Thanks for that spoiler, I couldn't be more satisfied, I feel like I had eaten a buffet by myself and I had already eaten LOL I feel happier for Edgar's fate than Rodcorte, thanks for the information. Pass the discord link
Everyone who knows Dumpstercorte hates him. He's that bad. @smjcc13 Ooh! Can't wait. Spoiler According to TVtropes, thanks to A-1 steak sauce, Delizah winds up dead, so Van takes her corpse, fills it with Demon King fragments and animates it as a clone, to get close to Mr. A-1 and blast him with a Hollow Cannon to the face.
Ah, yes. It's not truly a Japanese Light Novel until there's chapters going into fine detail regarding cooking, designed to get the readers to drool over the work and having their tummies rumble!
Also how a few centuries of development beat out millennia. Despite magic being a thing and drastically opening up the options.
They're just a bunch of dirty savages who need enlightened people of the modern day to think up crazy ideas like mixing eggs and oil to make mayonnaise or how to make cake batter. Or how to make a ball and kick it. Totally beyond them. Speaking seriously, the time scale of this series has always bothered me. Over a hundred thousands years you cannot seriously expect me to believe the world could be THIS stagnant, even with Alda watching over things. You will not convince me that Alda hates smoked meat so much that he smites anyone that invents bacon. He has better things to be doing. Even if you do assume he's capable of that. how have the Noble Orcs and other boundary range mountain nations not progressed further? How are they all still speaking recognizable Japanese? And it's all pretty much the same version of Japanese, too, with only tiny variations by region despite total isolation.
Well, If I remember right, Mayo comes to France in the 17th(18?)century, and that because someone conquers a Spain's city and brought a cook(or recipe) back, they are not invented it themself.
The issue is not a lack of creation, it is a lack of lasting progress. Things get developed and lost. Also, the "king" of the gods saying no progress is a major stopping point. That and progress is driven by need, and magic (plus de-humanizing slavery) tends to stifle that need. There was also a group of religious fanatics going around and destroying and form of progress for to long. Not that there has been none. from one of the ghouls backstories we know that slave collars were not in use a couple centuries prior. So they were either created or re-discovered in the last 2 centuries or so.
But the Bellwood fundamentalists were so extreme even Alda and his church didn't like them and tried to wipe them out. Maybe successfully, maybe not. So we know that he's not THAT crazy about it. And yeah Alda is an asshole but we know his priorities up until very recently was something like Vida's races > evil gods > raising up new gods since the attributes aren't being well maintained > gunpowder and anything that pollutes is evil and so on. It's shuffled around a few times during the story, but at no point has Alda stopped and gone "You know what? I fucking hate soccer. Any time I see someone kick a ball into a net, I am going to send laser beams down from the heavens." He's crazy, but he's not that crazy. Plus, it's not like this world has no forms of entertainment at all, it's just really niche and not terribly appealing. Remember, when Van introduced othello someone told him about a board game nobles play that has like thirty or more different pieces. How do you invent a game like that without something like checkers to build off first? Developed and lost only gets you so far as well. Amid and Orbaume are somewhere in the ballpark of a thousand years old, right? I actually don't remember for sure, but Amid was around at least two hundred years ago, as was Orbaume, and Orbaume existed as twelve separate kingdoms before that for a significant amount of time. None of these places invented backgammon or whatever? Maybe I should just pretend that an extra zero was added to how long ago Guduranis was defeated. Ten thousand years still massively strains credibility but it's not quite as absurd.
Plus people dont really travel around. Other than merchants, adventurers, and apparently bards people never really leave their birthplace so even if something gets discovered it would probably be stuck wherever it was made. That and alda is very traditional. As the god of order and law he prioritized status quo. All of his festivals and prayers are 20 hoops you have to follow in the exact order specified in section 10 subsection b of his church approved bibletm or else. With all of the gods that would actually care about progressing the world dead, sealed, in hiding, or kept under his thumb so if they did anything he would seal them, mortals of a creation profession can't really get divine protection of any kind.
