Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.
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@unknownmat said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
namely the idea of what it actually means to "conceptualization" something
I mentioned that as the only reason it was not completely broken. Since there was no injection of "modern knowledge" giving better conceptualization in the those books.
An example of a LN series that bound conceptualization magic in a good way is The Magician Who Rose From Failure. The MC is still OP and all, I mean it is a LN, but even though he can conceptualize things from the modern era of his previous life, he has to find the right magic words in the various ancient scripts that will work with his concept.
I won't say how good or bad the series is here, just that this series is an example of a good way to both use conceptual magic and set limits.
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@sorvani said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
I won't say how good or bad the series is here, just that this series is an example of a good way to both use conceptual magic and set limits.
Sure. I'm not saying that it can't be done well, and I love OP MCs. And I even like magic systems to be slightly ambiguous and mysterious. It's just that - in the spirit of "hate on what you love" - when "the power of imagination" is done without enough care, the implications can easily escape the author's grasp. It can knock me out of the story at least long enough to roll my eyes.
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@sorvani said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
One of the larger issues I have is so many authors not even attempting to understand time.
Good call. I have a similar observation but from the opposite direction.
We tend to conceptualize time logarithmically. So while we realize that a million years is more than ten-thousand years, we tend to lump them both into the category of "a long time ago" and fail to grapple with the implications that come with an extra 990,000 years.
I also can't think of any specific examples at the moment. But it's not uncommon for writers to write about some ancient civilization that existed an arbitrary large number of years ago, as if more zeros just adds to the mystique.
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@unknownmat said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
But it's not uncommon for writers to write about some ancient civilization that existed an arbitrary large number of years ago, as if more zeros just adds to the mystique.
In light novels it seems to always be less than 500 years though and that is what annoys me. Because they have long living races and educational institutions in almost all the series also.
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@unknownmat said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
We tend to conceptualize time logarithmically. So while we realize that a million years is more than ten-thousand years, we tend to lump them both into the category of "a long time ago" and fail to grapple with the implications that come with an extra 990,000 years.
... it's not just fiction authors that suffer from this. Archeological/Paleological news reporting does too with their casual use of century and thousand year time spans...
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@sorvani said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
In light novels it seems to always be less than 500 years though and that is what annoys me. Because they have long living races and educational institutions in almost all the series also.
Are you thinking of something like Frieren? For example, there's the elf warrior who performed some marvelously heroic deed... but so long ago that, although there are still statues commemorating his achievement, nobody knows who he was or what he did. In the present he's just some unremarkable guy walking around - even though there are other elves still around who presumably ought to remember him.
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@sorvani said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
@unknownmat said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
But it's not uncommon for writers to write about some ancient civilization that existed an arbitrary large number of years ago, as if more zeros just adds to the mystique.
In light novels it seems to always be less than 500 years though and that is what annoys me. Because they have long living races and educational institutions in almost all the series also.
Some authors treat this properly by having the MC actually go and talk to the elves. Realistically, they might or might not have known or cared about specific events happening at the time in question.
Even in the past twenty years in our connected world you could ask me about many events and I'd have to go to Google to find out, because I wasn't paying attention to them at the time. Many others I'd only have vague knowledge.
An author ignoring libraries and colleges is more of an oversight to me, though better authors make the effort to explain lost history by saying something like that kingdoms and their libraries were destroyed and only fragments remain. In Chise's world (Making Magic) there was a planet-wide catastrophe.
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@HarmlessDave said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
Even in the past twenty years in our connected world you could ask me about many events and I'd have to go to Google to find out, because I wasn't paying attention to them at the time. Many others I'd only have vague knowledge.
Yes, things on less than global affecting scale are going to fall away, I don't mind that. But even prior to the current era, the educated class (rich/nobles) know about large historical events passing 2000 years or more. Most of them may not be "learned scholars" about the subject, but they are aware of them, and there are scholars.
I'll pause my thoughts on this again until I pick up a LN that it happens in. I'm mid read of a few, so I am sure it will pop up sooner rather than later.
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@HarmlessDave said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
Even in the past twenty years in our connected world you could ask me about many events and I'd have to go to Google to find out, because I wasn't paying attention to them at the time. Many others I'd only have vague knowledge.
Yeah. Plus there's always so much going on in the world. Any particular division of history into distinct events is arbitrary and depends on cultural/historical narratives. Lots of important and momentous things happen that nobody will remember in 20-50 years.
An author ignoring libraries and colleges is more of an oversight to me...
Even this is actually not so crazy to me. Looking at our own history, people have existed pretty much everywhere on the planet for at least the last 10,000 years. Yet in school we only learn about a small handful of notable civilizations. It's not unusual for kingdoms to rise, exist for hundreds of years, and fall. And nobody in the modern world - outside of a handful of experts who specialize in that region or time-period - even knows it ever happened.
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One of my pet peeves is how many LN authors have to jam sexual fetishes in their characters. It's like they're trying to fill a checklist: Physical appearance, personality, skills, hobbies, sex kinks. This is very far down the list of things that make a character interesting or provide narrative motivation.
