This review was written after volume 9. This story isnt one I really have a good way to describe. It seems to intentionally avoid using templates and its great having a romcom that isnt in school. The story is basically just a bunch of the stuff that the author likes while I really dont care about the descriptions of how various Belgian beer brands taste much of the story is just... slice of life with an interesting enough cast which is my favorite. Oh and naked girls of course. What makes this novel stand out to me is the depiction of the actual working parts. Like with any story it has both the happy parts and the deadlinecrunching parts and I feel like I learned a bit about the industry from this book. After all they literally included one of the things that happened to this storys anime to the MCs anime. One thing that this story does is make a lot of references to other media. Theres discussion about specific characters some mentions to stuff youre definitely expected to know even if you dont actually I know nothing about SAO other than the premise so when they mention the fact that the imouto in SAO isnt the main heroine in a way that implied youre already supposed to know that it was a bit surprising and a bit of other minor background Oregairu is used as a common example of popular work thats easy to pick up on after the first few times but could be missed earlier thats needed to pick up on some of the details that I think are expected to be expressed. As with any good story about creators this story allows seeing much of the characters work. There are many stories that the novelists write and youre often given at least a bit of it though often just the proposal sent to the editors only the protaganist gets pages of hilarious story drafts too. Despite everything this is still a harem romcom and a harem romcom cant be good without a good cast. This includes characters that appear pretty late in and talk about some of their initial development... so expect major vol1 spoilers and minor later ones. Itsuki Hashima is the protaganist. He loves imoutos and all of his novels are about imoutos. He is fueled by his lack of a imouto allowing him to try to create the ultimate imouto. Nayuta Kani is a writer who started writing due to liking Itsukis books and is absurdly good at it despite not really thinking about what she writes and as such she misses most deadlines but is allowed to due to being too popular. Likes: Being naked Itsuki sex. Shes funny and normally these traits are such that Id expect her to be my favorite character... but I just dont see it for some reason. Maybe its her score of 0 life skills. Chihiro Hashima is Itsukis little stepsister who pretends to be his brother. Good at cooking and cleaning but is overall boyish in the places shes acting like a girl such as school. Apparently hasnt received much sex education. Miyako Shirakawa is a friend Itsuki made before he dropped out of college. A fairly normal college girl but has taken up an interest in editorial. Shes my favorite. I want to believe she usually scores 2 on the character polls too. Hayato Fuwa is a male novelist friend who debuted at the same time as Itsuki. Tries to write something sort of like modern trends but overall dislikes how their work doesnt pull a dedictated fanbase like Itsukis. But his work is still good enough to get an anime. Guess writing about failing writers is more boring since they dont have the income to keep fooling around all the time... Has a maid fetish and buys a lot of random games and imported beer. Unlike the other writers he actually had an okay college life. He also has a tsundere imouto to Itsukis jealousy though he hasnt realized her affection. Kenjirou Toki is Itsukis editor. Likes sex clubs. Hes mainly there at the start to have some sort of editor presence as in someone dying from stress but since more editors get introduced hes really just sorta... there. Ashley Ono is a tax accountant whos familiar with working with authors. Despite being a sadist it doesnt actually show up that much presumably due to not needing to reinforce a personality trait once established. Is a legal loli. Setsuna Ena is a novel illustrator that basically just does whatever they want. Likes ass and specializes in drawing it but especially Chihiros. Has a big dick not that thats ever relevent. Kaiko Mikunayama is a manga artist who loves lingerie ...and imoutos too much. Through being a model Miyako was able to still get them to draw nude scenes though. That sounds a little inaccurate but Im not fixing it Kasuka Sekigahara is a very popular writer until they died presumably out of stress due to getting way too severe criticism for the choices they made in their novel. Inspired Itsuki to start writing. Theres a bunch of other characters like newly debuted writers but most of them havent really done much yet. My favorites of those would be the old guy who wrote a normal novel but is now a light novel author since his novel was good and got an editing pass and the girl who looked down on everyone else for no reason until they managed to get her down her high horse I liked her because they mentioned that everyone else was like that once too. Theres a lot of very fun things that happen. Most are enjoyable some feel questionable but its still entertaining. The following paragraphs are mostly a ramble about various plot elements. The characters play a lot of simple games such as one where people take turns creating a story to try to steer it toward a certain ending or one where everyone makes up fake definitions for an obscure dictionary word and then try to guess the real one. I think these games are the biggest highlight of the story to me I feel like apart from the actually somewhat serious parts of the story theres not very many the game chapters are where the characters use their unique personalities the best. They also have a tabletop RPG campaign running it ends in volume 9 but where I was surprised by the high attention to detail put into it. They built a complete world for it and kept readers up to date on each players character sheets I could imagine playing a campaign and having it actually go like it does here except that I dont think my DM usually allows doing some of the stuff thats this stupid and I believe that thats perfect if someones actually played a TTRPG before. I like the workrelated events of the story too I think now Ill use them as a baseline for what I imagine people in the industry to be like. Obviously this isnt exactly perfect since every experience varies by person but theres just something in this that makes it feel like how it actually is. Receiving valentines chocolate for your characters knowing exactly how late you can be until not doing so would cause delays getting tossed in a jail cell until you finished your manuscript editors waiting until 3AM on the Real Deadline to receive their manuscript editors receiving all of the criticism rather than the authors for minor mistakes publishers holding contests where people have to rapidly read through way too many submissions anime staff being too overworked so they end up ghosting for a bit having weirdly annoying censorship standards for TV adaptations etc. are all things that I never really wouldve expected but now that Ive heard of it I wouldnt find it fascinating to hear about again. Theres a There are some meta jokes such as one point where they use a footnote which explains footnotes because the text was about footnotes and it was a good spot to slot one. Theres places where they have an editors note left in the text and some other places where they reference something in a text being written instory when it is very explicitly done in this story too. They arent really anything special but I find they make me laugh pretty easily. Theres this instance where Setsuna goes off on a cubism kick and temporarily stops drawing ass. I understand the purpose but I dont like Setsuna or ass that much so it just feels like it came completely out of nowhere completely intentionally by the author of course and I just found it offputting rather than cool. Naturally I also find the tastes of characters that dont match mine slightly weird but thats to be expected. As mentioned above I find Nayuta not very enjoyable despite how I normally love characters that are small and catlike. I cant tell if its because of how aggressively she pushes but she even gets proper development and everything. And I still cant think of anything in particular that would make me not like her a lot. Also there are some descriptions of different wine and beer usually from Belgium. The author states that the ones that they liked make it into the novel I dont care at all about it and believe too much space is spent on it but its something the author loves and I figure someone who doesnt like tabletop games as much but does like drinking would be able to enjoy the story as much as I do. Overall this story is the author putting their own likes and life into a book. Since the life of someone in an occupation in a foreign country is something I was never curious about in the past there was tons of cool things that occurred.