Things that annoy you in TM

[OverMaster]

so request DW to make Fujimaru into independent character?

is this how much TM has to do to stop 'bland character' rant that mostly came from gaijins?

Oh, those evil mean gaijin barbarians bullying superior Nihongo race again with their mean observations on Precious (Literally You) Mastah.

Take it easy, Hokusai.

[Leftovers]

so request DW to make Fujimaru into independent character?

is this how much TM has to do to stop 'bland character' rant that mostly came from gaijins?

who cares if they respond to criticism from red-blooded mouth-breathing elevens or filthy gaijin or even their actual paying customers, the only thing that matters is that nasu knows that people think fgo is shit and it hurt him enough to go all 'p-please give it a try' in an interview

whether or not you white-knight against random slights or criticisms towards them on some internet forum the integrity of your husbandos is already compromised by their own actions

"stop bland character rant that mostly came from gaijins", jesus CHRIST

[Ratman]

You know, when it's a light novel protagonist like say Kirito, it's understandable, because the author is literally a 17 years old monkey sitting on a typewriter trying to incorporate cliches into their perfect eintopf of shitty harem isekai. Such authors got into the industry through nepotism and hence are not, so to speak, in posession of a soul of their own, that they could impart onto their protagonist. It is a product rather than an attempt at any sort of expression.

If you're trying to publish something like a visual novel or a videogame, though, there is really absolutely no excuse, no way that blank slate protagonist makes anything better. Everyone hates it in Chrono Trigger, everyone hates it in Fire Emblem and everyone sure as hell hates it in FGO after the legacy of TM protagonist being total weirdos. People who dislike Shirou for being a person are retarded 0,5th level readers fortunately in the minority, and in order to truly cater to them you'd have to lower your business thinking to a level that would damn the rest of the product. So it's a big mystery how the fad of gachaman selfinsert started. Presumably at this point they're copying each other as a cliché, smarter ones like GFL dare having an actual protagonist in spite of that trend, but it's still mindboggling that at some point some retarded suit must have expressed the idea that 'we must make the protagonist empty so that our audience may fill them up with themselves', and there should have been people at that meeting going 'no, that's retarded, what you suggest is a relic of 8-bit gaming where there was just not enough space on the disc and some dialogue had to be cut, today we can afford to do better than that'.

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As I write this I am having a flashback of some fat neckbeard on a con 15 years ago explaining to me that Baldur's Gate is the best roleplaying game in existence because it let him have 2 children with Jaheira and I suppose on some level everything is connected and immersion is a good thing but fuck everyone who actually wants this

[Mattias]

Dullahan makes a valid point re: how do you actually perceive a character's "personality" when by necessity all emotional content they experience, gestures, reactions etc. must be relayed via observer because they are never visible themselves?

Fate and Tsuki did a pretty good job even though all you ever see of them is a porn still, bad end and the occasional battle shot.

[RoydGolden]

You know, when it's a light novel protagonist like say Kirito, it's understandable, because the author is literally a 17 years old monkey sitting on a typewriter trying to incorporate cliches into their perfect eintopf of shitty harem isekai. Such authors got into the industry through nepotism and hence are not, so to speak, in posession of a soul of their own, that they could impart onto their protagonist. It is a product rather than an attempt at any sort of expression.

Kawahara actually wrote Sword Art Online when he was in his 30s, not a teenager at all. Also I can't find any evidence that he got into the LN industry through "nepotism" so I'm not sure where you got that from. He submitted a novel to a contest and won an award, which sounds like it more or less propelled the rest of his writing career. That's not really what I'd call nepotism. I get you have reasons for disliking SAO and similar LNs, but that's not an excuse for just making up random information... (Obviously the "monkey on a typewriter" part can be assumed metaphor/hyperbole but the rest is seemingly grounded and could easily be taken as factual statements).

[OverMaster]

Fate and Tsuki did a pretty good job even though all you ever see of them is a porn still, bad end and the occasional battle shot.

