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hmmm

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Ascendance of a Bookworm and the Multiversal Marketplace of Ideas

Something that fucking stuns me about contemporary isekai as a genre is the way that it handles cultural transmission from one world to another. There’s a very consistent formula (as with all things in standard-issue isekai), and it all hinges on this fascinating system for deciding what gets to filter in from Earth through the protagonist and what is handily discarded when it would become an obstruction.

Consumer goods and services penetrate through the protagonist into the fantasy setting most easily. The single most consistent thing that isekai heroes reinvent in their otherworlds is cuisine. Almost universally contemporary Earth cooking, whether it’s Japanese, Chinese, or Italian (it is very rarely anything else), outperforms anything the locals produce, if only out of sheer novelty.

This sort of thing often forms the basis for the isekai protagonist’s horizontal monopoly—I’ve lost track of how many of these books I’ve read where an overwhelming portion of the plot is dedicated to the hero managing human and material resources as their multiple intersecting businesses proliferate like a cancer across the setting. It turns out that more than being a world savior, isekai readers fantasize most about being an entrepreneur living for the grind—albeit freed from the trouble of having to come up with your own ideas, as you can just re-hash the achievements of thousands of years of human endeavor instead and take the credit. Call it the McFly approach.

What’s peculiar is that less tangible and/or economically exploitable things don’t penetrate or are actively stripped away in the transition from life on Earth to life in the fantasy world. The most obvious point that comes to mind has to do with basic political and ethical conceits like the right to the most basic forms of self-determination. Isekai protagonists are indescribably quick to roll over for and get cozy with flavors of aristocracy and totalitarian power that the global public has been consistently taught not to trust.

Consider, for example, Ascendance of a Bookworm. I’ve lost track of how many people I’ve seen argue that Bookworm’s one of the standout isekai titles, and I can see why: it’s extremely committed to realizing an in-depth fantasy setting that’s not neatly explained with Dragon Quest allusions; the protagonist has an interesting array of flaws and limitations; in spite of the level of power on which the characters operate, it consistently creates convincing scenes of tension and peril in multiple dimensions; and the story is driven by a legitimate interest in something larger than the narratives the author has already consumed. This much is all great.

But the thing that strikes me about Ascendance of a Bookworm—the thing that keeps me from liking it at all—is that all of this craft and effort is sunk into a narrative about how there is no escape from serfdom. Myne starts at the absolute bottom rung of society, and through a conjunction of hideous self-neglect, total accident, cosmological convergence, and internecine political infighting, arrives at a position of frighteningly far-reaching authority. As Rozemyne, the archduke’s adopted daughter, she makes decisions every damn page about how her vast entourage will spend their lives in service to her agendas. Huge swathes of these books are just characters talking about how they’re going to move around various subordinates and, critically, which subordinates can be put in positions where lives won’t be at risk because of a failure to communicate across inviolable class boundaries.

While Rozemyne frequently shoots herself in the foot because she still takes as a given from time to time that people deserve to be treated like human beings and not disposable chattel, it’s never really up for consideration whether any of the societal structures that create this profound alienation should, perhaps, be changed.

And it’s not like dramatic social change isn’t a subject the story explores! Rozemyne’s whole objective in this story is to establish a thriving printing industry and universal literacy so she can go back to the standard of living she was used to as a Japanese bibliophile. She’s radically altering the cultural and industrial landscape of this other reality; it’s just that she’s not interested in changing the parts where, if you’re an aristocrat, people will act weird if you don’t murder peasants that look at you funny.

It ends up feeling kind of sinister, like the narrative is trying to convince you in slow, small steps that hey, maybe the problem here really is with Rozemyne not being willing to walk all over people as much as she could given the latitude afforded her (it’s worth noting that in many regards it’s the only latitude she’s got; the nobility are just as bound by bizarre, self-destructive social contracts as every other social class—it’s just that they can take it out on the people beneath them), and she’s already buying orphans in bulk from the church to staff her printing operation.

