at the end of his book, particularly regarding his finances. He’s very diligent to record much of what he made from his tours and matches, e.g. $6,200 for a one week tour with NJPW, $10,000 for a commercial, and so on and so forth. But then suddenly he’s broke and returns to England with less than $30 in his pocket. Wait, what? What happened to all that money? Drugs? Women? (of whom there are suspiciously few in his account) Bad investments? He mentions buying a house for $200,000 cash and having some land, but where did all the rest of the money go? Again it’s hard to call his book “honest” when it has such glaring gaps in the narrative.

Cautionary tale for wrestlers

As the summary says “Pure Dynamite is as much a cautionary tale as it is a glimpse into the world of a wrestling legend.” I don’t think Billington meant it as such, though. He himself says he wouldn’t change a thing if he had to do it all over again. He speaks approvingly of “hard” fighters, i.e. fighters who hit you for real and dismisses wrestlers who didn’t want to work dangerous styles or with dangerous wrestlers. With all due respect, the results show for themselves.

It’s almost funny how oblivious he is to the fact that he’s a walking advertisement for not doing the things he did. At a point where his own body is almost completely broken down, he criticizes Davey Boy Smith for not wanting to get hurt. It’s like, duh? Look in the mirror first?

And this book came out before the Chris Benoit tragedy, so his praise of Benoit for aping the Dynamite Kid’s style comes across all the more as “Don’t try this at home, kids.” I think fans who don’t like the WWE’s present safer working styles and wellness policies will rapidly change their minds when they see the toll unsafe practices took on Tom Billington. It’s definitely a “cautionary tale” whether Billington means it to be or not.

On the quality of the book itself

Last few notes on the book – this review is longer than I’d expected – for better or worse it definitely feels like something Billington wrote himself, even though I know there was a ghost writer. That means a lot of typos, inconsistent spellings and quite a bit of repetition.

It suffers from quite a bit of disorganization and rambling before getting back to the point. Your mileage may vary on this, since it does have a genuine feel of listening to the Dynamite Kid recount his life. A little more editing, cutting out the hundreds of prank stories and “I wrestled this guy” stories and more explanation of his life outside the ring would have really raised the level of this book.

This especially applies to his family in England. His dad shows up prominently but the rest of his family is like a shadow. His mother and his sisters almost never appear. It’s not so much that I want the nitty gritty of his private life, but it’s a very incomplete autobiography when most of the stuff you would expect from such a book are either covered up or completely ignored.

Another ‘mileage may vary’ issue is that many of the matches are written in “kayfabe,” as if the outcome of each match was ever actually in doubt. There are matches where this isn’t the case and Dynamite shows the decision-making process, but the bulk of the matches are written up like they were real fights. For me this wasn’t a problem at all and was actually very interesting to read, but I’ve seen complaints about it online so I just throw this out there. YMMV.

Final thoughts

Pure Dynamite is worth a read on one hand, but on the other hand it’s kind of hard to recommend this book. It’s invaluable for its frank look at the excesses of the 80s Rock n Wrestling era. It’s also useful if you’re the nosy type and want to know how much wrestlers typically made in those days – a lot if you were at the top and a good negotiator.

The problem is the subject, Tom Billington. He is just so, so unpleasant. A lying, unrepentant jerk that it’s really hard to feel sorry for despite all he’s going through now. Not that he wants or deserves your pity, of course. But you will come away with a bad taste in your mouth. Overall I’d say read it if you’re a fan of that era but definitely skip it if you’re not. It makes me grateful the WWE has changed so much these days, even though it does mean the angles and matches are so boring that I can’t watch it any more. At least lives are being saved, and that’s what matters.

Thoughts on Tsuujou Kougeki ga Zentai Kougeki de Nikai Kougeki no Okasan wa Suki desu ka?

I’ve only read the free sample pages of Tsuujou Kougeki ga Zentai Kougeki de Nikai Kougeki no Okasan wa Suki desu ka? provided by Fantasia Books and don’t intend to read any more, but that was enough to form a general opinion. The intention of the free sample is to help the reader decide if they want to read any further, after all, and 70 or so pages of a book is a pretty substantial freebie. This post will contain a few spoilers, so read chapter one and two if you haven’t already.

