Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.
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What are the things that annoy you about your favorite light novel series?
Seirei Gensouki has so many wasted character development opportunities in social scenes. Most of us too heavily on where people are sitting, or the side characters only talk about Haruto. What about theirmown motivations? What about the world?
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Overly verbose descriptions of magic systems in beginning volumes. I don’t need to know exactly how every spell works, just give me the characters, their motivations, & the plot and I can pick up the rest later.
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@lily-garden "The Magic in this World is too far behind" comes to mind. The reverse side of that is Rozemyne's, "all have to do is pray to the Gods right?"
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Pointless long-winded tangents about trivia, beating the point into the ground long after we've gotten it, as an unknowing homage to the wise and powerful Mojo Jojo. Who is very smart, thinks well, and can display wisdom more than most other people. (Insert 5 variations of the same idea.)
Looking at you Unwanted Undead Adventurer and Record of Wortenia War.
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Introducing new characters rather than developing the existing cast.
Realist Hero had this bad enough that I actually dropped the series over it around volume 13, despite liking a lot of other things about that series. Characters would get a lot of exposure when they were first introduced, and then get dropped by the wayside in favor of something new and shiny in the next volume, leaving a cardboard cutout in their place.
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@rsog412 - there was a volume that was basically "RH: The Next Generation: Kids of the future!" but focus has shifted back towards the conflict between Souma and Genghis Haan though still with more time spent on non-Souma POVs than in the first few books.
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@rsog412 What about when those characters turn out to be important people two or three volumes later?
(You know, just at the point where Japan decides to cancel the series)
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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”.
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Food descriptions. How it tastes, the umami, the fragrance. Honestly all we need it "We ate X and it was delish." Let's move on
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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.
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@masterlillyclaw there are so many series guilty of this. I forget which one I was reading recently, but the description of every girl was "she was a beauty without peer". Not only is it like "ok man, she's just drinking some tea", but that makes no actual sense. If you have 5 women who spend time together, then those are her peers. Therefore, she can't be a peerless beauty.
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@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.
Green's Theorem
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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.
