Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.
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@piisfun said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
@masterlillyclaw said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
Not an especially profound take but it still grinds my gears, so: creepy descriptions of (female) characters.
I love Cooking with Wild Game, but it doesn’t need to add addendums like “She was clearly miserable and depressed… But still exuding sexiness!” Let Vina Ruu be in a scene without commenting on her sex appeal please.
Adding on to this:
The obsession with the size of girl's chests.
And not just the size, but the fluid mechanics behind how their shape varies depending on angle/brightness/wind speed/etc.
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@myskaros said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
And not just the size, but the fluid mechanics behind how their shape varies depending on angle/brightness/wind speed/etc.
Or their position, like when they lay down.
It really bothers me when they have to go out of their way to comment about how beautiful a child is. Not to mention, this sin crosses the gender line as well. I don't know if it's just more culturally acceptable in JP, like it was in the West 20 years ago, but leave the kids alone.
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@piisfun said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
@masterlillyclaw said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
Not an especially profound take but it still grinds my gears, so: creepy descriptions of (female) characters.
I love Cooking with Wild Game, but it doesn’t need to add addendums like “She was clearly miserable and depressed… But still exuding sexiness!” Let Vina Ruu be in a scene without commenting on her sex appeal please.
Adding on to this:
The obsession with the size of girl's chests.
I roll my eyes at the yuri fanservice from having straight females groping each other, like during a group bathing scene which is already fanservice without it.
(The Mixed Bathing series is the exception to bad group bathing scenes.)
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Speaking of baths the obsession with bathing itself. Or rather, things being "because I was japanese!"
Character A : I gotta eat me some rice! It's in my blood! CAUSE JAPAN!!!!!
Character A : Also I need to bath in a big ass bath all the time... CAUSE JAPAN....Annoys the hell outta me... you don't see other things do that like having an american characters say "I need to eat a hot dog and fire a gun because I'm an American!"... Well, not often anyways.
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@kilocron said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
Annoys the hell outta me... you don't see other things do that like having an american characters say "I need to eat a hot dog and fire a gun because I'm an American!"... Well, not often anyways.
Interesting observation, because it might speak more to the way people living in each country see themselves :)
"Going to another world" is believed to be so popular with Japanese web novels and LNs/manga/anime because their work (and maybe some living?) conditions there are so restrictive and exploitative that this kind of escape sounds appealing. This can also be seen in the suicide rates in Japan; whatever the reason may be behind those higher rates compared to the rest of the world, it could be construed as people feeling as though they can't live in this one. However, the other appealing part of the isekai subgenre is that they tend to star characters who are easy to self-insert, to pretend can be you. So there's more focus on stuff they do like about life in Japan.
This is going to be a lot less visible in Western fiction simply because there's a lot less of people from Earth going to other worlds. YA fantasy and sci-fi fiction tends to revolve around either completely new realities that the protagonist is born in, or fantastical worlds that are adjacent to ours. Harry Potter and The Magicians, for example, just use a hidden dimension, essentially, where people are able to go back to their "normal" lives whenever they wish.
But still, while it may not be as noticeable since it's not called out so explicitly the way you see in isekai stories, western casts still tend to go out for coffee, burgers & fries, and pizza quite a lot, whenever they do eat something. Or take Iron Man (2008) for example; the first thing Tony Stark does when he gets back from imprisonment is find a Burger King. Yes, this is probably just product placement, but you see the same thing in Into the Spider-Verse as well, and even the Arrowverse shows (Arrow, Flash, Legends of Tomorrow, etc.) with Big Belly Burger and Jitters (a coffee shop) being frequent props and in-universe locations for characters to gather. It's just so infrequent for western characters to be deprived of the foods they want to eat that it doesn't become a big deal the way an isekai'd character might not have access to food they love.
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@rahul-balaggan said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
Every single fighting scene, in any Light Novel.
Just a personal thing, but no matter what LN it has been, any fighting scene with actual details on the fight are not my cup of tea.
I enjoy scenes like, “and then I beat them to a pulp” or, “and then they beat me to a pulp”.
I scroll past most fight scenes myself, so... mood.
Writing good fight scenes is hard. The best advice I was given for writing them is that by and large, your reader does not care about the fight. If you write a fight scene and try to make that scene be about the fight, that's as bad as writing a conversation scene about small talk and the mechanics of conversation. A good fight scene needs to center the characters and what they care about, more than the fight.
I don't have many good examples (as a testament to how hard it is), but The Genius Prince's Guide to Raising a Kingdom Out of Debt has a few of fight scenes where the main character has lots of objectives besides just winning, which allows the outcome to feel more uncertain - you can read about Wein making real-time decisions about which objectives he's willing to sacrifice and which ones he judges as important, which allows the fights to feel dynamic in a way that life-or-death binary combat doesn't.
Ascendance of a Bookworm also has a good example in the sportsball match in P4V2 that works on similar principles (being vague to avoid spoilers). But I also skimmed all the actual fight scenes, even in Bookworm.
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@myskaros Well of course I get the logic behind all of that. I'm just noting that it's annoying as I feel like it's kind of demeaning. And it happens way, way too often.
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Definitely agree with much of the above. When food scenes come around, I have a decent tolerance for it, but when it surpasses that (cough Dahlia) that's when I start skimming. If the food is plot relevant (Bookworm, Cooking with Wild Game) it's good, but at a certain point I just don't care for a long list of ingredients.
My two cents: As much as I love Bookworm, I think the series would be noticeably better if every character (and especially Myne) didn't act like the entire world was going to end every time Justus or Hartmut as much as bring up crossdressing.
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@lisast If you take out the "delicious foods" aspect of I'll Never Set Foot in That House Again!, half the content goes away.