Isn't there a lot of food culture? They just don't have certain Japanese foods, seemingly. The big food change that shook up the human lands was introducing ghoul cooking, and the races on the other side of the mountain range all had signature dishes that they made after a battle.The former Amid Baron whose family is obsessed with delicious foods had to be doing something before Van came along, too. The big thing with Van was that he seemed to have easy access to a lot of expensive imported spices through his weird plant binding skill, and that he ends up with exclusive sweeteners like Eisen's sap I guess. My eyes kinda glaze over when food is described, but I know at least they mentioned the tea snacks at the party Van attended in Morksi. Regarding advancement, I think there has to be some happening at least on the magic tool side of it at least. It seemed like with how Kanako's trio was wary of trying to spread new tech before meeting up with Van, the boogieman of Alda extremists is still a deterrent to stepping too far out of line for natives. I wouldn't be surprised if there are wealthy people holding on to tech or magical advancements for themselves, or scholars sharing it with guild members but otherwise keeping quiet. Heck, using Demon Fragment weapons is forbidden by Alda and the Amid Empire still does it. I wouldn't take absence of what the human culture is like for evidence that it doesn't exist. Van is a champion of the downtrodden and broken people, so we mostly see what life is like for the humans at the bottom of the hierarchy when he pokes his head out. Maybe that will change since he's visiting a proper city now, since he did want to be a part of the human nobility way back when.
Trade routes are a great way to spread culture. War too. Like how rice and silk got to Persia and Rome from China about a thousand and two thousand years ago respectively. Also Alda doesn't actually want his church to be so ceremonial and fussy, he just doesn't care if they do that. I think one of the character entries was like "So long as the rule of law is maintained, Alda doesn't care much about how his church runs itself." They don't have bacon or any smoked foods. They don't have any form of noodles and actually call it long thin bread or something like that. They don't have mayonnaise. They don't have cake. There is barely any use of spices. No wasabi. Almost no coffee. Honestly the way they describe the world it's like they just eat plain fruit, vegetables, heat their meat up and call it a day. ...Can we agree that the way Japanese hasn't changed in a hundred thousand years is crazy? Especially when two groups separated by half that entire time can still speak to each other perfectly comprehensibly? Look how many entirely distinct languages Latin became in less than two thousand, yet they don't even have true dialects.
For most of that, it would be down to not promoting factory style farming, I think. You can plant large portions of staple foods, in reclaimed devil's nests, but they aren't going to overlook you cultivating large amounts (at the tradable level) of spices, and other non-essentials. So it's at the agragrian level, of just collecting what grows naturally nearby, and isn't already in use somewhere else, like medicinal herbs. Gets weirder. It sounds like there was a common language in use by the Gods and their people before Gudu invaded, plus all the Champions were from different versions of Earth. Unless there's actually been some imposed language this whole time, there should be all kinds of variation, making it hard for Van's people to communicate outside.
Logically, the way Alda enforces the status quo should have collapsed on itself long, long ago, dooming the "human" races to exponential decline until they're extinct, especially since he prioritizes killing off "those evil Vida's races" rather than dealing with cults run by actually evil gods, only recently going "this isn't working, we need to deal with the evil gods first... wait Vida's champion just showed up, killed off an army of my fanatics and went 'return to sender' with them as undead? Okay everyone top priority kill the NEW DEVIL KING!!!!!" The language, we can presume is enforced by the Church of Alda, THE primary authority in just about every country, kingdom, hamlet, or village big enough to not have to worry about inbreeding to maintain the population independently. It's not the first time even in real-world history where the language was taught and enforced by the church. In fact Latin was enforced by the Roman Catholic Church until it splintered due to several internal revolts. The church of Alda doesn't have internal revolts as Alda himself is very active in keeping the place in line with his ideology. He's "tolerating" the self-proclaimed "peaceful" faction so he doesn't alienate Heinz and because even though he's cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, he realizes Van listens to Vida's teachings and shows empathy to mortals of all stripes, so the methods that worked on Big G won't work on him, AND he can rope in people to his "evil" cause. As for developing tech... Even if Alda and the loony "Bellwoods" don't immediately crack down (The Bellwoods are on record setting people on fire for growing rice.) How is it going to get distributed from town to town, city to city? The roads are filled with bandits, wild beasts, monsters, and a devil's nest and/or dungeon could just spontaneously appear anywhere. As an inventor, are you going to risk hiring adventurers as escorts, when they could simply go and knock on the door of Alda's church and ask the priest for guidance? Or are you going to do as Rudy did and risk running the road you think is safe only to find yourself swarmed by bandits, taken captive, and all your valuables taken, and then have the bandits demand how your new toy works? Then again, technological development also needs an impetus. There are cultures in the real-world that live like cave-men in the present, and they see no need to modernize; they have a barter based economy and couldn't care less about precious metals, cash, and have little interest in gems and other precious stones. Introduce them to a laptop computer and they'll likely smash it to pieces, trying to find something they can do with it to help them with their daily hunting, fishing, or farming, and if they can't, they'll just throw it away as total junk. Rod, for all his idiocy, tried to provide said impetus, but because he never bothered to clear it with the locals first, it's blowing up in everybody's face, and he has the gall to be dumbstruck that it's not going over well.