On to the meat. We all know other world/isekai light novels are all the rage these days. Every other LN features a hero ending up in another world somehow where he somehow becomes overpowered and a chick magnet and all the other otaku fantasy wish fulfillment tropes that the genre is so well-known for. Other world stories are so common these days that’s it’s hard for new books to make a dent – unless they either subvert or deconstruct the genre (getting increasingly common these days) or add some kind of spin or gimmick.

Enter Tsuujou Kougeki – Do You Like Moms Whose Normal Attacks Hit the Whole Enemy Party Twice? The twist here is that the main hero Masato does not go into the game world alone but is accompanied by his doting mom Mamako and it is Mamako, not Masato, who becomes the overpowered hero. It’s pretty funny how he gets so worked up and excited about being the Chosen One… then his mom just walks up and snags the two most powerful weapons in the game. Not only that, but the in-game guidebook suggests there might be other such overpowered mother-son pairs in the MMMMMORPG game. It would be interesting to meet them and see how things go.

So the unexpected swerve is an intriguing one, enough to get even a light novel avoider like me to read it. The problem is, it’s not quite what I expected. I should have smelled a rat when I saw the cutesy, fanservicey picture of Mamako on the cover. What I was expecting was a normal mom, late 30ish early 40ish soccer mom with the dignity and gravitas to match. Putting a regular, realistic everyday person into these kinds of situations is always much funnier and more interesting to me anyway.

Mamako is just annoying. Ditzy, clingy, manipulative, always ready to use tears to control her son if nothing will work. Doesn’t know jack about what’s going on, won’t share what little she does know, won’t listen to common sense advice but charges ahead without a thought in the world. Is this really a woman in her late 30s? How did she survive long enough to breed? The worst part is her fake crying to weasel her way into or out of situations. That’s just plain dirty. The excessive focus on her young appearance and on Masato’s brief moments of attraction to her are just pig-disgusting icing on a pig-disgusting cake.

Masato is no paragon of virtue either. He’s whiny and too cranky and rude towards his mother. I’m sure we can all remember times when we were a little sharper with our moms than we had meant to be, but to snap and snarl at her all chapter long is just… ick. And all that whining and crying just because his mom has better weapons instead of creating a build and learning skills to make the best of what he has. I blame Mamako for bringing him up wrong, that’s what. Plus he’s 15 years old, what can I say?

I didn’t read enough to get to know the loli merchant and the tsundere sage better, but I doubt they’ll be any better than the already-low level established. The tsundere in particular killed my desire to read any more. You know she’s just going to argue with Masato and beat him up all the time but she’s still going to “win” his affection over any better girls in the series anyway. Just thinking about it gives me a headache.

TL;DR – The premise was interesting, but the ditzy personality of the mom and the whiny, cranky personality of her son ruined the whole thing for me. If they make an anime I might try an episode or two, but the interest I had in Tsuujou Kougeki is gone and probably isn’t ever coming back.

 

Reread Dune – Quick book impressions

It’s been… I want to say 20 years but possibly more since I last read Dune by Frank Herbert, a classical work of science fiction. I still remembered a lot of the main points of the story but the finer details had long since been lost to history. After watching several anime series with overpowered main characters (Sword Art Online, Log Horizon, etc) I decided to return to a much earlier example just for kicks. Go on, Paul Muad’Dib Atreides, show those amateurs how a real Gary Stu does it.

Blurb: Set on the desert planet Arrakis, Dune is the story of the boy Paul Atreides, who would become the mysterious man known as Muad’Dib. He would avenge the traitorous plot against his noble family—and would bring to fruition humankind’s most ancient and unattainable dream.

A stunning blend of adventure and mysticism, environmentalism and politics, Dune won the first Nebula Award, shared the Hugo Award, and formed the basis of what it undoubtedly the grandest epic in science fiction.

