Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.
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Sometimes books are too short, like only 40K words. On top of that, they sometimes end in the middle of the action and to make matters even worse, that's followed by a totally irrelevant bonus chapter. I really, really, really don't like that. If it's an 80K book, then I get it; you've to stop somewhere. But not a 40K book - it's just starting. At least finish the action already by adding another chapter!
I also don't like it when 20% of a book is spent on a looong chapter on bathing scenes and meaningless banter between girls about their physiques. I skip those kinds of chapters because after heaving read them 1 or 2 times in books, I get it already! I don't need to read it again to the last drop of water in yet another book!
I also don't like how some novels suddenly go off on very long tangents about meaningless banter between kids, girls, women. Some novels have a lot of girls and women and all of sudden, they all have to feature in the book, at the same time! It's fine if it's only 2 pages or so, but please, not a whole chapter of 30+ pages. I skip that stuff because I think it is totally uninteresting and I've lost all interest after 1 page of reading that kind of nonsensical banter. Then sometimes I find myself in the middle of the book, not having read anything. At such a time, I wonder if the writer had a writer's block or something, since there's zero meaning or imagination in such a chapter. I can't imagine it's fun to write, either. It's certainly not fun to read... well that's my opinion at least. Well, I can imagine that the writer maybe starts writing something and then it's finished and then thinks... it's so-so, but that it'd be a waste to throw his work away, so let's just include it and hope that maybe someone will like it. Who knows. I'd preferred if it was put in the trash bin, because it's annoying me.
Also annoying is, how sometimes a story takes a complete turn.
Book 1 is nice.
Then book 2 is different.
Then book 3 is even more different.
Sometimes it's because too many characters enter the story. Every chapter, more come in. Then the story devolves from a nice fantasy adventure into something like a harem story.
Death March is such a series... well it still has enough fantasy feel to make it worth reading (around 50% I guess), but it's getting very close to becoming unreadable for me. -
Do you have any specific series in mind?
I broadly agree with much of what you wrote. The amount of time spent on bathing scenes, and on food scenes (and if I may add, cute animal mascot characters - looking at you Skeleton Knight) can gobble up a huge amount of real-estate when you're just waiting for the plot to move forward.
This is hugely frustrating because after waiting several months for the next volume, nothing at all seems to happen. Ok, they took a bunch of baths and ate a bunch of food. And then? Is that all? It's a genuine source of anxiety watching the completion marker in my e-reader slowly tick up to 70%, 80%, 90%, hoping against hope that something will actually happen. In that context irrelevant side-stories suck! The main story ends at like 92% completely shattering any hope I might have had for plot development. I'm not nearly invested enough in these characters or in this world to be mollified by some tacked-on plot-irrelevant consolation writing. I skip the side stories in most series (with Bookworm being a notable exception, where I actually look forward to them).
That said, I believe this is a larger problem in series that are not yet completed. I find that when I'm on book seven, say, and there are sixteen volumes published, I don't mind a more leisurely pace to the plotting. If you like the characters and the setting, it can even be enjoyable to casually experience the world with them, and it doesn't matter if takes up the whole volume because the next one is just a click away. Indeed, when binging through a dozen+ novels I often even loose the distinction between volumes. It's only when I'm getting near the end that I start to get anxious about it.
@robd said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
Death March is such a series... well it still has enough fantasy feel to make it worth reading (around 50% I guess), but it's getting very close to becoming unreadable for me.
Death March is an interesting series for me because it comes off as a fairly generic OP MC fantasy isekai, and yet it consistently manages to hold my interest in a way that a dozen other similar series do not. I do agree that the cast has gotten so big that trying to give everyone something to do/say can bloat the text. And they certainly do spend a lot of real-estate on food-related descriptions which aren't really all that plot-relevant. I wouldn't mind if they cut back on some of that.
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@unknownmat said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
The amount of time spent on bathing scenes, and on food scenes (and if I may add, cute animal mascot characters - looking at you Skeleton Knight) can gobble up a huge amount of real-estate when you're just waiting for the plot to move forward.
