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ConanThe3rd posted:Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear sounds fun (it's Isikai but its about a girl who basically becomes a Kirito level force of nature whenever she wears a silly bear onesie) but I know better so has anyone else read it? I read that whenever there's a new release, it's fun and light-hearted. Sort of meandering is really the only criticism I can level - doesn't really feel like the author has any sort of over-arching plot planned, just super bear wandering around fixing problems that appear in front of her eyes. It might get boring after a while but I for one am still reading it.
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Oct 7, 2016 07:51
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gimme the GOD drat candy posted:oh my god, shield girl is completely nuts. http://www.novelupdates.com/series/itai-no-wa-iya-nanode-bogyo-ryoku-ni-kyokufuri-shitai-to-omoimasu/ This is pretty great, the way she wins her first 'boss battle' is completely absurd (in a good way).
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Oct 7, 2016 23:15
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Avulsion posted:That sucks, I don't know where else it might be but she saves the world with potatoes. Whoa did the epilogue actually get translated? I thought they just did a couple of the side stories. I'm really sad I read that spoiler right now btw
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Oct 9, 2016 06:09
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I don't usually read fanfiction but that Harry Potter one was actually kind of fun, clashing and incompatible magic systems is always an interesting premise so thanks for the recommendation! It kind of unravels a bit at the end and then gets abandoned which is unfortunate, but fun to read up to that point.
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Jan 5, 2017 08:35
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gimme the GOD drat candy posted:i think the 'hero from earth fights the demon lord' thing might just be a combination of world traveling fantasy stories with dragon quest. Yeah I'm pretty sure the whole 'template RPG world' that constantly comes up in LN / WNs is more referencing video games. A lot of (older) video games play that trope extremely straight with a king sending a hero to kill a demon king.
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Feb 3, 2017 07:10
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Also as I understand it most of this stuff starts as webnovels, which is just some random dude with an internet connection trying to make his breakthrough as an author in a market where that's actually kind of viable. So one thing becomes famous and successful (and also features rape or slavery or something horrible) which spawns a million imitators trying to cash in. Or imitators who are just creatively bankrupt in general but want to ride the wave of popularity. It reflects more on the audience than the authors I think, people write what will sell.
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Mar 11, 2017 05:42
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Sephiroth_IRA posted:Did a fan or official translation ever come out for that light novel about the guy trapped in an mmo with his mom? Wow that's really a thing? What. I don't even  why
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Mar 22, 2017 10:16
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darkgray posted:Are harems really that outrageously unbelievable? In the real world there seem to be women who are willing to be a married man's mistress, even if it means having to share him with his wife. Plus, the girls in R:Z aren't even human, so god knows how rigid their preferences are, given how many primates share mates. Not that I'm advocating polygamy, but there should be room in fiction for some kind of theory that says we are monogamous due to culture rather than biology. Either way, if you absolutely can't stand the idea, just stop reading web novels altogether right now. You can't avoid it anywhere. A man who has multiple partners is media shorthand for shitbag in like everything books, movies, tv shows, hell even harem anime usually have some foil character to the MC who actively pursues multiple women just to show off how much of a not-shitbag the MC is. Whether it's realistic or not is debatable and incidental imo. Being a macho-alpha male who women fawn on is generally portrayed as a positive character trait but at the end of the day there is an expectation of monogamy for a protagonist character. There's a reason the protagonists of harem media are always unrealistically dense - it's because if you have a character who is trying to seriously pursue a relationship with 5 different women he's the bad guy 99 times out of 100. Like with very very few exceptions that's not the guy the author wants you rooting for - that's the flaky loser the hero compares favorably to. I mean at the end of the day authors are writing for their audiences who - if they're reading this on the internet - you can be pretty drat sure have been exposed to a culture that preaches monogamy = morality their entire lives. Rocking that boat is just dumb. And I disagree that it's impossible to avoid. A lot of web/light novels have harem in the sense that there is one male main character and then every other character of any significance is female and maybe or maybe not infatuated with the lead character which is one thing. Having the main male lead actively trying to reciprocate the feelings of a half dozen women (or even two!) is rare as hell. That's where all the drama comes from - the whole will they won't they thing.
