There was a Ninja, some woman with green hair named Gertrude, probably my sister Vengeance, and Lord Skywalker. You know. The one that likes to snorkle.) colabed on a story! Erin Vs. Giant Crab or Now My Favorite Color is Blue! Patreon Reward for A.P.O.N.I. · 8:41pm Oct 7th, 2018
Heya, readers!
As you may recall I dropped Threadbare like a bad habit for my Patreon rewards things on account of how angry each chapter was making me and A.P.O.N.I. gave me another thing to start reading. In this case, it’s a tale called The Wandering Inn. No telling on how good the quality is, but hey! At least I won’t be constantly interrupted by stat increases and a character gaining class lev-
[Innkeeper Class Obtained!]
[Innkeeper Level 1!]
[Skill – Basic Cleaning obtained!]
[Skill – Basic Cooking obtained!]
You mouther f*@%er
Anyhow, I went through installments 1.00 – 1.02 before I figured I had a good amount to get a blog going.
We’ll start with the elephant sized floating words in the room. First off, I had no idea ‘person or people stuck in an RPG game system’ was some sort of sub-genre, but here we are. Second of all, it’s actually substantially less intrusive her then in Threadbare. Notice the lack of bold. It also only happened twice in the three ‘instalments’ so it’s breaking the flow wasn’t so much a thing. In fact, any break felt natural enough given our main character herself was distracted.
Speaking of which, what we have here is a classic “spirited away” situation where our lead finds themselves in another world. If only she had paid more attention to her public service announcements. On the plus side, she’s female, so the chances of her having a personality are substantially higher than usual.
Sadly, that probably also means she’ll miss out on a pretty substantial harem, but who knows. Plenty of time to be surprised.
Erin runs into a wooden building of some sort to escape from some ugly-children sized creatures she assumes are goblins given she also had to run away from a dragon. She has no idea where the dragon came from as she saw no indication of spells or a summoning circle which is an utterly bizarre thought to have given she also doesn’t believe in magic. That’s perhaps somewhat nitpicky on my part, and there’s an in narrative thing that may serve as an explanation later (her interests) for her train of thought, but at the time it bumped me.
Any-who, she makes it into a somewhat foreboding inn, decides it’s too dusty to sleep in, cleans a bit, levels up, and then falls asleep, which gets us party way into 1.02.
I suppose this would be a good time to bring up the pacing. It’s actually not as bad as that sentence up there makes it seem. The first chapters do spend a fair amount of time just describing what’s going through Erin’s mind and what she’s doing which isn’t exactly the most exciting, but the prose carries it well enough. I personally wouldn’t mind if it moved things along a bit faster, but we’re just getting started. I will say the opening could have been much improved with a tweak or two. For starters, it opens with a description of the Inn and then a couple paragraphs later Erin shows up and then we switch to her perspective. I think it would have worked better to do everything from Erin’s perspective OR everything from the Inn’s perspective, regardless if it is even cognitive of what’s going on, then shift to Erin for 1.01. That could just be personal perspective, but the narrative from an object’s point of view is something I enjoy when I’m not bombarded by bold character changes. As you might imagine, a fair amount of words gets thrown at just about everything Erin does initially. Personally, I’d probably move things along quicker, but I tend to spend a lot of time just having my characters banter.
This brings us to the next bit, Erin is utterly alone and occasionally just… talks to herself. Having a character sort of narrate what they’re doing and what’s going on to themselves is a hard thing to pull off, and I’d say things are going… okay at this point. Though I’d think Erin would either cover things through internal thinking, Like this, or at least lampshade all the talking to herself she’s doing.
Anyhow, next morning Erin figures she better feed herself and wanders outside where she’s almost destroyed by a horrible rock-crab monster!
Okay, imagine this but not as cute.
Being the bad-ass young woman that she is with one level of Inn Keeper to her name, she takes stock of the situation and… runs for her flipping life! Well played online book thing I'm reading. Well played.
