Following up from last month’s LITRPG(A LITRPG or Literary Role-Playing Game is a genre of novel where the world has rpg mechanics as part of it’s world building, think characters having stats and levels) powerhouse we figured we’d keep it somewhat in the same genre and this month run it back with “Series: ROLL OVER AND DIE: I Will Fight for an Ordinary Life with My Love and Cursed Sword!”. A Mouthful of a series, Roll Over And Die is a grimdark fantasy LITRPG Light Novel about scorned lesbians fighting for a place for themselves in the world. It’s a pretty fun and edgy fantasy series that walks a line at times between fantasy and horror with some pretty cool imagery and descriptions.
Flum Apricot the protagonist is chosen as part of the heroes party, but her special skill reversal negates all stat-bonuses essentially keeping her as weak as possible. As the party grows in strength and Flum lags behind her fellow party member and sage Jean decides to do something about it, by selling her into slavery to get rid of her. Bought by a cruel man who just wants to watch slaves die, she’s thrown into a cell with fellow slave Milkit before being fed to monsters with nothing for self defense except for a cursed sword that melts the flesh of anyone who touches it. Determined not to give up, Flum picks up the sword and her skill’s true worth is finally revealed as the curse melts her flesh… back together? With this newfound knowledge of her power she breaks out and frees herself and Milkit and together they seek to create a new life for themselves. This all happens right at the beginning but the story starts taking crazy turns from here with church conspiracies and eldritch monsters speaking the words of god. Through it all though it’s a story about Flum and Milkit and the lengths they will go through to be together.
Not sure what a light novel is? In North America it’s basically an arbitrary genre of novels from Japan that mixes occasional illustrations while otherwise being a regular novel and is based mostly on whether it was published by a company that is considered a light novel publisher and has little to do with the content of the novel. There are many genres that fall under light novel and it gets sort of silly when people try to make a hard line definition. Think Manga vs Comic.
We figured it would be a good time to showcase some light novels since we just came back from Ai-kon (where we forgot to bring any, wups!). Our section for manga and light novels may be small but it is a medium that staff are very passionate about and we are happy to special order anything that we might not have on the shelf. (Except VIZ, we’re still working on getting Simon and Schuster ordering up.)
