Wark Say posted:

The Mahouka light novels were a game-changer for me: In early 2012, I got a friend in Tokyo to hunt down and send me the first half of the Gundam Unicorn novels because the I was really into the OVA's. In further exchanges through email, Skype, text messages and the like, he started mentioning in our exchanges that there was this Light Novel series that I might be into. That series was Mahouka. At around June-July 2012, I actually got the second package from my friend which included the back half of the Unicorn novels and the first 2 arcs of Mahouka (Volumes 1 through 4).

The reason that I wrote that first sentence about the Mahouka novels being a personal game-changer is that I'm fairly confident that those loving novels broke my brain: For real, the novels were so bad, they made me realize how much time I've had wasted in media that I honestly do not give one flying gently caress about. Like, there's stuff that I'll watch with friends while drinking and such, or the "So bad it's good" / guilty pleasure shlock that I still dig. However,all I needed to do was read this piece of fiction that was so vile, so up-its-own-rear end and just plain lovely, it flipped a switch in my brain that went "Man, this sunk-cost bullshit has got to stop", and it caused me to drop a bunch of long-running things that I knew in the back of my head were no longer among my jams: Among the things I can still half-remember dropping are Bleach, the Index novels, the SAO novels, the Marvel movies, and cheese knows how many other shows, comics and books. I think that I also stopped reading / bookmarking webcomics with the sole exception of Gunnerkrigg Court (which I still follow to this day). I actually started giving away stuff that I've been hoarding. So yeah, the Mahouka novels were so loving bad that they made me reevaluate my life choices in regards to what I use my time to entertain myself with.