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

unknownmat

@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...

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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.

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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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RobD

@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.

unknownmat

@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:

The world building is a cut above most other isekai series (but not amazingly so).
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.

HarmlessDave

@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.

tally1024 0

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.

poisonedbite

I can't stand stuttering protagonists. I'm looking at you, Kirito.

Folker46

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.

Zing

I hate it when protagonist saves the day, but his harem start giving him shit for not being tactful enough, and he starts apologising.

Windsagio

On a hate/love thing, I'm thinking about how mechanical some of the writing is;

Like I'm enjoying "Formerly Fallen", but the Otome game plot seems bizarrely stapled on to what would have been a functional story anyways, and they even seems set on forgetting parts of it as quickly as they can.

This begs the question "Why did you need to use that setting again?"

kuali

@Windsagio Because it was popular at the time, obviously!

Sometimes authors really do just tick boxes to get their work noticed. Even if it is ultimately detrimental to the work.

marcus_atticus

It really irks me to see works that say something along the lines of trying to differentiate itself from tropes but it ends being the very thing they try to distinguish itself from. For example, some that says not unlike those other manga/light novel etc that does x and y and then the story proceeds to devolve itself into it. Another example is I don’t want to stand out then they proceed to do x and y and end up standing out anyway then they repeat it so many times. It just comes out to me as lazy writing.

kuali

@marcus_atticus I agree with the first one you've got there, definitely. If I came for the subversion and then everything gets played straight, I've basically been tricked into reading a very different story from what I wanted to read...

Less sure about the second point. Sure, it can be bad writing, but in cases where its used to show the character's actual priorities - like Myne drawing unwanted attention to protect the people and books around her, or Sei doing the same each time she healed the knights in her first two books - or cases where the series is a comedy and the character being a bit of a dumbass is part of the joke (like Fia) - it works pretty well, I think.

Folker46

I'd have to say time crunching. In too many LN, everything is happening in just a few weeks or months. How not to Summon a Demon Lord has this problem. Everything Diablo goes through covers just a few months (not even a year), and he hardly has time to catch his breath before he's whisked away on another adventure. I kind of like how Unemployed Reincarnate does it where years pass between events, but it also makes the story seem more like a biography and less like an adventure novel. (sigh)

Mile from Didn't I Say to Make My Abilities Average in the Next Life?! is definitely one of those "I don't want to stand out..." than does everything she can (accidently?) to stand out. The anime is funny and needs a second season but the LNs get boring, what other people are going through is more interesting than her story.

kuali

@Folker46 Yeah, I know the feeling with the time ~~compression~~ crunching.

@kuali said in Cooking with Wild Game Vol. 18 Discussion:

So, we've covered 5 months in 18 books. At this rate, Asuta and Ai Fa's anniversary will come around volume... uh, 44! Ish!

As for Average Abilities... the spinoff gag manga is, at this point, better than the main series, I think. The series plot just isn't much of a draw - especially once the elder dragons got hit with Villain Decay and stopped being credible threats to Mile. So a spinoff that ignores the plot to just concentrate on the cast being crazy isn't sacrificing much in exchange for the extra laughs. I don't remember the anime too well, but I had the same basic impression of it - the usual adaptation compression just concentrated the gags, and cutting outs bits and pieces of the plot for time could be done without losing anything too important.

Folker46

@kuali I liked reading about what The Wonder Trio were going through and Lily's Miracle (spin off LN) was really good, if predictable.
But the main story is moving so slowly, it feels like the author has no idea what to do with it and is just making it up as he goes along. No plan means it will prob get abandoned when the author gets bored.

Lily Garden

One pet peeve that almost always annoys me is when the illustrations don’t match a description given in the text. It just rubs me the wrong way, even though I understand that the illustrations are a product of a separate creator than the author of the story, and naturally this will cause some discrepancies.

Lex

@Lily-Garden agreed, it can be annoying. Easier to accept when you know the illustrator has a specific art style that might not match well with the description, but when for example a character has different hair color in the text and in the illustrations I can't help but wonder what is the canon.

Regarding time compression, I don't have a problem if a story covers a limited amount of time, but especially in battle series you often end with the issue that the protagonists catch up in weeks or months with characters with years (or even centuries) of experience and that requires a bit of suspention of disbelief.

Campbella

@Lily-Garden This! Little details not matching doesn't bother me but I've seen some where a like 8 year old kid was drawn as an adult with lots of muscles - that bothers me. Makes me wonder why they're even doing the illustrations if they can't be bothered to read at least the section that they're drawing

Windsagio

@Lily-Garden Special call out to Land Mines, which I don't think has actually had an illustration without a major error yet.

BartzBB

I'm really curios if the illustrator;
a. actually reads the book then decides what scene to draw
b. the author decides and describes the scene to be drawn
c. the editor decides and describes the scene to be drawn

I'm leaning towards C since if it's A or B then it's very unlikely for them to get it wrong since they just wrote/read the book. For C, the editor might have made a mistake because they were busy since they are handling multiple authors.