This is hugely frustrating because after waiting several months for the next volume, nothing at all seems to happen. Ok, they took a bunch of baths and ate a bunch of food. And then? Is that all? It's a genuine source of anxiety watching the completion marker in my e-reader slowly tick up to 70%, 80%, 90%, hoping against hope that something will actually happen. In that context irrelevant side-stories suck! The main story ends at like 92% completely shattering any hope I might have had for plot development. I'm not nearly invested enough in these characters or in this world to be mollified by some tacked-on plot-irrelevant consolation writing. I skip the side stories in most series (with Bookworm being a notable exception, where I actually look forward to them).I think this is a flaw in the contrivances usually used to make the OP Protagonist trope work. If the protagonist is omnipotent, and set their mind to dealing with whatever the plot is, the whole thing would be tied up in a neat little bow within a book or two and then the author would need to come up with some new material.
So the protagonist isn't allowed to ever focus on the plot for long. Either they're lazy, kicking back and enjoying life until it comes knocking on their door, then they sweep it up with a broom, toss it outside, and go back to lazing around. Or they're a drifter, who always gets distracted by whomever asked them for their help most recently. Or they're completely oblivious to the bigger picture, only running into the plot on its own terms, and not realizing that it's all connected.
It's common enough that when I see "OP Protagonist" my immediate assumption is "Food, baths, maybe a cute mascot, and probably a harem."
Exceptions exist:
- Instant Death Cheat's thing is that most things that look like "the big bad" will last for a couple chapters at most, and the author keeps introducing new ones to keep up.
- So I'm a Spider makes the protagonist only look OP relative to human society, when the real threats she deals with (all introduced in the first couple books, more or less) are all bigger and more dangerous than she is.
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@robd said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
Sometimes books are too short, like only 40K words.
In the grim darkness of the Japanese Publishing Industry, there is only war...
@unknownmat said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
That said, I believe this is a larger problem in series that are not yet completed.
Some series are just begging to be binged. It's especially common with converted web novels, which were written as ongoing series (closer to comic strips than novels structurally) and then had the novel splits imposed over the top. Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear is a especially bad victim of this, in that I don't think it's ever really managed to sync up 'plot arcs' and 'published volumes', and as such, never produces a book that feels like a satisfying self-contained reading experience. But as a binge read, it works fine from the start to the point you get bored of reading the word 'bear'...
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@kuali said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
But as a binge read, it works fine from the start to the point you get bored of reading the word 'bear'...
No one ever gets tired of reading the word bear!
I agree that while the volumes don't end on a cliffhanger (looking at you, Monster Tamer with your literal cliff-hangers), they are often in the middle of a story arc and the LNs work best if you binge them. And the anime is best avoided until after finishing LN 5, since it is close to being a highlights clip show covering 5 full LNs in just 12 episodes.
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@harmlessdave said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
literal cliff-hangers
Out of context, but this reminded me of something.
There's something appealing about series that form a cohesive whole. When, taken together, all the books tell a single larger story. It's perfectly fine for a series to be episodic, where each story is its own whole. However, I have an actual hate-hate (not a "hate on what you love" hate) for series that try to look like they're telling a single story, but aren't.
Inter-volume cliffhangers are a tool for doing that. On the surface they seem to tie books together - but in actuality, they tie the end of one volume to the beginning of the next. That can make for a pretty powerful compulsion to buy the next volume or to keep reading but it doesn't make for a story that's interesting to think about after you put it down.
It's sometimes easier to make the audience believe that the story will be worth it than it once they see the whole picture than it is to actually write a story that has a whole picture worth seeing. I call this form of writing the Tease Box. (Am I being too harsh on JJ Abrams? I don't think so. Lost was super popular while it was running, and yet I don't hear it mentioned at all these days. As soon as it was over, it disappeared like smoke. Nobody talks about what a great and clever mystery it was anymore.)
A few years ago, I developed a defense-mechanism against such things. I call it the second read test. To be applied if your n-volumes into binge-reading a series, hit a cliffhanger, and are about to click the buy button on the next volume: go back to an earlier volume and read it again. Pay attention to how that first volume handles its mysteries, now that you presumably know some answers. Have they been resolved? Were those resolutions as interesting as they seemed when the mystery was presented? If the series is selling some overarching mystery, are there any hints that the author planned ahead and foreshadowed the current facets of that mystery? If the mystery you're currently hooked by were resolved in the same way as those mysteries, would you be satisfied?
