This I can still bear, as long as the execution is done well. It usually isn't, but I'm willing to keep an open mind.
yet the author builds the entire story and setting to not just focus on them, but idolize them and paint them as good people. I don't want to spend an entire series wading through rivers of you shitposting about why I should applaud this jackass's relentless jackassery.
Fuck this shit, though. The worst offender to me is when characters the protagonist is actively working against shower him in praise regardless, usually for outsmarting them. Even the trashiest story starring the world's biggest piece of human garbage can still be made somewhat redeemable by a few """antagonists""" rightfully calling the MC out on the crap he pulls off. At least I have someone to cheer for. Take that away and you're left with less than nothing.
When it comes to isekai, it's either good or bad; no in-betweens. I think this series just barely crosses the "good" territory but that's all that is important.
1. The romance actually progresses somewhere.
It's not really a good thing but rather saying that your thumb is amazing because the rest of your hand is crooked while it alone is normal. But so far, romance is fine. No forced drama, stupid misunderstandings, unneccesary NTRs. "Okay" romance is far better than "bad" romance in my book.
2. It's not a generic harem. Yes, it's generic isekai but compared to other generic isekais this one plays on the strengths of generecity more than others do.
Again, saying that your normal thumb is amazing while the rest of your hand is crooked. But like Slime Tensei, it knows that it's a generic isekai itself. It never tried to be anything more and instead focuses on what makes generic isekai good.
3. Power of imagination is much better than power of friendship (which this manga also uses but it's not as bad as Yugioh in its friendship power)
The main protagonist in this case is able to use common knowledge from our world and incorporate it with this world's magic to basically use his imagination as the source of his OP power. As generic as this is, Kenja no Mago quits worrying about being unique and develops this magic system quite well in my opinion.
It's a soft magic system which means that the mangaka can just give the protagonists any random advantage and make up an excuse for it. A good soft magic system explores the limits, is non-self-contradictary, and uses a certain skill or attribute as a measure of power (I'm pretty sure, correct me if I'm wrong). This manga fulfills all those criteria.
4. Worldbuilding follows "show, don't tell" rule. Need I say any more?
5. Character development and interactions are well-paced which is very impressive because this series has a rather large character cast. Even the antagonists have their "development" as well, granted it's less than the protagonists.
The way MC helps his friends to become as OP as he is and need their help to not break this world's economy as well as military because of his OPness is very satisfying to watch. Progress is a very fun attribute to play around with when writing your story.
And other than this, none of the characters are flat. Although MC is the only 3D out there, the other characters are 2D enough to feel real enough to suspend the disbelief.
Also, main antagonist is not generic so that's a plus.
And since this manga does have the "nobles are evil" cliche, I'm going to defend it.
(Non spoiler)
It all depends on the execution. In this case, it is played in such a way that it's plot-relevancy echoes into the story far more than other series does.
(Very slight spoiler)
The "nobles are evil" cliche does not affect the protagonist but rather than antagonist. Through the antagonist the protagonist is affected.
(Heavy spoiler)
The main antagonist is fueled by his hatred for nobles despite being a noble himself in the past. He truly hates how other nobles treat commoners like dirt and genuinely wants to change it. This is his backstory.
He did what we all would do in his shoes - prove the others wrong. He treats his workers with respect, pays them well, is generally very friendly. He hopes that his new attitude will prove to the other nobles how stupid they are.
The other nobles didn't like it. They gave main antagonist a fake invitation to a meeting which claims to approve of his new attitude to the commoners to be effective. Guess what happens next? They fooled his workers into thinking that he sold their women as prostitutes, men as slaves, and badmouths them behind their backs when in reality none of such is real. They escalated it such that the workers hate main antagonist so much that they killed his pregnant wife and burned his house.
This is literally why main antagonist took down an entire neighbouring country full of selfish nobles. And what does he do next? World domination? No.
He killed plenty of nobles. He is satisfied. His underlings on the other hand, aren't.
K this is far enough explanation as to why "nobles are evil" cliche has been executed very well in this manga.
@EaterOfBooks Although the settings often look fantasy European, the science, economics, education, and technology might better reflect the Japanese's own past. Japan was quite backwaters indeed, apart from some cultural arts, before the Meiji restoration and the rapid modernisation thereafter. Chances are double-entry accounting, and many other ridiculously absent things, truly were absent in the oppressively feudal Japan just a couple of hundreds of years ago. The authors of these stories know Japan's history undoubtedly better than Western history (just like it is vice versa), which could be where the conflict arises. It's kind of a pity they don't stop to think how a society could possibly even look like 18th or even 19th century European without those essential things, but when we are talking about light novels or manga, they aren't exactly high literature and the editors in the companies publishing them couldn't be called skilled.
But this is just my guess. I'm not exactly an expert on the Japanese history, especially down to such details.
Naruto/DBZ/One Piece/name-your-popular-shounen are mostly perfectly fine as entertainment for children. The problem is that too many bitter manchildren refuse to accept them for what they are and whine incessantly about how series made for 12 year-olds don't meet a 26-35 year-old's standards of quality. Either grow up and get out of the kiddie pool or be content with your trash.
