>>2934349Fuck it, going to post about the novel I was trying to DeepL my way through until I lost my fucking copy of the book.
So there's this LN called ???????, translates to something like "A City of Falling Silver Drops". I picked it up because I'm a simp for the Director character from Hagio Moto's Marginal, who the main character of this novel is inspired by. (The writer actually says this in the back of the book.)
Because I'm a complete numpty, I only got around ten pages in before I lost the book, but basically, the MC is a government official from the Capitol of a high tech nation who has been sent to administer a troubled, backwards province on the nation's outskirts. The area is a bit like North Africa under the Romans, and the only high tech is under the control of the people from the Capitol.
The MC initially suffers from culture shock when he's taken to his first slave market. (This is around where I lost the book so the rest is based on a summary.) He sees a child gladiator being sold and is so horrified that he buys the kid and decides to raise him to be his bodyguard. The kid falls in love but the main dude isn't into kids and is also slowly dying of a terminal illness. The bodyguard grows up and stuff I haven't gotten to happens, but I assume the bodyguard wins the MC over just before he dies at the end because Japanese readers on twitter seemed to like the book but find the ending sad.
From what I saw, the worldbuilding is ok, and though the author admits it's derivative, at least the concept isn't the most generic thing ever. It seems the novel did well in the BL awards the year it came out, but it's only a Light Novel so I'm not expecting much from it. Or at least I wasn't, now I'll never know.
Rikako Kasai did the art btw, but it's old enough that the character designs are pretty meh.
