F Volume 1 Chapter 4

In which stubborn characters are stubborn.

-SLIGHT SPOILERS-
Louie's behavior makes a lot more sense after you get through the third volume…

I finished all three volumes of F a little while ago. While the series is technically on indefinite hiatus, I am satisfied with where it left off. All in all, I would give this series as solid 7/10. I will warn you, however, that it doesn't close up any plot-related threads at all. If anything, I felt like the series stopped after Hibiki's first character arc.

On another note, I happened to chance upon another series from kindle's recommended list after I finished F. It caught my eye because not only was the artwork also by Suzunosuke, but because the characters on the cover of the second volume look exactly like an older (in the girl's case), more capable version of Hibiki and Louie. Like seriously…look at them:

I started reading this series, helpfully already translated as The Daybreak in English, and it's quickly become one of the best light novels I've read in a while. There are two volumes out at the moment. It is about a cross-dressing magician (the girl pictured above pretends to be a boy) and basically another Louie a knight whom she basically yells out of depression in the prologue chapter. The writing for this series is fantastic –the characters are well-fleshed out but still manage to do a lot of show-don't-tell even while in the first-person-perspective and the plot is both consistent and sensible. It is technically an isekai (the girl), but the isekai elements are only really present as a part of the character's backstory, which makes it feel more like an actual plot device than what you'd usual get with the genre. All in all, The Daybreak has become one of my personal favorites and I would recommend it to anyone who has enjoyed F thus far.

I would like to be able to translate this series one day. The gender confusion present in the series because of the main female protagonist's cross-dressing nature makes it a cut above most novels in difficulty because there are not many non-gendered p.r.o.nouns in the English language (not to mention honorifics/t.i.tles).

As such, I am planning on speeding along my translation of F so that I can finish the series and move on to this one. Hopefully, my translation skills will have improved enough by then that I can tackle The Daybreak. (Though, I can't deny that the prospect of picking up a third project isn't appealing to me right now, since I'll start having a bit more time on my hands soon. Kill me.) I'll have an update about what I end up deciding to do once I've made that decision.

tl;dr: I might speed up my translations of F because I want to work on something else.