Ancient Vampire Princess is reborn
To enact the most elaborate PG revenge porn
More super-powered than a god
She forces the plot not to plod
It’s so silly one can’t even scorn

Seriously Seeking Sister! Ultimate Vampire Princess Just Wants Little Sister; Plenty of Service Will Be Provided! by Hiironoame surely must be given some credit for taking it’s overlong title and actually providing useful information with it. I knew going into this novel nothing beyond the fact that I am overtly not the audience for it. And, indeed, I aborted my first attempt at reading it. But a second attempt was more successful once I stopped caring at all. ^_^

Ristia is a cheerfully unreal overpowered scion of a vastly overpowered vampire race, the destruction of which happens offscreen while Ristia is trapped in a crystal for millennia in a fit of pique because her parents would not procreate and give her a younger sister to dote upon. This opening is so overtly ridiculous that you’d do better to skip to roughly midway through the book and start there, after Ristia has been awakened and is overpowering her way through a feudal society unable to cope with her overwhelming magic. Ristia ends up taking over an oprhanage and making improvements that would catapult the orphans several centuries forward in technology. Throughout, of course, Ristia spends the entire book insisting that she’s normal, despite magicking everything around her.

Bad guys are, one and all, horrible vulgar men who rape and pillage, and speak in crudely malformed suggestive lines, a veritable pack of frat boys being appalling to the young women around them, so of course we feel nothing when they are bloodlessly disappeared out of the story. Good guys are thankfully split between men and women, or I’d suspect some kind of agenda.

Because I don’t read too many Light Novels of this kind, I turned to translator David Evelyn and shared that I found it hard to know whether there is humor in the overpowered Ristia or I’m being made fun of. He suggested that the language was typical of isekai novels, but there was a kind of self-awareness that made it funny. Like a joke that is funny only after the characters become aware that they’ve repeated it too many times, as Sean Gaffney noted in his review. After all the carpenters agree to never mention how obviously not normal at all Ristia is, I finally relaxed into the story.

The title is not wrong – there was a great deal of service and very little of it served this fan. There are a number of lingering looks at lingerie and physical descriptions of too-young women, which just flat out bore me. The idea that a line like “With her clothing now reduced to only her matching light bra and panties, Ristia went fishing through the assortment of dresses” is considered “service” by any human on the planet, fills me with exhaustion. Up your game, my fellow humans. The Internet should quench your fetish for matching underwear sets. Go find yourself a catalog. Matching bra and panty sets are the Wal-Mart of fetishes. It’s all so 12-year olds gathered around the NatGeo mags.

Because I had an easier time relating to this novel as a comedy than as an action or drama story, the sort-of emotional relationships Ristia forms in her quest for a little sister, were somewhat less satisfying to me as a relationship than a punchline. And they were the only (inevitably service-y) feature where her nature as a vampire has any relevance…which made it funnier to me.

As Yurimother noted in her review of this novel, the one strong point was the lack of violence against women, beyond implication that it had occurred in the past. But the threat of violence against women and children as a plot driver is still not optimal. Thankfully most of the “good” characters are thoroughly likable, so its gilding the reaction lily to make us worry about the cute dog-eared girl.

My only genuine criticism of this book is that the art does nothing to illustrate anything that is described in the text. Ristia is presented as a young woman with an ever-present allure, (due to her being a vampire, you know) but the character we see is goofy, not alluring. We read that her hair is long, thick and lustrous, and we’re shown her with a bad collar-cut. It feels weirdly dysphoric to have the text and art so at odds with each other.

Ratings:

Story  – 7
Characters – 8
Art – 4 Not bad in and of itself, but wholly unrelated to the text
Service – 5 Blood sucking, dressing/undressing for no reason, underwear (yawn)
Yuri – 5 Same as above, no real emotional connections…wasted opportunities to be a good story there

Overall – 7

As an elaborate form of a comedic revenge narrative, Seriously Seeking Sister is an amuse-bouche of a novel…it won’t satisfy your hunger, but it will pass the time until you find something more filling.

Much obliges to J-Novel Club for the Review copy.