Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.
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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.
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I generally don't like detailed fight scenes either, but my one exception to that is Lazy Dungeon Master. The sheer creativity Keima shows in the types of attacks he comes up with during the fight scenes totally makes it worth reading them in that one series. In pretty much every other series it's just skippable paragraphs.
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@waterdweller oh god I hate the kidnapping plots. It's even worse when it's forced marriage or similar as well...
I then usually hate the resolution even more when they forgive the (usually rapey-threatening) antagonist...
I've come close to dropping some series because of that garbage
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@waterdweller I agree with you, but as I read on some other thread, these stories are typically geared for pre-teens and teens. I really don't understand it, being older than that, but apparently these authors believe that 12 year olds don't want to read about anyone over twelve. And they want to see that the 12 year olds are so much better/smarter ... than older people. Maybe people in Japan have serious complexes? Anyway, this would not be such an issue if the authors didn't expicilty say the characters are only 12 and draw them as such. I pretty much just pretend all the characters are 10 yrs older and it usually it more reasonable. Oh, a 12 year old has their own apartment and cooks for themselves and blah blah ... suuuurrrre. But, a 22 yr old, okay.
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I do agree that more than one (maybe 2 or 3 max) love interests is pretty dumb. I don't know what idiot thinks they could possibly keep up with that. I have been married a long time and can tell you that more than one would have probably made me kill myself years ago. Anyway, I beleive historically the nobles/king did have more than one wife (see Apothecary Diaries), but I believe it was limited to like 3 or 4 max and strictly regulated as regards to who inherits... So this harem thing, like Realist Hero and Spirit Chronicles with a dozen or so "love" interest is just dumb.
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@christopher-lamay said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
Anyway, I beleive historically the nobles/king did have more than one wife (see Apothecary Diaries), but I believe it was limited to like 3 or 4 max and strictly regulated as regards to who inherits... So this harem thing, like Realist Hero and Spirit Chronicles with a dozen or so "love" interest is just dumb.
Historically harems existed, but they weren't fair or equal relationships as LN often try to depict them. There was always a significant imbalance of power, and love had very little to do with it.
Bookworm and Apothecary diaries are those random outliers. I can't imagine having the bandwidth for anything else if I was truly caring for the emotional needs of 2 other people plus "working".
