#which is a bonus bc I like figuring out mysteries in books and going along with stuff to see if I'm right at the end

[midwesternfields]

BOOK REVIEW 📖

This is the one for February – I was reminded of this book half way through the month and decided to reread it again because I couldn't remember how it ended; plus a short mystery is always nice to read (side note: this ended up as an ebook read bc I couldn't remember where in my storage boxes I have my copy – it's in storage because it's a paperback edition and old and I don't want it to die on me yet lol)

[helenaklein]

Heya, i come across your blog while talking about nelroche etc. I never know anything about l&l since i never play lovestruck, can someone give explanation which part that is similiar? While idk anything about lovestruck, I found their previous work also has similiar with manga yana of the dawn (which i have read the manga, and yes, they are pretty similiar to called it just coincidence).

okay so fair warning... this is long as fuck because there are more similarities than there are differences lol. also as a disclaimer i’m only invested in this whole thing insofar as it entertains me but if the “””””creators””””” want to fight me because i wrote this post.... they’re welcome to but i promise i’ll have more fun than they will lmfao

l&l’s about a young woman from a major city in our world who one day gets sucked via magical portal into a fantasy world filled with magic and races that are only fiction in ours. once there, she gets mistaken for their most notorious war criminal, an insanely powerful witch who committed a genocide and is center of a cult of worshipers willing to kill and die for her.

this is nelroche’s description, straight from their devblog:

now, if it was a matter of similar basic premises and setups, i’d write it off as coincidence and tell the anons who made me aware of this that i thought they were overreacting. after all, “normal-human sucked into medieval world” and even “mistaken identity” are both very well established tropes that have been done and done again and will continue to be done because many find it compelling. hell, i do too. honestly, if the devs had simply said that they drew inspiration from love & legends, i’d have understood.

but.

the similarities only begin there. and they only get more excessive. coupled with their adamant denial that they’ve never even read it....... it’s just not possible lmfao. even if they decided to change the physical appearances of the characters, the tropes behind them and their personalities are exactly the same.

the nelroche demo has:

1) the lord of a region who’s a massive workaholic to the point of self-detriment, but is very caring towards their people and their inner circle and whom everyone in the group has referred to as a parental figure.

aka.... l&l’s reiner wolfson, who’s described directly from the app as “Reiner is a fair and compassionate ruler who would defend the people of the human domain with his life.”

2) the prickly knight to said lord, who’s fiercely dedicated to their liege, very serious in personality along with stubborn and prideful, but cares deep down once you get past their walls.

literally l&l’s august falke. the demo describes them, literally as “...reminds me of the knights in the fairy tales, except, it seems, not quite as charming” whereas august’s in-app description reads “This knight in shining armor is more aggressive than the story books led you to believe...” I’ll let the similarities there speak for themselves.... lol

3) the energetic and bubbly mage who’s super tiny compared to their companions and avoids serious discussion, who happens to be a bit of a trickster and has a mysterious quality.

l&l’s altea bellerose but make it less pink! altea and “C”s similarities go even deeper but i’ll get into that a bit later.

4) the mysterious and heterochromatic-eyed figure who’s distrustful and initially stand-offish as a result of living through a life of hardship, that is excitable and actually loves to travel.

look no further than l&l’s saerys! M’s eyes are “ocean blue and purple” compared to his blue and red, but don’t let that difference fool you! their introductions are laughably similar (more on that later)... and the “travel” bit lmfao. not to be mean but they couldn’t at least change up his hobbies? come on now, work for that plagiarized bag!

5) the lazy and flirtatious one who’d rather spent their days joking and taking it easy than handling their many responsibilities, who does care but shows it in ways unconventional.

just because their hair is grey instead of white doesn’t mean it’s not l&l’s iseul idreis, babes! i’d know that endlessly frustrating man anywhere! lovestruck’s app description for him reads: “The elven prince is beautiful and cunning with a silver tongue, but his lackadaisical lifestyle leaves much to be desired”. corporate wants you to find the difference between these two pictures they’re the same dot jpg.

6) the complicated and slender blonde who wields both blade AND magic, whose eyes glow, whose power is deemed dangerous, who wears shades of blue, AND is initially described as cold? who seems like she wants to beat the hell out of her compatriots, who she seems to lead, and whose outfit is needlessly complicated?

you think i don’t know a knock off helena klein when i see one???? ME???????? helena’s in-app description LITERALLY reads “cold as ice” and “wielding both sword and sorcery with ruthless precision”!!!!! of alllllllllll the things i’m most offended by this one motherfucker you can’t just fuck around with helena on a whim okay this shit is personal now!!!!!!

7) the creepy, predatory, and combative pale-but-tanned-but-murky-skinned dude who wears robes and a creepy beast mask.

l&l’s jinhai jubal i know it’s you!!!! actually this is probably the funniest thing of the whole situation to me bc this dev decided to remove not-alain as a love interest and seemingly replace him with not-jinhai. secondary poster you a hilarious bitch i’m not gonna lie.

