Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.
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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.)
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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.
