Procrastination Report №13

Procrastinated on compiling procrastination reports again, but at least that means I have more than enough to write about, right? If I can even remember half the shit I read two months ago, lol.

How Could a Human Mage Be the Demon God Emperor’s Daughter? (人类魔法师怎么会是魔神皇的女儿) is a gender-bender yuri web novel about the mage Mo Li being defeated by the demon queen and turned into her daughter. Normally, for the “defeated” type gender-bender series, the villain lacks successors and only gains one by converting the enemy hero, which isn’t the case here as Mo Li, now Li Mo, has siblings already. The pacing of this series is absolutely breakneck, with exposition flying by so quickly that I swear they’re just skipping necessary parts to fall back on established tropes. The memory loss aspect typical to these works is present here as well, but the approach is shaken up a bit by the plot beginning before said memories are regained as is the norm. Regardless, Li Mo is still more accepting of her situation due to having acclimated before regaining her memories. She also gets close to people absurdly quickly, which isn’t too appealing for a story, to me. There were only 189 chapters when I started reading this, so I read them all (translator dropped at ch. 116, but I have my ways), so I can only give it a preliminary review of something like 4/10.

Story About Buying My Classmate Once a Week (週に一度クラスメイトを買う話) is a yuri web novel about Miyagi paying her classmate, Sendai, 5000 yen once a week for her time. It’s painfully opposite to the previous web novel; rather than simply hitting checkpoints to claim progress in relationships, this one’s more like carving through concrete with a plastic spoon. Two years in, they still don’t know a damn thing about how each other ended up in this whole situation because they refuse to ask each other anything personal. It’s a good story, well written, I particularly like the alternating point-of-view between chapters, but it’s so very hard to read. I kept just going back to play Anno instead of continuing reading, maybe I’m too fantasy-brained to focus on the girls who somehow agree to live together for four years with a mindset of trying not to get attached. I’ve only managed up to chapter 173, I should really continue at some point, but y’know? Inshallah they fucking talk to each other. 8/10.

The Demon King Loli Who Rules The World Will Never Be a Plaything! (统治世界的魔王小姐绝不做玩物！) is a gender-bender yuri harem isekai web novel about a boy who is forced (she poisoned him) into becoming the Evil God’s pawn in a game against another god to control some random fantasy world. That boy becomes the Demon King and also a short, silver haired girl,¹ taking on the name Luya. The series feels like a cross between OVERLORD (オーバーロード [5/10]) and No Game No Life (ノーゲーム・ノーライフ [5/10]), or maybe and edgier version of The Genius Prince’s Guide to Raising a Nation Out of Debt (天才王子の赤字国家再生術 [5/10])? The way Luya tries to maintain her prestige but just comes off as endearingly adorable instead, reminds me a bit of Is It Funny That The Dragon Slayer Failed And Became The Dragon Princess? (屠龙失败变成龙族公主很好笑吗？[6/10]). The actual premise of the story is reminiscent of “slow life” type isekai, where the protagonist just wants to chill out in another world but keeps getting involved in things; she was promised she could enjoy herself surrounded by hot girls by the Evil God, but she’s too busy trying to fix their failing nation to get around to it. I’d say it approaches that idea much better than Because I’ve Been Reincarnated As A Girl I Just Want To Do Yuri Things, But Things Aren’t Going Well (TS転生したから百合百合したいだけなのに中々うまくいかない [4/10]), at least I wasn’t tearing my hair out about historical misconceptions this time. The story is decently written and nicely contained in its 228 chapter length, which is probably why I was willing to give this a 7/10 after finishing it. However, the author using AI generated images for the characters could easily drop it to a 4/10 if the site I read it on actually² loaded them!