(here’s jinhai in his mask lmfao)

8) the mouse-looking man who seems not as confident as not-helena and not-jinhai, wears full armor AND a double-sided sword strapped to his back.

none other than l&l’s alain richter, back from the dead! im gonna let the next image speak for itself.

still with me? i sure hope so bc it really gets juicy now!!!!! the similarities don’t end with the characters!!!! no, no, no!!!! the plot and progression of the demo are identical to that of l&l’s pilot episode, beat for beat.

in the l&l pilot episode, after the mc stumbles through the portal and into the medieval town, she’s almost immediately accosted by august, a rude mf who essentially acts not very knight-like despite his appearance and forces her into the nearby castle’s dungeon.

once inside the dungeon, the l&l mc is approached by a figure with hetero-chromatic eyes, who seems intrigued and confused by the mc’s lack of knowledge about the fantasy world.

once that person leaves, in comes a bubbly woman who seems to be floating. she asks mc if she’s ready to get out of the dungeon, and mc is like!!!! finally someone willing to help me. only..... uh oh.... she takes her to her lord instead of freeing her, wtf!!!!

once brought to the lord, who seems much more calm and reasonable than his high-strung and feisty knight, he listens to mc’s story and seems to believe her somewhat, but doesn’t want to risk his people.

(he’s even standing at the window LMFAOOOOOOOOO)

then the last remaining figure (iseul) playfully suggests that the lord (reiner) allow the mc to pick which among the group she’d like to guard her while they all determine whether or not she’s being truthful about not knowing anything. this is literally! literally! LITERALLY! how the PILOT EPISODE! of LOVE AND LEGENDS! ENDS!

ARE YOU SERIOUS LMFAAAAAAAAAOOOOOOOOOOO. going through all this is literally fucking HILARIOUS to me like ak;sdfjadsfkl;asdfjlasdf how BOLD and BRAVE do you have to be to so blatantly rip something off and then deny even ever encountering what you stole from adsfkjldfasdfkasd,f. i’m not even super mad bc like.... i torment voltage for funsies. but! LMAO!!!!!!!!

lastly..... as an added bonus to all of the juicy, juicy evidence above. l&l mc has a best friend in the “real”, modern world, who inexplicably has a lookalike in the fantasy world. well..... would you believe it if i told you that the nelroche has one just like it???

that’s right! even sophie and solaire made the plagiarism cut! gotta love those girlies, i’m so happy for them :)

the end!

[icharchivist]

can you talk about your opinion on Wisely ? I kinda have no opinion of him aside from "weird psychic noah who's in the secret with Road, also a slob at using his powers"; so I'd like to be enlightened about him in general/if there's subtle characterization on him or anything

oooh boy that’s gonna be hard. I can pull on essays when I have a starting point on what to say, kinda? but from scratch it’s... complicated. 

Especially since Wisely is kinda recent. I mean I lived his introduction in the manga. And by virtue of being “All Knowing” he has to remain mysterious or else he would ruin the fun, so...

this is kinda the problem with Wisely, we know he knows much, much more than anything we can imagine. So he seems too tied to the lore of the story rather than his own person, so it’s harder to pinpoint stuff about his development the way we can with any of the characters. Even the Bookmen who are linked to the lore aren’t... Living embodiment of that lore and memory like Wisely is.

That said, I kinda love him? 

We have so few scenes with him but what we can gather is that yes he’s all knowing, that he’s a dork, he’s as sadistic as his family, that he LOVES his family, especially the Earl and Road 

Which kinda makes sense? they’re the two that “hadn’t changed” since his days. Even if he knows the others’s “memories” (both litteraly and their noah memory) he’s new and barely know them. Hell if Tyki is anything to go by, Tyki finds him creepy because he creeps into his mind. Wisely can know eVERYTHING about Tyki but Tyki doesn’t know jackshit about Wisely. and that’s the case for everyone else.

Besides, he’s arriving right at the moment everyone has questions about the 14th and the only one who have answers are Road and Wisely. The thing is: Road is surprisingly the “Eldest Sister” of the gang: Since she survived the massacre, she saw the awakening of all the others Noah, and we can see she, for exemple, helped Skinn toward his, making it likely she did the same with the others. So I can see everyone accept Road knowing more than most, they’ve been used to that all along.

But Wisely is the new guy. He’s the last one to come back to life. Everyone should be his “senpai” by “birthstatue” but that punk just came and declared he knew better than everyone else and immediatly started to hit off with Road and the Earl.

Hell, especially for the likes of Sheryl I wonder how much kinship between Road and Wisely might sting. They all would believe they know Road well and all, that she was their eldest figure, that she joked off with them and loved them, and suddenly that new guy arrives and they start to keep secrets together and obviously have a bound that trancended Wisely’s death.

Tbh it’s probably why the guidebook mentioned that Wisely since then made himself join the Kamelot family. He can therefore remain close to Road WHILE pissing Sheryl off. If that’s not a Goal.

