What I like the most is how the world just doesn't accept her.In most isekais, everybody accepts that MC is super good, and then they can do anything the world will accept them as being the heroes.But in Honzuki, Myne has to always thread lightly.
>>291310039Best is a matter of personal preference, but Honzuki gets a lot of points for the isekai element of the show being not just relevant, but central to the story. It isn't just an excuse for a blank POV character for the audience to insert as, the story legitimately wouldn't work without Myne having knowledge from another world. Most isekai is trash because the fact that the MC is from Earth basically stops mattering sometime during the first episode and then gets only the rarest of mentions after that. Massive time skips, cheat powers, and other isekai tropes often overwrite whatever personality or connection to Earth the protagonist had to the point that their origins are less relevant to the story than the powers they got handed for showing up in the new world. Honzuki and Red Ranger in Another World both hinge on the protagonist being outsiders to the setting. Konosuba works not just because its a comedy, but because Kazuma *acts* like a genre savy shithead with modern sensibilities such that you could never mistake him for a local. Mushoku Tensei is at its best when its dealing with the consequences of Rudy's previous life and his past failings, and at its worst when its just another indulgent fantasy, etc.Honzuki does have the benefit of being the best 'traditional' isekai of the bunch, in the mode of A Confederate Yankee in King Arthur's Court as opposed to Sword Art Online with the numbers filed off. Easily in the top five best isekai stories, even if the top spot might go to something with better pacing.
>>291310039Juuni Kokki/Twelve Kingdoms is better IMO, and better for being hard on its protagonist. But Honzuki is very good.
It is top tier, not sure about best though
Honzuki is very enjoyable but I wouldn't say it's the best.What's unique about it is that it becomes a comedy of manners which is not a very common genre in isekai or in anime, manga, and light novels in general. The comedy of manners aspects ramp up in part 3 but they only fully blossom in Part 4. Keep in mind that Parts 1, 2, and 3 are only 12 volumes combined, part 4 is 9 volumes, and part 5 is 12 volumes, so the anime so far has only really adapted the first third of the story.The political and social system of the world also feels quite fleshed out and realistic, which is why the comedy of manners aspect works so well. Nobles who are nobles because magic is hereditary and they have magic is an old trope, so actually seeing someone put in the effort makes it fun again.I think where it suffers is that Myne/Rozemyne's character development is mostly relegated to parts 1 and 2. I also think the story somewhat underdelivers on the progress of the printing industry as Part 5 becomes mostly about large scale political events and the technological innovation that was the main driver in parts 1 and 2 increasingly fades into the background. Finally, and tbf, this is isekai, so this is to be expected, but the themes of the series are not as complex as the length of it would warrant in terms of literary merit.That being said, Honzuki is the only isekai where I actually bothered to go read the source material, so I can probably only give a definitive verdict after going and reading the other contenders like Mushoku Tensei, Re:Zero, etc
>>291310039The LN is one of the top ten of all time for me. The Manga adaptation, though not quite as nuanced, is also high-tier. The anime adaptation, however, is pretty disappointing. They've dumbed it down to an annoying degree and created a generic shoujo show from it.
>>291310039AoaB is very well written... So good that people often tend to miss the glaring flaws:- Ferdinand overshadowed Rozemyne in the climax of the story (second half of part 5)- adults are retarded because the plots needs them to be, so teenagers can solve all the problems (e.g. Florencia, Grausam, Oswald, Aub Dunkelfelger second wife)- Kazuki is very good at worldbuilding in the micro, but misses entirely on the macro (10000 years of history unaccounted, time-loops fallacies, external influences of other countries, etc...). And even in the micro there are holes (colours=?DP, mana sense ±30%, mana crisis that effectively doesn't exist, etc...).- Major deaths offscreened- 10 years old children that have a social intelligence of a 40 years old experienced politician So yeah, extremely entertaining but it can't be top-tier.
>>291310039The best Isekai is Lord of Mysteries, but the one that is unrivalled in using the themes the genre offers is Mushoku Tensei.
>>291310039>>291310719"Having it hard" is a bad quality indicator, just like how in /v/idya just making more bosses HP sponges to raise the difficulty doesn't make games automatically better either. And in the first place, making the journey harder for the protagonist only to appease a notion of having to "justify" a protagonist's successes as "being deserved" as if the audience is some kind of karmameter has always been a cucked and self-deprecating position to take.>>291310402Your take is even worse. On top of treating the audience as a karmameter, you are additionally demanding for the story to blow its load instantly for no reason and demand that a singular aspect (isekai) needs to permeate throughout the entire story constantly and without breaks. But an author has no obligation to do that. The bare minimum that should be expected of the isekai aspect is to serve as a Checkhov's Gun and be shot once, which could, for example, be at the very end of the story to serve the function of "closing the circle" or such, and does not have the obligation to be used as something like a hypothetical "Checkhov's Brand-Name" like you are suggesting. Everything beyond that is just a matter of personal preference. You might want the isekai aspect to permeate a bit, a lot, or throughout the entire story, but all that is optional. Depending on what purpose the isekai aspect has in the story, it might even result in cases where it MUST only become truly relevant in the later parts of the story because multiversal-scale plot points can hardly be followed-up by village-scale or town-scale events afterwards, i.e. it's a matter of scale progression.Seeing such dogshit quality-indicators be used to praise and simultaneously set a an upper limit to Honzuki is quite perplexing. And I like Honzuki.