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Apr 29, 2017 03:51
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darkgray posted:Are we discussing the same thing here? My response was to Ytlaya crying about how girls can't possibly accept polygamy, and I tried to give some ways to suspend disbelief when reading fiction. quote:And have you actually read a web novel? They're all (as in 95%) about guys transported into fantasy worlds. Fantasy world means nobility, and nobility means multiple wives. They all feature this poo poo. The Japanese web novel portal Narou is a new kind of in-bred culture wave all about giving no fucks about "media shorthand" and giving in to their deepest desires to gently caress all the cute little girls they could ever want forever and ever, and it's fine, because it's fantasy land. Light novels and their high school romances are a thing of the past. These new isekai web novels are flushing everything else out of the market. Enjoy! I'm English only pleb so I only read what gets translated but I think it's pretty rare for the main character to be quite so openly deplorable. Like fantasy worlds have nobility but they're generally evil nobles for the hero to rail against and point at and feel morally superior too. Even if he has a dozen girls following around in his wagon or whatever he still gets the moral high ground because he's super dense or leans on his 'Japanese sensibilities' or whatever reason the author has to not have his main character be an openly terrible person. Setting aside the genre of poo poo where the MC being a deplorable person is the whole selling point of course... And Subaru is pretty clearly supposed to be a good guy yea?
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Apr 29, 2017 04:20
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Oh hey thread been a while Kumoko picked up again or someth-Synthbuttrange posted:A few chapters in and there's a necromancer that's into bestiality fiddling with herself. Synthbuttrange posted:It's pretty much I'm a spider so what except with occasional edgy bits like swearing, masturbation and genital destruction. NinjaDebugger posted:Stabbing people in the balls is comedy. It's mistagged. 
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May 7, 2017 10:32
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darkgray posted:Does Kenkyo Kenjitsu count? She has no powers or anything, since it's just the regular world. Not much of an adventure as such, mind. jon joe posted:Are there any stories where: Also there are a few where the main character is just some average guy who migrates to fantasy land for whatever reason like this one about a NEET who gets trapped in a fantasy world and only his handsome and powerful dog can protect him(the dog starts leveling up and stuff while he doesn't because he's a worthless NEET) I dropped it really early because the chat log format in some chapters was really annoying so I dunno if it's actually any good. Or this one about a guy who wins the lottery and also finds a magic portal to fantasy land which he uses to mess around with the medieval peasants who live on the other side(read: "Help" them). Or this one about some guy who meets a hot girl from a fantasy world and she wants him to come marry her for reasons and blah blah blah... this one is actually a bit better than the one sentance blurb does it credit. All the early drama sort of centers around his queen/wife not wanting to lose any power in her patriarchal fantasy world so to do that she marries a complete political outsider (the MC) who it's ok for her to marry for *reasons*. Then it's just him sort of bumbling around trying not to screw things up for her too badly. A tiny bit more mature take on the girl-falls-out-of-the-sky sort of genre.
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May 15, 2017 23:28
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I like "Running Away From The Hero", it's funny.
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Jun 8, 2017 10:15
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Man, I never really noticed but his character design really doesn't scream 'bad-rear end anti-hero on a quest for vengeance' so much as 'knock-off Link from Zelda'. It's kind of depressing how apparently popular that poo poo is though. e: Oh in slightly happier news I don't know if any of you guys were following Kenkyo Kenjitsu back when it was regularly updating - but it's started updating again! The translator has been uploading like crazy for the past couple weeks, it's real cool. sunken fleet fucked around with this message at 04:35 on Jul 4, 2017 |
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Jul 4, 2017 04:23
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Doubt it, I feel like intense hatred for women was a sort of core component to that particular light novel.