If anything though the fact Wisely can only create weird relationship is something that kinda puts his relationships into perspective? He seems like a nice, outgoing guy. He knows what goes on in anyone’s mind. Hell, in the manga’s bonus you even see him kinda like the exorcists. Having no boundaries to explore someone’s mind makes that Wisely can easily pinpoint them out, but yet he doesn’t seem to change his attitude a lot. I imagine he can take a glance at someone’s brain and wonder whenever or not it would be fun to hang around with them or to make their lives hell. It’s kinda fun that he’s not trying to adjust to anyone, he looks for his own fun.

What I loved with the Grey Log was how much apparently, Wisely and Tyki are enjoying “acting like hobos” in front of Fancy Sheryl. (from refusing to take bath to eating fishes out of pounds)  Tyki used to be alone in this disaster but now Wisely 100% supports him. And even more than him just finding out what’s the most fun, this is probably the closest thing we’ll ever get to Wisely connecting to his human life. And the fact he’s still carrying it on with pride is kinda amazing to me? Apparently the Jasdebi twins also love to play dress up with him? which is hilarious? (there’s also a bonus of them bullying Wisely by pulling his bandana if i remember). And he has a pet toad that apparently comes from when he became a Noah. I have no idea what to make of that aside that it is very cute.

So... trying not to look at the guidebook... wisely is so new we barely have enough info on him. And he’s too surrounded by mystery.

I think it’s undeniable that he cares for his family and that he is himself a rather playful person. He knows too much and we don’t know enough so we can’t relate.

Okay so one thing i think about, aside from the fact he kept contact with Road (which is WILD because Sheryl got very angry at the Bookmen and started to go further in his tortures when Road disappeared but somehow wisely could just have cleared it up?? But then I doubt Wisely cares much for whatever the hell they’re doing, and whatever Road is doing must remain a secret even from their family), and that he seems to be very adamant to protect the Earl:

When the Earl has his massive breakdown crying about how he is not Mana, Wisely hugs him tight and tries to calm him down right? Wisely obviously knows something, and it’s even to wonder if he could dig deeper about Mana Walker (even if we KNOW he knew Mana D Campbell). But he remained... so soft. So careful. He saw the Earl’s meltdown and was only preoccuped with making it easier for the Earl. It’s rather sweet and it shows that he has a very concerned side to him.

I think all i can say about Wisely is how... easily he could have been someone else? He could so easily have stayed distant in his own self-important mind. He could so easily be dropping every information he has on people. He could so easily just not care about making connections with people he can read like open books. He could so easily just know what someone would expect and act like it to controle them. But.... all of that isn’t in Wisely. For a All Knowing Character, he’s surprisingly gentle, he’s surprisingly outgoing, fun, trying to make connections. He tries to bound with people on his own terms, with his own preferences.

So i think that’s what I find interesting with Wisely? His archetype could have been anything, hell, it could have been a parallelism to the Bookmen’s lack of emotion (and perhaps the fact he so much as LOVE his peple serves as one, that he doesn’t hold back from having feelings despite his knowledge, that could work as a foil) but mostly the idea we can get of him he’s that he’s sweet and funny and teasing. 

And it was a nice addition to the Noah cast. I mean that we know well, we had the Earl (duh) who’s very sweet and caring, Road who is more playfully teasing and also caring, looking over how everyone deals with their internal issues, overprotective ect... We have Tyki that is extremely bound to his own humanity and therefore has the dilema of being the one who awoke his Noah so much he cant get back ot his human life. We had Skinn who was full of anger and frustration. Then we had The Twins, who represent a cruel childishness, who are always defying their family’s being (while loyal to the cause, they’re just brats). We had Lullubel, more stoic, more duty focused. Then we had Sheryl, the sadistic manipulator, sweet talker who prepares political horrors with a sweet work of tongue. And Nea... who’s Nea. (i’m not really counting the others ones since they’re not that developped. Fiidora perhaps deserves a mention under “sadistically childishly horrifying”)

Wisely works a bit how caring the Earl can be. And the fact he bounded more easily with Road and Tyki is also something to take into account. He’s the knowledge, he’s a manipulator on the feelings he can gather yes, but we also see him as more gentle, more playful, not in the amounts of cruauty we saw the youngest of the cast (.. which just reminded me the twins are actually 18 while Wisely is 17. Not that it matters when Wisely remembers all his past lives but.. still.). 

Ofc while all of them remains a certain amount of sadistic ofc.

Idk i guess it’s.. a question of what he could have been and what he adds to the cast that kinda gets my attention? and there’s mostly a lot to picture in his dynamic with his family and perhaps the Exorcists if we take the Komui Corner for granted.

THIS IS ALL OVER THE PLACE but unless i have an idea where i’m supposed to go i end up.... all over the place.

Idk i like him fine. Not a fav by all account bc i still wait to see how he might develop (if a character like him can develop) but.... we’ll see.

Take care!