Oshi no Teki ni Natta node - Vol. 2 Ch. 13

[MangaDex]

 

[Shrimperor]

fan tour poggers

 

[razorshaleh]

Is this spoiler for future chapters ??

thank you for translation

 

[AgniZet]

So Nega Messiah did not know Ibuki helped Hinata thus by extension PL take down Gouki. I would like there to be a follow up but I kinda doubt there will be one.

 

[UdenEmpati]

The author kinda screwed up having him live in that world for so long instead of getting transported over as an adult, I think.

He's been in a place where he'd be treated as a second-class citizen at best for like 15 years, and he still treats the world and everyone in it like it's a story and they're all just characters instead of real people. It comes across as jarring, because after that amount of time you'd expect him to be more grounded about things and not just fanboying over all of this, because he should have had time to see first-hand how dangerous it all is, and how serious the stakes are.

Even just having him "take over" the body/life of someone who was close to Hinata would work, if that rapport needed to be established over a long period of time. But as-is, he's just acting like a spectator, and not someone mired in the consequences of the world and what happens in it.

Makes it hard to care about him, because he himself is treating this all as though it's a big cosplay festival of his favorite story.

Even when he first realized he might die at the hands of Rui a few chapters back, he was surprised, like he didn't actually understand the situation he had put himself in for so long, of being on the side of "the terrorists" in a world that hates men.

And seeing him so unaffected by the constant low-grade hate aimed his way so pervasively just makes him seem like he doesn't take the world seriously, which is also immersion-breaking as a reader.

And a lot of this would be solved if he had only just gotten here, and was still in that starstruck phase of not fully internalizing how immense the stakes are to this place. The setting is pretty harshly dystopian in a sense, with the systemic classist sexism and a resistance movement treated as ideological villains. So for him to be so blasé about it all makes it hard to care about seeing anything done about it, and he's been here for like 15 years, which should be enough time to have the "fan boy" beaten out of him a bit.

 

[n3na3]

the child executive is a representative of the reader.

 

[DirtEater21]

Thank you for the translation

 

[ExileTheBlank]

I just really hope this doesn't get axed

 

[ShionVaynex]

The author kinda screwed up having him live in that world for so long instead of getting transported over as an adult, I think.

He's been in a place where he'd be treated as a second-class citizen at best for like 15 years, and he still treats the world and everyone in it like it's a story and they're all just characters instead of real people. It comes across as jarring, because after that amount of time you'd expect him to be more grounded about things and not just fanboying over all of this, because he should have had time to see first-hand how dangerous it all is, and how serious the stakes are.

Even just having him "take over" the body/life of someone who was close to Hinata would work, if that rapport needed to be established over a long period of time. But as-is, he's just acting like a spectator, and not someone mired in the consequences of the world and what happens in it.

Makes it hard to care about him, because he himself is treating this all as though it's a big cosplay festival of his favorite story.

Even when he first realized he might die at the hands of Rui a few chapters back, he was surprised, like he didn't actually understand the situation he had put himself in for so long, of being on the side of "the terrorists" in a world that hates men.

And seeing him so unaffected by the constant low-grade hate aimed his way so pervasively just makes him seem like he doesn't take the world seriously, which is also immersion-breaking as a reader.

And a lot of this would be solved if he had only just gotten here, and was still in that starstruck phase of not fully internalizing how immense the stakes are to this place. The setting is pretty harshly dystopian in a sense, with the systemic classist sexism and a resistance movement treated as ideological villains. So for him to be so blasé about it all makes it hard to care about seeing anything done about it, and he's been here for like 15 years, which should be enough time to have the "fan boy" beaten out of him a bit.

he isnt exactly treated as second class. more like 1.5. i know it sounds like im just nitpicking but that 0.5 is important.

unlike actual second class. he is more seen as a hunk/good breeding stallion rather than a livestock. as he has powers, and good face and submissive personality, women has been treating him more favorable.

as for fanboying. i dont think its not at that lvl anymore. but more like a religious fanatic. where they are willing to die for their faith. and his faith being the story. he ensures the growth of the main character and co. while also trying to support his friend/boss. he is devote on the roll he plays.

 

[UdenEmpati]

he isnt exactly treated as second class. more like 1.5. i know it sounds like im just nitpicking but that 0.5 is important.

unlike actual second class. he is more seen as a hunk/good breeding stallion rather than a livestock. as he has powers, and good face and submissive personality, women has been treating him more favorable.

That honestly compounds the problem, for me.