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Jul 4, 2017 05:24
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Namtab posted:Ah yes, the well known translation flaw of blocking ad block. I mean ...yea? When you machine translate the first thing that catches your eye on soysetu, copy / paste the results to your poorly formatted site where nothing functions but the ad-blocker blocker, that's a bit annoying? Worse is when there's a paywall or a login requirement though.
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Jul 22, 2017 05:29
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Yea, it's great what a complete crapshoot the quality of this stuff is innit?
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Jul 27, 2017 01:28
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Furious Lobster posted:Speaking of Kenkyo, which I marathoned thanks to the translations on ff.net, in 284 Enjou's feelings towards Reika are made pretty clear for those still in the dark. I also didn't realize that this was still ongoing, so that's a pleasant surprise. Wait, there are translations up to 284 somewhere? Wat.
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Sep 29, 2017 10:10
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Furious Lobster posted:oh no, I've been slowly reading the japanese through jisho.org since we're almost caught up with the current releases. Oh word. Feelsbadman.
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Sep 30, 2017 01:20
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TheDemon posted:Well, actually, the fanfiction.net translation just hit 284 today so yes. There are. Huh. I've been following the oniichanyamete translation for like ...a long time. Didn't know someone else had picked it up and gone way ahead, that's cool. Except now I have like 100+ chapters to catch up on 
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Oct 1, 2017 07:53
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Well I mean 'finishing projects' is kind of a high standard to hold when you're talking about free translations of garbage that tends to sprawl out hundreds upon hundreds of chapters. He picks up a lot of cool and interesting stories and I'm glad he does. Its nice to have one translator that doesn't bother with "generic shounen harem thing #9001". Also he did finish bathroom goddess and evil god average which are both pretty good imo.
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Oct 1, 2017 19:39
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Remember that time you took that class called "Psychology" in High School and suddenly understood the underpinnings of the world around you? Now imagine you took that newfound power to write a crappy fiction. Also you have a really horrible sense of naming things in this hypothetical.
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Oct 3, 2017 22:45
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Overlord volume 12 is out and translated(translator did it in like 10 days!). Haven't read it yet but that's pretty cool.
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Oct 10, 2017 07:12
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Huh glad you warned me. Gross. His blog is kind of sketchy though, guess I'm not surprised. Seems like a lot of translators in this scene are kind of  as people.
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Oct 10, 2017 09:47
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It's a weirdly popular premise. I guess authors think its more legit for their self-inserts to poo poo all over their High School bullies if the bullies first literally attempt to kill them. Personally I don't understand the appeal of having High School bullies in your High Fantasy story in the first place.
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Oct 12, 2017 00:43
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It's all over the English web-novel scene too - it is a really impenetrable trend to me. Like in some cases its tolerable as shorthand for quickly knowing that MC is overwhelmingly more powerful than the mook - though really I can infer that in most cases - and it also gives a sense of progression, through learning skills and whatnot... but do some people actually like to read pages and pages of skill lists and level up bonuses? And of course 90% of them don't actually have any sort of coherent system, just half remembered bits and pieces from video games the author has played... I've never read a story I felt where I felt having a bunch of weird video gamey RPG stuff shoved in there improved the experience, the ones that I did like I liked in spite of those elements.
