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

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.

kuali

@BartzBB It could also be a timing issue; In large projects with multiple groups working together, its hardly unknown to have to do your part of the project to a spec produced before the project begins, rather than against the actual product of the other groups involved. (Admittedly, I work in software development, not publishing...)

But I wouldn't be surprised if they have equivalent issues - art gets commissioned based on whatever outline you have ready at the time, and if later redrafts change the story enough it no longer matches the commissioned art... tough.

The infamous Haruka Teleport from Land MInes, for instance, would make a lot of sense if the art was commissioned against an early draft where Haruka was present on the trip, only for the final version to leave her out... except for her appearance in the already completed illustration.