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Feb. 9th, 2025 08:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsBy coincidence, Django Wexler's How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying came in for me at the library right around the same time as Long Live Evil, for an accidental double feature compare/contrast on English Language Villain Isekai Published By Orbit Last Year.
How To Become the Dark Lord is not just isekai, but also regression -- Our Heroine Davi is originally from Earth, but has spent approximately a thousand years (subjective) trying repeatedly to fulfill her apparent destiny to save fantasyland from the Dark Lord and losing the final battle every time (on the lives where she even makes it that far). Conveniently, after a thousand years, Davi remembers almost nothing about her actual life on Earth, but retains a near-encyclopedic knowledge of jokes, slang, pop culture references, etc., etc, in order to keep up a peppy, slangy first-person narration. (Occasionally Davi alludes to the likelihood that she might misremember a lot of these pop culture references, but as far as I noticed she never actually does; honestly, I wish she had, as it would have stretched my disbelief on this point slightly less.)
Anyway, the book begins when Davi has hit such an extreme point of frustration with the endless cycle of never beating the final boss that she decides she might as well see if she fares any better at becoming the final boss, and sets out on a quest to pick up a horde of orcs and and other horde-creatures to compete for the title of Dark Lord. Along the way, she learns some valuable lessons about moral relativity, how it is a bummer when people on either side of a fight die, and how it's possible that the choices she makes do matter to herself and the people around her even if she's stuck in an endless regression loop, by way of befriending some of her horde and falling for a hot butch orc woman.
So, you know, it's a comedy regression isekai. It's a perfectly fun way to pass the time, and hits all the beats it should hit. It's going broad rather than deep, and the emotional relationships did not pull me in particularly; Long Live Evil was for me more uneven but also much more absorptive, but I suspect tastes will differ on that score. One thing seems for sure across both books though and that is that we are in the era of Protagonists Making Personal Little Pop Culture Jokes For An Unappreciative Audience with a vengeance.
How To Become the Dark Lord is not just isekai, but also regression -- Our Heroine Davi is originally from Earth, but has spent approximately a thousand years (subjective) trying repeatedly to fulfill her apparent destiny to save fantasyland from the Dark Lord and losing the final battle every time (on the lives where she even makes it that far). Conveniently, after a thousand years, Davi remembers almost nothing about her actual life on Earth, but retains a near-encyclopedic knowledge of jokes, slang, pop culture references, etc., etc, in order to keep up a peppy, slangy first-person narration. (Occasionally Davi alludes to the likelihood that she might misremember a lot of these pop culture references, but as far as I noticed she never actually does; honestly, I wish she had, as it would have stretched my disbelief on this point slightly less.)
Anyway, the book begins when Davi has hit such an extreme point of frustration with the endless cycle of never beating the final boss that she decides she might as well see if she fares any better at becoming the final boss, and sets out on a quest to pick up a horde of orcs and and other horde-creatures to compete for the title of Dark Lord. Along the way, she learns some valuable lessons about moral relativity, how it is a bummer when people on either side of a fight die, and how it's possible that the choices she makes do matter to herself and the people around her even if she's stuck in an endless regression loop, by way of befriending some of her horde and falling for a hot butch orc woman.
So, you know, it's a comedy regression isekai. It's a perfectly fun way to pass the time, and hits all the beats it should hit. It's going broad rather than deep, and the emotional relationships did not pull me in particularly; Long Live Evil was for me more uneven but also much more absorptive, but I suspect tastes will differ on that score. One thing seems for sure across both books though and that is that we are in the era of Protagonists Making Personal Little Pop Culture Jokes For An Unappreciative Audience with a vengeance.
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Date: 2025-02-10 10:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-02-15 09:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-02-10 12:18 pm (UTC)The realization that oh, I won't do another timeloop, these people will stay dead and it's my fault, and her subsequent breakdown over it did hit convincingly for me, but yeah, I enjoyed it enough to read the final book when that comes out but it was not in my top books of 2024.
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Date: 2025-02-15 09:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-02-10 05:58 pm (UTC)I thought the pop culture references were a little much - but I also thought it might actually be more annoying if they were constant and also wrong, so... yeah.
I also kinda feel like the book cheated a little. Davi feels terrible about the people she cared about whom she killed this time around figuring she'd make it up to them later and after all, they'd never remember. Except we never met those people, because she killed them, so the emotional impact is close to nil. Okay, yeah, she killed her human on-again, off-again girlfriend who was the one member of her team who wasn't a total asshole. Yeah, she killed the mage who brought her here, very cathartic but probably a bit mean if he's really dead. Too bad, so sad, but... hard to care? Meanwhile, we're supposed to care that she cares?
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Date: 2025-02-16 03:51 am (UTC)