Below is the prologue to my as yet untitled light novel. It will appear in irregular installments on this blog. The likelihood of its continuance depends in part on the nourishment it receives from its readers. So please let me know what you think as it develops! And yes, the writing is rough. I just don’t have the time to polish it now. I’ll also come up with a title at some point….
“I wonder if Japanese schools are just like the ones in anime.”
I bet there’s some of you otaku have thought over that very question in your minds… even the smart ones at some point.
I’m not talking about the magic schoolgirls or kids who pilot giant robots in their free time. Even the most figure-obsessed hug pillow-caressing moetard knows that stuff isn’t real, right? But maybe the other stuff, the “slice-of-life” stuff. Special childhood friends; maid cafes at the cultural festivals; precious rabu reta; rooftops where guys and girls confess to each other–or under trees that are always spewing out blossoms at the right time; and tsunderes (who could ever forget about them).
I know I try to act like a guy who’s all jaded, but for a split second these kinds of expectations actually forced their way in to my brain when “oneesama ” (heh heh) said we’d be going to Japanese schools. After spending the first fifteen years (twenty-three in my sister’s case) of our lives in the US, we were going to the land where our mother was born. Dad’s business was taking him there and we were going to trail along as usual, Sis to a college and me to a… well you know… to where students clean their classrooms and bow to teachers and where the girls wear those uniforms and some might even be tsun and dere. I was gonna find out first hand if all those weeaboo fantasies were true or not. Yes, I liked anime and manga and even the occasional fan service, but I didn’t wear fandom on my sleeve like squealing idiots at the anime cons I usually avoided. But would ideas unconsciously implanted deep in my psyche by years of exposure to 2-D girls warp my reactions? I knew my own tendencies were always to and when I went to my room after talking with Sis, my single wall scroll of bikini clad Mikuru and Haruhi seemed to taunt me almost irrepressible desires. Would there be clubs like in Genshiken and K-on? Could I actually end up with my own harem and to a hot springs and…… “STOP!!! Real life is just not like that! Leave your wall scroll behind! It’ll be just like the stupid schools here except you won’t understand half of what they’re saying cause your Japanese sucks!”
But Haruhi and Mikuru were up there looking down at me. What kind of girl might end up sitting in class next to me? Some tsundere or meganekko or nekomimi or ….
“To hell with it,” I said (yes, I was addressing the 2-D girls directly), “I’m not gonna be afraid of my own fantasies. I am who I am and I’ll just accept whatever happens.”
As it turned out, worries about otaku sterotypes would be the least of my problems. I should have read up more on mahou shoujo, mahoutsukai and Narutard justsus after all…
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Too much jargon here. Cut some. The premises are interesting, but the “in Japan” part will be decisive. Continue.
Agree with Smankh about the jargon. Or, if you want to keep the jargon, I’d use it in a context that an average reader would understand, or include a one-word description in parentheses after each word of jargon. And since a rough copy can be miraculously transformed when polished, I don’t know if the rest of the story is worth reading or not, based on this. The beginning doesn’t quite draw me in enough to care…yet. Still, I’d like to see where this story ends up. Continue.
For the topic of jargon, I don’t think it matters if you’re only posting it here. It’ll be tricky if you want to use it outside of anime fandom though.
Anyway, I’m curious enough to keep reading.