Um, Fate's VN has an actual fair amount of insight into Shirou's mind, and we can say whatever else we want about Uro's writing but Zero doesn't skim on describing Kiri's mindset from the get go. Even Apocrypha, Requiem and Strange Fake do at least the basics and then some of setting up marked personalities for their leads (Sieg arguably aside).

[SpoonyViking]

Sieg does have a personality. It's the prose which is bland, not the characters themselves.

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Kawahara actually wrote Sword Art Online when he was in his 30s, not a teenager at all.

Yeah, that's actually worse.

[Ratman]

Kawahara actually wrote Sword Art Online when he was in his 30s, not a teenager at all. Also I can't find any evidence that he got into the LN industry through "nepotism" so I'm not sure where you got that from. He submitted a novel to a contest and won an award, which sounds like it more or less propelled the rest of his writing career. That's not really what I'd call nepotism. I get you have reasons for disliking SAO and similar LNs, but that's not an excuse for just making up random information... (Obviously the "monkey on a typewriter" part can be assumed metaphor/hyperbole but the rest is seemingly grounded and could easily be taken as factual statements).

Because that's just a fact of an industry where actually creating and publishing content deemed satisfying or 'sellable' takes minimal effort.

We can have these dreams of how Haruhi was a lightning from clear sky where someone young happened to pitch something decent and made a breakthrough through their own efforts, or how some stuff like Nisio is really spectacular and unironically literature, or that Dengeki Bunko is a good thing because it publishes lots of stuff that isn't shit alongside the stuff that totally is. But at the end of the day this is not doujin culture, this is an industry, and it has PR fronts and costs and advertising spaces and so on.

A good comparison is western high fantasy, I guess, that should be familiar to people on this forum. You know how Eragon is the most formulaic thing in existence but sold gangbusters? It's the same thing. It takes minimal effort to write run of the mill high fantasy, just as is takes minimal effort to write isekai. You just throw the stuff into the pot, let it boil, and feed it to people. Turns out an average stew just by the recipe works just fine for the common folk, and that's not to speak of the outright putrid stuff that sometimes gets widely printed and sold on the wet markets of literature. What gets it sold is not the way it is written, but nepotism. Nepotism does not just mean that you don't have to work in a warehouse after becoming a dropout, it's just about everything being incestous in nature. In this environment the writer is nothing, anyone can replace them and write the exact same crap. Conversely, it's nice if the thing is well written and stands out of the line, but it means nothing if you can't get it through publishing.

If he wrote that crap while he was 30 while doing 0 research of subject matter, then he is even more of a colossal failure than I ever imagined

[OverMaster]

Sieg does have a personality. It's the prose which is bland, not the characters themselves.

Hence why I said "arguably". It's not much of a personality anyway.

A major problem with Sieg is that, for all intents and purposes, he's a newborn and it's always difficult to believably portray 'character who has just come to life quickly develops through an emotional, mental evolution into full fledged adult analogue' since that's not the way it can ever happen in real life, where years of life experience are needed to forge a completely fledged personality.

It's fine if you're going with a Boris Karloff Monster of Frankenstein type, who starts as a confused blank slate and ends the movie as a barely all that developed angry overgrown child, but even with a series format, there's just so much you can do for such a character type unless you really have a whole lotta time and room to work with.

[RoydGolden]

Because that's just a fact of an industry where actually creating and publishing content deemed satisfying or 'sellable' takes minimal effort.

We can have these dreams of how Haruhi was a lightning from clear sky where someone young happened to pitch something decent and made a breakthrough through their own efforts, or how some stuff like Nisio is really spectacular and unironically literature, or that Dengeki Bunko is a good thing because it publishes lots of stuff that isn't shit alongside the stuff that totally is. But at the end of the day this is not doujin culture, this is an industry, and it has PR fronts and costs and advertising spaces and so on.

