So just as a part of my recent "I read this" log, I finished the danmachi spinoff recently (Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? Familia Chronicle: Episode Freya (what a waste of character limit(oh no so was this)). First off it was great. (1/18)

This is normally where I'd blurb some off the top of my head impressions of the series as a whole, but the more I think about this series (Is it Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?), and why I like it, the more I feel like I have to say about it. (2/18)

After trying my hardest to be a special snowflake snob in my younger years, I've generally mellowed out in my criticisms of media as a whole. I can enjoy most things, and can overlook a lot of flaws if there are enough redeeming qualities in any work. (3/18)

This has even become a bit of a catchphrase of mine: "It's okay to like bad things." I don't mean that as an insult to anyone's taste when I say it, I just mean you don't have to bend over backwards to justify enjoying something while at the same time recognizing flaws. (4/18)

Because let's be real here, there's a whole lot of extremely popular books, comics, and movies that are, for lack of a better word, pretty lowbrow. Your favorite series might be commercially successful, but it's hard to say if it's a classic, objectively good or whatnot. (5/18)

And that's okay! I've always thought the most important thing for art to do is invoke emotion. Taking in a variety of emotions through stories, in whatever form, helps to understand the human condition. That has value. It's also subjective and unquantifiable by nature. (6/18)

Now what does my (maybe over-thought, rambling, justification for being a total nerd) philosophy on fiction have to do with the series Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? Well, I hesitate to say, because I'm not entirely sure, but this series... (7/18)

...might be Actually Good (TM). As in, if you take a critical lens, break down its literary structure, and try to do an objective judgement on it, it might hold up. (8/18)

I say "might" because it's not like I read this series with a critical eye at first - I definitely just grabbed it at random because I'm jobless during a pandemic, turned my brain off, and went to town. It may have helped that my expectations were so low due to the anime. (9/18)

Now that I'm something like 30 volumes deep in the series (main series, spinoff, extras), I'm starting to fully appreciate and wonder that maybe this series isn't something I can dismiss as a "guilty pleasure". But also, wait, I did not read any of it critically at all. (10/18)

That being said, here's my quick recommendation for "Is it Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?". First, the title is horrible and misleading, and the anime does not do the source material justice. (11/18)

Danmachi is beautifully written, full of charming characters, heart-wrenching drama, pulse racing action, with a rock solid core of story and plot progression. (12/18)

Speaking of the story, you'd be forgiven for dismissing it as a run of the mill isekai. It does share some familiar tropes, but I've been realizing that danmachi may very well have as much in common with modern shounen as it does with Homer's epics (I'm not joking). (13/18)

The overall plot beats follows the timeless, well established flow of the hero's journey, complete with all the classical archetypes (the hero fool, the comforting mother, the seductress, the wise companion, etc). Considering the setting, this seems carefully deliberate. (14/18)

The setting is likewise deceptively deep (and on my opinion the greatest failure of the anime adaptation). The dungeon grows more mysterious and horrifying as the author reveals it. (15/18)

The gods and goddesses, introduced as humanlike thrill seekers, continually reveal themselves as capricious, awe inspiring, pure, and occasionally cruel beings, much like the classical gods of ancient mythology for which they are named. (16/18)

If I get any deeper than this, I might start pulling references so...

tl;dr, "Is it Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?" is my number one favorite light novel series, and I think it's Actually Good(tm) (17/18)

I kind of want to give it a real critical treatment, so I'll probably re-read the whole series at some point... I mean, I have the time... (18/18)