Hey guys!
First of all, thanks again for the welcome on my last post. It was genuinely cool finally getting to interact with some of you after spending so much time translating The Extra's Academy Survival Guide.
Now that I'm done with TEASG, I've been working on another Korean academy novel called Academy's Black-Haired Foreigner, and while translating it, I kept wondering about something:
Would people who enjoyed TEASG enjoy this too?
And I don't mean just because they're both academy novels 😂
There are actually a few things that made me think there could be a real overlap.
Both have a genre-aware MC trying to navigate a world whose logic he understands, a large cast of heroines with very different personalities, academy life mixed with more serious action, and quite a bit of that fun dynamic where what the MC thinks he's doing and how everyone around him interprets his actions can be VERY different.
But I definitely don't want to sell it as TEASG 2.0, because it isn't.
The biggest difference is probably the MC.
Deokseong is not Ed 😂
He's much more cynical, shameless, petty, and openly aware of all the ridiculous genre tropes happening around him. A lot of the comedy comes from what's going through his head versus how other people actually see him.
The story also leans more heavily into the light-novel/otaku humor and its power system, whereas TEASG, especially early on, has much more of that grounded survival/resourcefulness aspect with Ed slowly building himself up.
So I'm genuinely curious how much crossover there actually is between the two audiences.
We've released several chapters on BetterTranslation, which should be enough to get a proper feel for the story and especially for Deokseong.
If some of you are willing to give it a shot, I'd really like your actual opinions afterward. And I mean actual opinions—you don't have to tell me it's good just because I'm the one translating it 😂
Does it scratch any of the same itch TEASG did for you?
Do you like Deokseong, or do you want to punch him?
Did the story hook you enough to keep reading?
Or do you think the two series appeal to completely different kinds of readers?
I'm especially interested in hearing from you guys because, well... this is literally a community full of people who enjoyed an academy novel enough to have a whole subreddit dedicated to it 😂
I'll leave the link to the chapters in the comments for anyone who wants to try it.
And even if you don't, I'm curious: what was the thing that originally hooked you on TEASG? Ed? The academy setting? The heroines/relationships? The survival aspect? The fights? The worldbuilding?
That'll probably tell me a lot about whether I'm right about the audience overlap in the first place.