Incomplete list of things in QPB’s (TWSB’s?) worldbuilding that make me laugh:
(heavy spoilers up through recent, untranslated chapters)
Demonic Beasts: What are they? We just don’t know. As far as I know, their existence hasn’t been explained beyond a couple of points, like their danger levels. For some reason a wide variety of angry, magical animals that really hate divine items populate the entire continent. Types of demonic beast range from poisonous boars to palace-sized griffins to electrical t-rexes. They live in caves called dungeons. Some dungeons make monsters increase in power level. Any other story, dungeon diving would be part of the plot, but TWSB has waaay too many other priorities. Possibly demonic beasts can be tamed because people seem to accept that the divine beasts could be tamed demonic beasts very easily, but I don’t think we’ve actually seen a real case of this either. They appear to exist purely as animate plot devices, and while I kind of respect it, I want to knoooow. Sookym, release the forbidden demonic beast research papers. I’m sure some wizard is looking into it. François?
Cardinals automatically get Latin as a second language, no studying required. Like, the Cardinal level up rewards are:
Awesome power
+1 Trauma
Language proficiency: Latin
Hyunseo loves martial arts novels so much that it infected QPB’s Europe-esque setting, but he’s pretty good at hiding it so it only appears in the most northern, middle-of-nowhere part of the Holy Kingdom. Realistically, there would have been no reason to ever go there in QPB, but the Fates decided to do some sequence breaking in the new worldline so now everyone gets to experience the random Far-East Asian set pieces in the middle of a Germanic-analogue country.
With the reveal that holy knights are only born in the Holy Kingdom in order to protect the Goddess, the implication that the Empire went from 0 holy knights in 1000 years to 4 holy knights of significant power in 1 year solely because Yeseo (second son of the Goddess) crash landed there. Like, sure, the actual characters did the hard part, but his existence had the world itself just start spitting out holy knights like a broken vending machine (including, currently, 3 whole Cardinals, at least 1 of whom may not have existed at all in the original work).
All wizards are magic nerds, even combat wizards. A wizard will look at a magical mystery and ask “anyone else going to investigate this?” and not wait for an answer.
All the worldbuilding that’s inappropriate for minors goes on the islands of Admah and Zeboim because they didn’t make it into the original work. Most of the population of that region is also atheist for the same reason.
Even though the genre changed from romance fantasy to action-adventure fantasy between worldlines, a bunch of romance tropes have enough genre inertia to keep popping up, which then proceed to interact with the new genre in fun ways. The character roles swapping around is a big one (secondary male lead -> female lead, female lead -> best friend, [file not found] -> secondary male lead), but also stuff like:
Fake dating – the participants are etherically incompatible and hate each other. When asked what they like about each other, they would rather talk about their mutual partner.
Late to school with bread in their mouth – somehow there are sea anemones involved.
(make-your-own) Soulmates – actually, this one is rather interesting because I get the impression that while it existed in QPB, it wasn’t really that important to the plot, but it’s very important in the new worldline. There’s also that unrelated accidental soulmate event that happened, though, which was very traumatic for everyone involved.
Magical item in the shape of a ring – does get exchanged! But not between Yeseo and his main pursuant. Instead, Johann took the opportunity to troll his students and his students exploded a house.
Kiss cam – somehow this exists, but not standard cameras?? François’ mind is a mystery.
Romantic personal information (the middle name thing) – ends up mostly being used practically for identity verification, or in familial contexts.
Romeo and Juliet motifs – Gain completely misuses them wonderfully. Though the background radiation of Cedric being associated with Romeo and Yeseo associated with Juliet remains fairly intact.
Etc.
The Empire is the good guys. Sorry, years of Star Wars pop cultural influence has made me default to thinking Empire -> Bad Guys. It feels very strange rooting for the Empire.
The Holy Kingdom hates wizards, even the ones who only practice white magic, so the Big Bad (who operates in the Holy Kingdom) only employs warlocks, who use black magic. Except the Holy Kingdom also (nominally) hates warlocks, and they work underground (literally!) anyway, so Wilhelmina could have just used standard wizards…? I feel like she really missed out by not tapping into the standard wizard talent pool. I guess she had an ample supply of warlocks from Liliana’s leftover followers, but still. Did no one in the Holy Kingdom’s lengthy history of Trying To Usurp God ever think “wow, maybe it would be a good idea to have mages with a wide variety of specializations, not just ‘evil’”?
I should have put this one earlier, but the power ranking names of priests and holy knights being based on Catholic church clergy hierarchy cracks me up. The only cool ones are Cardinal and maaaybe Archbishop, because adding Arch- to a title immediately adds +1 coolness. It’s fortunate that all our main characters are Archbishops at minimum.
Also, the Vatican exists. Just, the Vatican. Not a thinly-veiled Vatican-analogue, it is straight up called the Vatican.
This one's more sweet than funny, but I love that probably the reason therapy exists in QPB even though many other fantasy novels don't have such a thing, and in such a positive light too, is because Hyunseo was writing it for Eunseo, who went to therapy for her depression, and now it's helping Yeseo with his PTSD.
I have a lot of thoughts about the ways Hyunseo and the trio’s mom shaped the world of QPB in a way that has looped back to affecting the “IRL world”, but most of them ended up more tragic than funny so theeey’re not going in this post.
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