Reading With Yun! - 01122020
I was debating on whether to actually start 'Reading with Yun!' with this series, for various reasons:
- The translation is nowhere near finishing >> Which also decreased my interest in starting to read the novel, to begin with... I really dislike the feeling of chasing after updates... Hahaha. Ironic, right? When I'm a translator and so I won't have any readers at all if everyone thought this way...
- By the fourth chapters or so... I already started having a bit of a bias against the MC...
But! I figured I had to start somewhere, so... I'll just start here, with this novel...
The Protagonists Are Murdered By Me
There are spoilers below! There are spoilers below! There are spoilers below!
A brief intro to the novel using information from NovelUpdates, which I have also linked above...
This is a Korean unlimited/infinite flow webnovel that follows an MC who jumps around to hunt down protagonists, killing them to absorb their abilities.
One of the reasons I decided to start this novel though it's currently only 61/253 translated was that this was an infinite flow. To me, this implies that there would be various suitable 'resting points" for me to wait on updates when the MC is jumping between the 'worlds'. Otherwise, I would have had to turn a continuous timeline into disjointed fragments... Which is a no-go for me.
So reasons I wanted to read this novel:
- It's infinite flow, which also means I get to see more worlds all at one stop. It's like a mall~
- The MC sounded cool. Whether I enjoy a novel is heavily dependent on how much I like the MC, agree with the MC's decision, how much I can empathize with their thought process... That sort of thing. I want to think that this... is also true for most readers?
Continuing with the topic of MCs, my favorability from lowest to highest goes something like this:
naive, white lotus, holy mother, spoiled >> very human-like >> cold, calculative, rational, ambivalent
Where, when I say 'white lotus' and 'holy mother', I meant real 'white lotuses' and real 'holy mothers'. As for the fake ones, it depends on the specifics of how they are described. For example, Ji Anran of Fierce Silk Flower is a fake white lotus, sort of, no?
Well, back to the novel at hand...
The novel started off similar to a certain gaming novel, where the MC was paid to "retire" from his current guild/company. And this was due to the fact that he could no longer engage in their line of work because of his health... He's dying.
Which I found... That completely makes sense, no? Like, which company would keep someone who can't work anymore even though he had worked there for ages? But then... He went on to lament the fact that they're letting him go for a minuscule amount compared to those who actually died in the line of duty or retired from the line of duty...
To which I express... I guess? But what was going through my head was just: as long as you have enough to last you until you die... That is enough, no? It's not like you have any family to leave the money to like the others.
This was just the just chapter, throughout which I just felt that the MC lamented on how the world was treating him because of his lack of value? It really sounded like an inferiority complex.
Then, of course, to get things started, he receives THE opportunity. And the question he was asked was:
"If you could hunt down with your own hands, the heroes who made you enter the path of a loser and take their abilities... Would you do it?"
...
My question was... One's abilities are one's own. While a person may be inferior or superior when compared to another, one doesn't "become a loser" because of other people's capabilities! To me, 'being a loser' is self-prescribed... At least at this moment, how I define a loser is someone who when compared to others was considered inferior, but they would only lament on their weakness and gaze hungrily, jealously, enviously at those who were 'superior'. To me, a loser is one weak at heart and mind and not one who physically couldn't compare to others.
Anyway, we all know the MC accepted and soon went on his first hunt... Killed that first protagonist and received an A+ rank ability. And... It was after he killed the other and got back that he asked the system what kind of sins the protagonist committed...
To which the system listed a series of crimes... Which I took with a grain of salt. After all, the life of a protagonist isn't always smooth-sailing either... There is no way to ascertain what led up to those 'crimes'.
The MC's response was... That he was glad he could consider this new 'hunting' as killing villains.
...
My morality may be iffy... I'm also rather gullible... But, I can't seem to force myself to buy into that 'excuse' of a whitewashing.
To me, the MC sounded just the same as that protagonist he killed. At the end of the day, it was still that same greed. For the MC's world, he is on his way to becoming its own protagonist...
I think it would be nice if, at some point, there would be another person who comes to his world for the same mission - to hunt him. If the 'system' existed to level off these world-killing protagonists, there is no way that nothing would be done to him.
So after this first kill, of course, he powered up, confirmed that his health had stabilized, etc. By this point, it kind of felt similar to Solo Leveling, but it felt like a lower quality and more cliched version of Solo Leveling.
I quite liked Solo Leveling, sans the 'romance' and the ending/truth, maybe.
And then... Speaking of romance, a female character - Celeste - was introduced.
I read somewhere that there was no harem, but honestly, I rather have a poor harem plotline than a weak romance plotline. I feel that for a lot of male MC novels where they had one woman that they 'absolutely had to protect', the author only added it in because a male protagonist needs a partner but they also didn't want to open the can of worms that is 'harem'. So they just threw one in however they could and called it a day. [[Cue romance of Solo Levelling and The Desolate Era]]
And this all leads to where I am up to... Where Celeste sort of idolizes the MC now? I really hope she's not the female lead...
I liked Solo Levelling enough to finish reading it... And like I said, this is like a lower quality but more cliches version, so I do plan to continue reading for now...
Will update with more rants on this if there are any...
Until next time!
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