Hello Bookworms,
the votes have been counted and I present you the
2024 Lemmy LightNovel Awards Winners!
Best Volume
WINNER: Ascendance of a Bookworm: Part 5 Volume 12 (a.k.a. Part 5: Avatar of a Goddess Vol.12)
Runner Up: Didn’t I Say to Make My Abilities Average in the Next Life?! - Vol. 18
Best Debut
WINNER: Exp Is Golden: Volume 1
Runner Up: Zilbagias the Demon Prince: How the Seventh Prince Brought Down the Kingdom Volume 1
Best Protagonist
WINNER: Rozemyne (Myne) from Ascendance of a Bookworm
Runner Up: Fran from Reincarnated as a Sword
Best Antagonist
WINNER: Gervasio from Ascendance of a Bookworm
Runner Up: Erwaermen from Ascendance of a Bookworm
Best Supporting Character
WINNER: Hartmut from Ascendance of a Bookworm
Runner Up: Karion from Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody
Best Couple or Duo
WINNER: Karion & Urion from Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody
Runner Up: Fran & Teacher from Reincarnated as a Sword
Best Author
WINNER: Miya Kazuki for Ascendance of a Bookworm
Runner Up: Hiro Ainana for Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody
Best Illustrator
WINNER: You Shiina for Ascendance of a Bookworm
Runner Up: Llo for Reincarnated as a Sword
Best Worldbuilding
WINNER: Ascendance of a Bookworm
Runner Up: Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody
Best Overall Series
WINNER: Ascendance of a Bookworm
Runner Up: Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody
Congratulations to all the Winners. Thanks to everyone that participated ba nominating and voting and special thanks to @wjs018@ani.social for doing all the behind the scenes work to make this possible.
Also check out the winners for the Manga and Anime sister awards.
And if anyone is interested in the raw data they can view it here
My issue wasn't the quantity, but the quality. Things like the peasants living in super colorful housing even though paint is supposed to be expensive, or the peasants not knowing how to make pancakes despite having all the ingredients on-hand. The first one at least I could easily see being an anime-original mistake.
I don’t remember anything about paint being expensive. Just about ink. And I don’t remember pancakes. Myne sells the recipe for pound cakes and only after sugar trickles down into Ehrenfest. I have never made pound cakes so I have no idea if it’s something that would be obvious to make but I think it’s believable enough to just run with it.
And TBH, If you’re saying those nitpicks are enough to disqualify Bookworm from that category then you’ll have to disqualify every other light novel as well, because I can promise you that I can find way worse for everything else.
Bookworm has fan books with tons and tons of background infos and world building that didn’t make it into the books. Its own Silmarillion if you so will.
I get it. Some people don’t like it. It’s a story about a female protagonist without any cheat skills that literally nearly dies from taking a flight of stairs. Not exactly the usual power fantasy many people are looking for in those this media. It’s also one of the slowest paced stories out there and the anime adaptation is an atrocity. All things that makes it understandable if someone doesn’t like it. But saying that it doesn’t have good world building is just objectively wrong or in bad faith.
It comes up about 13 minutes into episode 33, when they're trying to figure out how to make colored ink.
The pancake thing happens about 10 minutes into the third episode.
None of this has anything to do with my complaints. If anything, this is why I watched it in the first place. I was hoping for something with a bit more thought put in than most isekai stories get.
It's subjective. In good faith, I'm saying I didn't like the world building. I find inconsistencies like the paint thing very distracting when the supposed scarcity of these materials is supposed to be a huge driver of the plot. Maybe if you only compare it with other light novels it has good world building, but I don't see why I'd hold light novels to a lower standard of quality than normal novels since both categories are competing for my time. And maybe the peasant housing is only painted bright colors in the anime and not the light novel, and the light novel does a better job with these details. That's what I was hoping to find out by posting about this in the first place.
I think in the Anime the houses are made more colourful to give more visual effects. I don’t remember paint or colour being mentioned in the LN apart from possibly the North of the city where the guilds and Bennos Store is. (The rich part)
The Pancakes / Parucakes were because the parufruits husks were used for bird feed as there was no taste. It’s because of Mynes knowledge that she combined the tasteless husks with the liquid to make a tasty food. As sugar is expensive there is only Paru fruits to use as sweetener, They also only come rarely in winter so it is not a common food.
Good to hear.
The issue I have with that is that historically it's taken a lot more than that to stop poor people from eating things, and from figuring out how to eat things. In Nordic regions it used to be common to mix flour made from tree bark with other, less shitty flours during times of famine. It kinda felt to me like the author was looking down on peasants just so the main character could be cool or whatever.