This is not helped by the most persistent fantasy elements of the setting. “Mana” in Bookworm is, on its face, a fantastical gloss made to legitimize the divine right of kings and the great chain of being. People have limited but varying capacity for mana, which is both trainable and heritable; the people bred for high mana capacity rule the country because their expanded mana reserves let them pump blessings into the surrounding environment, improving crop yields. Literally every noble is a miniature Fisher King, and when nobles withdraw their support from whatever fiefdom’s getting shafted, it withers and the people who live there suffer. This may be cruel, Rozemyne opines, but It Must Be Done to remind people how order is kept, however much she may not like it. Human survival in this setting hinges on the nobility’s generosity with their mana, and if there’s another option, it’s not really up for consideration.

I think periodically about how, as dense and thoroughly realized as this setting is, there’s really only one “nation” that I’ve seen so far in this series. There are rival fiefdoms, internal struggles, and cultural variations from region to region, but nobody’s really “foreign.” Everyone speaks the same language and follows the same broad set of customs. I wonder, when these thoughts come to me, how someone from a different nation in the same world might think of the culture represented in Ascendance of a Bookworm, and the thing I keep circling back to is “oh, those are the people who can’t do without owning other people.”

Part of the thematic messaging of this series, however inadvertent it may be, is how quickly a contemporary Japanese person adjusts to these expectations, even if they might make an effort to be as lenient as possible in most cases.

But pasta and hardbound books—those our hero will fight tooth and nail to introduce to this world.

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The Pizza Cutter Feedback Loop

I used to attend a camp for young writers, which says a lot, perhaps, about how much fun you're allowed to make of me. I met the first peer who would eagerly talk about their strengths as a writer there. They claimed at one point that their biography would be titled Crying, Dying, Dead, on account of those being the three kinds of scenes they did best. I believed it.

They were the first of us to get published. It was a three-book series, two books deep when I decided to invite them to my grad cohort's lit festival. I delivered a glowing introductory speech about how we'd studied together, and how much I'd looked up to their example in the intervening years.

And then they read, and I realized that nothing about their craft fundamentally changed since we were teenagers. They were still using the setting their group had come up with at camp. But I bet the tragic deaths were still a cut above the rest of the work.

Another story: in that same grad program, there was a student who loved to write nauseating scenes. VR sex dreams glitched to hell. Improvised corpse disposal. More cannibals, catholics, and dubious consent than you can shake a stick at. The scenes themselves were excellently vile; they did precisely what they were meant to.

I never once grasped where the stories they were part of were supposed to be going. The plots, whatever there was of them, existed to string together grotesque vignettes like rosary beads.

There's this thing that happens to journeyman writers sometimes. It's often someone used to being a big fish—but not the biggest, necessarily—in a small pond, with a relatively deft hand for description and a couple of people (fans, friends, instructors) who'll happily read everything they write. It goes like this:

Our writer friend has a new story. They're venturing somewhere darker than usual. People will suffer. Horrors will ensue. Because they are, as established, pretty solid compared to their peers when it comes to banging out an evocative sentence with a strong sensory charge and stringing them together in a way that sustains the mood, whatever that suffering is, whatever chilling thing happens, it leaves an impression. In workshop, everyone rallies around how that shot of pathos or dread was a high point, if not the high point, of the piece.

Whether the mood at the keyboard is peaking or troughing when the scene comes together, the moment of confirmation that your story did something to someone—the intended thing, even!—beats the hell out of cocaine. It's the sort of thing that drags you back to your MFA workshop all year for reasons beyond the sunk cost fallacy.

For this writer, this first shot of wow, this made me cry or I was legitimately creeped out or I had to stop midway or I'd have thrown up is the biggest shot in the arm they've had since the moment that convinced them the written word was their Calling. It gives them an idea:

the purpose of storytelling is to shake up a person's feelings.

And from this they derive a certain nascent aesthetic and politics. If they want to be a better writer, they have to shake people up more. More times, in bigger ways, from more angles, crossing more lines. If for no other reason than that you've got to keep wringing that hit out of your audience and you expect them to expect you to top yourself all the time.