The thing is, only certain people know he even has a Lux, and we are only really shown him interacting with named characters, the majority of whom are his allies already, and given he's "on their side" he would understandably not be treated with contempt.
But the few instances we do see where it's just random "civilians", he does get treated harshly simply for being a man. It also doesn't really get shown, other than the first chapter with the train car with that one woman which I assume was the author's effort toward "depicting the world".

So the issue I have, is that we get that one-off, and then.....really nothing. Which creates an additional problem for me: we're told this world sucks for guys, to the point that a resistance movement is born to try and fight back against a tyrannical government with the aim of bringing about equality. Also, the main female lead is a proponent of said government, who is seemingly fully on-board with maintaining the status quo of a two-class system, while "being a good person". Sure, nuances exist, but I don't recall us ever seeing her grapple with the idea, and we know that actual equality isn't some fully foreign notion, because Nega Messiah is a thing.
And then we see the MC largely just get pampered by a large cast of female characters, and we get almost no reinforcement that he's part of a hated gender within his society. He's insulated from the problematic nature of his existence, and because this series is from his perspective, it almost makes it seem like one of the central underpinnings of the premise of the story the world is based upon either doesn't matter, or isn't as big a deal as you'd imagine such a setup would realistically be.

So we have a premise and a gimmick that by all rights should be very serious, and would I think reasonably support a much more serious narrative. But the main character isn't engaging with the world like it's got actual stakes. Even if he personally isn't affected by it, that sorta makes it seem like he's simply blind to the reality of where he is, which strains credulity over how serious the problem actually is. Or, it makes him utterly un-empathetic, in the sense of "other men have it bad but I have hot women pampering me so it's fine", which makes his reason for joining Nega Messiah even more superficial ("I want to see my oshi up close"). He cares nothing about the state of the world in that sense, or his place in it, or how fucked up such a system would be for a lot of people. It's entirely a means to his selfish desire to see his favorite character up close when she's actively fighting, and he joined "the terrorists" to do it, even.

as for fanboying. i dont think its not at that lvl anymore. but more like a religious fanatic. where they are willing to die for their faith. and his faith being the story. he ensures the growth of the main character and co. while also trying to support his friend/boss. he is devote on the roll he plays.

I guess that could maybe be the case; I'd have to go back and re-read again, but I'm not sure I get the sense that he's actually bought-in to what he's gotten himself into.
Him being devoted to the story isn't something I'd argue, but it still means he's treating it like a story, and not like his reality, which is again my main criticism because he's supposed to have lived it for so long. He'd have to have been completely isolated away from society for 15 years and saw nothing of what happened around him up to the point the first chapter takes place, and even then faced with the real world for the first time, it should have caused a bigger reaction from him. And it's all just stage dressing, the way he makes it seem, rather than a harsh reality for a huge portion of the populace of the place he's living in.

Maybe it's just me. But he feels too "removed" from the setting, like he's a spectator here to watch his favorite movie play out in 4D, but hasn't accepted that he's a part of it and that he should maybe take the stakes more seriously. He's part of a group seeking to upend a world order who are publicly reviled and labeled as enemies of the state, and half the chapters we see him worrying about getting to see his oshi in action or that he's going to get to see "places not shown in the source material". And if he'd been here for 6 months, I'd get it, but not after 1.5 decades.

*edited for minor grammar fixes and thought completion.

 

[SigmaMaster69]

Thanks for the tl

 

[BobBob]

So now it's Rui's arc, huh.

 

[zerio]

The author kinda screwed up having him live in that world for so long instead of getting transported over as an adult, I think.

He's been in a place where he'd be treated as a second-class citizen at best for like 15 years, and he still treats the world and everyone in it like it's a story and they're all just characters instead of real people. It comes across as jarring, because after that amount of time you'd expect him to be more grounded about things and not just fanboying over all of this, because he should have had time to see first-hand how dangerous it all is, and how serious the stakes are.

Even just having him "take over" the body/life of someone who was close to Hinata would work, if that rapport needed to be established over a long period of time. But as-is, he's just acting like a spectator, and not someone mired in the consequences of the world and what happens in it.

Makes it hard to care about him, because he himself is treating this all as though it's a big cosplay festival of his favorite story.

Even when he first realized he might die at the hands of Rui a few chapters back, he was surprised, like he didn't actually understand the situation he had put himself in for so long, of being on the side of "the terrorists" in a world that hates men.

And seeing him so unaffected by the constant low-grade hate aimed his way so pervasively just makes him seem like he doesn't take the world seriously, which is also immersion-breaking as a reader.