@Kaarme That's a good point you bring up, authors writes what they know, after all.
It's still not a good excuse, though. It'd be like trying to write about tigers, but instead of actually researching, they just look at their cats and scale it up to tiger's size. There's going to be a lot of things that's different, and they should know that.
As for my unpopular opinion, I'd say it's about how westerners seems to be allergic to any potential pedophilia in LN/manga. I mean, I understand how creepy and disgusting pedophile that wants to lewd young children are. But sometimes they react just as strongly to situations that don't seems to be that alarming, such as 20 - 30 something guys that might be romantically interest in girls about 15 - 17 years old, with no hint of sexual act in their near future yet. And quite often they'd mostly ignore this issue if the girl is state to be 18 years old.
Cards on the table, SAO died after Season 1 because of what the author did to the story.
Season 1 is as close as you can get to a masterpiece in terms of story and themes (whether the whole package is a masterpiece, IDK, that's depends on opinion). It's a study in how people deal with life death situations when trapped and the real consequences of death and regret all set in a world where the value of life is completely different from what the game world was designed for.
Season 2 + however, is a story about Kirito button mashing to victory against his enemies with his superhuman reflexes. And winning, with no consequences if he wins or loses. Ho hum, how generic.
Newp, originally it stated something like "dentists aren't real doctors", or "Neil Gaiman is con of a writer", cause I didn't read the the opening statement in this thread.
@Exiled I think it's a bit unfair of you to stick One Piece in that lineup. It's one of the few popular shonen series that avoids power creep and has both interesting characters and actual character growth.
One of the things that really caught my attention about it was the "No power creep" bit. Yeah, Luffy and co power up pretty impressively during the series, but there's never a point where their power level exceeds what has already been established as the top of the world's capacity. There's no point at which the writer fucks up and says, "Whoops, there's no conceivable challenge for my MCs anymore, time to pull something stupid out of my ass." As early as the Barati arc, possibly earlier, it's consistently made very clear that if the Straw Hats ever stumble hard enough to "fall off the boat" per se, that's it. They're done. Yeah, there's a fair bit of plot armor here and there, but it's not obnoxious about it and the plot armor itself is never a deus ex machina that saves them despite fucking up beyond recovery.
As for characters and growth, I shouldn't need to go into specifics. Anybody who wants to can read it themselves
I don't like it when romance series shifted its storyline to the side character pair as if the main character changes. it just feel disconnected, even worse if the mc pair's side is put on the backseat as if time stopped for them and nothing is progressing. why not make a spinoff or extra chapter for the side pair or something like that? I want to focus on the mc dammit
even if the side pair is more interesting, I still don't like the shift of focus
however, I wrote this based on a small grudge for a quite while ago. I don't even remember which manga made me feel that way. I even don't read that many manga too, so maybe only one or two that does something like that. not sure if this is an unpopular opinion.
but I do remember one manga that does not do something like that. it was Love Roma I think? the story always focus on the main character, and the side pair progress happen in the background. it was sweet the side pair's progress was sprinkled between chapter and make their story is left to reader's interpretation. I like that kind of thing.
That's an interesting idea, and you may be right. By no means is that worldbuilding problem limited to isekai (or even just Japanese fantasy works - there are tons of Western fantasy books that lift parts of historical cultures and forget to include the factors that made them the way they were), but it's often more noticeable with isekai due to the 'crazy inventions from the future' angle. Another pet peeve of mine about D&D/RPG-derived fantasy is how little thought most writers put into how a society where a huge chunk of the population hunts magical monsters for cash would function and look different from our own world's historical cultures.
One fantasy work that I think does a really good job on the worldbuilding front is Red Storm, where there are good geographic and cultural reasons that the main character's country is a bunch of nomadic desert tribesmen, although they live by a pseudo-medieval European country and a pseudo-imperial China, and one of the minor plot threads is about the various hurdles the main character has to go through weighing the pros and cons of taking certain cultural and technological advancements from the neighbors and the difficulty of implementing them back home in a bid to turn the desert into an actual world power.
I'll go you one better: SAO got meh after the first webnovel, when the author wrote a bunch of sidestories (these were rolled into the anime). The original webnovel had a really tight focus on two people falling in love in a dangerous situation, and the sidestories featuring a bunch of other girls potentially interested in Kirito detracted from that (and turned him into a more generic protagonist), even if they did add a bit of interesting worldbuilding.
Well, i pretty much have nothing left to offer to this threat so I'll just place mine here and be on my way. I don't like harem and ecchi but that's probably a product of time as it's at least some of the reason i started watching anime as a kid. And i doubt it's an unpopular opinion in the west but i just drop anything loli.
One thing that could be discussed is when the story shifts focus to a new character(covered above already). Sometimes it can be interesting and i don't mind it as a side story but when the entire story was told by following character X for 20+ chapters and all of a sudden I get 3 chapters of character Z i lose interest. This can be avoided if it's done like this from the start but it usually isn't.
