Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.
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@Travis-Butler More like I have grown a thick skin. Once you get over spending years considering suicide, you kinda stop caring. And once it stops bothering you, as a survival mechanic, you stop seeing it as a problem. Because if I didn't start thinking like that, I doubt I'd still be alive.
So no, I probably didn't have that different an experience from you, I just changed in a different way.
I mean, if grade/middle school and mid 30s, you are luckier then me. I lived with it since second grade all the way up til my early 30s.
Edit; So in the end, I think I'll just agree to disagree. I see no maliciousness in her actions at all. All I see is friendly teasing. The same way me and my friends make fun of each other all the time.
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@KopiCAT I think the tsundere trope is kind of dangerous, in a RL sense. While you may find a real life tsundere, is it really something you would want? Someone who is always ragging on you in public? And how would you tell the difference between a tsundere and a girl who actually hates you? Do you have to wait until she calls the cops on you? Complains to your boss or the school's admin? Best to avoid a girl who acts like that, it could save you a lot of heartache in the future.
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@Folker46 Since I've never liked the tsundere trope to being with, I don't disagree with that.
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Pet peeves. Cities with walls around them but no farmland, and why is the forest right next to the town? Wouldn't it have all been cleared when they built it?
Adventure guilds in big cities that send people on fetch quests where the forest is right next to town. Wouldn't that kind of work already be done by the town's poor people? Any forest would have been cleared to build housing, for farms, and firewood.
Most LN authors spend no time thinking of travel distances and how hard it would be to go long distances. Let alone understanding wagons and how many horses you would need. Adventure guilds should be on the outer edges of an Empire, not right in the middle of one!
Hair. The men never talk about how hard it is to shave with a knife or wash their hair, let alone how hairy the women would get. (eww!)
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To have a specific hate, I think bookworm just lost me.
Great world and protagonist, but the way it handles villains is pretty consistently atrocious and it's inability to properly handle certain side characters is so very alienating (looking at you, treatment of Wil and his retainers both in the general narrative and specific events).
It started with the awful women (always women somehow) from ahrensbach, and it's only gotten worse as the series has aged.
Logic is out, Unreasonableness is in!
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@Windsagio said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
awful women (always women somehow) from ahrensbach
I don't deny that it's got an abnormal amount of women villains, but Count Bindewald says it's not always women there. Gerlach and Bezewanst are also of Ahrensbach descent and are aligned there politically, but those are certainly more edge cases.
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@GeorgeMTO Oh totally. The villians in general are of much poorer quality than the setting or the main cast. Just the women are sustained and particularly poorly characterized (most of the male villians have essentially no characterization at all, which is frankly an improvement).
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@Windsagio see, always found them very believable. They all come from the same family, and there is a clear cycle of abuse. Veronica discarded Georgine, causing Georgine to resent Sylvester. Georgine never forgave him, and she tried to gain as much power as possible in Ahrensbach. Everyone was treated as a tool, but she still never let go of her resentment for Ehrenfest, her mother and her brother. She was abusive to her own children in her quest for power, and she looked down on Delitinde. I think she also associates her daughter with her mother, which affected their relationship.
I do see where your coming from, and I saw it the same way before. But I do feel that Georgine's back story and influence explains a lot.
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@Windsagio I have a lot of problems with bookworm. Magic as an evil force that devourers people souls? The MC (and the views) can hear the girl whose body she is in dying as her soul is destroyed. As a viewer I feel nothing but horror and dislike for the show from the start.
The way the nobility and the church view magic are also weird, they see it as a gift from the Gods but also restricted it to themselves, like they have some divine right to it. While commoners who have the "gift" are allowed to die or must serve as slaves of the nobility. I can understand why the MC doesn't react to this immoral setup, she's powerless to change it, but it still rubs me the wrong way.
Why I never really enjoyed the series, I hate the world the MC has to live in. -
Something that's been bothering me with Ascendance of a Bookworm is just how much the narrative has slowed to a crawl. Sure, there are a lot of things happening, but it feels like we can go an entire volume worth of narrative dealing with other things before we get one chapter on a given thread.
It's... frustrating to read. Payouts happen so far apart in reading time that they end up not being satisfying, and often we don't even get them at all! (I really wish we'd seen that conversation from that recent short story, but alas, we can only imagine how that went)
I'm invested, and I want to know what happens, but I wonder if I'd enjoyed it better if I had waited until it was completed and I could have binged my way through.
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@Folker46 said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
Magic as an evil force that devourers people souls? The MC (and the views) can hear the girl whose body she is in dying as her soul is destroyed. As a viewer I feel nothing but horror and dislike for the show from the start.
While you are free to interpret that scene how you like...