It's rare for a series to pass this test, long-term. With about four exceptions, every series I've ever read either ends in single digits, is episodic, or fails this test eventually. But if a series is going to go on for 20+ volumes, failing the test eventually doesn't mean the first volumes aren't worth reading. This test is my guide to say when to drop such a series.
Unpopular opinion: Log Horizon is great for exactly 4 volumes.
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@rsog412 said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
It's rare for a series to pass this test, long-term. With about four exceptions, every series I've ever read either ends in single digits, is episodic, or fails this test eventually. But if a series is going to go on for 20+ volumes, failing the test eventually doesn't mean the first volumes aren't worth reading. This test is my guide to say when to drop such a series.
Is Rokujouma one of those four? It's probably the best example I've seen of a LN maintaining a coherent, well-plotted story arc over a long sequence of volumes. (Though arguably I think it should have stopped when it reached the original end; it's picked up well enough by now, but the restart was very rocky.)
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@travis-butler - I have not read Rokujouma. I'll give it a look next time it's on catch-up.
The four I had in mind were:
- Ascendance of a Bookworm
- Fullmetal Alchemist
- So I'm a Spider, So What?
- Full Metal Panic!
I'd recommend the first two of those four to just about anyone. Spider and FMP both have caveats that would keep me from making unqualified recommendations of them to people I don't know the tastes of.
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"tens"
As in describing an estimated number of something more than ten and less than one hundred.
I hate seeing this in translations. It is so out place. I feel it should be "dozens" even if it isn't exactly the same. I've never used "tens" in a sentence like that. I've never seen or heard any other native English speaker use "tens" like that. Tens of thousands? Sure. Tens of Millions? Yeah. Tens of donuts? Never. Tens of books? Nope. Tens of women? Negative.
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@unknownmat said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
Do you have any specific series in mind?
Hm... I've done some searching in my digital library. Here are some hits:
Full clearing another world under a goddess with zero believers.
I liked book 1 very much. Book 3 turned into a cringeworthy harem story that's just unreal... page after page of it. You've to read it to believe it. Well I managed to make it to the end of the book, but I was seriously put off by the story.The hero laughs while... This hero has 1 slave beast-girl, who loves him. They travel together, exact revenge together, kill others in the most unimaginable ways that are almost too disgusting to stomach. And then they're beating about the bush about starting a sexual relationship? It's so weird that it's not even funny. Again, you've to read it to believe it.
In the land of Leadale: Book 1 was great, I loved it. But then, with every new book, it gets crazier and weirder. She (the protagonist) has 3 adult children... okay, that was funny for a while, but then she adopts more children. And then the adventures also become weirder and weirder. It's veered so far off course that it goes from fantasy straight into absurdity and beyond...
Chillin in another world, 4. Don't know what to make of that book. Don't know what it was all about, it was hard to read for me. Book 1 was nice. Book 4... I don't know... totally forgettable, I guess?
Didn't I say to make my abilites average in the next life. Book 1 was very nice. I stopped following that story because the girl's stuff was getting cringeworthy. It's a party of all-girls. But then there's another 1 or 2 parties of all-girls. And they're all after 1 girl (the protagonist): Mile. It gets very tiresome after reading book after book and in the end I stopped reading it.
To another world with landmines 2. It's a very nice book, but... it's about 1 guy with more and more girls around him. On top of that, they're helping a small elf girl?! What?! It's comes over so forced to make it funny that it's not funny anymore. Reading that was cringeworthy... yeah you've to read it to believe it. Good thing about book 2 is that it's very long, so there's enough content in there that's good. You just have to somehow bear the forced 'funny' stuff.
Trapped in a dating sim. In book 1, it was about women suppressing men. However, this quickly devolved into 1 guy saving girls and gathering them around him, while his sis has 4 guys or so around her. Btw, his sis is hanging around him, too, for his money. WTF is with that crazy set-up? Well... I guess it's funny, in a strange way, and it's an entertaining series and the adventures are nice.
A wild last boss appeared! Book 1 was very nice, but after that the story got completely off the rails. I mean, a sheep that can grow 100 meters tall?! That's even worse than power rangers stuff. It was seriously, very off-putting and I stopped following the series.
I'm a spider, so what. Book 1 was great, but then... yeah... there are way too many people featuring in this series. Entire books are about side characters. The story line isn't even linear in time and often I'm guessing what timeline the book is taking place?!
The timeline of the books are chaos, utter chaos.