I'll come back if anything comes to mind. For now, I wish whoever reads this a nice day !
Ohh! If that's even a little bit true, that explains a LOT.
I've been listening to a lot of history podcasts and documentaries, and what I've noticed is that while humans may not be intelligent, often they'll try any damn thing at all in the name of innovation, even at risk of life. Reading isekai LNs/manga where the main character is leagues smarter than everyone else in everything was just...unbelievable. There's one in particular that's really bad about some kid named Souma who saves a country from starvation just by telling them to eat weird shit and it's like...no...just no...
When a population is starving, they'll try eating anything. There's no way they wouldn't have already attempted this. There's no way things like soap wouldn't have been invented either. Lye's been around for ages. Laundry has historically been a pretty labor intensive job. Humanity is so much more inventive and resilient than these novels give them credit for. Ancient civilizations have risen, flourished in unbelievable wealth and comfort, and fallen from violence or poor management. People are so so good at making stuff, but for a long time we just had to keep reinventing it because every time a big country fell, we'd lose all that and have to start again.
@Sem Stuff like soap is a bit out of the scope of this conversation because there's no excuse for such things that have existed since the ancient Egypt and beyond. It's not lack of research or anything, it's just half-assed writing and looking down on the readers. Even in the West there are lots of people who have no idea how old some innovations actually are, but everything can be researched these days if an author bothers to. I'm personally far more willing to overlook things like the mentioned double-entry accounting than some far more obvious things that existed more or less in every place, where civilization was anything to speak of. 9 out of 10 isekai series are, however, poorly written, but since I'm a big isekai fan, I can stomach a lot for the sake of entertainment.
This is primarily a wuxia/light novel problem, but some isekai do it too. Characters that are not just flawed, not just mixed bags, but actively fucking evil (often for no reason) and yet the author builds the entire story and setting to not just focus on them, but idolize them and paint them as good people. I don't want to spend an entire series wading through rivers of you shitposting about why I should applaud this jackass's relentless jackassery.
Agreed. What makes it even worse is the large amount of readers who react to comments pointing out that a character is acting like an evil jackass by saying there is nothing wrong with the character and that "it's because he isn't a pussy!" and go on to twist things farther than you might think possible to justify and glorify everything he/she does.
Dude, he just massacred thousands of people because one guy in that city didn't 'give him respect' by handing over his family heirloom when he demanded it, what the hell is wrong with your head?
@Sem One of the particular factors in the Japanese stagnation during that time period was its very deliberate sakoku ('closed country') policy, which lasted about ~200 years from the 1600s on, under the Tokugawa Shogunate. Additionally, even before that point, Japan wasn't in a position to exchange knowledge with many other countries, since China gated the west, and the Pacific wasn't reliably crossable. Japan was also very poor in terms of several natural resources, which led to lacquered armor, and the forging techniques necessary to beat their bad iron deposits into serviceable weapons without the use of coal or coke. (Folded a thousand times...) That's also a huge reason for their actions before/during WWII, because they had little native oil, and a reason that firebombing raids by US forces were so effective, since most cities were mainly built of wood (something Japan did have).
Part of the reason for Europe's astoundingly rapid progress in several eras came from its ability to exchange information (in Greek, then Latin, then other lingua francas) and its relative abundance of natural resources like iron and coal. The current 1-2-3-etc. numerals Europe uses today (and some form of math, like algebra) derive from Arabic ideas brought by traders across the Mediterranean. Long division would be nearly impossible in Roman numerals, for instance. There was also knowledge passed along the Silk Road into Europe from China, which aided several advancements.
Communication with other nations and cultures is a key point in 'teching up' a civilization (often, everyone simply has one piece of the puzzle), so it's weird to see certain things hailed as revolutionary in a society where there are trading routes with multiple other countries, where at least one 'renaissance' should have taken place already.
@ununseti That's a great point, but most of the concepts in isekai I'm complaining about are instantly hailed as the best thing since sliced bread by everyone who sees them, rather than there being a cultural inertia against them, as there was against germ theory and sanitation practices. Everyone who opposes them is a bad guy with ulterior motives. That's why I gave Red Storm as an example of this concept done well: although it's not an isekai, the MC brings back some cultural ideas from another country and has to grapple with getting popular acceptance for them and deal with the unintended consequences of implementing them, instead of having them instantly be a hit with everyone who doesn't have a vested interest in opposing them.
I mean, it's all fiction, but this stuff just jolts me out of suspension of disbelief sometimes. For example, Release That Witch: concrete has been around in western society since Roman days (and it appears to take place in a Western-ish ~1600s setting). If the "oh shit, he's doing something crazy here!" angle was using witches to mass-produce it, or just that he knows how to lay out the walls best because he was an engineer? That'd fit. (And both of those are factors.) But the fact that it appears they're been building without even knowing concrete or mortar existed? And everyone's dressed in early modern European fashion? It makes me sigh.
