The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You - Vol. 19 Ch. 159 - The Gothic Lolita Festival Girl

[Seregosa]

unsurprisingly, this manga is going downhill with no sign of getting better. as more and more characters have been added, the art has become much more simple and just worse in general, and characters have been reduced to a single personality trait. they used to have some depth, but now they are one dimensional as hell. i genuinely dont even know if the manga will be readable by the time it gets to 100 girlfriends.

Honestly I have to agree. That's the issue of having too many mainstay characters. There's simply not enough time for every single one and no one would want to get in-depth about each of them in the first place with how boring that'd be. The more are introduced and needs to be kept relevant somehow, the more the story gets spread thin.

This happens even in normal harem stories with 3-5 girls, but at least then it's manageable. But with this many, it's just not even slightly manageable anymore without turning it into some kind of episodic manga where they just throw random ideas in there for the weekly episode, every girl at best gets scraps of story. We'd need a ton of chapters just for each to get a single chapter to themselves, so that will not really happen and it'll just be a hodgepodge mess.

I still find it a bit amusing to read, but it's definitely starting to feel like the story has no value at all anymore, it's just a matter of rinse and repeat, even down to making the new girls do exactly the same thing as the old ones, just slightly edited to fit the new personalities.

I really believe that the author bit off far more than they could chew. "The 10 girlfriends who really really really really really love you" would've been difficult already but at least manageable. At least then we could've avoided the main point of each and every volume being introducing about 2 new girls, where it's all about integrating them into the group somehow in the limited time we have. It's so repetitive that you just know exactly what'll happen now and exactly what kind of chapter to expect. We always know that after a girl is introduced, he will need to somehow charm them by being nice and trying to act according to their interest, then they need to get together, then he needs to introduce them to the group on the rooftop and then they need to do some weird activity usually related to the new girlfriend's hobbies. This happens every single time without fail. Then the few pages leftover we might get some small date or mini-event on the side of whatever character the author fancies to write about at the moment.

Since there's no time to develop the characters either, they all act exactly according to the initial setting/stereotype and we know exactly what they'll say/do, so the comedy is also pretty much gone after so many chapters, it's not really funny if we know exactly how they'll react and what they'll do, especially not now when everyone around him has accepted the abnormal as normal and no longer react in funny ways, not even the new characters tend to be surprised, they just accept everything because the author doesn't have the time/pages to spend on writing proper reactions or think up jokes.

It's basically creatively dead at this point.

 

[Seregosa]

You should have notice that after Hahari got into the gang. You've been warned (if you followed this series from first release) that this trope would make a lot of girls don't have dynamics as they have more characters joined because of limited pages.

The author already passed the impossible task by her unique writing. Asking the latest chapters to be like first chapters is too much. There is no way you would get what you want

Just because we knew this would likely happen, as they SAID they did, doesn't mean it's good that it did.

Who is to say they wouldn't be able to keep it fun even with more and more characters? Sadly, they haven't been able to with how repetitive everything has become and that means the story is going downhill regardless of it was expected or not. Even if we knew it was going to spread the story thin, it could've still been saved by great humor, but even that has been watered thin. We couldn't expect that it'd end up being so lazily written where every single girlfriend is basically the same at this point, it's the same routine every time, he meets a girl, he charms her by pandering to her hobbies/personality, he introduces her to his girlfriends (which is never an issue because, yeah, manga logic), she shows her abnormality to the rest of the abnormals and then maybe there's some event related to the new character, then we might get a side story chapter or two before another character is introduced, rinse and repeat. The characters have become increasingly less witty/interesting, which isn't a problem with the amount of characters but that the author has lost control and can't think up truly funny/new things anymore.

This ended up being a one-trick pony kind of story and at this point we've beaten said horse to death and we're just kicking its corpse every chapter.

I still enjoy it enough to read it, but that doesn't mean I don't recognize that it's at best a guilty pleasure and that it has little to nothing to offer and that the story has been becoming wore and worse. Saying that someone should've realized it doesn't mean the facts become less factual or their opinion less valid.

Your argument is the same as saying "You should've known you'd become an adult, so you shouldn't be frustrated at having to deal with all the issues that come with being an adult". Simply inane.

 

[AAA1]

Just because we knew this would likely happen, as they SAID they did, doesn't mean it's good that it did.