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Oct 14, 2017 06:23
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Yea it's definitely recent. Trashy fantasy based on D&D has existed as long as D&D has but somehow Drizzet mowing down a million guys in a row because of his "bracers that mysteriously make him feel light" and "swords that are impossibly sharp" is more palatable to me than Kumoko explicitly getting a +1 to her webs and +5 to her fire resistance so now she can kill the magma thing... It feels like the kind of stuff that is left behind the curtain of a story for a reason - because it takes the fun out if you can be like "oh she's level 144, hes level 25 - I know how this ends". Maybe I'm just an old tho
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Oct 14, 2017 09:15
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I don't know if any of you guys read Overlord but I finally got around to reading volume 12 and I want to whine about it. I used to really like the series but each subsequent volume has made that more and more difficult. I don't mind stories with villain protagonists, I don't like prefer them, but it's not a dealbreaker generally - but even with my uh... openmindedness the story is really getting to be a bit much. I ended up skimming part of the first chapter since I couldn't stomach it... My problem, I think, is that I've started to legitimately hate the main character. He bumbles around into unearned successes, let's his chaotic evil subordinates run around completely unchecked, and becomes more and more unlikable with each new atrocity committed in his name while he just sort of shrugs and goes "eh". It wouldn't be so bad if he didn't maintain this weird lukewarm "I'm actually a good and reasonable person who's in over his head" thing in his monologues when he is so clearly, unabashedly, capital E evil! Clearly the author intends for us to understand that Ainz sort of sees the world around him as 'gamey' and doesn't give a whole lot of weight to the lives of the inhabitants of the world around him... but it's really not an excuse to be such a loving monster. The poo poo he does makes Hitler look kind and compassionate and it's not a lot of fun to read. Which is the point, obviously. I mean the author wouldn't spend whole volumes building up side characters only for Ainz and co. to roll in and stomp on them in yet another emotional gut punch, if the gut punch wasn't the whole point. But then the story has the audacity to treat Ainz like a bumbling everyman video gaem player and it's really infuriating. The weird little humorous asides really don't jive with the horrid backdrop of what happens in the story. He's a monster! He does nothing but monstrous things! It's not funny! You can't pretend like he's actually a likable everyman while his jackbooted thugs are skinning people alive - and that's the merciful ones! You can't be the leader of an organization of super powerful chaotic evil monsters that are raining terror onto the world around them and not be a horrible person, it's one or the other author.  I don't think I'll be reading the next volume...
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Oct 22, 2017 06:59
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Death flags really frustrated me because... I don't know how to explain it, but there is a "type" of character that is to be the lead character in a lot of web/light novels - like everyman japanese teenager who likes video games and jokes, right? And in Death flags it goes out of it's way to put the protagonist in these really difficult situations (he's one guy who's supposed to be able to fight on par with the whole Hero party - since he's the rival character you know?) with tense emotional moments. And then it just scraps that poo poo, the MC doesn't care, he says dramatic lines because he remembers them from the game and thinks it might be important to recreate everything as precisely as possible. Then you get a bunch of alternate POV chapters where the side characters misconstrue him as a troubled genius who is struggling mightily with his inner demons or some poo poo - you know, something that sounds kind of interesting? - before we cut back to his POV and realize it was indigestion or whatever hi-larious gag it may have been. It's misunderstanding comedy where all the other characters misunderstand the MC to not be a dumb jerk-off. Personally I think I would have enjoyed it more if it turned out MC actually wasn't a dumb jerk-off, but you can't have everything in life.