Jobless Reincarnation is the big offender here. I am fine with Rudeus being a perv, because it's a part of his character arc. Rudeus has no interpersonal skills, starts with a messed up view of sex (otome game brain rot) and over his life negotiates where it fails and where it succeeds. It's a story about a morally grey world where you try, fail sometimes, and keep trying.
What's weird about Jobless Reincarnation is how seemingly every character has to have some fetish. Beastperson slave rape, piss play, legal loli, peeping, panty sniffing, harem, incest, on and on! It doesn't contribute to their characters, it's just a side characterization.
Another example is Middle Aged Sage, which has gay rape monkeys, a shota-con, a nun who gets her big tits groped... It's not essential to the plot, and it's played for laughs. I find it to be unfunny, edgy, and pandering.
Overall I wonder who is it for. Sexual fetishes are not that common. Single-digit percentages of the population have them. Even if you do have one, it's likely not the one the LN has included. I understand that sex sells, but sexual fetishism seems like a niche that would harm sales more than boost them.
Ultimately I have to roll my eyes and focus on the parts of the story I care about.
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@Outinthegardener said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
Overall I wonder who is it for.
My guess: often it's the author, especially their early novels.
Much as I enjoy TRPG and the characters themselves, Erich's harem of monster girls seems like something for the author's wishes as much as the reader. Not me, I'm good on spider girls thanks. (growl!)
Unlimited Gacha seems even more like the author's wish to live in a world with his 1,000 gacha waifu harem.
When it's not the author's daydream: pandering, trend-following, laziness. Build a harem, follow the checklist to offer a menu of possible reader wishes.
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Another grievance.... the ineffectiveness of bullets in fantasy and LN settings. (EDIT: This is such an obvious one, maybe it has already been covered. If so, then sorry).
In many series, the surest way to lose a fight is to be the NPC holding a gun. You can have a machine gun aimed directly at your enemy over a mile of flat unbroken terrain with a clear view, and he's just going to dodge around your bullets or knock them out of the air until he reaches you and takes you out with his katana.
Modern weaponry is really effective, and hot metal traveling at a high velocity is going to do a lot of damage, even in a fantasy setting. This is one reason why I enjoy Gate and Arifureta so much - let's give technology its due. Making the projectiles heavier and accelerating them faster and adding explosives ought to be enough to overcome any force-field barrier eventually, regardless of the magical system involved.
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@sorvani You haven't even scratched the surface of anime tropism, I'm afraid Japanese tropes are there for a reason though. I'm pretty sure those bamboo water-clocks are pretty standard at old-style Japanese manors. CLONK!
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@staylo67 said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
@sorvani You haven't even scratched the surface of anime tropism, I'm afraid Japanese tropes are there for a reason though. I'm pretty sure those bamboo water-clocks are pretty standard at old-style Japanese manors. CLONK!
Yes, but those two I can attest to in my personal life.
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@sorvani đź‘Ť
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@unknownmat said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
@geetop said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
Benjamin Franklin was held in high esteem because he made it to 84 when most people only lived 38 - 40 years old during his time. I think we assume that in fantasy people have a longer age but if in fact they mirror our own planet than 30 could be very old.
I'm too lazy to look this up, and I imagine it varies a lot by time and by place. But I've read that the historical lower average lifespans were due to high infant and child mortality. If you made it out of your childhood, there was a decent chance you'd make it to age 60.
This is true. The reason that the average lifespan during the middle ages is around 30, is infant mortality rate. It was as high as 50-60%. But live past that, and getting to 60 was quite common.
When half the children born die before the age of 1, it drastically drags down the average age. But that does not mean that people in their 30s were actually old.
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Here's another one that bugs me.... names that are too similar! This is particularly the case with light novels and other translated works because there are often cultural reasons for it.
I recently re-read Solo Leveling and every other character's name starts with "Jin". So, for example, there was a scene where Jinwoo, Jinchul, and Jinho all traveled together, and the whole time I'm tripping over these names trying to keep straight who said and did what to whom. Even including the last names hardly helps - they become Jinwoo Sung, Jinchul Woo, and Jinho Yoo. Yeesh.
Personally, I wish the translator had localized the names a bit more.
I understand that this story takes place in South Korea and these names are cultural. And I realize that this is an unwinnable position for the translator - changing the names would immediately piss off anyone familiar with the original work. I might even be persuaded if the nature of the work were educational or literary in intent. But come on - the story is about superhumans who enter randomly appearing gates to fight powerful monsters. Would it really ruin anything if the main character were localized as, e.g., "Johnny Sung"? I think not.
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@unknownmat this why I have stayed away from Chinese light novels; I tried reading one once and I had trouble keeping everyone straight since the names were too similar!
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@unknownmat said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
Would it really ruin anything if the main character were localized as, e.g., "Johnny Sung"? I think not
Yes.
Re: Sailor Moon - 4 Kids.
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@sorvani said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
Yes.
Re: Sailor Moon - 4 Kids.Do you mind elaborating? I'm not familiar with Sailor Moon or 4 Kids.
