An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

Titles I can’t make up – Battle Divas: The Incorruptible Battle Blossom Princess (Light Novel Review)

I implore anyone who wants a good takeaway from this review to read it the whole way through.

Battle Divas is one of the more… unique experiences in literature I’ve had lately. Which isn’t to say its plot and characters are unique. Far from it – if you’re a fan of anime, you’ve seen the broad strokes of this story before about a million times, including the broad strokes of the characters: the mild-mannered and usually ineffectual male lead who’s actually amazingly badass, the spitfire love interest who won’t admit she more than hates said lead, the cool love interest who won’t emote if her life depends on it, the slightly less popular aggressively pervy love interest; these are all familiar. Similarly familiar are the trappings of demon kings, chanted-up magic, evil empires, battles being decided on the force of singular champions with kickass powers, super-powered cat fights breaking out at the drop of a hat and causing massive property damage, innocent situations that look compromising found at the exact wrong moment by people who don’t feel like listening to explanations, and so on.

What’s more, some of the tired tropes the story trots out aren’t just extremely familiar… they can be kind of annoying at times. For instance, the good guy who’s an ahead-of-his-time egalitarian is so done to death that the cliché is, like the societal models said character is against, a torturous relic best left abandoned in the antediluvian eras that birthed it. It’s not that such a character is wrong, per say, but if you read enough fantasy and/or period fiction, it really starts to get to you how all these starry-eyed dreamers hit upon fully formed philosophies that were historically shaped by generations of pontification. And in the case of Battle Divas, we trot out the most tired of all the straw men for such a character to wage war on: “equality for everyone” and “slavery is bad”. Class struggles are a complicated issue, and if you’re going to take it on, doing so in a ham-fisted manner with a character who just happens to be a king is… probably not the smartest way to do it. And while the issue of chattel slavery is absolutely a softball, part of me wonders if there will ever be a fantastical story that decides to tackle the complicated strata and legal layers of bondsmanship in antiquity. I suppose that’s more for xenofiction than a Light Novel, though.

It’s also a hard book to read at times, not because of its verbage or deeply layered structure, but because either the author, editor, or translator (I am honestly not sure who to blame) largely left out any way to signify scene breaks. Usually it’s decently easy to follow where people exited, entered, and time passed between two lines, but sometimes you’re left in the dark and forced to back up and go over the section with the snag another couple of times in order to really appreciate that we are now in a different place or time. A horizontal line, a centered trio of asterisks, a larger than average break – give us something to signify that there was a stop more significant than a single period here! Some of the larger structural notes are also a little odd to face as a western reader, but this isn’t the only Light Novel I have under my belt so I think it’s safe to say that reading a type of fiction that we don’t have a great analog for, which has been translated into an entirely different language is going to have some eccentricities as far as your standard sensibilities are concerned. But it does make it somewhat harder to recommend the book when, as here, it interferes with the enjoyment of reading it.

At this point, you might be wondering why this review is continuing, rather than just handing it a big fat FAIL right now. Well, in short… Battle Divas is what it is, and at least it tried. I am dead serious, that matters a lot.

As to what the book is… You couldn’t read the pitch for this story and think “Wow, Battle Divas! That’s sure to stand up against the great masters of fantasy and science fiction! With a pitch like that, I’m sure it will take on the fantastical world-building of Lord of the Rings or the deeply intricate political maneuvering of Dune!” If you’re here, reading a review for the Light Novel ‘Battle Divas: The Incorruptible Battle Blossom Princess’, you’re not looking for a thought-provoking tour de force of literature. You’re probably looking for a book that reads a little like watching a few episodes of an anime… and if that’s what you expected from the cover, title, and pitch then what you see is pretty much what you get. Battle Divas is what it is.

And then we come to the part that really turned my frown upside down, effort. It is the easiest thing in the world not to try, and for somewhere around the first half of Battle Divas, not trying is exactly what I thought it was doing. I’ll be honest, between the cliches, the repetition of the cliches, and what at first looked like a general lack of creative intelligence in handling its themes and/or offering anything of substance, I was ready to put the silly book away for good and read something else. But, it’s a Light Novel, it wasn’t like getting to the end was really going to waste that much of my time, and then at least I could say I knew for sure how, why, and where the book failed. Except, then it did something that surprised me… it actually took a moment to stop providing slapstick comedy (that doesn’t work so well in text, where timing is somewhat reader-dependent) and decided to actually take a look into the feelings of one of our leading characters, expressing emotion and treating the players in the scene as though they were people rather than just archetypes made into puppets playing out another round of their little dance. Curious, that. Then the story did it again. And again. And kept doing it.