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Oct 24, 2017 20:37
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Ccs posted:So is it the similarity to anime plots and tropes that draws readers to these? Cause, no offense, from what I'm reading it can't be the quality of the writing. The amount of repetition in the word-choice, the clunky adverbs cluttering sentences, and the incredibly cliche descriptions for everything make even the worst published fantasy writer seem like Shakespeare. It can be a bonus, I guess, if an anime or whatever that you like ends abruptly and then you find out there is twenty light novels that continue the story. But I think a fairly big draw is that a lot of these stories can be fairly described as unique - if you're history with literature is entirely constrained to western works beforehand. The characters all have very different perspectives when compared against other characters in books that are written for English audiences - they have novel and alien perspectives and social dynamics that can be fun to learn by osmosis. You can wave that away with "anime plots and tropes" if you like but even that stuff is different - like I don't know about you but all those done to death tropes that anime lives and breathes by were at one point entirely new to me. Like what the gently caress is a class representative? Why do girls run into boys with bread in their mouths? What's the significance in that? Or you know, a million other common anime tropes that exist for whatever reason? What's with the weird naming conventions and social power structures? Why are teachers so disproportionately feared and respected in Korean stuff? Why is the main character of this Chinese novel clearly and evil piece of poo poo? Why does the very idea of a gun cause this Japanese protagonist to speak in hushed and reverent tones - doesn't he know he can just go buy one at Wal-Mart and blow the fucker with a god damned box knife away?!? Why read at all if not to be exposed to new ideas? You say that even the worst published fantasy writer looks like Shakespeare by comparison but find me a western fantasy author that publishes books about being reincarnated as a loving vending machine. Not as a gag, or a one off joke, but an honest to God book entirely about the daily life of a vending machine inhabited by the soul of a vending machine fanatic. There's a bunch of ridiculously off the wall premises that wouldn't be written about anywhere else - because an average Japanese or Korean or Chinese or Vietnamese (etc...) person's take on what constitutes "off-the-wall" is way different than mine. In short it's a hyper-specific niche of culture you really won't see anywhere else. Also it's free.
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Dec 20, 2017 09:00
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Silver2195 posted:There's plenty of better Japanese fiction for figuring out the answers to the first few questions, and someone who doesn't know the answer to that last question would strike me as remarkably ignorant. Although I suppose "Why is the main character of this Chinese novel clearly an evil piece of poo poo?" is sociologically interesting from a certain point of view. It's not about knowing the answers to the questions. It's about even having the questions raised in the first place. Like obviously you can't buy a gun at Wal-Mart in Japan. But when it comes up it still catches me off guard from time to time, coming from a place where every other book with a contemporary setting features a Good Guy With A Gun.
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Dec 20, 2017 23:12
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gimme the GOD drat candy posted:i think having a crappy translator pick up dropped series is far worse than simply leaving them incomplete. you never know, someone might eventually pick up a dropped series and do it well, but there is much less enthusiasm for re-translations in general. Yeah it's really the worst. I mean while I sort of appreciate the effort involved (even just copy/pasting and editing any formatting errors is probably a fairly substantial time investment) on the other hand it's like ...it's 2018 - everyone has google translate. If you can't improve on that, why are you even bothering?
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Jan 18, 2018 01:19
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Bakanogami posted:Apparently I Said Make My Abilities Average is getting an anime. Average Abilities is so scatter-brained and poorly plotted, I can't imagine it translating very well into a tv show. The plot is literally: *isekai happens!* > school arc( kind of interesting; dropped immediately) > hunter arc > school arc(...again for some reason?) > side characters! > references! > hunter arc again > companion quests! > ...I stopped reading. I was like 80 chapters in or something. And nothing happened the whole time! No plot appeared at any time! It felt like the author had a check-list of like five things he'd read in other light novels and just went through them one by one until he got to the bottom and took it from the top again. How do you translate that into a compelling television narrative? I mean, I know that anime is over-saturated and they make anything and everything into a show b-but there has to be some lowest bar they won't drop beneath ...right? There isn't even a story here is there?
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Feb 27, 2018 09:28
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Jackard posted:I pretty much skip anything Chinese aside from Cultivation Chat Group. The writing and setting feels impenetrable, their dao is too strong or something Same. Plus I can never tell if characters are supposed to be male or female unless they have an explicit description in text. Foreign naming conventions 
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Mar 3, 2018 07:00
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Megazver posted:That's literally every web novel I've read so far. I mean there's... there's... ...Grimgar? Is that it?
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Mar 10, 2018 06:38
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Yinlock posted:the weird thing is that before they get everything immediately handed to them there's sometimes a brief period where they are actually underpowered and things are genuinely interesting The best is when it's literally a single chapter of "oh woe is me" from the MC - followed by a million chapters of brutal and disproportionate retribution visited on typically unrelated parties. It really undercuts the "justification" when MC not being an OP demigod is <1% of the wordcount.
