Series with the steepest/largest drop in quality
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@kuali said in Series with the steepest/largest drop in quality:
@kurosov When condensing the (much longer) source material to fit the remaining book, the author cut the jokes to make space for the plot. And even that was cut down too much to really work.
You can't screw up the final book of a comedic series much more than that.
That's a big problem with webcomics. Most of them turn to shit in the last 5-10 chapters as they're told to wrap up entire storylines and move on. You get the image equivalent of bullet points where not even the tone of the previous chapters remains.
with this story it was worse than just the humour being cut. The MC went from not having feelings for the "boyfriend" and just trying something new which the previous volumes painted as a problem when she inevitably has to turn him down to supposedly actually being in love.
She went from someone embracing the freedom to change her dream to giving it up without a care to be a wife.
The section about her acting as a queen was essentially bullet points.
Every other characters plotlines were cut entirely.
Her double life abruptly ended with a character thrown in just to do that.
Anything of substance happened off screen.
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@Kurzaa said in Series with the steepest/largest drop in quality:
Rising of the Shield Hero - Looking back, the first season and the corresponding books pretty much covered the "rising" of the shield hero. It was my second light novel series though and I still enjoyed the characters. My cut-off though was the iron chef volume, spent coming up with a new way of powering up the characters through cooking cheats, with a cook-off in town to save the citizens.
This is amazingly similar to my experience with it. Except I stopped before the Iron Chef one because I thought the premise looked really dumb by that point, and it was my first light novel series. My second one was Bookworm, which really just highlighted the series's poor qualities.
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From any source:
So I'm a Spider, So What after about the fourth volume. You can actually tell the author was streching a story they had mentaly finish, and the characters started flip-floping through power-creep and suffered back story changes on a whim.
I Shall Survive Using Potions was good until the 6 volume. If it would have ended with a little of 7 in it, the story would have had a fit ending. From there it feels like the same story but with added characters that don't add anything at all to the overpowered MC.
My Quiet Blacksmith Life in Another World becomes disappointing. The author has no real direction for the story, flip-flopping every volume. If you read the author's afterwords it just makes the experience all the worse. The author actually says things in his afterwords that never come to be, and the MC tends to forget things It was enough to quit reading it.
I personally don't like homosexuality as part of the stories, so while I can easily include other titles for that reason, the above are titles without that being the reason.
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@igounfazed said in Series with the steepest/largest drop in quality:
My Quiet Blacksmith Life in Another World becomes disappointing. The author has no real direction for the story, flip-flopping every volume. If you read the author's afterwords it just makes the experience all the worse. The author actually says things in his afterwords that never come to be, and the MC tends to forget things It was enough to quit reading it.
How come? Do they say things will be in the volume that then aren't, or promises for next volume that never happen?
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@igounfazed said in Series with the steepest/largest drop in quality:
My Quiet Blacksmith Life in Another World becomes disappointing. The author has no real direction for the story, flip-flopping every volume. If you read the author's afterwords it just makes the experience all the worse. The author actually says things in his afterwords that never come to be, and the MC tends to forget things It was enough to quit reading it.
I'm faintly surprised you thought that series had quality to lose; It started out with cast-iron swords and endless mental whining about his cheats and age, and was already shafting the harem to make the MC look more awesome (No, I don't need an experienced huntress as support. This random bear is something I have to fight alone!) before the end of the first book.
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@Pieta said in Series with the steepest/largest drop in quality:
@igounfazed said in Series with the steepest/largest drop in quality:
My Quiet Blacksmith Life in Another World becomes disappointing. The author has no real direction for the story, flip-flopping every volume. If you read the author's afterwords it just makes the experience all the worse. The author actually says things in his afterwords that never come to be, and the MC tends to forget things It was enough to quit reading it.
How come? Do they say things will be in the volume that then aren't, or promises for next volume that never happen?
Yes. It is to that degree. As well as inexplicably changing the MC's character atributes. There are instances of interactions between the MC and heroines which lead the reader to anticipate more. Then the author says more of it will come next volume. Next volume arrives and it was forgotten or excluded. The volume after that, the MC is written as if it never occurred. All the while, as a reader, you are left wondering, "WTH is going on?". All so that a couple volumes later it is reintroduced into the story as if everything that happened in between the first occurrence and the reintroduction 'may have possibly happened'?? The MC is pointedly told several things, matter of factly, acknowledges those statements in one novel, then is written as if those conversations never took place. Only to write the MC later on as if that train were never broken. Volume number one though... man, it fills you with so much hope, promise, and anticipation that you hang on after every disappointment until it finally breaks you. IMO.