A good comparison is western high fantasy, I guess, that should be familiar to people on this forum. You know how Eragon is the most formulaic thing in existence but sold gangbusters? It's the same thing. It takes minimal effort to write run of the mill high fantasy, just as is takes minimal effort to write isekai. You just throw the stuff into the pot, let it boil, and feed it to people. Turns out an average stew just by the recipe works just fine for the common folk, and that's not to speak of the outright putrid stuff that sometimes gets widely printed and sold on the wet markets of literature. What gets it sold is not the way it is written, but nepotism. Nepotism does not just mean that you don't have to work in a warehouse after becoming a dropout, it's just about everything being incestous in nature. In this environment the writer is nothing, anyone can replace them and write the exact same crap. Conversely, it's nice if the thing is well written and stands out of the line, but it means nothing if you can't get it through publishing.

If he wrote that crap while he was 30 while doing 0 research of subject matter, then he is even more of a colossal failure than I ever imagined

I was more thinking of nepotism as "the elites" giving positions to their family/those in their clique over common people with the same credentials. If "anyone" can write the exact same crap and succeed I'd consider that not nepotism but a twisted meritocracy (even if what it's rewarding isn't anything you'd deem good), because I define nepotism as when the writer's personal identity and characteristics (their belonging to a certain group, relation to the publisher, etc) are valued above what they can actually produce. Then again, I can sort of see how what you're saying could be called nepotism too, so I guess it's mostly a matter of definitions.

[Herod]

Because that's just a fact of an industry where actually creating and publishing content deemed satisfying or 'sellable' takes minimal effort.

We can have these dreams of how Haruhi was a lightning from clear sky where someone young happened to pitch something decent and made a breakthrough through their own efforts, or how some stuff like Nisio is really spectacular and unironically literature, or that Dengeki Bunko is a good thing because it publishes lots of stuff that isn't shit alongside the stuff that totally is. But at the end of the day this is not doujin culture, this is an industry, and it has PR fronts and costs and advertising spaces and so on.

A good comparison is western high fantasy, I guess, that should be familiar to people on this forum. You know how Eragon is the most formulaic thing in existence but sold gangbusters? It's the same thing. It takes minimal effort to write run of the mill high fantasy, just as is takes minimal effort to write isekai. You just throw the stuff into the pot, let it boil, and feed it to people. Turns out an average stew just by the recipe works just fine for the common folk, and that's not to speak of the outright putrid stuff that sometimes gets widely printed and sold on the wet markets of literature. What gets it sold is not the way it is written, but nepotism. Nepotism does not just mean that you don't have to work in a warehouse after becoming a dropout, it's just about everything being incestous in nature. In this environment the writer is nothing, anyone can replace them and write the exact same crap. Conversely, it's nice if the thing is well written and stands out of the line, but it means nothing if you can't get it through publishing.

If he wrote that crap while he was 30 while doing 0 research of subject matter, then he is even more of a colossal failure than I ever imagined

You are just playing with words. That is not nepotism in any sense of the word.

[Ratman]

Think of a better one to express my general sentiment, then. Could call the LN industry rigged instead, but that word is charged right now because of politics.

I was more thinking of nepotism as "the elites" giving positions to their family/those in their clique over common people with the same credentials. If "anyone" can write the exact same crap and succeed I'd consider that not nepotism but a twisted meritocracy (even if what it's rewarding isn't anything you'd deem good), because I define nepotism as when the writer's personal identity and characteristics (their belonging to a certain group, relation to the publisher, etc) are valued above what they can actually produce. Then again, I can sort of see how what you're saying could be called nepotism too, so I guess it's mostly a matter of definitions.

That's precisely what I'm saying: People who shouldn't be getting published are getting published, and people with good ideas are forced to either dump them onto wordpress, or convert them into a healthier industry like videogames (lol). Since I'd rather not lose faith in humanity by explaining this model as one being driven by demand, I choose to call the industry nepotistic, since it's the easiest way to explain the industry producing what nobody wants. It's all that the people who actually get to publish got, and the people who get to publish are the ones with connections. This randomly determined group is limited, it's unlikely they'd just so happen to also be good writers, so they go for the easy formula. Movies, anybody? Hollywood?

[weeblord]

Fate and Tsuki did a pretty good job even though all you ever see of them is a porn still, bad end and the occasional battle shot.

The key difference is that tsuki and fate have narration and proper dialogue by MC. Guda is a nonentity until a choice pops up.