I buy every new book just hoping I can finally read how it ends!
Book 11 is a whole book about the hero side character, and it was quite boring.
Book 12 was pretty good, though, even if it was only side characters. It was like many small stories and it was nice.
Book 13... well... was enjoyable, I guess... nothing really memorable though. Again, it ends with no end in sight, with a teaser of all things... after 13 chapters it ends with a teaser!! Maybe that's why I forgot the story.
I think this series has gone completely off the rails and every book I hope it's the last chapter because it goes back and forth in time and... where does it all end? The problem is, that the author puts hints about the end in one book, and then jumps back in time in the next book. The number of teasers is astronomical and is off-putting in its own right. The character is nice, though, so I'm still following the series, but... it requires patience!The world's strongest rearguard. Book 1 was cool. Book 6... just too many characters, I think. Everything is written down in so much detail that it's completely and utterly tedious and almost unreadable for me. It's like reading in slow-motion. I think it's a prime example of how too many characters and detailing them all can ruin a story.
Private tutor to the duke's daughter. Book 1 was good. Book 2 though... what's with the parade of girls?! It was too much and was really off-putting. I mean, seriously off-putting.
Black summoner. It's a nice series, but really... how many wives does that guy need?! It is too much and it's becoming annoying.
If it's for my daughter, I'd even defeat a demon lord. Book 1 was cool. In book 8 though... after a lot of stuff happened... he marries his (adopted) daughter. That was off-putting... seriously, very off-putting, like a complete betrayal of book 1. I think there was also a book 9, a bonus story I think, but I didn't read that one.
Arifureta book 1: very good book. Book 9 or 10, or maybe both, were unreadable for me with endless 'personal' side stories. I tried to skip paragraphs and pages to the good part, but unfortunately reached the end without finding a good part. Totally forgettable. Book 12 was okay again.
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@rsog412 said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
Unpopular opinion: Log Horizon is great for exactly 4 volumes.
Yeah that opinion is unpopular with me, because I've read ALL volumes 2 or 3 times and I quite enjoyed all of them. Even the ones that were so-so the first time I read them, are pretty enjoyable the 2nd time I read them. Even the stories about a bunch of kids saving the day, were enjoyable although the 1st time I thought... hm... why such a tangent? Once you get over that feeling of being side-tracked, I noticed that the stories were quite good in their own right.
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@harmlessdave said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
@kuali said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
But as a binge read, it works fine from the start to the point you get bored of reading the word 'bear'...
No one ever gets tired of reading the word bear!
I agree that while the volumes don't end on a cliffhanger (looking at you, Monster Tamer with your literal cliff-hangers), they are often in the middle of a story arc and the LNs work best if you binge them.
I so agree on this. The cliff-hangers are almost in mid-sentence, then the story suddenly stops and there's a bonus story. I don't like this series anymore because of [1] too many monster-girls in the party and it just keeps getting more and [2] the cliff-hanger (followed by bonus-story) was so off-putting that I felt totally cheated and I was even angry, like, what the hell? How can you end a story like this?!?! That was book 5 I think. Book 6 was then like... why was there a cliffhanger in the first place? That 'action' scene was finished in 1 page. I felt even more cheated.
I boycotted book 7.
I read book 8, but then discovered that in that book, he was adding another small monster-girl to his party. That was a triple whammy. And the premise? It's like, she doesn't like the other monsters in her village, therefore it's better that she joins his party. What... the... hell... is with that? He could've told her to girl up already and make peace with the others! Nooooo.... of course not..... she's to join his party. -
@robd said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
I'm a spider, so what. Book 1 was great, but then... yeah... there are way too many people featuring in this series. Entire books are about side characters. The story line isn't even linear in time and often I'm guessing what timeline the book is taking place?!
The timeline of the books are chaos, utter chaos.
I buy every new book just hoping I can finally read how it ends!
Book 11 is a whole book about the hero side character, and it was quite boring.
Book 12 was pretty good, though, even if it was only side characters. It was like many small stories and it was nice.
Book 13... well... was enjoyable, I guess... nothing really memorable though. Again, it ends with no end in sight, with a teaser of all things... after 13 chapters it ends with a teaser!! Maybe that's why I forgot the story.