This has three effects.

1) the obvious one: the writer falls deeper and deeper into a dependence on Edge. Misery porn, torture porn, hey-look-at-this-fucked-up-guy as genre—to keep the hits coming, the writer obliges themselves to mine darker and darker veins. It's possible to work this path from a warm and fluffy angle but frankly it's way, way harder. Wholesomeness is hard to do and even harder to sell in a workshop environment.

2) the writer eventually convinces themselves that since evoking a dramatic reaction from a reader is an a priori good, questions or criticism regarding the means they use to get there are beside the point. At best, the critic in question doesn't Get It, and at worst they're acting in bad faith or posturing as a Censorious, Pearl-Clutching Moral Authority—regardless of how legitimate a grievance may have arisen from the boundaries the writer has chosen to cross or the clumsiness with which they've handled sensitive and hazardous material.

In late stages, this metastasizes into an attitude where their work is of incredible value and significance when no-one's crying foul and totally ineffectual when it becomes the object of criticism for its place in the social scheme of things.

3) the sneaky one. Because our hapless writer has convinced themselves they have figured out the Most Important Thing about writing, they become markedly more likely to tune out criticism of anything else so long as the most recent piece still wrings that gut-level reaction out of the audience. Things like structure, plot, and characterization become inconsequential compared to Getting The Reaction, stunting the development of the writer's other creative skills.

The result of this process is pizza cutter writing—all edge, no point, consumed by suffering for suffering's own sake. If you read the synopsis of A Little Life or ROLL OVER AND DIE: I Will Fight For An Ordinary Life With My Love And Cursed Sword! and go "why the fuck would anyone write this?" wonder no more.

And if you should wonder why this approach has such a universal foothold—litfic or light novels, the pressures are the same wherever you look—remember that people who sell books are concerned first and foremost with literature's power as a device to sell more books, and delivering a swift, novel, and powerful shot of feeling in the midst of a suffocatingly anodyne reality is a good way to maintain a base of customers.

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The modern light novel’s core sensibility is insecurity

You learn a lot about where a writer’s coming from based on what they decide needs justification and what can stand on its own. I know here in this discourse community, folks are inclined to read that as a statement about worldbuilding—how much time and effort should be spent unpacking your magic system if your fantasy world doesn’t have black people in it?—but I mean it much more broadly.

A man taught me once that a story’s highest aspiration is to communicate the apocalyptic transformation of someone’s inner life purely through actions and objects. A masterful writer, he argued, could communicate vast depths of human interiority by arranging, with immaculate precision and focus, those depths’ material signifiers. Instead of telling us what a character thinks about the importance of wealth, tell us about the car they drive. Instead of unpacking a character’s relationship to violence, describe the gun they own. Then, crash the car. Make the gun jam. Make the object live and transform under the character’s gaze to betray how the character is transforming.

The man in question turned out to be a rabid, scheming motherfucker, so I don’t trust his approach all that much. But it’s a philosophy that betrays certain assumptions about what you can and can’t expect a reader to grasp immediately and what they’ll make an effort to unpack under their own power. Some of them are useful assumptions—your reader needs to know what they’re looking at before you can hope to communicate the huge thematic turning point you have in mind. Specificity is still king.

The first light novel I ever read was a volume of Haruhi Suzumiya selected effectively at random (god rest my soul). I was 15, maybe 16, visiting Seattle for a week or so in the summer, and I had set aside a little of my time to drag my family out to Kinokuniya, because I was a hopeless weeby midwesterner bewildered by the idea of an entire bookstore full of weeb shit instead of a dedicated corner of my local Hastings with, in retrospect, a weird amount of obscure ecchi shit tucked away here and there.

And when I sat down and gave it a read, I was struck by a realization:

this prose is a bit shit, huh?

Ten years later, I read a lot of light novels, because I make more money editing them than I did as a graduate assistant, and I make it doing, frankly, way less work. And my impression persists:

this prose is a bit shit, huh?