It IS indeed a stunning blend of adventure, mysticism, environmentalism and politics. For once the blurb did not lie. I stayed up to like 3am reading it and continued the next day until I finished. There are plenty of hair-raising will-they-make-it adventure sections, way too much BS psychological mysticism, enough environmentalism to make you develop an interest in desertification and its reverse and, of course, politics up the wazoo. The politics was the most interesting part IMO, there should have been way more of it.

So is Paul really a Gary Stu? You betcha! He’s sooo smart and sooo strong, and sooo psychic, he can do at age 15 what thousands of predecessors have failed to do, he learns everything so quickly, and on and on and on. There are suggestions here and there of the probability that he might fail at something, but of course it never comes to pass and he always sails through just fine and comes through even stronger.

That’s okay with me in the earlier parts of the book. It’s justifiable to have a super-strong, super-perfect character if the alternative is certain death. Of course he’s strong, if he weren’t strong he’d be dead. It’s the later parts of the story where he’s no longer in any danger but continues to get even stronger and even more perfect to the point where almost nobody in the whole universe can hold a candle to him physically, psychically or mentally that made me think, oh brother! Frank Herbert really laid it on thick.

To his credit, the negative side effects of his perfection do trouble Paul quite a bit. He gets fear, worship, reverence, fanatical devotion and even love in spades, but all he really wants are friends. He’s also worried by persistent visions of a universal jihad caused by his followers – an eventuality he seems to stop fighting after a while because, *shrug*. Dunno why, he just does.

It also bothers him how little he feels even when tragic things happen. Or so he says, anyway. Frank Herbert was probably trying to soften the super-perfect, super-competent image on Paul, but it backfires a bit, IMO. It just makes it much harder to get under his skin or relate to his feelings as he gets more and more prefect. Which is kind of the whole point of his dilemma so it works and yet doesn’t work at the same time. Very… complicated.

I also enjoyed the fact that Dune doesn’t start out focusing exclusively on Paul Atreides. Sure it’s his story, but there’s plenty of time spent developing characters like his doomed father, his mother, retainers like Thufir Hawat and Gurney, and even side characters like the geologist Liet. When you watch anime or play games about a prince taking back his kingdom, the kingdom is usually lost pretty quickly. Sometimes it’s lost even before the story starts. Dune, on the other hand, takes the time to sketch out the previous status quo and show how and why things went wrong. It’s very enjoyable stuff and I’m a little sorry other series haven’t imitated that approach since.

So, as I’ve bseen saying all along I had fun rereading Dune. It’s not a perfect book, though. When I was younger I found the swashbuckling adventures in the desert to be the main point of interest. This time I enjoyed the social and political intrigue and found the geological and ecological details to be far more interesting than the “Paul does something awesome yet again” parts. If I had to find fault with anything it’s that there wasn’t half enough attention given to those sections as there should have been.

For example Herbert portrayed Baron Harkonnen as a sneaky, wily, highly competent foe early on, but then the character vanishes for a while and the next time we see him he’s just a fat buffoon. There are attempts to build Feyd Rautha up as Paul’s ultimate rival but not only is he out of focus for most of the book but when we do see him he’s just a spoiled brat. Same goes for the emperor, who is never given a chance to show us what, if anything, qualifies him to rule the known universe. The supposedly powerful Guild is yet another example. It’s not that they aren’t all powerful in their own way, just that Paul is portrayed as so much stronger and smarter and more determined that they might as well not bother. I would have enjoyed a bigger focus on all of them, but it wouldn’t affect the ending in any way so I guess it’s all the same in the end.

Long story short, Dune is a great read/re-read for fans of overpowered main characters. There’s a lot of new terminology thrown around but you can usually figure it out from the context without referring to the glossary. And the story is just plain interesting and easy enough to follow without being simplistic. Good books are just good, you know, Gary Stu or no Gary Stu. I’ve never read any of the sequels because I hear it’s all downhill from Dune Messiah, but I’ll give it a chance anyway. Looking forward to it!