I think this series has gone completely off the rails and every book I hope it's the last chapter because it goes back and forth in time and... where does it all end? The problem is, that the author puts hints about the end in one book, and then jumps back in time in the next book. The number of teasers is astronomical and is off-putting in its own right. The character is nice, though, so I'm still following the series, but... it requires patience!Much as I enjoy So I'm a Spider... I do kinda agree with you, the order in which those stories are told is often baffling.
It's not even that I think the side content is bad, but... for it to really work, Shun's side of the Battle of the Elf Village really can't be half a dozen books before Kumoko's, and we needed to spend all that time with Julius before the first timeline covers his death, not 9 books after.
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@robd said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
Thanks for the response. Since you took the time to write that all up, I wanted to comment in detail but first let me make one umbrella caveat.
I agree with much of what you are saying, but I notice that in most cases when I drop a series* this usually happens after reading all the books available. The inertia of wanting to see what happens next is often enough to push through slower scenes and rough patches. But taking a break kills that inertia, and I can struggle to get started again. Sadly, as much an I like JNC and think they are the best translation house out there, even the weekly cadence of part releases can be enough to kill my inertia. As was discussed briefly above, some series are just meant to be binged and the experience of trying to read them as intermittent serial releases just isn't the same.
*I don't think I've ever "officially" dropped a series. Instead, updates start to accumulate in my "to read" queue and I just never seem to get around to finishing them. This includes series like Classroom of the Elite, Make My Abilities Average, Goblin Slayer, Lazy Dungeon Master, and several others. I keep telling myself that I will definitely (Really! I mean it!) get around to finishing them eventually.
In the land of Leadale: Book 1 was great, I loved it. But then, with every new book, it gets crazier and weirder. She (the protagonist) has 3 adult children... okay, that was funny for a while, but then she adopts more children. And then the adventures also become weirder and weirder. It's veered so far off course that it goes from fantasy straight into absurdity and beyond...
Leadale definitely fits here. The concept is funny and the world is big and interesting. It delivers some genuine laughs early on.
But the writing is just bad. It's creative writing 101 level bad. It violates every dictum of good writing. Strunk and White would be rolling in their graves. I tried to re-read it when the anime came out and I could barely finish the first book - the poor writing keeps destroying my suspension of disbelief. The fifth book was just released and I only managed to finish it through a sheer act of self-control on the naively optimistic hope that the story will finally go somewhere worth reading about.
Writing aside, I also have some issues with the content...
Chillin in another world, 4. Don't know what to make of that book. Don't know what it was all about, it was hard to read for me. Book 1 was nice. Book 4... I don't know... totally forgettable, I guess?
Stopped after the first book myself. It's a bit too wish-fulfillment for my taste.
In fact, I could add Skeleton Knight to this category. There was some genuinely interesting political intrigue early on that had me looking forward to the epilogues almost more-so than the main story... and then it all got wrapped up too quickly and too neatly. I'm not sure if I will be able to keep reading this series when the next novel is finally released, although the world is big enough that there's still some room for things to get interesting again, so I haven't lost all hope yet. Oh, and I hate (hate hate hate) the mascot character.
Didn't I say to make my abilites average in the next life. Book 1 was very nice. I stopped following that story because the girl's stuff was getting cringeworthy. It's a party of all-girls. But then there's another 1 or 2 parties of all-girls. And they're all after 1 girl (the protagonist): Mile. It gets very tiresome after reading book after book and in the end I stopped reading it.
As I mentioned above, once I hit the end of the translated content it was tough to maintain interest in this series. Every problem just gets solved too easily and I feel that the characters are a bit too one-dimensional for me to care what happens to them. On the other hand, my overall impression of the series is one of fondness and there are some mysteries remaining that I would like to see resolved. I may yet give this another try, but I'm like four novels behind now.
A wild last boss appeared! Book 1 was very nice, but after that the story got completely off the rails. I mean, a sheep that can grow 100 meters tall?! That's even worse than power rangers stuff. It was seriously, very off-putting and I stopped following the series.
I'm similarly stuck here after reading to the end of the translated books (book 7 or 8, I think) - I just can't pick it back up. I think the power-creep has gotten so ridiculous that the world isn't big enough to contain them, and most of the mystery about how she wound up in that world has already been addressed. I'm not sure what's left that's worth resolving.
