Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.
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@salientmind it's on purpose. They're written to be self insert power trip fantasies. I still agree though, I can't stand those blank slate instant harem protagonists. So dense and weak willed a girl can literally climb on them naked and say i love you and they still wonder what they really mean, or say something like, "if you keep saying that, I might start believing you"
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@salientmind It's not so much that it's hard, as that it's rarely necessary, so few bother to put much effort into the protagonist. Harem series live or die on the ability to make the audience interested in the members of the harem, after all, so they're where all the effort goes.
https://forums.j-novel.club/topic/6701/omnibus-builder
https://forums.j-novel.club/topic/5745/ascendance-of-a-bookworm-omnibus-editionsThe Primal Desires: Food, Sleep, Sex, StroZero, Hypnotism, and Awayuki Kokorone.
Item Diaria Apothecaria legi debent.
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@lex said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
the funny thing is that when I read TRPG I'm more bothered by the fact that Margit has the upper body of an elementary schooler rather than by her having the lower body of a spider, and I don't even have a particular fetish for monster girls.
Well, yeah, that's why I specifically called this series out.
I'm not into monster girls(unless the stereotypucal animal ears/tails count), but in the case of Margit, I ended up trying to imagine what it would be like to be embraced like Erich was in the 1st volume Henderson.
And immediately followed that by slapping myself, since she'd look like a 10 year old(Her status as a 22 year old being irrelevant, since it's the whole legal loli lip service again) -
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@maxwyght so, I met one true "legal Loli" in real life. She was in college, college age. She had a disorder that stopped her physical development at around 12.
Just having normal sfw adult conversations took a while to get used to. Because everything about the person in front of you signaled to the brain they were an adolescent.
I really don't get why it's such a popular trope. The only justification I can think of is they don't actually mean "Loli" but young looking adult woman. That... Or the majority of these authors are so young when they first start that they don't get it.
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@salientmind
Are you talking about Shauna Rae? -
@maxwyght nah. This was my ex-gfs good friend. It was a while ago.
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@maxwyght How Not To Summon A Demon Lord had a good reason for the MC to not sleep with the girls, Rem is 14 at the start, Shera is 16 but for an Elf that's still a baby, and Horn is 12. Don't know about Lumachina but I'd say 16 to 18, but since she's the High Priest (why not High Priestess?), sex with her would be a political problem for both of them.
The guild master is at least of age, looks like a child but is around 50, so sex with her would technically be ok. (In my fanfic, D does have sex with her and Horn is actually his daughter from the future. Why can he get her pregnant? He's the Demon Lord of course.) Rose could use her mouth and hands but has no other way to do it. The crazy women is out, never stick your d*ck in crazy. Kreb is out, she's a loli and Edelgard... she's hot but the LN says she is covered in scales so prob not. -
@kuali Well it sucks how true that is.
Just kidding. The truth is It Totally Sucks how true that is ლ(ಠ益ಠ)ლ
Someone might say "steer away" but you are pretty much grinding on the web, trying to find a good protagonist, especially in romance lately, where they don't appear in the cover, let alone in the story (is almost like reading in first person because the male lead has as much personality as a seashell).
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@avatarian That's not the only thing they have in common - I heard a rumour that if you hold a harem protagonist against your ear, you can hear the ocean ;)
https://forums.j-novel.club/topic/6701/omnibus-builder
https://forums.j-novel.club/topic/5745/ascendance-of-a-bookworm-omnibus-editionsThe Primal Desires: Food, Sleep, Sex, StroZero, Hypnotism, and Awayuki Kokorone.
Item Diaria Apothecaria legi debent.
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@kuali said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
@avatarian That's not the only thing they have in common - I heard a rumour that if you hold a harem protagonist against your ear, you can hear the ocean ;)
lol
@kuali SEAms legit. -
@lex said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
Going back to things I'm not too fond of, one is when the protagonist is weak or plays a support role and his companions (be them a traditional party or a battle harem) do all the action. Basically I prefer stories that make me feel awesome rather than stories that make me feel like I'm watching someone else being awesome. Series like Mapping, Monster tamer and Unwanted undead are guilty of this, albeit not too much.
There's a western novel series I read that attempted to fix this very problem. It was called "An Unlikely Hero" and it basically took the premise from "To Love Ru" and said "what if the protagonist was actually a total badass who knew what he was doing and wasn't as dense as a rock?" and in my opinion it actually came out really good. It was enjoyable to read. While it does steal most of the characters and the initial plot from To Love Ru, the plot does go off on a direction of its own because it's impossible to go the same direction when the protagonist's personality prevents him from making the same choices as Rito. He also has (in my opinion) a much more wholesome relationship with the alien princess (i.e. they actally have stuff in common and do things together, rather than the princess just liking him because he's nice and doesn't treat her like a demigoddess)
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Seems interesting, I'll check it. Thanks for the suggestion.
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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.)