>>291313599There's no mana crisis?
>>291310039still, the novel is better.>>291310719still, the scroll is better.
Frieren is still a better isekai.
It's another retarded take on the genre by someone who thinks themselves smarter than anyone else.Myne introducing the concept of "soup" to this otherworld is retarded for the simple reason that throwing stuff into one pot of boiling water until it is cooked is the most basic application of cooking imaginable.The author probably saw some westerner cook potatoes and then discard the water without understanding that the water is full of solanine from the potatoes. Solanine is soluble in hot water which is why you must not reuse the water you cooked potatoes with.But stupid retarded isekai authors don't care about why things are done the way they are, they think themselves smarter than the westerners, pardon, the otherworlders who live in not-Europe, ignoring the fact that cooking stuff in one pot is the most basic of cooking techniques other than outright grilling stuff on an open flame.
>>291314524>Myne introducing the concept of "soup" to this otherworld is retarded for the simple reason that throwing stuff into one pot of boiling water until it is cooked is the most basic application of cooking imaginable.The difference is that in this setting there is the possibility that the cooked vegetables after cooking them and being in contact with certain other vegetables suddenly mutate into a huge man-eating plant and kill you and your entire family. This becomes an even greater risk when the household includes someone with mana, like a ley-noble family demoted into a commoner family or a family that has a child with the devouring. It makes sense that such tragic cases happening from time to time impacts the culture to be less willing to experiment with food than what we on Earth are used to, especially since when such a tragedy does occur, rather than being informed about it properly, you'll probably just get some ley-noble being ordered by a higher noble to deal with the aftermath, so the ley-noble just sends a random servant into the lower city to order all commoners to not experiment with food dishes or something and then 20-30 years later everyone involved including the nobles have already all forgotten about such a prohibition even existing since it was not even worth making a magic contract for and then only the inclination not to experiment with food remains.
There's a shitposter getting attached to it, yeah.
>>291313936There is, but when you see all attendants archnobles literally just using their mana to power some appliances and knights dropping all their mana into training, the real questions becomes: are they all retarded or the plot needs them to be retarded? Also, I am aware your mana can be used against you with spells or entering your secret rooms, but there are devices to transport your mana across dimensions, surely you can make one to bring it directly to the foundation (albeit with less efficiency as seen with RF).
Frieren is better
>>291315130It's enjoyable, but it's derivative. The best thing that came out of Frieren is the music imo
>>291313921I can't remember the last time I saw so many bad takes in a single post like this.
>>291314410reminder not to bark if you didn't read it raw.anime isn't too far behind the novel because it at least has the real language.
>>291315214even the music is hard to listen to there lol.i have to crank the compressor to 1.7 so my ears don't get blasted by uh, evan call's dynamic range fetish.look at that faggot's tracks.but sure, i liked the ost overall.>>291312704>Myne/Rozemyne's character development is mostly relegated to parts 1 and 2.shouldn't have jurewe'd her for 2 years just to extend her weak ignorant position in society into hogwarts hm? maybe then she would have had growth, if she were more experienced in year 1.>underdelivers on the progress of the printing industryexactly right. crafting kino mostly died in part 3. horrible sin.
>>291314524>Don't wash vegetables -> make soup -> stillbirth Mmh I wonder why people didn't make soup
>>291310039Everything before being adopted is painfully slow and boring. Almost nothing is foreshadowed about the larger world, and Myne frequently comes off as unreasonable to her family. Her sudden attachment to life as a commoner and her family after joining the church actually feels delusional. Also despite being targeted multiple times and having people like Ferdinand with intelligence networks looking after her, she's extremely passive about allowing more people to threaten and attack her. That lack of agency is infuriating and feels like cheap drama. I think it isn't until part 4 that the story gets decent.
>>291310039>>291310719Just suffering constantly doesn't make a story compelling.
>>291317229Humans have washed their vegetables and cooked soup since before recorded history.It is unthinkable a civilization formed without these cooking techniques.Not to mention that cooking vegetables kills all the bacteria in it. And rotten vegetables smell bad so you don't even attempt to cook them on an instinctual level.Don't even attempt to defend this trash.