Can The Defeated and Captured Heroine Still Be Happy? (战败被俘的勇者小姐还会幸福吗) is a gender-bender yuri fantasy isekai web novel about the transmigrated hero Monet being defeated by the Dragon Queen Iris only for his System to sacrifice itself to turn him into a dragon girl thereafter named Naya. It’s something of a kitchen sink of a series, which is understandable from a first time web novel author. The issue is how little it follows through on! When Naya acquires a new system, it reawakens memories from before her transformation that were previously lost, which is where the story really begins. At that time, she’s married to Iris, already has a five-year-old daughter, and is not pregnant with another child. Naya contends with suddenly remembering she was a man, a dragon slaying hero, and a transmigrator from Earth in rather short order, if anything she has more issue accepting being a dragon than a woman. In humanoid form, dragons have horns and tails, Naya has little knowledge of what to do with these beyond instinct, and she has never “reverted” to her true dragon form. Beyond some shyness of suddenly realizing she’s in a very intimate relationship with another woman, don’t expect much from the gender-bender aspect here. For a while, there’s a big focus on Naya’s ideas of family, being a human from Earth, and how that contrasts with the culture of this other world, the culture of dragons, and, most importantly, the lineage of dragon royalty. One would be forgiven, perhaps even righteous, to believe Naya has a breeding fetish with how obsessive she is about having and raising children… so is this a child rearing series? Not really. There’s plenty of focus on dealing with their daughter, Ilya, as she matures from a spoiled mommy’s girl into a respectable crown princess, but it gets tossed aside by time skips the moment the series has made it clear she’s on that path. Naya has knowledge from Earth, does she do any isekai type things about it? As a mother and housewife, despite having maids around, she loves cooking for her family, and occasionally will use recipes from her past life. Scientific knowledge, though? There have always been transmigrators from Earth in this world, what can she even offer? A grad school level understanding of astrophysics is basically a prerequisite for understanding the past glory of the dragons, plus the firmament is an illusion constructed by usurper gods anyway. Her System exists to push her to kill Iris, so it’s always at odds with Naya who is obsessively in love with her wife, that plot extends through the entire series at least, since the System is just one of many. Other than the fight against the Main God that backs the System, the only reasonable way to classify the entire series is probably as ecchi, if you accept Chinese censorship circumventing metaphorical lesbian sex as ecchi. Near the climax of the story, we suddenly get a clearer look at the greatness of Dragon Queen Iris as not just a leader, but also an alchemist… it’s Fullmetal Alchemist alchemy. Suddenly, there’s this obsession with immortality thrown in and… I got bored, dropped at chapter 251 (out of 267 + some side stories), 5/10.

This series really makes me want to talk about tagging. I didn’t originally find this on NovelUpdates, so I didn’t see what it was marked as beyond what the translator’s site showed. First off, there’s the “rape,” “rape victim becomes lover,” and “Stockholm Syndrome” tags. These are what I call “blacklisting tags,” basically content warnings. Because these exist mainly to help people avoid topics they’re uncomfortable with, they should be strict. After regaining her memory, Naya is initially hesitant about Iris’s intimacy, not to mention Iris had hidden the fact that she impregnated Naya from her. I’d agree this deserves the “rape” tag for that. The others, though? When Naya was first taken in, she was an experimental subject, and Iris used her genes to create Ilya’s egg via alchemy. Naya wanted Ilya to have a real family, a wish Iris granted by taking Naya as her queen consort. It was only after this that they fell in love and reached the intimacy they have now. At best, you could argue that Naya after regaining memories, sleeping with Iris, then finally accepting her situation completely, could justify these tags if you ignore the fact that she’s uncomfortable specifically because she’s still in love with Iris after regaining memories. On the other hand, the “enemies to lovers” tag is more of a “whitelist tag,” it shouldn’t be applied for technicalities as it’s a trope people generally seek out. Naya was a hero set on defeating Iris, they’re now lovers, it is enemies to lovers, technically. This all happens in the first couple chapters as a summary. It isn’t an enemies to lovers story.

Divine Maiden, Please Devour this Malevolent One (神女大人，请吃掉恶神小姐吧) is a gender-bender yuri mystery romance fantasy web novel about Bai Lianyue, the Terran Malevolence, former hero of some sort, deciding to raise the children of the Divine Maiden she ate. Way back when she was the leader of the heroes, Lianyue was betrayed by her comrade so that he could use her daughter’s power for some weird plot. It’s cool how she decided to eat the monster she was thrown to, which is how she became what she is now: the Terran Malevolence whose mind is usually clouded and is constantly corroded by her own power. Eating the body of a Diving Maiden has stabilized that corrosion, further aided by being around the children of said Maiden. I don’t really enjoy stories where the main character is just kind of an idiot like this, so I didn’t vibe too well with this one. Her adopted daughter wanting to fuck her is kind of neat; did she really learn all this lesbianism from the gay catgirl princess? Who knows. Might come back to this one at some point, the story itself is generally rather interesting, at least up to vol. 3, ch. 27 where I’ve reached. I’ll give this one a 5/10.

Footnotes