Eventually, she gets away and finds a tree with fruit that she lacks the strength to climb, so she punches it in frustration and is rewarded with fruit. Said fruit is hairy and blue. Erin wisely scopes it out before hoping it won’t kill her and find that the outside is edible if having a weird texture but it contains a massive seed pod that when smashed open is full of something that smells like anti-freeze and is something of an irritant. So basically, it’s a blue peach-jackfruit hybrid with a free poison toy inside!
With this in mind, she hatches a plan and goes off to face her mortal enemy. After the rock crab does a fake out that ends in Erin turning her back on it and the thing sneak-running 20 feet in a few seconds, which is pretty terrifying to visualize, she nails it with a seed pod right in the antenna eye causing it to flip out and try to rip off its own sensory organ thing.
This again, but in horrible pain! Suffer!
Having successfully dealt with the crab, she realized she should grab more fruit, leaves to do so, and then runs into two Goblins.
Having just taken out some sort of rock mutation crustacean, Erin steels her courage and… runs… runs for her life.
Before this “Chapter” ends, we’re given Erin’s Tinder profile for some reason.
Erin Solstice, age 20. A young girl—woman from Michigan with a casual interest in video games and a deep obsession with strategy games. Her hobbies include snowboarding, watching Youtube videos, playing chess, shogi, go, etc. She dreams of one day becoming a professional strategy game commentator.
So, general thoughts are that the story and narrative are maintaining a decent level of interest. Not so much that I’m hungry for what’s next, but at least it wasn’t like dragging my eyes over BOLD flow-interrupting needles. Erin has at least avoided being anything resembling a Mary Sue with all the running away from thins she does, however, she’s definitely a bit of a blank slate. Sure, the profile helps establish that she’s not necessarily a big walking “blah” for the reader to switch places with, however, I couldn’t tell you anything about her besides what’s up there, for the most part. I don’t know almost anything about her personality aside from some basics like she’s clever enough, she’s quite miffed she’s in a video game world, and at least has enough moxie to get up and solve her immediate problems. Likely a lot of this stems from the story not giving her anyone to talk to.
Still, a big miss for me in Erin is at no point did she really stop to think about her home, or how she gets back there, or her family, or even a friend. It still leaves her as something like an empty canvas that one could easily see themselves in. It could be that she just wasn’t too attached to her home or anyone, but her hobbies aren’t exactly ones you can really indulge in by yourself and her dream would require not being in a fantasy setting unless there’s magic Youtube. Hopefully, her character just gets a bit more depth, because without her having friends and family to miss, who in turn would miss her, my investment in this is tied to how I feel about Erin specifically and well, we’re still in the shallow end in regards to liking her.
Still, we just got started so there’s plenty of time to establish this few, minor details like an entire personality and how much she’s missed back home/cares to get back.
Anyhow, since I references it, enjoy this song I like that has little to nothing to do with the story itself.
Alright, well more on this later this month if I can keep this reward pace up!
THEN BOY DO I HAVE 3 ANIME FOR YOU! And no, none of them are SAO. Though the latest Abridged episode of that is out. One is darker, one is ecchi, the other is generally more relaxed.
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Grimgar, Konosuba, and Log Horizon?
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In order, Overlord, How Not To Summon A Demon Lord and Death March To The Parallel World Rhapsody. Yes I know they're weird names, blame Japan.
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There's officially too many isekai.
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Eh, these 3 are actually solid.
Technically, this is a spoiler, but eventually it's revealed that she's not letting herself stop to think about those things, because otherwise she'd break down entirely, be unable to function, and die.
You may find, as I did that some of the characters tend to make the same bad decisions over and over. This is intentional character design, and is noticed and commented on by the other characters. I'm just saying, if they're doing something that frustrates you, it's on purpose.
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Honestly, I was fine with Erin's actions and don't mind her making mistakes. I'd be far more irritated if she was hypercompetent in this new world. I do feel the lack of covering her personal life is a bit of a miss. I tend to shun characters who are easily replaceable by the observer as I mentioned in my mary sue post, but things are early on enough that I'm not going to outright say that's what she is. Her hobbies do lend me to believe she was designed to be "marketed" to the same group that play RPGs, which I don't know is really a point against the story or just good planning. I will feel a bit more comfortable with her if her hobbies come into play, especially snowboarding.