This was difficult to read, it took weeks from start to finish, but it was still an immensely satisfying experience throughout. The sexy scenes were still sexy, the romantic scenes were still gushing with warm fuzzy feelings, and the philosophical points were delivered in mesmerizingly persuasive fashion. Of course, I wasn't reading '100 Waifus' all day every day for weeks, it was interspersed between other fun things I was doing like Xenoblade Chronicles 3, but this is a long book that's very demanding of your memory and attention. There's no way to make it through the long lists of names while keeping track which child belongs to which franchise without 100% of your brainpower. All the necessary information is available in the book, but only for those who are paying attention.
With all the recent name changes I felt it was time to check out the book again and make sure everything was running smoothly. The answer is yes, the name gallery is better than ever. But no, it still isn't perfect. I would need to play the new Star Ocean game, Tales of Arise, and perhaps find a few more great works before I'm truly content. But it's close to perfection. Out of 1106 names we're talking about a mere handful of weak placeholders. Most of the names are surrounded by a blazing halo of glory where just looking at them reminds you of a million good times. When I read this book for the 34th time I hope to have fixed a few more names. I won't give up until I've got everything as good as I can make it.
But my edits weren't exclusive to name changes, I also (to my chagrin) found lots more things to correct even though this is my 33rd runthrough. Namely, minor spelling errors, correcting Nekone's hair length (it's actually long not short, which you can see when it isn't all gathered up under her ribbon), and phrasing improvements that make sentences hopefully read more smoothly. None of these corrections taken in isolation matter much, but taken all together, and after 33 times of this sort of cleansing, it ends up sounding a lot better.
The most important change, the only change to the actual content of the book, came in Chapter 28. I noticed there was a plot hole in the segment, where Christopher said he was going to switch his education system to English only learning, but in Chapter 37 Ushio spoke purely in Japanese. Which means his society was bilingual, not monolingual, and his education system should reflect that reality. I added in a few more sentences to correct the discrepancy:
"Our children need to know how to read and write. They need to know the concepts of arithmetic and algebra so they even know what to ask of their AI assistants in order to get the right answers. But with AI translation, they wouldn't have to memorize kanji to get at the majority of good art. Given the superior simplicity of the English alphabet and the language's greater size and versatility due to inheriting words from all over, and now that machines can translate everything good from Japan instantly and easily for us, thus mooting any reason kids should continue to learn such an archaic script, we should switch to English as our written and spoken language. After that it's just building up our vocabularies. The larger our vocabularies, the more we can understand and appreciate both nature and art. Fiction and non-fiction. If we don't have a concept for something, even AI can't help us. We have to understand the words internally to make sense of the world." I said.
"Drilling the concepts of math into a kid should be much faster than actually coming to the correct answers. And English should be much faster to learn to read than kanji. Both the math and English classes can be reduced in length and achieve the same effect. You're right about written Japanese, but spoken Japanese is beautiful, concise and poignant, it would be a shame for children to lose access to it. Besides, can you really accept anime as genuine if it isn't voiced in Japanese?" Kaname advised.
"Alright, we'll keep the bilingual education like we had before, but only with the English alphabet." I conceded.
"People still need to know history in order to understand ethics, politics and economics. Just having the facts available isn't enough, they have to actually know them so that they can apply said historical lessons to the governance of their daily lives." I decided.
"So let's say, 50 minutes of English/vocabulary building, 50 minutes of history/geography/economics/politics, 40 minutes of math, 2 hours of "Arts, Literature, Philosophy and Morality," 1 hour of lunch/recess, 40 minutes of Japanese/vocabulary building, 1 hour of sports or performance arts. The full school day would then be seven hours." Kaname typed a note up on her iPad.
If it took me 33 times to notice this plot hole, I doubt anyone else noticed it, but the book is still better when plot holes are filled, however minor. If nothing else it will please God to see the best book ever written get a little bit better.
I keep thinking it would be fun to add more to this story, but by the time I finish reading it I always feel like everything that needed to be said has been said, and there's genuinely nothing left to add. This story encompasses everything. It's the all-book. Any detail that's missing can be derived from overarching content which addresses it from a wider perspective. Since there's no point repeating yourself, once something can be derived it needn't be written. The reader can figure out stuff like that on their own.
For people who have never tried '100 Waifus' before, or people who read it long ago before all these edits were made, now is the chance with everything updated to the current day:
If you're interested in girls' bodies, girls' hearts, building a utopia, God, the afterlife, art or happiness then this is the book for you.
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