Who is to say they wouldn't be able to keep it fun even with more and more characters? Sadly, they haven't been able to with how repetitive everything has become and that means the story is going downhill regardless of it was expected or not. Even if we knew it was going to spread the story thin, it could've still been saved by great humor, but even that has been watered thin. We couldn't expect that it'd end up being so lazily written where every single girlfriend is basically the same at this point, it's the same routine every time, he meets a girl, he charms her by pandering to her hobbies/personality, he introduces her to his girlfriends (which is never an issue because, yeah, manga logic), she shows her abnormality to the rest of the abnormals and then maybe there's some event related to the new character, then we might get a side story chapter or two before another character is introduced, rinse and repeat. The characters have become increasingly less witty/interesting, which isn't a problem with the amount of characters but that the author has lost control and can't think up truly funny/new things anymore.

This ended up being a one-trick pony kind of story and at this point we've beaten said horse to death and we're just kicking its corpse every chapter.

I still enjoy it enough to read it, but that doesn't mean I don't recognize that it's at best a guilty pleasure and that it has little to nothing to offer and that the story has been becoming wore and worse. Saying that someone should've realized it doesn't mean the facts become less factual or their opinion less valid.

Your argument is the same as saying "You should've known you'd become an adult, so you shouldn't be frustrated at having to deal with all the issues that come with being an adult". Simply inane.

Not really. It's just that is just wishful thinking it can't be realized whoever author it is. It's not possible. The reader already know the exact expected number is 100 from the start. The option would obviously either cutting the supposed to be 100 number to lesser than that, making some like background character, or forcing it with barely unplanned plot. All choices is a lessened quality to the first chapters. It would be ungrateful of you to be a fan if you expect more when continuing it is already hard enough. Even one piece, the most successful onGoing manga in sells, can't escape the fate of sacrificing quality and can't satisfy all readers

 

[Monday_]

OH GOD SHE'S BR*TISH🤢🤮🤢🤢🤢🤢🤢🤮🤮🤮🤮🤢🤮🤢🤢🤢🤮🤮🤢🤮🤮

 

[Lunkli]

I wouldn't have thought this character would be so divisive, honestly, but I can understand the complaints about her being a bit difficult for non-native speakers to understand.

But, anyways, it's frankly ridiculous that there are people in this thread saying Kusuri's なのだ should have been kept in untranslated. Like, god, please no. It's a translation; you shouldn't leave random Japanese words in there just because the character says them a lot. (And this is a Japanese word, not a nonsense catchphrase! It's roughly equivalent to English "is," usually.) It'd be like if there was a character in some piece of English media that had "right?" at the end of all their sentences like "Yeah, I'm going to the library, right?" and it was translated into Japanese as literally the English word "right," like 「じゃあ、図書館に行くライト？」 (Or worse: 「じゃあ、図書館に行くＲＩＧＨＴ？」And I know most of the people here don't know a lick of Japanese, so in rōmaji that's "Jā, toshokan ni iku right?")

I'd have to drop this if they suddenly decided to do that. I've only slogged through that sort of translation once (Translating stuff like "I'm going to the pool desu!") and that was only because I already knew a new translation group took over for the later chapters. Even then, I sort of regretted it afterwards.

Basically, just please never suggest keeping blatantly Japanese grammatical words like that in a translation ever again.

 

[Lucca_R]

Why she scotish?

 

[TNGDeadly]

She sounds more scottish than british lmfao

 

[Deathhappens]

I haven't heard anyone use "Berk" in anything since I played Planescape:Torment back in 1999.

 

[Deathhappens]

I wouldn't have thought this character would be so divisive, honestly, but I can understand the complaints about her being a bit difficult for non-native speakers to understand.

But, anyways, it's frankly ridiculous that there are people in this thread saying Kusuri's なのだ should have been kept in untranslated. Like, god, please no. It's a translation; you shouldn't leave random Japanese words in there just because the character says them a lot. (And this is a Japanese word, not a nonsense catchphrase! It's roughly equivalent to English "is," usually.) It'd be like if there was a character in some piece of English media that had "right?" at the end of all their sentences like "Yeah, I'm going to the library, right?" and it was translated into Japanese as literally the English word "right," like 「じゃあ、図書館に行くライト？」 (Or worse: 「じゃあ、図書館に行くＲＩＧＨＴ？」And I know most of the people here don't know a lick of Japanese, so in rōmaji that's "Jā, toshokan ni iku right?")

I'd have to drop this if they suddenly decided to do that. I've only slogged through that sort of translation once (Translating stuff like "I'm going to the pool desu!") and that was only because I already knew a new translation group took over for the later chapters. Even then, I sort of regretted it afterwards.

Basically, just please never suggest keeping blatantly Japanese grammatical words like that in a translation ever again.