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Major hate!! Shows that dub into English but DON'T translate Japanese text, like signs and stuff, while subtitled shows do!! Many times, they are done by the same outfit so why not just dub over what they have already subtitled? How hard can it be? Miss Kobayashi does it so it's not imposable. Is it some plot to get me to watch both?! Grrr!!
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@Folker46 If this is about a new episode on Crunchyroll specifically they usually add the translated text at a later date. Why? IDK.
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@Folker46 said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
Hair. The men never talk about how hard it is to shave with a knife or wash their hair, let alone how hairy the women would get. (eww!)
Good one. Or just basic bathroom usage in general. In a world without plumbing or toilet paper, especially on extended quests, these details get mentioned far less often than its relative importance to the human experience might suggest they ought to be.
I guess this is more a problem for the fantasy genre than LNs. LNs actually do tend to at least mention it, if only perfunctorily - and I can sympathize with not wanting such an unpleasant topic to dominate the narrative. Any story would quickly become unreadable if the author had to mention every time the party paused to allow the cleric to go behind a tree, or the mage desperately holding it in waiting for a sizeable enough bush to offer some privacy, or the warrior's excessive flatulence after a night of drinking, etc.
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@Windsagio said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
Just the women are sustained and particularly poorly characterized (most of the male villians have essentially no characterization at all, which is frankly an improvement).
Do you mind elaborating? Not trying to disagree, but I genuinely have no idea what you mean.
The villains have personalities, back-stories, motivations, families (and a well-defined spot on the family tree), social statuses, etc. Aren't these the same thing as being well-characterized? What's missing?
... inability to properly handle certain side characters is so very alienating (looking at you, treatment of Wil and his retainers both in the general narrative and specific events).
Similar question. How do you feel the narrative improperly handles Wilfried, and what might be different if he were properly handled?
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@unknownmat
note that I'm not fully up to date because eventually I decided that no, I actually no longer loved that series.1: Fraularm. Detlinde. They're transparent hate sinks, with ultimately shallow characterizations and extremely over-the-top reactions.
2: He and his retainers always had his narrative role as foils, and at the time I thought it was a huge case of wasted potential in what could have been an interesting deuteragonist with their own path and growth. There's no room for anyone else in the Bookworm's rise, so ultimately said growth is clumsily and arbitrarily limited. He has to fail in relation to Rozemyne, as that is his role.Edit: Even Georgine's response to things is absurdly out of scale, to the point of Evil-stupid. Even when I was reading the only thing I could figure out was that she maybe had been taking her own drug and self-brainwashed.
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I have two new grievances to add after finishing the second volume of I Got a Cheat Skill in Another World and Became Unrivaled in the Real World, Too. Before I begin, let me acknowledge that I am not the target audience for this story - I'm far too old and ornery and set in my ways to be able to identify with the protagonist. I accept that the book is largely wish-fulfillment for insecure young men, and I won't criticize it for being what it is. But even with that leniency, I feel the series does two things that really annoy me:
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Lazy (or maybe brilliant) plot-points. Everywhere the protagonist goes he's beset by tragedies that allow him to show-off his OP cheat-skills, to the amazement and adulation of on-lookers. He goes to the department store and it burns down, he goes camping and they are attacked by bears, he goes to school and a biker gang shows up to kidnap the students. It's long past eye-roll inducing. That said, there is a (admittedly unlikely) chance that the author is actually leading up to plot-twist where the protag's OP cheat powers are - unbeknownst to him - causing the tragedies. The protag would then be forced to make a choice between his powers and his friends. Or, alternatively, some detective might notice the pattern and arrest the protag on suspicion of arson/attempted kidnapping, etc. These would actually be some pretty neat plot-twists that I would welcome.
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Excessive insecurity that comes off as fishing for compliments. I get that he had an abusive upbringing and that would have an impact on his self-image and the way he interacts with other people. But when you've just jumped down from a four-story building and fought-off a biker gang, and when someone then says "That was amazing!", it should be pretty obvious what they mean. To respond, "Oh, you think so?" or "What about that was amazing?" doesn't sound merely insecure, it sounds like the protagonist (and thus the reader, vicariously) actively requesting the speaker to compliment him again and more specifically . Yuck.
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@Windsagio Ah, I see what you're saying, thanks for answering.
I agree that Fraularm is unreasonably easy to hate with apparently no redeeming qualities. Although it's kind of built into the name, she plays a large enough role in the narrative that you'd think her characterization could be a bit more nuanced. Its' hard to believe she could be as high-achieving as professors are implied to be, while being so bad at politicking and at human-interaction.
I also agree that - for the hypermastermind she is purported to be - Georgine's actions make no real sense to me. Her supposedly brilliant plots have been unintentionally thwarted three or four times now by a 10-year-old girl. And even if she had succeeded it's not really clear to me what she was hoping to get out of it.