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@kuali said in Series with the steepest/largest drop in quality:
I'm faintly surprised you thought that series had quality to lose;
Well, if you consider it along the lines of, "I Shall Survive Using Potions", the premise that an actual relationship between the MC and another character will occur is a promising plot, as not many light novels in their genre seem to go that way. In 'Blacksmith', that was an integral part of the story. The author even mentioned it as such. Then, it just disappears, with the MC getting an extra woman about one per novel before I stopped reading it. That may not be 'quality' as quality is typically defined, but it was a 'quality' of the story that never appropriately delivered.
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@igounfazed said in Series with the steepest/largest drop in quality:
@Pieta said in Series with the steepest/largest drop in quality:
@igounfazed said in Series with the steepest/largest drop in quality:
My Quiet Blacksmith Life in Another World becomes disappointing. The author has no real direction for the story, flip-flopping every volume. If you read the author's afterwords it just makes the experience all the worse. The author actually says things in his afterwords that never come to be, and the MC tends to forget things It was enough to quit reading it.
How come? Do they say things will be in the volume that then aren't, or promises for next volume that never happen?
Yes. It is to that degree. As well as inexplicably changing the MC's character atributes. There are instances of interactions between the MC and heroines which lead the reader to anticipate more. Then the author says more of it will come next volume. Next volume arrives and it was forgotten or excluded. The volume after that, the MC is written as if it never occurred. All the while, as a reader, you are left wondering, "WTH is going on?". All so that a couple volumes later it is reintroduced into the story as if everything that happened in between the first occurrence and the reintroduction 'may have possibly happened'?? The MC is pointedly told several things, matter of factly, acknowledges those statements in one novel, then is written as if those conversations never took place. Only to write the MC later on as if that train were never broken.
That sounds like a result of heavy editing without an editor that pays attention.
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@Pieta said in Series with the steepest/largest drop in quality:
That sounds like a result of heavy editing without an editor that pays attention.
Hmmmmm... yes. I agree with that statement. Thinking about it after you saying that, it does give this vibe of people writing the story and not talking to each other. Or like someone writing a chapter without knowing what the previous chapter contained.
I think you are right with that assessment.
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IMHO these seem to be common problems with current writing that is based on webnovels - most of the time the authors start writing without a clear idea where they want to take the story and just make it up as they go along, eventually after a few volumes they run out of steam and either make up a crap ending or the series just gets dropped without warning.
Unfortunately I've had to come to accept this as the rule for LNs or WNs (WNs both Japanese and Western) and I've learned to enjoy WN/LN as they are without expecting any eventual resolution.
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@durask - true. The better ones have one or more arcs plotted out in advance, like Realist Hero's first 4(?) covering the kingdom arc. The author mentioned when it was complete that they were happy to have reached that point in the planned story without being canceled.
Death March might or not be winging at times, but there is foreshadowing in the first couple of volumes and continuing in others that finally turned into stories in volumes 18-20. The author clearly has had some of the very long term development planned from the start.
Many of the others you just have to accept that the author is winging it and hope that the results are entertaining.
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@HarmlessDave Yeah, with Realist Hero while it has plenty of problems, namely it's not at all realistic, I respect the author for having clear arcs and for actually finishing the story at a logical point and wrapping everything up.
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@HarmlessDave Not sure I would say that having 1+ arcs plotted in advance is really a sign of a better series - there are series out there that likely would have been better had the plan been chucked out and the author just improvised their later books. Walking My Second Path in Life and Forget Being the Villainess, I Want to Be an Adventurer! being the examples that come quickest to mind.
Though on a note closer to the spirit of this topic, one of the most common ways a series gets a steep dropoff in quality is when the author has an arc or two planned, and then suddenly has to go off script once they get past the end of the plan and the series is still selling...
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@kuali said in Series with the steepest/largest drop in quality:
there are series out there that likely would have been better had the plan been chucked out and the author just improvised their later books. Walking My Second Path in Life and Forget Being the Villainess, I Want to Be an Adventurer! being the examples that come quickest to mind.
Oh definitely - Villainess was one of my big disappointments. Having arcs planned helps, but that assumes they are decent and that the author has good material to fill in the rest of the story.
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@durask said in Series with the steepest/largest drop in quality:
IMHO these seem to be common problems with current writing that is based on webnovels - most of the time the authors start writing without a clear idea where they want to take the story and just make it up as they go along, eventually after a few volumes they run out of steam and either make up a crap ending or the series just gets dropped without warning.
Unfortunately I've had to come to accept this as the rule for LNs or WNs (WNs both Japanese and Western) and I've learned to enjoy WN/LN as they are without expecting any eventual resolution.
I've been reading a lot more Korean novels recently for just this reason. Korean webnovels more often seem to be self contained stories with a planned ending sometimes with bonus chapters post conclusion so you don't get the "happily ever after, no you don't get to see" ending.