The second half of Battle Divas still is what it is, but when it comes to the basics of good storytelling, that apply regardless of your genre, tone, intended audience, or even language? The things that make any literature, whether high art or low-brow crowd-pleaser or anything in between tick? It actually started to get those things right, even seriously right. There are dramatic scenes that round out, if not the egalitarian king, at least do manage to give some depth and complexity to the “whatever-dere” love interests who could have as easily been called by their primary joke as their name in the first half. Because the author decided to actually put in effort, Sharon is Sharon, not Tsundere #187.

Even the stuff that ticked me off early got better. Let’s take the “ahead of their time” cliché I mentioned earlier as the example again. The world doesn’t magically bend to King Al’s will when it comes to bringing into being the social change that he wants to see, the way it totally would in a book that didn’t try. Nor did it (as in a book that didn’t try) have only characters who were flagrantly evil or blatantly deceived and/or misguided oppose him. Actually, he’s taken to task fairly effectively on the logistics, viability, or even principle of his dream of more general equality and an end to the abuses of slavery, and some of the characters that do it are treated as basically decent people acting on their own strongly held convictions, which makes his struggle feel much more real and serious despite its over-used roots. In fact, the only character (with much ‘screen-time’, at least) who seems to support Al wholeheartedly in his efforts is given a detailed background as to why they might be of a similar mind, and even then said character doesn’t comment on whether it will work, only that they fully support the idea and would dearly want it to work themselves. That’s a treatment with a lot more intelligence than I would have expected from the first half of Battle Divas, or even for a sort of fantasy/harem light novel in general. And, as you might have guessed, it means that what is otherwise a dry issue – an issue that tends to suck the life out of characters and cause them to devolve into mouthpieces for morals most of the first world already holds core to our modern culture – is actually used to develop, round, and explore how certain characters interact with the world around them and where they might have strong or conflicted feelings about complex issues in their lives.

I could name a lot of books that start with more and accomplish less than Battle Divas. Books that fall in many different places on the great spectrum of literature, close to or far from Battle Divas in any way you could imagine. Books that started out, from the level of their pitch, with many more promising components, but that, because they didn’t try, failed to achieve anything with what should have been their superior parts. Because of that, I can’t be too mad at Battle Divas, despite its failings… and actually, in a way, I kind of have to respect it. If you handed the premise, just the blurb and maybe a simplified Dramatis Personae, to another author and told them to write the book that resulted, I think most of them would turn out a good deal worse than what we got.

So in the end, what do I have to say about Battle Divas? I think I’d actually like to see both where further volumes go, and what it would look like as an anime. I’m not kidding about that last part – the book as a whole has the material for probably three or four well-paced episodes, and even the first half of the book, which repeats the same slapstick-style action-humor would probably do better in a visual medium. At least if this was fully animated, you could really take in each scene where something gets royally wrecked in a diva-on-diva battle. In text, those scenes aren’t great (especially after the first) because the emotions in them are always the same… but a picture is worth a thousand words and even a few seconds of moving picture considerably more, and the variation in the style and timing could (if the adaptation was handled smartly) make the scenes that fell flat in the book interesting and engaging on the force of their visual ambition alone. And while it’s somewhat difficult to forgive the first half of a book being lackluster, it’s kind of easy to forgive the first one or two episodes out of twelve if the material picks up and grows stronger over its run. Which is part of why I’d like to see how the story continues, too. I’d hope that the weak moments predicated on flat executions of the characters would be behind us, leaving us more running time to actually delve into the meat of the leads we’ve met (who do all still have some room for growth and expansion) and the two-pronged main plot that faces them, as well as any new characters that come out of the woodwork. And really, can I ask for much more out of a first volume than being left with the sense that “gee, I’d like to see where we go from here”?

Well… yes and no.

I rate Battle Divas at somewhere around a B, probably a B- , because it has a lot of strengths, especially given the basic foundation its built on… It’s not a high B or an A because it does have a number of faults. The formatting is legitimately a problem, and you will probably lose a lot of good will towards this book before you get to the parts that actually work or are clever. I imagine, for some readers, there won’t be any coming back from that – they’ll hit the bits that turned it around for me and will already be feeling uncharitable enough towards Battle Divas that they won’t let it actually have a positive emotional impact. If you consume media you’re angry at, that media can’t force you appreciate it.

In the end, I would personally say that if you take in the title, the cover, and the blurb and think you might actually be interested in something with that kind of premise… go ahead and give Battle Divas a shot. I just implore you to, as with this review, read it the whole way through before passing final judgment.