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

[unknownmat]

@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.

[unknownmat]

@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?

[Windsagio]

@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.

[unknownmat]

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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

[unknownmat]

@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.

[Windsagio]

@unknownmat Realizing they were kneecapping Wilifried again was when I decided I was out.

[kuali]

@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.
.
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.

[Windsagio]

@kuali Problem is we know the author can do better, but just didn't bother (with Detlinde) and actively sabotage the character (with Wilifried).

Granted you don't generally call an audiable within a series, but these are kids, and you could have made them grow meaningfully, or you could just use them as plot props. Wili is especially bad because he has grown, but in the process his failures have become less and less believable. We see character growth that is then absolutely erased for plot reasons. It's jarring.

Detlinde, Fraularm, Georgine et all being awful you can take as general Light Novel narrative laziness (although that work, again, can do better). They'd be acceptable to me (if annoying) if it weren't for the fact that all the actual detailed and long-lasting villians are women. The bad men, mostly are shallow, one note, and are dealt with relatively quickly. The women we constantly have our noses rubbed in for volumes and volumes, and that bugs me somehow.

[kuali]

@Windsagio The point I was trying to make with regards to Wilfried is that the story is less about Rozemyne overcoming Wilfried, specifically (though that's likely to happen) and more about her reforming the society in which even his supposedly loving and supportive father is, ultimately, failing to properly raise him. Oswald is(/was) manipulating him for political reasons, Sylvester is spoiling him for personal reasons, nearly everyone else is going along with it because of his bloodline, and the people willing to be completely honest with him (Rozemyne, Ferdinand, and eventually Lestilaut) are being drowned out because they're the ones least involved in his day-to-day life.

And he's far from the only person in such a position - Delia and Detlinde were/are both caught in similar traps - he's just the most sympathetic. And its not impossible for him to ultimately escape - Sylvester managed it, after all. And he wasn't that far off the age Wilfried is at now...

As for the gender imbalance in the antagonists... Well, it depends what you count. Openly antagonistic villains who last beyond their original part? 3-1 victory for the ladies (Gloria, Fraularm, Detlinde vs Bezewanst). Recurring antagonists that last beyond their introductory part? By my count, 7-4 win for the men (4-4 tie if you only count villains instead of all antagonists). So the series definitely looks like its missing a long-running female antagonist that is not, as far as we can tell, actually evil.

Though this list is off the top of my head, so I may have forgotten someone.

spoiler

[Windsagio]

@kuali I think my point in comparison is that the series is on that weird very specific threshold that makes it annoying to me.

The author seems good enough that we expect better than bog-standard LN characterization, so when that's what we get it can feel dissapointing.

Arguably that's why it belongs in "hate on what you love"!

[unknownmat]

Another grievance - every other translation house besides JNC!

Why the hell are they all so slow and opaque? I just got notification that the 19th volume of Deathmarch (an isekai series that I love beyond all rationality or ability to defend) is delayed yet again until September of this year!

The series is up to 27 volumes in Japan, so there's plenty of content out there. Yet the translators are somehow losing ground to the author! The author has consistently put out three novels per year for a while now, but Yen Press has only put out two volumes per year for the past few years. Grr!!

And the worst part is that there's nothing I can do but to rage quietly and impotently. At the end of the day, all I'm contributing is my $10 for each novel - and ten bucks won't buy you a whole lot of translation. I'm even actively worried that if I raise too much of a stink Yen Press might decide that Deathmarch is no longer worth the trouble and just drop it entirely (I hope its sales numbers are still OK). The fact that each new drop seems to take longer and longer has the same feeling as the "completion" time in a download dialog slowly increasing after the connection has been dropped ("100 days? I guess if I just leave it open long enough the file will eventually finish downloading."). And so all I can do is sit here watching it get delayed again and again just hoping that the series will continue to be published.

[GeorgeMTO]

@unknownmat The majority of Yen Press' issues like this are unlikely to be translation based. These kind of delays are more likely to mean issues in the printing process rather than the text not being ready. Unfortunately they believe in tying digital releases with physical releases, so that means everything gets delayed if the book isn't ready to release. Not every issue is necessarily with the book that gets delayed though, I figure they just see some series as less impactful if they're delayed than others.

As a minor note, Death March still had 3 volumes in 2021. This 2 per year thing began last year.

[unknownmat]

@GeorgeMTO said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:

Unfortunately they believe in tying digital releases with physical releases, so that means everything gets delayed if the book isn't ready to release.

That sucks if that's the reason. As a digital-only reader, I'm being inconvenienced for a consideration that adds no value to my experience. Of course, part of my frustration is that I have no insight into why it's being delayed - if they announced the reason for the delay it would be easier to swallow, at least.

As a minor note, Death March still had 3 volumes in 2021. This 2 per year thing began last year.

I had hoped it was just a COVID related hiccup and was disappointed when V18 and V19 kept getting pushed back. Hopefully they get back to three (or more) releases per year, and these delays don't signal waning enthusiasm for the series.

[salientmind]

@Windsagio said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:

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.

That is a fair criticism. I just figured she was obsessed/fixated and slightly out of her mind.

[Lily Garden]

@salientmind said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:

@Windsagio said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:

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.

That is a fair criticism. I just figured she was obsessed/fixated and slightly out of her mind.

Yeah I assumed it was a Captain Ahab situation; she is so obsessed with getting her "revenge" that she doesn't care what happens along the way or what damage she causes to make that happen

[Campbella]

Forcing someone to have Stockholm syndrome to marry you is NOT cute or romantic

[Gamen]

@Campbella I assume one of the new Heart titles, but... context?

[Campbella]

@Gamen I Want to Escape from Princess Lessons if you want the title that prompted my comment but also just in general as a basis for a story

[unknownmat]

So I have one that will maybe be controversial: Honorifics! Or more specifically, when honorifics and their usage play a prominent and plot-relevant role at any point in the story (e.g. Where it becomes an actual point of discussion in-story). This one has crept up on me slowly after years of LN consumption.

Previously, I have been mostly neutral on the subject of honorifics. I viewed them as a vestigial reminder of the Japanese culture from which the work originated. I accept that they can be impossible to remove without butchering the work even though they don't really have the same significance to a foreign audience. This is also true for other tropes of Japanese media such as nose bleeds and bathing. It was with this apathy that I have mostly just raised my eyebrows in confusion over how strongly LN readers seem to feel about the inclusion/exclusion of honorifics in translated works.

But lately I've come to see excessive focus on the usage of honorifics to be a cheap substitute for actually depicting character development. Wading into yet another paragraphs-long morass of tedious negotiations over <first name>-san vs. <last name>-san just leaves me rolling my eyes and bored out of my mind. Maybe to a Japanese reader this negotiation would be a meaningful and important way to express character development. But to me, an American reader, it just comes off as a cheap way to avoid doing the hard work of actually constructing prose to show the distance between two characters. A well-written scene filled with awkward interactions and poorly received jokes is far more evocative than stubbornly insisting on a more "distant" form of address, for example.

[kuali]

@unknownmat So the use of honorifics to do Tell, don't show on relationship statuses? Yeah, I can see how that could get irritating.