Tonari no Neko to Koi Shirazu - Vol. 2 Ch. 9

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Every idea would be better without a school setting. It's the most boring, played-out location in all of manga/anime, with generic fantasy Isekai world coming up hot in second place.
i don't know how i'm supposed to convey to you that school is a place that nearly every person on the planet spends 1/4 of their life in and therefore it would be weirder if it wasn't a locale that creators had the most ideas about. lived experience will influence the ideas that you conceive. hell even isekai are similar given that most people have played video games before or daydreamed about fantasy worlds in their youth

i would also argue that having a common reference point that anyone can immediately relate to without being infodumped about what a school is becomes way more reader friendly and easily accessible than describing some niche bizarro conceptual place. sci-fi (and to a lesser extent fantasy) can be really difficult for people to get into for this reason. the writer being able to spend that time developing the characters and the plot rather than being forced to spend many chapters for exposition's sake, some school series like kono oto tomare are so unbelievably heartfelt and nuanced and i feel like a brand new setting (or really new premise entirely since it wouldn't work anywhere else) would detract from that. the only reason you complain about it is in this absolutist way is that the more popular something is the more the ratio of bad:good content becomes apparent, and you've probably just read a lot
 
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i don't know how i'm supposed to convey to you that school is a place that nearly every person on the planet spends 1/4 of their life in and therefore it would be weirder if it wasn't a locale that creators had the most ideas about. lived experience will influence the ideas that you conceive. hell even isekai are similar given that most people have played video games before or daydreamed about fantasy worlds in their youth

i would also argue that having a common reference point that anyone can immediately relate to without being infodumped about what a school is becomes way more reader friendly and easily accessible than describing some niche bizarro conceptual place. sci-fi (and to a lesser extent fantasy) can be really difficult for people to get into for this reason. the writer being able to spend that time developing the characters and the plot rather than being forced to spend many chapters for exposition's sake, some school series like kono oto tomare are so unbelievably heartfelt and nuanced and i feel like a brand new setting (or really new premise entirely since it wouldn't work anywhere else) would detract from that. the only reason you complain about it is in this absolutist way is that the more popular something is the more the ratio of bad:good content becomes apparent, and you've probably just read a lot
There's an entire universe of fiction outside of light novels and manga that can manage the small amount of creative legwork to write about something outside of high school or a fantasy video game setting. In fact, there's a huge gulf of potential between "high school" and "some niche bizarro conceptual place" and its telling that even in a thoughtful response to my shitpost, that's your standard for what a setting is: High School, Generic Fantasy, or Impossible Esoteric Bizzaro World.

Fair enough though, I've fruitlessly consumed a lot of this stuff and it starts to blur together honestly. This hobby kind of sucks and I've gotten sick of reading the borderline AI generated goop that gets churned out by the majority of the web novel/manga/anime scene. It's not worth the effort to sift through the mountains of grey matter and dogshit to find a few gems, especially when no decent sites let you filter out what you aren't interested in.
 
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Every idea would be better without a school setting. It's the most boring, played-out location in all of manga/anime, with generic fantasy Isekai world coming up hot in second place.
You're right, but you're not supposed to say it.
 
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i don't know how i'm supposed to convey to you that school is a place that nearly every person on the planet spends 1/4 of their life in and therefore it would be weirder if it wasn't a locale that creators had the most ideas about. lived experience will influence the ideas that you conceive. hell even isekai are similar given that most people have played video games before or daydreamed about fantasy worlds in their youth

i would also argue that having a common reference point that anyone can immediately relate to without being infodumped about what a school is becomes way more reader friendly and easily accessible than describing some niche bizarro conceptual place. sci-fi (and to a lesser extent fantasy) can be really difficult for people to get into for this reason. the writer being able to spend that time developing the characters and the plot rather than being forced to spend many chapters for exposition's sake, some school series like kono oto tomare are so unbelievably heartfelt and nuanced and i feel like a brand new setting (or really new premise entirely since it wouldn't work anywhere else) would detract from that. the only reason you complain about it is in this absolutist way is that the more popular something is the more the ratio of bad:good content becomes apparent, and you've probably just read a lot
I don't feel quite as strongly, but @Darkchung is right and you're only writing apologia here. There isn't a dichotomy between highschool and "some bizarro conceptual place". Most fiction in most media exist between the two. Read some proper literature; or even, read some western comics. Highschool settings in manga are often merely lazy vehicles for a conceptual conceit, where the author doesn't have to give it much thought and instead can follow through with his or her central theme or idea and simply apply it to a familiar template with various established tropes. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, in my opinion, but it does more often than not lead to formulaic writing with unnecessarily limited scope. That's not to say that certain stories don't lend themselves to the highschool setting enormously well, indeed manga as a format also demonstrates that. However, this story in particular is not well-served by the school setting. This conceit ("virgin boy" meets "cat-like girl") would work in plenty of other real-life settings and appropriate life stages, and benefit from it by not having to go through the motions of a typical school setting's tropes. The fact that the setting is utterly bare-bones (What does he do when not in class? Does he have any friends? Why/why not? What classes does he take? What classes does he excel at? What are his teachers like? What is his class like? What cliques are there? Etc etc) makes me wonder if the author isn't really committed to it being set in highschool either, and is simply using it, as I've said, as a vehicle for the central conceit applied to a setting with established tropes.
 
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