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One thing that didn't use to bother me much, but which is increasingly grinding my gears, is harems. I used to enjoy harem stories quite a lot, but after reading a whole bunch of them, and starting to write (admittedly crappy) stories of my own, I've realised that nothing destroys the romantic tension between two characters like adding a third (and fourth, and fifth etc.) wheel to the mix. In the end, most harems devolve into a game of pokémon ("Gotta catch 'em all!"), which I guess isn't fundamentally bad as a means of simple entertainment. It's just that there's nothing romantic about it. Thus, when I read stories with harems nowadays, I try to set my expectations low with regards to the romance.
Another thing that tends to annoy me, and which has had me drop series before, is a cliché that I guess isn't specific to Japanese media (though I've mostly encountered it there): the main romantic pairing(s) getting separated, sometimes for a whole volume or more, whether because the love interest gets kidnapped or possessed by the big bad (or is otherwise preoccupied), or because the protagonist has to go on a journey and the love interest gets put in the freezer in the meantime. I don't know why this one bothers me so much, though I suspect it's because it feels like a cheap way of adding tension. Romantic subplots/main plots are some of my favourite parts of stories, and as long as the partners are separated, there literally can be no romance, except inside the heads of the characters. Even worse if the protagonist then goes around picking up harem members while the whole separation thing is going on.
The weird obsession with breast sizes has been mentioned before, so I'll just add that I fully agree.
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I don't like the trope of having one insecurity making you completely different from your peers. For example horimiya, Hori is just a homebody, and Miyamura is not an otaku. My dress up darling, Gojou just likes making hina dolls.
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@waterdweller said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
Another thing that tends to annoy me, and which has had me drop series before, is a cliché that I guess isn't specific to Japanese media (though I've mostly encountered it there): the main romantic pairing(s) getting separated, sometimes for a whole volume or more, whether because the love interest gets kidnapped or possessed by the big bad (or is otherwise preoccupied), or because the protagonist has to go on a journey and the love interest gets put in the freezer in the meantime. I don't know why this one bothers me so much, though I suspect it's because it feels like a cheap way of adding tension. Romantic subplots/main plots are some of my favourite parts of stories, and as long as the partners are separated, there literally can be no romance, except inside the heads of the characters. Even worse if the protagonist then goes around picking up harem members while the whole separation thing is going on.
The only western story I can think of off the top of my head is Percy Jackson: The Titan's Curse. It was used as a reason for Percy to even bother getting involved in the plot of that particular story.
Green's Theorem
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@someoldguy and the other half is like... Major pedo vibes. Another thing I hate is 1,000 year old Loli characters. Can't we just have a series about adults?
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@piisfun said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
The only western story I can think of off the top of my head is Percy Jackson: The Titan's Curse. It was used as a reason for Percy to even bother getting involved in the plot of that particular story.
Just looked up the details on wikipedia. I guess if I hadn't dropped that series at the beginning of the second volume (due to annoyance at Percy and Annabeth's completely pointless squabbling, IIRC), I would've definitely dropped it when being faced with that plot. I suppose I never really was all that taken with that series, so it didn't take much to get me to drop it.
@salientmind said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
@someoldguy and the other half is like... Major pedo vibes. Another thing I hate is 1,000 year old Loli characters. Can't we just have a series about adults?
I'll never understand this preoccupation so many Japanese authors seem to have with children and young teenagers. Sometimes it gets downright disturbing. It's to the extent that it seems almost universal for male protagonists to be entirely surrounded by girls or women younger than them, with the only exception being the token 600/800/1000 year old who looks like a little kid. Can't we get the occasional "waifu" who looks like an adult, acts like an adult, and is, like, maybe a decade or two older than the (already adult) protagonist? Off the top of my head, I can think of only one series I've read where the male protagonist hooks up with someone like that (Reborn as a Space Mercenary), and it was a breath of fresh air.
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@joey-gil My Dress Up Darling does not feel like a harem story, he has one girl he likes who loves him, and the rest just really like him for how well he makes their cosplay dresses but aren't in love with him. He doesn't seem like the type to put up with harem nonsense either and won't "string" a girl along for fun.
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@waterdweller said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
two older than the (already adult) protagonist? Off the top of my head, I can think of only one series I've read where the male protagonist hooks up with someone like that (Reborn as a Space Mercenary), and it was a breath of fresh air.
I loved the first couple of volumes of "The World's Strongest Rearguard", because Arihito was an adult with adult love interests. As the harem grew, the ages of the new characters got lower. The whole series would have been better with one love interest and many "adopted rascals".
I am holding out hope that he makes it clear he isn't about a harem.
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@waterdweller The target reader are sex deprived and lonely 16- to 18-year-old boys, so of course they read erotic fiction and since sex sells, sexy young girls are everywhere. What is funny is I read that part of the reason for Japan's falling birth rate, other than over-work, is it's impossible for most Japanese women to measure up to the beauty standards 2-D women have set. Japanese men are not as interested in real Japanese women as they used to be. They have to be either really young and cute or older but still sexy, but an average looking woman? She's going to be an old maid.
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I hate harem stories that don't have a harem ending, like Rosery and Vampire. Many times, these other girls will risk their lives for the MC and each other yet get kicked to the side at the end. But when the harem gets too big, like in Another World with my Smart Phone or Death March or World's Strongest, then it just gets stupid. No man will be able to keep up with all those woman's sex drives as they get older, having a large harem seems more like a power fantasy then even remotely realistic (breaks immersion). Also, sometimes the MC has a harem, but you can't figure out why the girls want him so badly. Sometimes he's just really strong but other times he's the only guy around, like there is one guy for every ten women or something.
The glory of Japanese food is also overblown and used as filler for an otherwise shallow story.
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@someoldguy Filler for an otherwise boring story.