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Mar 30, 2018 06:39
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Ytlaya posted:Part of why I actually like the Shun parts is that he is very unlike your average WN isekai protagonist. By the time he does any sort of fighting, he's already established as far weaker than many other characters in the setting (who generally have much stronger cheat abilities than him), and he also doesn't have the typical sort of self-insert harem; IIRC just his crazy sister and apparently-trans (but now cis) best friend are interested in him (speaking of which, I found that whole plot thread sorta interesting). Even though he's very strong by human standards, in the context of the story as a whole he is decidedly weak, which doesn't work at all as a power fantasy (which is the biggest defining characteristic of male isekai protagonists). As a result, he's more interesting to read because the battles he gets into aren't necessarily foregone conclusions. He also comes off as a genuinely decent guy, which is unfortunately unusual for isekai WNs. 
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Apr 3, 2018 18:55
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gimme the GOD drat candy posted:lol i dropped the exterminator isekai wn because the translation was so bad, and i checked to see if the manga was any better. the translation was fine, but of loving course the guy acquired slaves by the second chapter. and as usual, it was slaves who were really eager to be property with vague bullshit reasons why they could never not be slaves. It's such a weird trope that has become weirdly prevalent. An older trope that I used to see a lot was a magic supergirl would randomly show up in the story and love the MC for no reason at all while somehow giving him magical super powers. At some point MC's stopped getting their super powers from magical girls and instead just randomly have them for no reason; consequently(? idk where this leap in logic comes from but here we are...) the magical girls now get regulated to slave status in the story. That's sort of my take anyway, since 99% of the "slave" characters in these stories could just as easily have been... you know. Not slaves. And instead just be random people the MC befriended.
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Apr 5, 2018 05:10
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khy posted:My current two favorite WNs are Sword Dad and Skeleton Knight. Both notable for a lack of slaves (Correction: slaves owned by the MC) and harems but still manage to be fun as poo poo. The Chronicles of a Lost Man in His Forties Founding a Nation ~Commonsense is Hindering Me From Becoming TUEE~ is about a guy who isekais into a literal D&D wizard. MC is in his 40s before the isekai so he looks down his nose at the notion of romance and instead focus on exploring the setting and being a hero and stuff.
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Apr 12, 2018 02:54
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gimme the GOD drat candy posted:i think changing the content of someone else's work to fit your own tastes goes too far. at that point, just write your own dang story. Yeah it's sort of mysterious to me because you know even just transcribing all this stuff from one language to another has to be super time consuming. Much less going you of your way to rewrite everything into understandable prose +removing things you don't like and having to rewrite around that... With that amount of time you could totally be writing your own story. idgi otoh I used to read The Amber Sword which apparently was heavily rewritten by the translator and the reading quality was definitely improved by having someone who cared enough and knew enough English to do a rewrite so At the end of the day it's not like the Chinese author's intent is ever going to be really adequately reflected to the English speaking audience that they probably don't even know about, so more power to the translators that are that passionate about the project that they want to rewrite things.
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Apr 20, 2018 05:08
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It's annoying how much chinese web stuff has exploded in the last few months or year or whatever, looking at novelupdates is just a huge unending spam from like the same 3 sites that translate a million sub 1k word chapters a day... is there any way to filter that out? Filter by site or something? e: oops I didn't really read the last page but Paracelsus posted:When I was back in undergrad, the Victorian tendency to omit references to the unspeakable vice of the Greeks from their translations was considered a bad thing and a sign weakness in their beliefs. It's a bit weird to see that sort of behavior come roaring back as a sign of wokeness. lol@ the idea that reading crappy translations of crappy webnovels is "engaging with another culture". lol@ the rest of the stuff you posted too sunken fleet fucked around with this message at 06:13 on Apr 21, 2018 |
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Apr 21, 2018 06:11
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