I'm a spider, so what. Book 1 was great, but then... yeah... there are way too many people featuring in this series. Entire books are about side characters. The story line isn't even linear in time and often I'm guessing what timeline the book is taking place?!
The timeline of the books are chaos, utter chaos.This is a tough one for me. I think the writing is pretty good, and it's a much deeper series than it first appears to be. But I agree with you that the last three books have been really frustrating. There's been no plot development, as it's all been about filling in gaps introduced by the muddled timeline. Also, there's been way too much Julius and not nearly enough Sophia. The one bit of back-story that I would really have liked to see more of - Sophia's time in school - was just skipped over in like half a chapter.
That said, I like the muddled timeline. It's an interesting story-telling device that allows the author to cleanly subvert our expectations (the author says interesting things about the nature of good and evil, for example). But it does feel, at this point after three books of blah, as if the story was poorly planned and the author is struggling to tie things up.
Arifureta book 1: very good book. Book 9 or 10, or maybe both, were unreadable for me with endless 'personal' side stories. I tried to skip paragraphs and pages to the good part, but unfortunately reached the end without finding a good part. Totally forgettable. Book 12 was okay again.
Arifureta is a lot like Death March for me, in that I like it way more than I can explain. It seems like it should be forgettable isekai fare, yet there's an X-factor that gives it a longevity that other series seem to lack.
I didn't share your frustration with volumes 9 and 10. Although, in fairness, I read the WN immediately after running out of LN content (starting after volume 9, I believe). I liked the backstories as they helpedto show how complex these characters are. It also made their trials feel impactful and overcoming the trials was satisfying character growth. These novels also contain some of my favorite scenes
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@unknownmat
About Death March: aside from the meaningless banter between the kids and girls, which sometimes fills page after page after page with cringeworthy lines, the books do always come up with new developments, new friends and interesting characters and that has been keeping me interested in this series for all this time. -
@RobD said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
About Death March: aside from the meaningless banter between the kids and girls, which sometimes fills page after page after page with cringeworthy lines, the books do always come up with new developments, new friends and interesting characters and that has been keeping me interested in this series for all this time.
I've been meaning to respond to this for a while. Sorry it's taken so long.
Since this thread is about what we don't like, it's probably not a good time to talk up Death March too much, except as a point of contrast. I posted this question to Reddit (won't link it here, but if you are interested my Reddit username is the same) trying to figure out what set Death March apart. The forum consensus boiled down to two things in particular:
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The world building is a cut above most other isekai series (but not amazingly so).
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Satou is mentally an adult, and this maturity reflects itself in his decisions and actions, particularly in the way that he acts as a guardian for the children under his care.
If I may add one additional detail that didn't get brought up in the Reddit thread: Satou's evolving view of Tolma. This is one of my favorite examples of Death March's more nuanced wold-building when compared to other series. Tolma didn't change or grow or improve in any way. He was every bit the undeservedly privileged, thoughtless, discriminatory jackass that he started as. The only thing that changed was Satou's perception of him as he interacted with the character in several different contexts. It turned out that Tolma had positive traits that weren't apparent initially, and the character was really a mixture of both good and bad traits - just like most people are. Whereas I think most isekai stories tends to fully characterize background characters during the first impression which is never challenged. E.g. The weaselly adminstrator will be consistently weaselly and never anything else, etc.
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@unknownmat - good point, and "characters that are only one thing" (in other books) qualifies as a Hate too.
Much as I enjoyed the first 15 or so volumes of Smartphone, the side characters mostly have one facet, and that's it. Weaselly administrators are not only weaselly through and through, they also look weaselly to grind the point into the ground.
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This was an issue I have somewhat learned to live with, but light novel’s written in 1st person. I understand the use of the 1st person style of writing in books such as Catcher in the rye where the book is meant to be read through Holden’s perspective otherwise it losses its meaning. Light novel series attempting to use first person is almost never used in this way and only gets worse when they add in a ton of characters whose perspective is only told from the mc. The worst part is I don’t understand why they choose to write in 1st p when they have a much better, easier to digest style of writing in 3rd person. The kicker is when authors try and do 1st person with extra steps: ie. switching pov between characters or writing half in 1st p and the other half in 3rd p.
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I can't stand stuttering protagonists. I'm looking at you, Kirito.
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Light novel series that just stop with no idea why. Sometimes you find years later that the author died or just got bored, but other times you never find out.
