Heretical Fishing Review: When the Pokémon Outpace the Story

Bracing for the hate mail

I'm probably going to catch heat for this review. So be it. Heretical Fishing is enormously popular, the early stretch genuinely earns its reputation, and I still dropped it in the middle of book two. Both things are true, and the reason I dropped it is specific enough that you'll know within one book whether it applies to you.

The setup is delightful. Fisher is the scion of a wealthy family who inherits the company, discovers how it actually operates, torpedoes it on principle, and becomes his world's social-media laughingstock. Seeking any scrap of peace, he takes up fishing, gets maybe a handful of trips in, and is promptly taken out by truck-kun. He wakes in a world where the ocean gods once harmed humanity, so the dominant religion holds the sea itself taboo: nobody fishes, nobody eats from the water, and waterfront land is worthless. You can see the man's grin from here. He buys the beach house nobody wants and commits the heresy of the title. It turns out consuming his catches kicks off cultivation, in a world where cultivators are rare, hoarded, and enslaved by a king who fears them, and Fisher, who only wants to be left alone, starts quietly turning himself, his friends, and the local wildlife into exactly what the powers of this world are hunting for. Great premise, high-quality writing, a warm cast, a cute slow-burn romance, and real stakes simmering in the background. Book one is very good, and I enjoyed almost all of it.

The Pokemon problem

Then the roster starts growing. Feeding his catches to the local animals wakes them up too, and by early book two Fisher has five or six sapient companions: Claws the majestic crab, the lightning otter, then a rabbit, a lobster, on and on. And here's my honest structural complaint: the first two are unique, charming, and additive. Every animal after that is derivative of the first two, and each one comes with its own chapters, its care, its cultivation development, its solo adventures, and once one animal gets a chapter, they all get chapters. By the middle of book two the story spends nearly as much time with the menagerie as with the humans, the plot slows to a crawl, and the series has fully become a gotta-catch-them-all situation. Their social range is inherently limited, they're all devoted to Fisher and dependent on him, so the chapters can only do so much, and for me they mostly did the same thing repeatedly. I got bored, and I stopped.

Compare Beware of Chicken, which I resisted for years precisely because I feared this exact trope: there, every animal is distinct, the personalities complement each other, and I fell in love with the whole barnyard. Same trope; the execution gap is the whole difference. The rest of my nitpicks are smaller: the romance being with literally the first person he meets in the new world is a big coincidence, and the stern-father bit is ham-fisted and overplayed, but this is a story that leans into its tropes on purpose, and that's part of its charm rather than a crime.

The fans vs. me

This one splits cleanly, and I've watched it split in the forums: people who share my complaint about the animal cast bogging the story down, and people whose favorite thing about the series is the Pokemon of it all, who love it more with every new companion. Neither camp is wrong. The variable is you: if an ever-growing cast of cute sapient animals sounds like the point rather than the tax, add a tier to everything I've said and go be happy.

Verdict

C-peak, which on this site means I stopped, and peak because what I liked, I really liked. My stated plan: come back someday, skip the animal chapters, and see if the verdict moves; given how gently the plot advances, I don't expect to miss much. If you want this flavor perfected, Beware of Chicken remains the best slice-of-life in the genre. If you're here for the slow-burn romance angle specifically, Nathan Lowe's The Stars Have Eyes does that better, review to come. And if you're a fisherman: the fishing itself is written with real love, and you might round this up on that alone.