Respectfully, I disagree. I understand why you feel that way, and that's what most professional translators would lean towards, but the end goal of all translation is the transferrence of meaning, and "yup yup" is not really semantically equivalent to "nanoda". I never watched the anime and, while I had a pretty good guess on what Kusuri and Yaku's verbal tics were meant to be, it hit me completely differently when I ended up watching a clip and hearing what they'd been actually saying all this time. And this goes for a lot of the girls who express aspects of their personality via their manner of speech; while I honestly thing the translation team has done a positively bang-up job in inventing themes that match the original, at the end of the day that's exact what it is, invention. There's definitely an argument to be made for leaving as much of the idiosyncrasies untranslated as possible so the reader gets as close to the original meaning as possible, even if that raises the bar of required understanding of Japanese culture and language. Maybe not for the official translation, but they don't have a choice. Fan translations do.

 

[Lunkli]

Respectfully, I disagree. I understand why you feel that way, and that's what most professional translators would lean towards, but the end goal of all translation is the transferrence of meaning, and "yup yup" is not really semantically equivalent to "nanoda". I never watched the anime and, while I had a pretty good guess on what Kusuri and Yaku's verbal tics were meant to be, it hit me completely differently when I ended up watching a clip and hearing what they'd been actually saying all this time. And this goes for a lot of the girls who express aspects of their personality via their manner of speech; while I honestly thing the translation team has done a positively bang-up job in inventing themes that match the original, at the end of the day that's exact what it is, invention. There's definitely an argument to be made for leaving as much of the idiosyncrasies untranslated as possible so the reader gets as close to the original meaning as possible, even if that raises the bar of required understanding of Japanese culture and language. Maybe not for the official translation, but they don't have a choice. Fan translations do.

I feel like you don't know anything about the Japanese language. なのだ is not a verbal tic, despite how people describe it. It doesn't have any inherent meaning and it absolutely does not mean anything in English. Like I said in my original comment, for all intents and purposes, it's basically the exact same thing as English "is."

Like, quick Japanese lesson for you:

ペン (pen) = "a pen"
ペンだ (pen da) = "(this) is a pen"

なのだ is then an alternative to だ that has a more confident and explanatory tone. It's a real part of the language— not some silly thing to make characters sound unique. The only thing unique about how Kusuri talks is that she overuses it and has it in basically every sentence she says. Which, while notable, isn't something that should be directly loaned into English, because English doesn't use copula (words like "is" & だ) like that.

And I know that this probably seems odd to you, but that's because Japanese is a foreign language— it's not "English but different." And for that same reason, literally everything about a translation is "invention." Despite what you may think, there's no such thing as a literal translation, or an exact translation, or anything of the sort. Directly translating Japanese into English is impossible. So, really, the only way to get the exact nuance of a Japanese sentence would be to just write it in Japanese— It's not "idiosyncrasies," it's a fundamentally different language.

And while it's fine for you to not know stuff like this— and I mean this in the nicest way possible— it'd be nice if you didn't act like you knew what you were talking about when you clearly don't.

 

[Deathhappens]

I feel like you don't know anything about the Japanese language. なのだ is not a verbal tic

I feel like you don't know anything about the English language, if you're insisting on this. Tacking on a word (meaningful or not) to the end of every single sentence is the very definition of a verbal tic. Like, this isn't a question, you're straight up wrong. Kusuri doesn't does this even when it doesn't alter the meaning of her sentence at all.

And I know that this probably seems odd to you, but that's because Japanese is a foreign language— it's not "English but different." And for that same reason, literally everything about a translation is "invention."

Something I am well aware of, as everyone who has ever opened a translation textbook is. Which is why my point was explicitly about NOT translating certain things considered to be understood to the audience precisely to avoid going through this stage. This isn't (broadly speaking) a stance that an official translation can take, but it IS very much possible in the fan domain. If you had spent a little more time actually reading my comment rather than jumping to conclusions about my facility with either language, you might have seen this and wasted less of both our times trying to give lessons.

 

[Lunkli]

I feel like you don't know anything about the English language, if you're insisting on this. Tacking on a word (meaningful or not) to the end of every single sentence is the very definition of a verbal tic. Like, this isn't a question, you're straight up wrong. Kusuri doesn't does this even when it doesn't alter the meaning of her sentence at all.

Okay, you're just being deliberately obtuse, aren't you?

 

[Deathhappens]

Okay, you're just being deliberately obtuse, aren't you?

Feel free to explain whatever it is you think I'm missing anytime.