Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.
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Let’s leave the best slight jab contest for another topic
(Which I will immediately lock)
Thank you
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@harmlessdave
Her armor is historically accurate, actually. The shield covers the thighs, cuisses aren't worn to improve mobility. It's also not a bikini, that's a tasset, and the skirt is her faulds. She's also not wearing pauldrons, but the great shield covers that too. -
It seems to really bug you that I draw the line at Bofuri. I don't really know what to say. You do you, but I'm just not comfortable being publicly associated with 2-D anime girls. The prominent placement of the characters on the covers of the books will prevent me from ever purchasing the physical volumes.
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@poisonedbite said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
@harmlessdave
Her armor is historically accurate, actually. The shield covers the thighs, cuisses aren't worn to improve mobility. It's also not a bikini, that's a tasset, and the skirt is her faulds. She's also not wearing pauldrons, but the great shield covers that too.First, my apology if you took my comment as a jab, it wasn't intended that way.
To me, a female character who is supposed to be a heavy armor tank being shown with bare shoulders and bare legs is fanservice. It feels like (heavy) bikini armor since I'd expect her to at least be wearing heavy cloth or leather on any area not covered by the armor.
It doesn't offend me, I just roll my eyes and think "yup, fanservice."
Contrast Maple's armor with Paks' here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Deed_of_Paksenarrion
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If I may change the topic, I have another grievance that I wanted to discuss...
Namely, the writing in many LNs is just bad. There are professionally published LNs that seem to violate every rule of good writing. And while I realize that poor writing is not unique to LNs, there is certainly a lot there to be found. I can overlook, or even enjoy, many of the tropes and quirks of Japanese media. Harem antics, improbable isekai setups, OP MCs. These hardly give me pause. But bad writing ruins my suspension of disbelief like nothing else can.
A category of bad writing recently came to my attention, courtesy the "Leadale" series, that I thought I would share. I will call this category the "misapplied medium". In this case the author seems to think s/he is writing a script for an anime, rather than a novel. Consider the following specimens:
Realizing he'd been toying with her, Cayna fell to her knees. Waterfalls poured from her eyes as she inched over to Elineh.
and ...
Speechless and dumbfounded, Lonti watched as the headmaster of the Academy clung to Cayna from behind like a large child (puppy ears and tail included).
Visual metaphors, such as waterfalls from the eyes or a wagging dog's tail, make sense in anime because they depict emotional states that would otherwise be difficult to convey. But in a written medium where the narrator is sitting behind the character's eyes, and the author has the entire breadth of the English (or Japanese) language to build vivid imagery, falling back on these visual metaphors is just bad writing. And while there are plenty of other examples of bad writing in Leadale, a lot seems to stem from the author wanting the story to read like an anime, rather than like a novel. For example, trying to mimic anime tsukkomi-boke back-and-forth leads to strange (often, over)reactions that make no real sense and thus make it hard to get a read on some characters' personalities.
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@unknownmat - good one. "Writing as if an anime or manga script" annoys me every time I read of nosebleeds, which only make sense as a G-rated visual stand-in for arousal, not in prose. Just say they are aroused for puffin's sake.
(Hall of shame award to the Strike the Blood LNs for trying to give a "logical" reason for nosebleeds.)
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@harmlessdave said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
First, my apology if you took my comment as a jab, it wasn't intended that way.
To me, a female character who is supposed to be a heavy armor tank being shown with bare shoulders and bare legs is fanservice. It feels like (heavy) bikini armor since I'd expect her to at least be wearing heavy cloth or leather on any area not covered by the armor.
oh no, I wasn't offended at all, I just enjoy playing devil's advocate. Everyone's allowed their own comfort zone and such. And yeah, I'll give you the point she's a heavy tank and should be in full plate. or at the very least chainmail or studded leather. She most likely takes less damage from armored areas, like you'd expect. but we'd never know...
