"A Wild Last Boss Appeared" uses tropes in a clever manner. I want to discuss some of them here.
I'm gonna just talk about volume 9, the final volume, straight away here since it's fresh in my mind as I just read it today.
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Why does every isekai have "beastfolk"? Why do they always have "demon lords" and "devilfolk"? Why do they always have standard fantasy creatures thought up on Earth (elves, orcs, etc)... and why are they all the same every time?
Alovenus, the Goddess, is actually an earthling. Life is something she is unable to create. Therefore, she must "steal" life from Earth and modify them befitting of a fantasy world. Alovenus loves Earth and its stories and therefore takes inspiration from them when creating her world.
I'm not sure if this is intentional, but there's some good philosophy here. It's the fact that nothing you think of is truly original. You can take inspiration from sources and modify them to make it your own, but it's impossible to be 100% original. If you don't believe me, try to imagine a new color.
Alovenus is the same.
I'm gonna give the author the benefit of the doubt and assume that he meant to refer to this philosophy. And it's fantastic.
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Why does every isekai have a "demon lord" and "hero summonings"? Well, a good portion of isekai have them because the authors aren't creative and need a cookie cutter template to help them write (which isn't bad if you're just learning to write!).
But obviously Last Boss is different.
This will also tie into another philosophy that I want to explain real quick for context.
After reading V9, I assume Firehead is an agnostic. I could be looking too deeply into things, but this is my assumption from what I read. I think he believes a god exists, but he doesn't do anything.
Alovenus is a goddess that spontaneously came into existence. An analogy to the big bang is made here. What is the beginning? The big bang, right? But what came before that? It's hard to say what the beginning of everything is, so we just have our spontaneous big bang which is the beginning for us.
Anyway, since Alovenus is an earthling, she has obviously heard of Abrahamic gods. If "god" exists, why doesn't he do anything to help those who are suffering? So, as a goddess that could do anything, she took it upon herself to create paradise for people.
Any time people prayed, she answered. Any time they wished for something, she granted it.
Now enters another philosophy known as the hedonic treadmill.
One's state of happiness is relative. The analogy made in the book is a cake given to a rich kid and a poor kid on their birthdays. The poor kid is overjoyed. Since his life circumstances are worse, this is seemingly a fantastic change of pace. The rich kid, however, is angered. What a small cake! Since his life circumstances are better, he expects better things.
So, ironically, by trying to make people happy all the time, Alovenus achieved the opposite... Since prayers were always granted, when something small didn't go someone's way, they would be unhappy.
Let me go on another tangent here.
How do you make someone happy? If there was a career that made everyone happy, what would it be? Well, studies show that as long as one's income is slightly but steadily increasing throughout their life, they are the happiest.
Now we go back to the concept of hero summonings and demon lords. What is the purpose of the "goddess' script" that's been repeating for millions of years?
To Alovenus, it's the ultimate way of keeping people happy. By having a "demon lord" in existence, people will despair. And once a hero is summoned, people will be elated. This is the only way to keep people happy. If you drive them to worse circumstances, the happier they will be when something good happens.
The demon lord, though, is a being created by Alovenus that has been alive for all this time, and he has an "ego", or self, of his own. Eventually, he's fed up with the script since he's forced to drive people to despair for eternity. And subconsciously, Alovenus is as well. This is the reason Lufas is who she is - she's the "bug" that spawned as a result of Alovenus wishing for this script to be changed. Once Lufas beats Alovenus, they come to the conclusion that it's best for individuals to lead their own lives without a higher power interfering.
I thought this was a fascinating philosophy to agnosticism. Perhaps Firehead believes that God exists, but he doesn't do anything since trying to make people happy will only have the opposite effect.
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Anyway, there's probably more stuff I could talk about, but that will probably have to wait for later.
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