Greetings from kbin.social! We can’t see any of your existing four posts from our instance yet, so I figured I’d kick things off with a hot take to get people talking.

I’ve lurked in /r/lightnovels for awhile, and a common opinion that I’ve seen is that Disciple of the Lich is skippable because it is “another misunderstanding story with a dense and overpowered protagonist”. I can definitely understand the burnout with those tropes, but I also think it’s a selling the story’s potential short.

To me, Disciple of the Lich is basically One Punch Man: RPG Edition. It takes the concept of an overpowered protagonist in an RPG world and plays it straight. The primary viewpoint character for this isn’t the protagonist, but Pomera: the newbie half-elven shaman that he recruits early on. What is it like from a NPC’s perspective to be power leveled against nightmare fuel enemies to the point where you are basically superhuman? (answer: recurring PTSD) What happens when an over-levelled healer accidentally uses her staff bonk on an average level adventurer? Exploring RPG meta jokes like these is what the series does well, and it functions at its best when it is being a genre parody like Konosuba instead of trying to tell a serious story.

Is Kanata dense? At the beginning, very. Like Pomera, he was power leveled in a small period of time. Unlike her, he wasn’t born into the fantasy world and was misled by someone much more powerful than him into believing that the world is a scarier place than it actually is. The fact that his master still is more powerful than him anchors him to this mindset for two books. That’s no small amount of time investment, and anyone who is already burnt out on clueless protagonists probably isn’t going to have the time for that unless there is something else that grabs their attention. That goes double if they aren’t a RPG fan and their ride isn’t made any better by the genre jokes. Contrary to what some people have come away with, Kanata is not as oblivious to his master’s crush as people seem to think he is, and I think the author recognized this sentiment enough to address it in one of the bonus stories.

Overall, I don’t think Disciple of the Lich is perfect by any means, but what it does well it does very well. I just don’t think it’s the right series for everyone, and I say this as someone who didn’t find Sword Art Online very appealing with how its main character was handled. I’m by no means a fan of protagonists who coast along through no real merit of their own, but I still like this series quite a bit. I think anyone who finds these bread crumbs I’m dropping interesting should give it a fair chance and make up their own mind. If you try it out on that basis and still think the series is meh, well, that just means I’ve got a strange attachment to it I guess. :)