When I was in high school, I had a teacher who would walk up and down the rows of desks in the classroom while we were in his class. If he thought we were not paying sufficient attention, he would slam a pointer down on our desks to startle us. Reading ROLL OVER AND DIE: I Will Fight With My Love and My Cursed Sword, Volume 2 was exactly like his trigonometry class – overstimulating and understimulating at the same time.
We left Hero Flum Apricot and her companion Milkit at the end of Volume 1 safe in the Western District with a former colleague in her hero party, Eterna, the mage. Eterna had left and, we know that so have several other party members, leaving the so-called “genius” leader Jean close to being on his own. As a hero, Flum is constantly fighting off the utterly tiresome Dein, a boring, gloaty and exhausting guy who spends literally every moment of his life trying to make Flum miserable. This will not end well for him. But we’re going to have to listen to a lot of “gyahahah” style gloating, and “hernh-hernh” type threats of sexual violence first. /deep sigh/
In the meantime, Flum will be fighting off accursed eyeballs and other grotesqueries, and we will learn more about what a total scam the Church is and how humans are evil. On the positive side, all of this will be done at such breakneck speed that we don’t really linger too long in threatening situations. On the negative side, some of the dialogue here is reminiscent of Tantric Stripfighter Trina. Characters that say “I should tell you now that I’m far superior to a normal human.” unironically not as a joke is, in my opinion, not-great writing.
Once again on the positive side, this book definitely saves innocent lives, as opposed to sacrificing them, and violence against girls is usually in the past while the present is filled with affirming their right to thrive. Flum is definitely the center of all the decent and good people of the story, who are slowly, surely drawing in around her to what will undoubtedly be a final climax that is full of scuzzy boring gloaty bad guys, organs and blood. as we remake society.
There are at least two other books in this series. I honestly do not know if I can bring myself to read them. We’ll see. But if you are enjoying this series, rock on. You have at least two more books to go and a manga adaptation is on the way.
I idly wondered what the original name of this series was, as I expected “ROLL OVER AND DIE: I Will Fight With My Love and My Cursed Sword” was not it. It was, as I suspected, not it. “Omaegoto toki ga Maoh ni Kateru to Omouna” to Yuusha Party wo Tsuihousareta no de, Outo de Kimama ni Kurashitai,「お前ごときが魔王に勝てると思うな」と勇者パーティを追放されたので、王都で気ままに暮らしたい, which I’m not saying is untranslatable or anything but does make it tough for a title: (Since I was told, )”I don’t think you you can beat the Demon Chief” and was thrown out of the hero party, I want to live freely in the Royal Capital or something like that.
Ratings:
Art – 6 Okay. Not horrific, just sort of shocked faces and blood and torn clothes.
Story – 6 Rushed, crowded and often lazy, but if you like it, you like it
Characters – 7 No real growth, but they are okay as characters to start
Service – 5 Still lots of gross and dressing and undressing.
Yuri – 4 Last volume I said “but no doubt it will climb”…I was wrong. Milkit and Flum are in outright denial, even as others are like, “Look, its obvious.”
Overall – 7
Try to avoid having every single bad guy in your story being gloaty AND boring. I’m not in this book, but was still begging for death at times.
The team at Seven Seas did a fine job, but this book is just all right, no matter how well it has been handled.