Except it’s not just a bit shit. It’s a bit shit in a remarkably consistent, predictable way from author to author. It runs deeper than the staple obsession with genre trappings over substance, or flimsy characterization, or rote and stilted dialogue (though these are also of concern, obv.); it’s a matter of what the author believes is detail the reader needs unpacked for them.

Over and over again, I’ve encountered moments in the volumes I’ve edited where the author grinds the scene to a halt so that they can set aside a paragraph or two explaining why a character made a decision. I’ve seen light novels establish and resolve a massive societal upheaval in a sentence or two, and then spend an order of magnitude more time and effort justifying the timing of a character’s arrival on scene based on the intersection of their established habits, personal preferences, and situational pressures, when I never questioned the timing in the first place. There is no tiny, persnickety detail of behavior light novelists won’t explode into a character study in order to litigate a point about said character that I would already grasp if they just said they did the thing and moved on.

This fear of letting actions and exterior markers speak for themselves pervades into everything else. Scenes with extended dialogue tend to be stiff and insubstantial, because if the author was doing anything but the bare minimum of in-scene blocking (to lift from stagecraft vocab), they’d feel obliged to unpack every change in posture or expression, rendering the exchange unreadable. More broadly, the impulse turns every scene into an uphill battle as attention is constantly drawn away from the specific present action that actually makes plot happen in order to establish the more abstract, summatively-described context that frames the present action—often retreading material that an attentive reader should already know.

I blame the framework in which these people are learning how to write—namely, from each other, in forum posts. Most writers in the industry today are culled from the ranks of enthusiast amateur authors who’ve already built a reputation in one of a handful of deeply incestuous message boards. The closest equivalent we’ve got is serial-numbers-filed-off professionally-published fanfiction a la Mortal Instruments, Fifty Shades, and that Wattpad One Direction thing.

One of the knock-on effects of cutting your teeth on fiction writing serials online is that you learn to write with a very direct, low-latency discourse with your audience in mind. So long as you have an audience, feedback is something you can anticipate rolling in about as quickly as your work goes up, and replying to that feedback happens just as fast if not faster. In an extremely competitive environment—and let’s remember that every published light novel author in the prevailing format of the field has clawed their way to the top of a pile of broken bodies to get there—getting holes poked in your work by a vast army of pedants and fellow writers looking to secure their spot is just par for the course.

So it’s really no surprise that the single most consistent tonal thread in the rhetoric of these books is a lack of trust in the reader to draw their own conclusions from what the author puts in front of them, given that the reader that these writers have been trained to write for is one reading in an extremely uncharitable light whose objections need to be preemptively shot down whenever possible.

Come back next time, when I try to unpack where so many light novelists’ attachment to needlessly edgy and ghoulish premises and story beats comes from!

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I cannot articulate how fucking gobsmacking it still is to hop on twitter and be reminded that the author of Murry Purry Fresh & Furry is now a household name among twitter famous genre author types. I just saw that Shaenon K. Garrity whipped up some fanart for Midnight Pals and I felt like I’d fallen into some kind of abyssal time hole as I wondered if she Knows

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I’ve been reading XXXenophile

which, if you don’t know, is the comic your geek dad read when he wanted to get his rocks off. It’s a historic touchstone of nerd pornography and largely not discussed anymore. Lately I’ve changed abodes, and one of my generous housemates owns the complete run. I, being a historian at heart, said to myself “narc, are you going to go your whole life without reading the work that really put Phil Foglio on the map as a player in the comics industry?”

And I said “narc, this is a silly dramatic device. Of course I will read Phil Foglio’s horny anthology series.”

And reader, I have thots.

I’m two volumes deep and XXXenophile is boring. It’s not bad! On a craft level, it’s pretty damn workmanlike. I’ve read much worse when it comes to porn comics.

So far, it consistently prompts two reactions:

1. Foglio just did not bring the humor chops to this that he does to his other work. The titillation is doing a lot of heavy lifting for the jokes, and the dialogue often slips into pretty rote territory.