They're often shorter because of this with 100-200 chapters and done.Then there's the Chinese web novels where they're 4000+ chapters and ongoing with translations taking so long they'd catch up to the author in about 30 years.
My favourite Japanese LNs all seem to have the story well planned out even if they haven't reached the conclusion yet.
@kuali said in Series with the steepest/largest drop in quality:
Though on a note closer to the spirit of this topic, one of the most common ways a series gets a steep dropoff in quality is when the author has an arc or two planned, and then suddenly has to go off script once they get past the end of the plan and the series is still selling...
The worst part about this is there is a perfectly valid way of doing so without ruining the existing story but it's not often enough used.
Books that follow someone else but set in the same world. Existing characters, New ones, different time periods. All sorts of ways that can increase world building, can interest existing readers and can be an entryway for new readers who may decide to go back and pick up the previous series.
Though there are spin offs like this that are terribly done as well.
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@kurosov said in Series with the steepest/largest drop in quality:
Books that follow someone else but set in the same world. Existing characters, New ones, different time periods. All sorts of ways that can increase world building, can interest existing readers and can be an entryway for new readers who may decide to go back and pick up the previous series.
See Der Werewolf for one example going it right, but I won't spoiler how for anyone who hasn't read it which you really should.
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I'm going to add some more examples.
Let's start from the big one, Rent a girlfriend. No explanation should be needed for people who read the manga, but the series started with an interesting enough premise, a main character who is in college and actually already had a girlfriend, so he could be expected to act in a more mature way than the typical virgin highschooler romcom protagonist. After being dumped, he decide to try a rental girlfriend app and meets a girl who is perfect in every conceivable way, but this is mostly an act and outside of work her personality is much harsher. There was the basis for a story sbput falling in love with a fake, perfect persona snd then learning to appreciate even more the real person behind that, nothing incredibly original but something I'd have no problems reading. Fast forward 300 chapters later, the protagonist is less mature than an elementary schooler who never talked to a girl and a ts as the simpest simp who ever existed, the main heroine can win the award for who played hard to get the longest, and in general there was little to no progress. Stopped reading more than one year ago, but from what I hear it's not improving at all.Second is Hokkaido gals are super adorable, and here a warning is necessary since there is an anime currently being aired so people who are watching it might want to skip to the next paragraph. Series started nice enough as the typical gal-themed romcom, then it turned harem which wasn't really unexpected, problems started when the story reached the point where the protagonist wanted to confess to the girl he chose, and the author introduced some annoying misunderstandings in order to delay that. It was really hard to read that part.
This is more subjective, but 2.5 dimensional seduction started as a cute romcom about an otaku who has no interest in 3d girls who met a beautiful girl who perfectly cosplayed as his waifu. I was looking forward to see him falling in love with her while struggling to understand if his feelings were for the character or the person. Then we started to get stuff about legendary cosplayers, going to conventions and participating in cosplay battles, whole chapters when the male protagonist barely appears and I started to feel I was reading an idol manga, so much that I considered dropping it. In later arcs things improved, but I'm still wary.
We end with Undead Unluck: this is even more subjective since most people still like this series a lot so I can't honestly say it has be one worse. Again, people who are watching the anime need to pay attention and maybe skip reading. The thing is, after a big story arc author made my favorite character disappear and that killed most of my interest in the series, which is a shame since I liked it a lot.
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@HarmlessDave said in Series with the steepest/largest drop in quality:
See Der Werewolf for one example going it right
I actually dropped (or at least put on hiatus) reading Der Werwolf because of the spin off. I was actually reading it for the characters and the ones that I liked ended up getting even less screen time in the spin off.
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@saidahgilbert said in Series with the steepest/largest drop in quality:
@HarmlessDave said in Series with the steepest/largest drop in quality:
See Der Werewolf for one example going it right
I actually dropped (or at least put on hiatus) reading Der Werwolf because of the spin off. I was actually reading it for the characters and the ones that I liked ended up getting even less screen time in the spin off.
It stopped being as much about the original characters which is going to end the enjoyment for some readers, but it made sense to me from a storytelling point of view.
The author felt that story for those characters was over, so either a new story with different characters was going to start, or it would turn into something else like slice of life or domestic comedy which also would have lost some readers.
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@HarmlessDave In the case of Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody, the Web Novel is completed and much, much longer than what's out right now in LN, and the deviations from the greater plot look to be minimal. The changes that happen was the addition of filler arc around the flying ancient island, which ties into technology he happens to need later, the removal of him getting an easy win chant orb, and other things which made the plot drop in quality because his struggles vanished. Little details like fleshing out of characters also occurred, but once again, the greater plot points remain the same or similar.
But because it's mostly based on the web novel in grand strokes, there is sufficient foreshadowing laid out throughout the actual Light Novels because all of these plot points are mostly known and fleshed out.
