Garbage Brave: Isekai ni Shoukan sare Suterareta Yuusha no Fukushuu Monogatari

tl;dr: A generic isekai that’s also really weak all around. This is the standard type of story where a bunch of people including the protagonist, get summoned to another world and the protagonist seems to be weaker than the rest due to his initial class seeming useless though he then turns out to be vastly overpowered. The particular subtype, which is also quite common, is the one where the protagonist was betrayed and left to die and thus becomes an edgelord that wants revenge. On average isekai light novel series aren’t very original and I’m totally okay with that or I wouldn’t have bothered to readthis. Even considering that, I felt that this was exceptionally generic and a lot more blatant than usual about copying elements from specific other series. Still, even with that, if what is being copied is good and the execution is good, I’m generally not all that bothered about it. Unfortunately, while I do like the various concepts in a broad sense, the execution was immensely lacking. The largest problem is that everything feels so disconnected and random without any sense of flow. This isn’t much of an issue in the first volume, wherein although it does go in a bunch of different directions with a lot of them ultimately being completely pointless, it still felt like there was some level of cohesiveness and I did enjoy the plot at times. However, as the series goes on, everything seems utterly random and arbitrary. The world building is completely nonsensical. The events that drive the overarching plot are all very very different with jarring transitions and usually just feel like unnecessary tangents until suddenly they’re not. This results in so many plot holes that it’s not really fair to call them holes anymore, rather it’s like the various parts of the plot are just floating around haphazardly in a void. And of course, there’s nothing even close to resembling any sense of tone or atmosphere. The cast face similar issues. Firstly, let’s just get out of the way that there’s no real character development at all in anyone so it already fails completely in that regard. Secondly, everyone is just really inconsistent, especially the protagonist, Tsukuru. His internal monologuing makes him seem like a complete edgelord and he acts like one half the time, but the other half of the time his actions make him come across as a heroic pushover. There’s usually some attempt at explaining said actions in a way that fits with him being an edgelord, but these are usually laughable at best. As such, it’s completely impossible to take him seriously and he ends up seeming so incredibly lame, and that’s coming from someone that generally likes edgelord protagonists. The same applies to the heroines, and especially to the relationship development between the heroines and Tsukuru. The heroine focused on in the first volume, Canaan, gets some pretty decent relationship development, but with everyone else it’s rushed to the point of completely lacking any substance. Honestly, if it was consistent with that and kept it up, I may well have gotten over it since it’s a true harem sort of situation and the romantic fluff it resulted in was pretty good. But in the last volume the protagonist essentially rejects a heroine because he wants to avoid rushing a relationship, which doesn’t make any sense at all from a character point of view or from a broader thematic point of view, and just puts an emphasis on the failings of the series up to that point. In terms of the protagonist’s abilities, there’s one ability that makes his ability set completely broken from pretty much the outset and should make all the conflicts he’s in completely trivial. Thus, him not using it all the time is a pretty major plot hole. Still, if it was just that, I would be okay with ignoring it. However, as the series goes on, he just gets even more and more broken to the point that power ups should have no meaning, but there is still a considerable amount of time spent on showing the cast getting stronger which largely feels like a waste of time and completely unsatisfying. It also feels that considering how powerful everyone is, it spends way too much time on just mindless action where it doesn’t really feel like there are any real stakes and thus no sense of suspense at all. The cover illustrations were all pretty good. The inner illustrations for the first two volumes were okay at best. The latter two volumes were handled by a different artist and were generally better, though they made the protagonist’s face look weird. The bigger issue though, is that the budget was clearly lacking, as there were very few illustrations and no color illustrations at the start like there usually are in light novels. The fan translation from the perspective of the English prose was a mixed bag. Of course there wasn’t anything long term like trying to give character’s consistent voices or trying to adhere to tone and atmosphere as you’d find in a professional translation, but for a fan translation there were times where it read pretty well without feeling overtly stiff. But there were also times where it was written incredibly stiffly and full of errors to the point of being barely readable. And everything in the middle.