Four days into 2026, two new books finished, and two rejections

[waltzoid]

Well, this is disappointing. Four days into the new year, and I already have two books to toss onto the rejection pile. I guess that's the gamble you take when you pick up random isekai and LitRPG novels from Amazon Kindle Unlimited because its recommendation algorithm thinks I might like them because I read So I'm a Spider, So What? and The Rising of the Shield Hero once a few years ago.

First up: (deep breath) Failure Frame: I Became the Strongest and Annihilated Everything by Using Low-Level Spells, a story where a bullied kid named Touka Mimori gets dragged into a fantasy world by a manipulative (and probably outright evil) goddess under the pretense of becoming great heroes by defeating a mysterious demon king. All of his classmates, who treated him like dirt in their old world, act even more hostile to him after their summoning because the goddess grants most of them A- and S-tier stats, while he gets saddled with a lowly E-tier ranking. Touka is then cast into a dungeon for rejected adventurers, where the goddess hopes that the similarly S-tier monsters will kill him as they've done with the others.

The joke's on them, though, because his E-rank stats come with a handful of seemingly useless status effect spells that work all the time, every time. He uses these spells to power-level his way through that dungeon, hell-bent on revenge against everyone, including the goddess, for looking down on him.

I've heard Failure Frame compared in some anime fandom circles to Arifureta: From Commonplace to World's Strongest with their shared setup of "reject student goes on an isekai journey and becomes a super-powerful edgelord with a bone to pick with his peers". Having only watched the first two episodes of the (incredibly jankily animated) first season of Arifureta, I'm not fully qualified to compare the two series. I will, however, state that even accounting for the book I read being only the first in a series of a dozen-plus light novels, there's not much to get excited about here. The basic-but-servicable LitRPG system, where a person's skills evolve with repeated use, along with the goddess who summons the main character and his class to the fantasy world being evil and selfish from the start, are the closest things Failure Frame Volume 1 has to unique and/or interesting ideas. The actual battles that Touka gets involved in are the most boring part, as they all consist of him casting Paralyze, then Poison, then Sleep, and waiting for his enemies to die to gain his massive EXP-per-encounter boost. By the end of the story, he learns how to use non-lethal Poison magic and only Paralyze every part of a target from the neck down, which is a weird way to evolve a character's abilities, but whatever.

Unfortunately, these one-note battles comprise the bulk of Failure Frame's page count, and the side characters other than the goddess Vicius aren't appealing enough to break up the monotony of the Touka-focused parts of the story.

The other story I read was Slow Life in Another World (I Wish!), a manga adaptation of a LitRPG that hasn't officially been translated from Japanese yet. This one is about an office worker named Itsuki Shinomiya, who dies and gets reborn with a set of non-combat abilities like "alchemy" and "farming" knowledge, stating a desire to take it easy in his new life. The first volume only briefly uses his "alchemy" talent as the setup for a clash between the local adventurer's guild and his employer in the alchemist's guild, which ends with him involuntarily taking on a pair of adventurer girls as his slaves.

Now, there is a lot of discussion to be had over so many fantasy isekai stories having plots or subplots involving (almost always) male protagonists with harems of beautiful slave women (looking at you again, Shield Hero), but my beef with Slow Life (I Wish!) isn't its existence in the story at all. Itsuki, for one thing, is deeply uncomfortable when the warrior Aina offers to sell herself to his service to settle the guild rivalry (and her partner Solte goes along with it to keep an eye on her because Aina's value alone isn't high enough). My problem with the setup is that the slave contracts are forced upon him over his objections, and he's the initial victim in the rivalry between the two guilds (the other adventurers thought he was a pharmacist trying to sell them weak, overpriced potions, so they attacked him and destroyed his entire stash, driving his guildmaster to extort them for an exorbitant amount of money as punishment).

Slow Life is more about things happening to Itsuki than him taking action himself - he dies, gets reincarnated, joins a guild, loses his first new source of income, and is bonded to two adventurers (one of whom always assumes the worst of him and beats him up at the slightest provocation). Everything that happens to Itsuki in this volume is the result of the actions of other characters. The most he does of his own volition is craft all those potions and occasionally generate a single coin with his "pocket change" ability.

There is quite a bit of fanservice in the manga, but the way it's used is...weird. Several pages have shots of female characters with their backs turned and drawn at angles that show off their butts and/or underwear. Most of the time, those characters are just standing still, not doing anything intended to be sexy. It's a minor complaint when put up against Itsuki being a mostly passive and ineffectual protagonist and wolf-girl Solte repeatedly beating the crap out of him, but I still felt like mentioning it because I think a series willing to show some skin ought to be a little less... tame? I don't know.

Anyway, I'm sticking both of these into the "This Just Isn't for Me" bin, but I suppose I'd have to give the edge (pun not intended) to Failure Frame here, if only because Touka Mimori does things instead of just having things done to him. I hope that my first week of 2026 brings me something new that I can recommend unconditionally.