[Holiday]

That's precisely what I'm saying: People who shouldn't be getting published are getting published, and people with good ideas are forced to either dump them onto wordpress, or convert them into a healthier industry like videogames (lol). Since I'd rather not lose faith in humanity by explaining this model as one being driven by demand, I choose to call the industry nepotistic, since it's the easiest way to explain the industry producing what nobody wants.

There's a much easier way of explaining why "the industry is producing what nobody wants" without resorting to baseless accusations of nepotism: whoever has the money and power to make decisions is simply afraid of taking risks. They've found a specific genre and set of clichés that sell well, so they're continuing to regurgitate things which match that pattern (regardless of whether they're any good or not) because they think it's a safer bet than taking a risk on something radically different.

We saw something similar in the videogame industry between the late 2000s and mid 2010s—when the first Modern Warfare came out, making a shooter with a contemporary military setting was seen as a huge risk, but after the runaway success of MW, every mainstream/AAA shooter for the next eight years or so had a contemporary military setting, until the genre had been completely run into the ground. And one of the reasons the first MW felt so unique in the first place was because prior to that, the industry had spent several years running WW2 shooters into the ground.

It's naïve to expect that when a publisher takes a risk on a work and it's a smash hit, they and their competitors will conclude "the way to get big hits is to take risks". Much more often, the conclusion they'll draw is "the way to get big hits is to imitate that recent big hit".

(Regarding Swort Art Online specifically, I'm not really familiar with the series, but a quick Google tells me that it was originally a web novel, which if I understand correctly are self-published. So it seems more like a Fifty Shades of Grey situation, ie. "this story is terrible but it's inexplicably popular within a particular online fiction community, and the author parlays that popularity into a traditional publishing deal". Not "the author took advantage of friends/family in the industry to get their work published", which would be nepotism.)

[AAM1232]

Nepotism is one thing but this sounds a lot like complaining that people with "good ideas" are somehow incapable of forming a single connection with a notable publisher or cannot take steps to publish by themselves, in the age of the internet. I wouldn't exactly blame the publishers for not being able to vet and edit the ideas if they don't even know it exists. You kind of have to do more than just write, proofread and edit a book to sell it.

[Mattias]

The key difference is that tsuki and fate have narration and proper dialogue by MC. Guda is a nonentity until a choice pops up.

Yeah, but the point was that it's hard to get emotion from a character who you don't constantly perceive. And while a bunch of Self Insert Vn's, like FGO, can fall into that category, the other TM works are proof against it. Which is why I though the statement was so funny given what forum we're on.

[Menwearpink]

A problem is also we don’t actually see the MC do much, or some may even say, anything at all. So saying that they’re emotional think things or are effected by things doesn’t really matter when you don’t see the effects of that upon their conduct or their performance.

[SpoonyViking]

So it seems more like a Fifty Shades of Grey situation, ie. "this story is terrible but it's inexplicably popular within a particular online fiction community, [...]

It's a teenaged power fantasy for the video games crowd. Hardly inexplicable. :-P

[warellis]

He doesn't have personality as much as other characters with actual personalities keep telling us he has a personality and pointing out these personality traits that he doesn't really have.

And the whole 'trauma' bullshit is too little too late.

It's funny, I was once told that FGO Part 2 (the Lostbelts) had improved on Ritsuka via narration. Then I actually looked at some dialogue and found out there was no real narration at all. It honestly irritated me, because I had noticed in FGO Part 1 that Ritsuka was mostly there to just react to something in lines, but without any narration from them.

Like all they did was just respond to questions or statements, but never have some sort of inner thought. And they still don't seem to really have inner thoughts in the stories in Part 2.

who cares if they respond to criticism from red-blooded mouth-breathing elevens or filthy gaijin or even their actual paying customers, the only thing that matters is that nasu knows that people think fgo is shit and it hurt him enough to go all 'p-please give it a try' in an interview

Where was this interview? Because wow.

[Comun]

Fujimaru has narration. Once in Shimousa, once in Gotterdamerung and twice in Yuga Kshehtra. And only the first YK one is any good.