Detlinde is a bit more interesting to me because there is a constant thread in the series about how Ahrensbach nobility treats those of lower status. Her behavior is believable for a spoiled, neglected, high-status noble raised in Ahrensbach. To the extent that she lacks characterization, I might suggest that it's because she just doesn't have a very deep or interesting personality.
As one of the few consistent defenders of Wilfried in the AoaB forums, I feel your frustration! I don't know if I consider that a weakness in the writing, or just an unavoidable result of his circumstances. I think Wilfried is a great kid - earnest, ethical, kind, generous, hard-working - who would have been able to lead a happy and successful life in just about any other story. But that the situation has been stacked against him in such a way that he was basically guaranteed to lose from the start, and it can be frustrating to watch.
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@unknownmat Realizing they were kneecapping Wilifried again was when I decided I was out.
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@unknownmat said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
@Folker46 said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
Hair. The men never talk about how hard it is to shave with a knife or wash their hair, let alone how hairy the women would get. (eww!)
Good one.
Putting aside the question of whether they're trying to be as 'hairless' as some modern people do (even to this day, acceptability of body hair varies by culture and taste), the earliest usable razors in our history are flint and/or shell tools that predate metalworking. We've had metal razors (using easier metals to work, like bronze and gold) as far back as Ancient Egypt. Most fantasy societies are more than advanced enough to have some kind of razor available.
In short, why would they bother trying to shave with a knife?
Anyway, on to the more interesting topic (AOAB villains):
To a large extent, Rozemyne's primary antagonist in AOAB is Yurgenschmidt's society, not the specific people who oppose her. Things like the prioritization of bloodlines over competency, insulating the powerful from the consequences of their choices (and, in the more extreme cases, from the objective truth), the zero-sum mentality (for me to win, someone else must lose), a lack of investment in (or care for) the future, revenge myopia, and an unwillingness to consider the needs of society over the needs of oneself.
Yurgenschmidt is a society in long term decline for some very good reasons, even before the likes of Veronica and Bezewanst were born.
There's also the POV issue - Wilfried is about the only antagonist (and he only holds that title part of the time) that we get a decent look at through Rozemyne's POV. Most of the others - from Bezewanst on up - Rozemyne just doesn't interact with enough to get a feeling for their true nature. You have to rely on the alternate POV chapters for that.
Fraularm, for instance, while still loud and annoying from everyone's perspective (and obsessive in some of her behaviors, going by the other teachers' reactions to her waschening a crime scene), is competent at her job (she's fully capable of teaching the pre-civil-war syllabus she pulled out to try and trip Rozemyne up), and has a reason for personally hating Rozemyne (revenge for her sister and brother-in-law) even if we don't learn about it until the third year.
Though to notice this, you need to be paying attention to a few small passages in the first book of Part 5, and reading the other teachers' POVs from the Royal Academy Stories collections. Someone who just read through Part Four would only know her as the cartoonishly shrill ineffectual comedy villain that shows up a couple of times each year, but can't be fired because of Ahrensbach's backing.
(For the record, this was one of the reasons for me to include side content in the AOAB Omnibuses - several characters suffered from the bits of their personal stories that were cut out in the WN->LN transition.)
@unknownmat said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
Detlinde is a bit more interesting to me because there is a constant thread in the series about how Ahrensbach nobility treats those of lower status. Her behavior is believable for a spoiled, neglected, high-status noble raised in Ahrensbach. To the extent that she lacks characterization, I might suggest that it's because she just doesn't have a very deep or interesting personality.
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As one of the few consistent defenders of Wilfried in the AoaB forums, I feel your frustration! I don't know if I consider that a weakness in the writing, or just an unavoidable result of his circumstances. I think Wilfried is a great kid - earnest, ethical, kind, generous, hard-working - who would have been able to lead a happy and successful life in just about any other story. But that the situation has been stacked against him in such a way that he was basically guaranteed to lose from the start, and it can be frustrating to watch.Wilfried and Detlinde, though, are an interesting example. For the most part, they're demonstrating the same societal flaw (nepotism + parental figures raising children to fulfil the short-term need for compliant flunkies rather than the long-term need for competent successors), but with slightly different characters.
Wilfried does, as you said, have some positive traits to him. I personally would dispute a couple of them (he's frequently lazy when insufficiently motivated, oblivious to the feelings of those around him, and prone to jealousy and entitlement, for example), but he is, overall, a fairly nice person whose spots as an antagonist usually aren't out of malice (at least, not his malice).
While the alt-POV views of Detlinde show that, despite the need for validation that drives her, she's at her core a rather unpleasant person - with all of Wilfried's negative traits amped up, and none of his positive ones.
Wilfried, I suspect, will end up following Delia's route (failing to get the future he thought he wanted, but ultimately proving to find happiness in the future he does get), while Detlinde... is likely going to end up dead or imprisoned as a criminal.
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.
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