He Who Fights with Monsters by Shirtaloon aka Travis Deverell, is a LitRPG that takes a much more traditional approach with slight variations in its setting and with major focus placed on its characters.
Jason Asano is a half-Japanese, half-Australian man who had been living as a soulless office-supplies store middle manager for the past 2 years who suddenly finds himself naked on the ground in a place he has never seen before. He finds himself in an entirely different world than he’s used to, many things seeming similar but with obvious differences, such as the two moons in the sky. Eventually Jason searches around and realizes was a garden villa for a cult of cannibals after he is captured by some of the cannibals. In the prison Jason meets the rest of the main characters, a group of adventures consisting of two humans, Rufus and Farrah, as well as a Leonid named Gary. When he meets them, all hope seems lost, however Jason managed to scavenge and hide a magical item that looks like a coin from when he was searching around the top-side garden. The team of adventures urge Jason to eat the coin as a last-ditch means of escaping. When he eats the coin, Jason gains a surge of power which he uses to break all of them free, leading to one last escape/fight sequence in which the team and Jason all escape the villa.
After the hecticness of the starting chapters, the book’s calmer setting allows it to go much more into detail about the world’s magic system as well as the powers Jason ended up receiving upon waking up in the world. Jason’s power basically give him the ability to look at and interact with the world like he was playing a game, allowing him to instantly absorb magical powers from apparatuses that he stole from the cult, which unintentionally gives him powers with evil connotations, such as poison magic and a dark cloak which raps him in darkness. While the magic system and setting the author sets up is interesting in its own right, it is far from ground breaking, with it containing many classic fantasy creatures. The true draw of the book is the star of the show, Jason Asano, and his interactions with other characters.
Jason Asano is a very laid back person who likes to joke around and confuses people with seemingly random rants as seen on the surface. However, in reality Jason Asano’s interactions with people always move with Jason’s pace as he uses various strategies to get people where he wants them. Whether that be switching from serious conversation to ranting about the sandwich in his hand in order to throw off the person in from of him, or subtly guiding the conversation towards that cause people to think about problems or desires that he can help with and forcing them to ask for his help. Jason’s very politically oriented mind shines through as he later clashes with his new world’s nobility, gaining the attention of people very powerful physically and politically when he shouldn’t even be close to be considered important by societal standards, as one’s rank is what gives someone importance. Jason even uses the nature of his dark and evil looking powers in order to conjure an image of mysterious danger around himself which constantly causes the people he fights, whether in training or to the death to wholly give up trying to reason out the strategy of the “unpredictable man”. The author displays a grand dichotomy throughout the novel between Jason’s actions and his intentions summarized by calling Jason “a good man with evil powers”.
Jason’s inner dialog and some of his lowest points have his questioning the ethics of his actions, whether it’s ok to manipulate someone into becoming your enemy if it will make you allies, if its ok to use powers that poison and corrode leading to a slow death to any monsters or humans he may face, if its ok to set in motion change that will spread and improve the entire world if it means the death of those halting that progress or their underlings who are just following orders, or even if its ok to kill as a display of power to your enemies, in hopes warding them off from attacking your loved ones and companions. While this book goes into detail about the different fields of magic and different levels of power people have attained, which is interesting, the true draw of the book is the battle between ethics and politics playing out around the main characters and the complex political structure Jason asserted himself into.
Audiobooks, and books of this genre, are something I haven’t explored yet but your blogpost makes me interested to start one. I think that you incorporated the ideas from chapter 4 of the Flair book really well here, I liked the repetition of phrases through the last paragraph and really allows the reader to fall deeper and get immersed within the plot of the novel.