While we're on the subject of prose, books that are WAY overly prose heavy - As much as I like
the story, 86 falls into this category. -
@kuali The thing is flash forward are not always tension killer, they can be, but they can also help built tension when characters seem to powerful to fail.
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Oh I’ll just add the lack of proper gender representation in like every series. Seriously, pick any drawn crowd scene count the female to make heads, I often do, and you’ll start wondering if females are endangered.
Let’s not get started on the comments section on many sites that immediately hate any new women walking on screen, I try not to read the comments section on many sites because of this.
Also happy international womens day
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@salientmind Yeah, talk about unrealistic standards! 😂
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@rozemynekamil1
unless it's a harem anime, then only females and dense-kun exist. -
@rozemynekamil1 "lack of proper gender representation" You mean like female warriors who are stronger then men twice their size? Unrealistic portrayals of women is pretty rampant in LN and anime.
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I agree with a lot of what's already been said, so I'll add in one that's not been mentioned yet. The common cold. Every single time this comes up in anime/manga/light novels I'm left somewhat baffled and bemused.
It seems like in Japan, just being outside in a light rain shower for more than 5 minutes is pretty much guarantee of coming down with it. Having played football (soccer) for hours in pouring rain mutiple times with no such results I'm left pondering if this is in fact some completely different disease of the same name, native only to Japan.
Likewise, if the immediate panic to rush to a warm bath doesn't prevent the worst, it seems the unfortunate victim quickly reaches a state of near death, barely able to stand up or even stay conscious in many cases, requiring round-the-clock care to prevent the worst from occurring. Remarkably different to the runny nose, sore throat and general mild discomfort I more familiarly associate with the condition (at least for those of the general age and physical fitness of an average light novel character).
But there is some hope. For where you might normally expect cold recovery to take several days, or even weeks, this strange alternative version has a remarkable turnaround of just one day! Indeed, almost every sufferer will miraculously return from death's door after a good wiping down of their sweat and bowl of soup from their love interest, then a single night's sleep, restored to full health just like that.
In all seriousness though, where did this ridiculous presentation of the cold come from? It plays out the exact same way every time, despite being total nonsense. I mean, you literally can't catch a cold just from getting wet in the first place, it's an infectious disease. It's actually the insistent close range caregivers in every anime situation that are actually the ones putting themselves at risk of catching it.
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@thewickerman I actually have a theory about that. It's very simple - anything less than incapatitating does not count as a cold. So people well into 37s resume their normal activities, and the cold either stops naturally or gets bad to the point where the person pretty much collapses, gets their temperature down overdosing on paracetamol and returns to their normal routine underhealed the next day.
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Cliffhangers. I would rather the author find a good resting point in the story at the end of each volume.
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@strangeattractor said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
Cliffhangers. I would rather the author find a good resting point in the story at the end of each volume.
Looking at you Monster Tamer for
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@harmlessdave
But then how would they make sure you buy the next volume? But yeah, Monster Tamer is bad about that. -
I just finished the latest volume of The World's Strongest Rearguard: Labyrinth Country's Novice Seeker, and I am so annoyed.
I loved volume 1, because despite the tropes, the main characters were two adults who knew each other and had a complicated relationship. They were both very believable.
Now... We have like a 10+ harem that developed over a matter of days, and the female characters thoughts mostly center on "Man, Arihito is awesome" and the male characters thoughts are "man, Arihito is awesome."
It's like.... You see the promise an author has to develop a world and characters with real personality, and then you get some F tier nonsense. I keep reading and hoping it gets better, but I wished I stopped at Volume 2.
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@salientmind Uh... I don't believe I read the same volume 1 of that series as you did. As far as I can remember it was just as bad in the first volume as it was in the later volumes. Kyouka wasn't even his first party member, or the first to fall victim to his periodic auto heal passive. She also never had any depth to her character, other than their informed history which ended by the middle of the first volume.
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@endoftheline I mean, it's a first volume and she actually had history and motive. The bar wasn't high.
