The Spring 2024 Light Novel Guide
The Otome Heroine's Fight for Survival
What's It About?
The Otome Heroine's Fight for Survival has a story by Harunohi Biyori and art by Yuu Hitaki. English translation by Camilla L. Published by J-Novel Club; PublishDrive edition (March 11, 2024).
Is It Worth Reading?
Rebecca Silverman
Rating:
This is a tale of lost potential. Harunohi Biyori's novel has a decent premise: Alicia, the heroine of an otome game in our world, learns of her status when a reborn woman there tells her as she's attempting to kill her and take her place. The nameless woman loved the game but was reborn into its world too early to experience its events; her solution was to take over Alicia's body using an aether crystal. (That's mana stone in any other work.) Freaked out, Alicia tries to evade her but instead ends up absorbing a bit of the crystal and gaining the woman's memories, at which point she straight-up murders her. Now armed with the knowledge that she doesn't want to be part of this “otome game,” Alicia renames herself Alia and sets off.
At this point, that sounds pretty good. It's an interesting twist on a tired genre (two, if you factor in the latent villainesses, one of whom has also been isekai'd), and while I'm not much for violence, having Alicia turn into a battle-hardened murderous seven-year-old isn't terrible either. But shortly after she takes the nameless woman's memories, the story gets lost, by which I mean it becomes bogged down with stereotypical isekai light novel pablum to the point where it devolves into an endless stream of stat screens, dull jargon we already know from other books (aether is the exception, and even that's not too creative), and Alicia becoming more and more of a hardened killer. Oh, pardon me, adventurer. It's 340 pages of something we've all read at least a hundred times before without much to distinguish it from those other works.
It is not so bad when Biyori is working with the more unique aspects of the story. It isn't so much swapping the roles of heroine and villainess as it is forcing the isekai'd to see that labels like that are strictly the province of games and that real life doesn't get so neatly labeled. As a shorter book, this might have been a good or decent one. But the bloat and lack of understanding about what makes the premise exciting hamper it, making this both dull and tragic.
Lauren Orsini
Rating:
What if Cinderella got stuck in a JRPG? The outcome would probably be a lot like The Otome Heroine's Fight for Survival. It's the story of Alicia, nicknamed Alia, a girl tired of being too weak to change her fate. After becoming aware at age seven that she's living in the world of an otome game as its protagonist, she devotes herself to becoming too strong to let this supposed game plot sway her fate. Instead, she devotes everything to raising her stats, no matter how cold or unfeeling this single-minded resolution forces her to become.
Earlier, I shared a short excerpt on Bluesky of Alia's encounter with a random man. “Hey, girl—” the man begins before Alia, not stopping to ask questions, cleanly slices his throat with a well-placed throwing knife. The narrative temporarily exits Alia's point of view to inform the reader that this stranger is bad, but did Alia know that? It's just one example of her ruthlessness and deadliness. In their author's note, Harunohi Biyori wrote that their goal was to write Alia as “one who would never show her enemies any mercy at all.” Alia succeeds at this, but it comes at the cost of her humanity. As Alia single-mindedly focuses on leveling up, the book begins to feel more like a written transcript of a Twitch streamer's Let's Play of an extremely complicated game I'll never play myself.
The Otome Heroine's Fight for Survival gets points for introducing a wholly individual protagonist who is exactly as merciless as advertised and completely rejects the narrative she is destined for, at least so far. However, that is where the originality ends. Alia's hard-earned toughness comes from a cookie-cutter world that follows video game logic. She spends a lot of time checking out her stat screen, leveling up skills like Intimidation and Dark Magic. These stat screens sometimes take up entire pages! She also frequently scans other characters to visualize their attack power. As Alia grew stronger throughout the book, these video game references increased in frequency until it felt like I was reading one of those videogame.txt walkthroughs from my childhood: informative but hardly an emotional read. It's difficult to stay invested in a protagonist who, upon getting injured, says she “lost about a third of [her] HP.”
As Alia picks up survival skills, she meets several characters straight out of Fantasy Central casting: a kindly adventurer who teachers her to fight, er, that is, “level up her martial mastery,” a grumpy shopkeeper who nicknames her “Cinders” because of her hair, and plenty of other 7-year-olds who will eventually grow up to be characters in the otome game that Alia is so desperate to avoid. Even without the videogame structure, it feels incongruent to read a book for adults about children, even if some of those children have preternatural adult knowledge of the future. But the encroaching videogame speak ended the immersion for me: at the point that an enemy insulted Alia as a “level one child,” I was over it.
Disclosure: Kadokawa World Entertainment (KWE), a wholly owned subsidiary of Kadokawa Corporation, is the majority owner of Anime News Network, LLC. Yen Press, BookWalker Global, and J-Novel Club are subsidiaries of KWE.
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