Milk and Cheese

(Sakura)

Spoiler :

My apologies for the wait. Beside the usual shameful reasons there was also the understandable excuse of a power outage at my house today which prevented me from accessing the internet and even my computer.

It might satisfy your Schadenfreude to know that sadly right before the power outage I ran out of battery on several of my mobile devices so I had to go on electronic cold turkey...so painful ;)

Anyway originally I was going to name this chapter "birds of a feather" but then I felt upon looking at it...that is a way too cool of a title for such a stupid chapter so I changed it...to a stupid title so they maches now yay :D

Alright I think I will confess something to you, no don’t look at me that way it’s nothing major, just that I wasn’t exactly being totally accurate when I kind of jumped the gun and said that I remembered ‘everything’ about my past life.

To be more precise, I think I remember most of the generalities and some maybe even a majority of the specifics but I definitely do not remember much of the little tiny details.

Why did I say that then? Well don’t you think that the word ‘everything’ is a bit more awesome and impressive then the sentence: most of the generalities and some maybe even a majority of the specifics and in regards to the details things are kinda blurry.

See what I mean?

Anyway back to what I realized about my past life and what it has to do with my new one, in other words why the need for my confession?

Simply put, I can’t remember the title of any of the works which I now have reason to believe show a version of one of my probably no longer possible futures.

Hey before you rake me over the coals let me point out a few key points.

First of all, as I think I have already at least mentioned in the short time before my death especially I have read hundreds if not thousands of books, webnovels, light novels, comics…well you get the idea.

With the exception of those that have the mythical and imaginary thing known as photographic memory, remembering one out of many anything’s is quite difficult if not impossible at times…unless one purposely works to memorize said information for some reason.

I had neither the cheat known as photographic memory nor did I feel any need to remember the title at the time, I was reading for fun after all I didn’t think that there would be a test on the subject. Nor did I think I would suddenly awaken in the future in a new life with a need for said information.

I also used a great deal of the handy dandy little things known as bookmarks on my web browser, to keep track of things I wanted to read, and I would read things in the order the book mark was put in the folder which by the way was not organized alphabetically or in any other way.

Second of all the original language of the works was not my native language, the name of which is kind of complicated and I will explain later but for now let’s just call it ‘English’ to make things easy.

Memorizing things is hard, with the exception of certain cheating people see ‘photo graphic memory’ mentioned above, it should then be obvious that memorizing things written in a language different from your own is even harder.

Maybe if I knew even the basics in the language it was written in it would have been easier but in my past life I took a few classes in school but never got that proficient in any language except the one I grew up learning. And the options in school were quite limited there was no-…well…for now let us just dub it ‘Nihongo’ and once again I will probably explain things later.

Finally, and most importantly the title, maybe titles?  Just were not memorable. They were neither that creative nor catchy…maybe something about a road? Or maybe princes something…or perhaps magic something or other…like I said I simply do not remember it.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

Maybe it would have been easier to remember it if I had been my most favorite out of the things I read but sadly and now unfortunately it wasn’t.

While it wasn’t my least liked thing to read, it was always low on my list of priorities especially after the webnovel author no longer posted new content.

Well pointless to bother caring about this now as it’s not like I can go back in time and work on gaining both photo graphic memory cheat as well as, cheat knowledge to study the works like a bible.

There was a reason for my lackluster in regards to these particular works.

Simply put most of all of the ‘stories’ had been not of the highest quality. Perhaps the webnovel was the only one with any degree of excellence in regards to literary worth, and I admittedly did read it several times. And luckily despite their numerous flaws I also read the light novel and manga and read some basic information about the game.

Or to be more accurate I read the fan translations, and the summaries off of the wiki.

You have got to admit though that at least reading/skimming through something that you later discover to be far more important than you would ever originally believe is much better then never having read it at all right?

If I had never reincarnated through I wouldn’t have minded if I had forgotten everything about them for those works became part of a list of what I later considered one of my somewhat shameful guilty pleasures…which I wouldn’t even talk to Ramona about though when I mentioned it she eased my embarrassment somewhat by sharing that she also liked to consume such ‘junk-food’.

Why shameful specifically? Well as you have probably gotten by now, in my opinion the webnovel wasn’t that bad, actually it probably could have amounted to something great even if the original author had finished it before they died or something.  Fan translators disagree on what happened to them…

Well anyway while the webnovel wasn’t that bad and could have possibly been great with a little more completion and polishing. Whoever took up that mantle…well I have two words for it…pure cheese.

Yes cheesiness and cliché-ness to the point of ridiculousness.

It was the kind of story that at certain times that you knew were supposed to be serious or sad if not tragic you couldn’t help but laugh because of the shock value of just how well un-shocking and predictable it was.

Well having said that…as I have already hinted it wasn’t like it was unreadable, just disappointing…especially when paired with all the hopes that the webnovel raised up and then brought gently though brutally down when you read the light novel and realize that a different author wrote it.

In the author notes it says that the new author was a friend of the original author…but let me say if their writing styles tell anything about their personality it completely disproves the expression.

“Birds of a feather flock together”.

To me what made the webnovel better wasn’t just the lack of cheese but also it seemed like they worked much harder on their characterization, for example their version of Sakura was believable as a human being even sympathizeable compared to the monstrosity that showed up in the rest of the franchise.

Of course many of the other readers probably disagreed with my opinion, for the light novel and later the anime and games it was based on did better on certain things that the webnovel completely neglected.

The one that was most obvious was mainly fan service.

Yup, part of the ‘milk’ of the cheese shall we say was all the ‘inappropriate’, and from my point of view ‘pointless’ innuendo and as well er shall we say excessive sex appeal added to the female characters and a few of the males too.

But let me just finish for now on this subject, with my personal opinion that I ‘didn’t like those parts, and sometimes they made me feel uncomfortable’ and just leave it at that.