And a lot of this would be solved if he had only just gotten here, and was still in that starstruck phase of not fully internalizing how immense the stakes are to this place. The setting is pretty harshly dystopian in a sense, with the systemic classist sexism and a resistance movement treated as ideological villains. So for him to be so blasé about it all makes it hard to care about seeing anything done about it, and he's been here for like 15 years, which should be enough time to have the "fan boy" beaten out of him a bit.

I wonder if maybe he never really experienced true harassment thanks to the childhood friend, Kushina. Like back in ch 1, he acted like the angry woman was weird. Maybe he always go out with Kushina who shielded him from most of the discrimination.

Also, he wanted to join the police side when he was a kid. Then he got shocked when he was told men can't join. Maybe the shock was too much that he couldn't truly live and became unable to accept reality?
Maybe a stretch though lol.

But yeah, his behavior really doesn't match the fact that he grew up there.

 

[DrarRV]

She gonna fall for him too i guess

 

[Lenasien]

I just really hope this doesn't get axed

Me too

It become slow burn at this point

 

[UdenEmpati]

I wonder if maybe he never really experienced true harassment thanks to the childhood friend, Kushina. Like back in ch 1, he acted like the angry woman was weird. Maybe he always go out with Kushina who shielded him from most of the discrimination.

Also, he wanted to join the police side when he was a kid. Then he got shocked when he was told men can't join. Maybe the shock was too much that he couldn't truly live and became unable to accept reality?
Maybe a stretch though lol.

But yeah, his behavior really doesn't match the fact that he grew up there.

him being shielded by Kushina is plausible. Given she's part of Nega Messiah, she'd ostensibly not buy into the "men are second-class" idea, or at least I'd assume (and I don't recall seeing anything that would point toward such an attitude from her). That certainly does him no favors, though, and kinda reinforces my point about how the reader might find it hard to care about the overarching goals of Nega Messiah, because the lens character through which we experience the world isn't actually meaningfully impacted by any of it.
And he didn't seem particularly impacted by the woman in chapter 1, or the glaring while on the bus--but the narration we get from him makes it clear that he's aware that men are by-and-large treated like scum in this world. And I'd put that down to just more incongruity between what we're told it's like, and what we're shown from his perspective.

If anything, it feels more like he's our tour guide through a setting that resembles something he obsessed over while previously alive, and because it's all "my oshi!" this and "lore dump reveal!" that, none of it actually feels real. Not the people, not the conflict. It's hard to care about it when the person we're following doesn't seem concerned, and at that point why does any of it matter at all?

To the part about his being rejected from the job he wanted as a kid--is that from the story, or a continuation of your "maybe" from earlier? I couldn't find the chapter it was from on a quick read-through, so if you can point out the page source or something I'd appreciate it because I don't recall anything of that sort off the top of my head.
If you're instead positing--it would seem he's had his memory of this being a world he otaku'd over from the start, so I would imagine he'd know better than to try and join up for something that he'd be discriminated against from a lore perspective. Given how much he gushes about being a fan of the series and various heroines within it, and even knowing about special locations like in this most recent chapter, him "forgetting" that he'd be barred from certain things as a man feels like story-writing inconsistency. Which is its own problem.

 

[zerio]

To the part about his being rejected from the job he wanted as a kid--is that from the story, or a continuation of your "maybe" from earlier? I couldn't find the chapter it was from on a quick read-through, so if you can point out the page source or something I'd appreciate it because I don't recall anything of that sort off the top of my head.

https://mangadex.org/chapter/ccd89bc7-2fb3-4ba6-a7d3-cf4aa4ebccaa/19
It's from ch 11. But again, it's probably a stretch to say it's the reason he was disassociated from the world. The whole plot is just weak as you mentioned.

 

[Miserys_End]

https://mangadex.org/chapter/ccd89bc7-2fb3-4ba6-a7d3-cf4aa4ebccaa/19
It's from ch 11. But again, it's probably a stretch to say it's the reason he was disassociated from the world. The whole plot is just weak as you mentioned.

@UdenEmpati

While reductive, it really just boils down to the author not caring and or understanding how a functioning society works. The system that is in place would immediately fall apart if this wasn't a fictional story were the author has complete control.

Just the reconstruction costs alone would bankrupt the government and that's even with several teams with abilities that can revert the frequent damage to critical city infrastructure, businesses, and residential areas.

Casualties among the civilians also wouldn't be light. Even if both sides agreed to not directly target them, the shown collateral damage is common and wide spread.

And all that before you even tackle the social dynamics of men being treated like third class citizens. So yeah, trying to rationalize this setting is a fools errand. This world only exists as a poorly written fiction with B tier actors and bad CGI special effects.