2. There’s an outspoken group of people who can’t stand the way Foglio draws people; I’m not one of them. Fuckers need to chill. That said, his work lives and dies by his inker. He rotates through a lot of collaborators on inks for XXXenophile—some folks know how to work with him, and some really, really don’t. I don’t think anybody knew exactly how to bring out the best of his pencils until Kaja came along.

The reaction it doesn’t prompt is “hnnngh. Ngah. Whoo.” It does nothing for me. It doesn’t even seem especially intrigue-making in the way porn-that’s-not-really-for-you does.

This is, of course, not on Foglio’s readership, who came from an age when you could not get hot and cold running porn direct to a screen in your loft, basement, or lap if you don’t mind a little spyware siphoning a fraction of a percent of what your facebook profile does. These were people whose friends knew what hentai was, but you sure as shit couldn’t find it without investing a small fortune in the act and suffering through a mangavideo dub.

XXXenophile was weird, once. Some of this stuff still has a presence in the kink scene, but what persists is the stuff with deep roots in the folk tradition of porn by nerds, for nerds—xenocock (as old as Star Trek slash at least, and weirder there tbh), women with dicks (in that particular stumbling cis guy way that suggests a certain bewilderment at the idea that actual women with dicks might exist), women with dicks and vaginas (see above, but with intersex folks), gals getting railed by werepanthers (possibly older than language). Probably the most inventive out of the bunch is a story that dips into transhuman territory: a cyborg gal’s absent, prankster boyfriend leaves her his dick and a bunch of invasive code that causes her augments to misbehave while he’s out—unfortunately, it’s also the one that feels skeeviest, as the scenario dips into some territory where it’s really, really easy to imagine its potential for abuse, and frankly it doesn’t feel quite consenting, given the lack of forewarning involved.

Point being, the comic’s a window onto a simpler time in the world of porn comics, before the internet lowered the barriers for entry and left us primed to receive the confluence of furries, image boards, and Shinzo Abe’s Sex Freak Pop Culture Arms Race. It’s porn conceived of by a mind that knows nothing of and exists at a remove from the continuum that contains vore (soft, hard, cock, or otherwise), the Great Milf Rebranding, blueberry expansion, cumflation, pooltoy tf, BE, FMG, GTS, bara, omorashi, or whatever goes on with the people who want to raw/get rawed by the cast of Five Nights at Freddy’s. Porn from before the porn singularity. That makes it worth a read in its own right.

Personally, my issue with it boils down to a realization that Foglio’s taste in women is never gonna overlap much with my own. Dude loves a toned, sprightly gal getting up in the business of one to four other toned, sprightly gals and/or a gaggle of sex homunculi. Lord knows he draws what he likes well, but preferring—how to phrase this—let’s say women of girth, I’d forgotten how monotonous more normative standards of beauty could get.

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Okay so

I’m narc. I’m a big believer in compartmentalization when it comes to how you present yourself in public, and I have a lot of Takes that are better said here, curated for an audience that might want them, than out on the same blog where I put everything else.

You don’t get to know where that is. Here’s what you do get to know about me:

- I write. Got a terminal degree in it, pissed some people off real bad along the way. Won’t be saying who until some stuff changes.

- I edit really really really bad books for a living.

- I dabble in tabletop game dev. I do a lot of jam submissions and chump out of a lot more.

- I post horny under this name. Reblogs too. It’s not gonna be everything but it’s gonna be there. Not safe for fucking work. And while yes, I am a brilliant worker in my medium, I am not some wunderkind who breezed their way to an MFA at the tender age of Not Legal. I am twenty-six. I don’t want minors interacting with this. If I can’t figure out whether you’re an actual goddamn adult, I will block you.

- white, they/them. Bi in the sense that my attraction to men comes and goes like an uncle the family can’t decide is welcome or not during the holidays. I’m not interested in litigating any particular identity discourse here.

- black lives matter, nazi punks fuck off, capital delenda est, y’all should know this shit by now.