>>291317484good thing honzuki is a slice of life with a good amount of comedy
>>291317513Retard, see >>291314715
>>291315015Keeping the status quo is just that important.
>>291318185Not just that, but humans will always prioritize their current accepted quality of life over a background existential threat that will arise eventually if they don't tighten their belt.Until the mana shortage ACTUALLY is on their doorstep and preventing society from functioning, thats a later problem that someone else can solve.
>>291317463>Her sudden attachment to life as a commoner and her family after joining the church actually feels delusional.It's explained thorough the whole series that Myne likes familial intimacy, which the Noble society doesn't allow for.
>>291318373yeah man so many volumes passed until she got one hug from elvira
>>291318324The actual stakes of the mana shortage aren't even understood by the highest echelons of the society due to the cascading mishap of how Grutrissheit transfer is handled. They would have sooner found themselves on dunes than change their ways I think.
>>291310039>In most isekais, everybody accepts that MC is super goodEh? I didn't watch many isekais but they largely follow the same tropes>underdog / ostracized / somehow else crippled protagonist>he/she does something>he/she wins the favour of some side characters>rinse and repeat
Finished the last book of Part 5 few days ago. I read it for the great sense of world building and foreign values. Differences in perspective are also depicted really well. Myne being an absolute dork is a nice plus. Angelica is the best girl though.It being isekai is kind of besides the point.
>>291319303The problem is people will read/watch this show because it's isekai
>>291320119I don't get the popularity of isekai. For writers it's easy literary device to inject a familiar viewpoint into a story, but for readers I don't see the inherent appeal. Most of it isn't that interesting thanks to the same tendency that causes most isekai writers to pick it in the first place.
>>291310039Is this shit good? I only got vaguely interested in because I heard WIT did the latest season
>>291320632wit has worse direction than ajiado, unironically.
>>291318150You're replying to a soupnigger. They haven't watched more than 5 minutes of the show.
>>291320774i didn't know suzaku was here
>>291320774>They haven't watched more than 5 minutes of the show.And why would someone watch more than 5 minutes of generic isekai garbage to determine it unworthy of their time?It's the same disgusting slop as everything else and people defending crap like this is a net loss for all anime.
>>291310039No. Myne is a fucking retard.
>>291321265So you admit that you don't watch it? And you're going to be telling others whether it's worth their time or not while not having invested any time yourself? What kind of retard behavior is that? Especially when centering the entire ""critique"" on the soup shit which even fans of the series acknowledge as dumb and which is entirely irrelevant for the rest of the series.
it's been a while, but i watched the first 2 seasons and they were quite awful. and not just from the QUALITY production. something bothered me about the writing too. i cant put my finger on it anymore, but the way some of the characters behaved and (to a lesser degree) the storybeats felt really off.
If you can get the story from the anime, which barely even got a page right, I will commend you.I genuinely feel pity for Honzuki's anime-only. At least read the manga. Shizuka's art and direction is top-notch. They even waited for her to finish Part 2 manga to start on Part 5 manga.
>>291323088I initially picked up the manga and ended up reading it when I got tired of waiting for manga chapters. Is the anime really that bad?
>>291310402Posts like these are why I avoid these "better" shows. Its like they take genre conventions that were done for a reason (that they didn't like) and just throw it out without compensating for why people liked them at all.
I like that Myne wields her knowledge of another world to survive. Initially it is just for convenience to make the life of a dirt poor peasant more palatable. In Part 1 and 2 this is what, imo, makes you hooked on the story.With Part 3, it changes from being about convenience to being about survival. Sylvester would have summarily executed her and her family as any noble in this world have if he had not been convinced of the value printing could bring. It also massively expands on the world and introduces actual stakes. In that sense, I consider Part 1 and 2 the prologue.Just in terms of fantasy world building I think Honzuki is the best that has come out of Japan.
>>291323407That would be a better argument if people hadn't been taking the piss out of the standard isekai tropes for being dogshit for like a decade, anon. Yes, isekai LNs remain popular in Japan. Otaku support a lot of garbage, you know this. Unless you want to make the argument that popularity means quality, which you already should know is a losing stance.
>>291310039What? This applies to every isekai unless the isekai in question has the MC being ultra OP, the only difference in Honzuki is that every character acts beyond retarded for no clear reason, they just suddenly have brain farts left and right, latest episode might be one of the worst isekai episodes ever made.
>>291313734I'll check out Lord of Mysteries.>MTI would suggest you check out Bookworm if you read LNs. I would rate the Honzuki anime somewhat behind MT's anime but the LN is pretty much hands-down the best LN in existence.
