A struggling slime farmer manages to unlock a class that allows her to wield the power of slime, summon slime creatures, and even turn into a slime. It turns her life upside down and she ends up living a life of adventure and danger she never expected.
(Note: The main character is transgender and will eventually change to living as a woman.)
It's about cute slimes, I personally imagine them like a mix from the game slime rancher (especially if they turn monster from to much mana) and the thumbnail.
Also Egg hatches. So it's a perfect win-win situation.
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I love the characters in this story. So why do I dislike this story?
The whole premise is based on a philosophical scenario presented to us, and then.... it just flat out states that it's morally wrong to do this thing, without any actual argument as to why it's wrong, much less any real attempt to pursue alternative actions or any kind of critical thinking that would probably get in the way of the grand adventure built on the premise. We are just told thing bad, and it is presented as self evident without any real argument besides concepts that exist outside of the story held by the author. We are told that free will does not have any sort of conditionals, yet we are given no real response as to what should happen instead when it is used to harm, even when there are multiple examples in the setting where that free will has done plenty of harm and nobody has done anything to stop it. Also, I understand that that story has no room to fit this whole thing in, but has anybody actually defined how free will works? Like, does talking to or even seeing another person violate either your own or other people's free will just from the act of observation altering both subject and observer? Where is the line here? Obviously some level of consent is involved, but there are so many things happening to us that we aren't actively consenting to at every given moment that creating a philosophical scenario where people add their own element to it that registers on the same level as the air being slightly warmer making people wear less clothing sounds really.... empty handed as evils go.
Of course, immediately stopping the flimsy argument wouldn't be a very exciting story, but at the same time we're supposed to buy at face value that the story itself is siding with the lead characters here with no critical analysis of what they're doing or why they're going unquestioned from nothing but the most toothless strawmen. Maybe like thirty theoretical chapters into the story, somebody will ask the character that was one of the victims of that harm why they are fighting for letting the people who harmed them continue to run rampant with no consequences, or maybe the character will come face to face with more victims and tell them to their faces that it is the god of free will that dictates that they must die for the living to have meaning while they themselves lucked out of not dying.
And of course, opposing this automatically means imperialism or something. Idk??? Making somebody stop being bad through force is equated to colonialism, and instead we should just watch their victims get tortured while engaging with their oppressors in bad faith negotiations for decades. I'm not sure what the proposed alternative is here, cause we're not told one.
I know I'm being harsh here, but I just find it odd that everything in the story up to that point is clearly understood by the author, and then their brain just switches off for this one part and I got whiplash. Like there's some kind of outside context that led to this and I'm just not getting it somehow. They proposed this exact scenario for a reason. They wanted me to see that in such a wildly far fetched scenario, morality should remain absolute. But my counterproposal is such: if you place morality in an environment completely divorced from the reality it originated from, does it really make sense anymore?
The kicker to all this is that it very much feels like they just gave a fake version of communism a blue flag and then just made them arbitrarily evil and imperialist to drive this plot. That this great sinister evil arguably improved everybody's lives is like the stinger here where we're shown that people don't deserve to have any of that if it's not done The Right Way even though for all intents and purposes there is no actual material difference besides The Right Way costing an infinite number of better realities for an infinite amount of people in those timelines in exchange for it. The story was fine up until the point where it has to lean on these cardboard stand-ins for real life concepts, and not only that, I'm told that they're going into this not to deal with the Obviously Christian Fascists Who Actively Harm People, but the Probably Communists Who Make People Nice By Evilly Not Killing Anybody, and at this point I stopped and left so that I wouldn't say anything mean.
I actually didn't write this review for a few years because I had to distance myself from this to make sure I wasn't just blindly reacting to this, but I've reviewed everything about this story and myself since then and my answer remains the same. I'm sorry I posted this whole essay under your story but I just had to put it down in text so I can get closure.
Philosophy isn't worth anything if it can't take one step into the real world (like, a single step into peoplehood. I'm not talking about getting rid of slime creatures, just like, who people are), and this fantasy wasn't worth entertaining the complete lack of discussion or self awareness it presented.
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Very cute story with cute characters and interesting background lore. A litRPg that's *not* isekai? Awesome!
Highly recommend-worthy!
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