| View previous topic :: View next topic |
| Author |
Message |
|
|
|
a_Bear_in_Bearcave
Joined: 14 Jan 2019
Posts: 512
Location: Poland
|
 Posted: Mon Apr 22, 2024 4:04 pm
|
 |
|
| Key wrote: | | The other major point mentioned is the moral/political point I referred to, and that's the one that's going to split audiences, even if it is part of a consistent characterization for the MC. |
Sure it was consistent, the problem is that basically MC and orphanage mother were noticeably only ones granted moral authority at the end as mouthpieces of the author, whose main theme seemed to be "hope is most important human quality, we shouldn't lose faith even worst situations and instead hope and work for the better future". It felt to me like brainwashing Sarah when she went from understandably hating that world due to all that happened to her, especially being pregnant from rape, into not only not aborting her rape kid, but even taking symbolic torch from Mother, who saved her life yet whom Sarah failed to help in any way ( author's way to make the moral request/brainwashing stronger), and fulfilling her and MCs request to carry the kid to term, as well as forgo her own safe and happy life and her real family to fit with the moral theme of "this dystopian world can be as good as ours, if Sarah have faith and love towards it". Village leader was similarly butchered as character to prove him and his fight/revenge ideas as wrong - I guess we Poles shouldn't fight those Nazis and assassinate Gestapo officers during WW2, but that doesn't bother me as much as framing a pro-life lecture to raped traumatized kid as good message of hope, clearly to make her poster kid for author's moral thesis, whether it would be realistically good for her or not.
At some points I felt like I was watching movie Signs, with similar heavy-handed moral theme forced on the viewer through the characters, despite not really having convincing arguments.
|
| Back to top |
|
|
|
Shay Guy
Joined: 03 Jul 2009
Posts: 2126
|
|
Posted: Mon Apr 22, 2024 5:26 pm
|
|
|
| a_Bear_in_Bearcave wrote: | | I mean, Narou self-publishing website "Let's Become a Novelist" is itself barely 20 year old (as expected of anything famous due to internet) so basically everything Narou is relatively recent, when you add the time before it got big and popular - MT started publishing on Narou in 2012, Re:Monster in 2011, and those are the oldest popular Narou works I heard of. |
Here's my spreadsheet of the ones popular enough to get anime adaptations. Log Horizon (2010) and The Irregular at Magic High School (2008) are of particular note.
And for anyone who doesn't know much about that site, Kim's piece from 2021 is still one of the best English-language rundowns of its significance I've seen.
|
| Back to top |
|
|
|
|
a_Bear_in_Bearcave
Joined: 14 Jan 2019
Posts: 512
Location: Poland
|
|
Posted: Mon Apr 22, 2024 7:10 pm
|
|
|
| Shay Guy wrote: |
Here's my spreadsheet of the ones popular enough to get anime adaptations. Log Horizon (2010) and The Irregular at Magic High School (2008) are of particular note.
And for anyone who doesn't know much about that site, Kim's piece from 2021 is still one of the best English-language rundowns of its significance I've seen. |
Thanks! How could I forget about Irregular, though that one one still from the period of era of battle harems, which predate Narou. It seems though it's mostly due to Narou's influence that battle harems have been replaced by isekai.
|
| Back to top |
|
|
|
Shay Guy
Joined: 03 Jul 2009
Posts: 2126
|
|
Posted: Mon Apr 22, 2024 7:39 pm
|
|
|
| a_Bear_in_Bearcave wrote: | | Thanks! How could I forget about Irregular, though that one one still from the period of era of battle harems, which predate Narou. It seems though it's mostly due to Narou's influence that battle harems have been replaced by isekai. |
I think I've seen that trend attributed first and foremost to Infinite Stratos. Which started in 2009, after Mahouka started (but before its LN release), so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Maybe Negima should also be considered an ancestor to that genre, as it's usually recognized today?
|
| Back to top |
|
|
|
Top Gun
Joined: 28 Sep 2007
Posts: 4577
|
|
Posted: Mon Apr 22, 2024 9:02 pm
|
|
|
| Lord Geo wrote: | | The term "isekai" itself, at least from a modern usage perspective, dates back to Haruka Takachiho's novel Warrior from Another World from 1979, which in Japan is literally titled Isekai no Yuushi, while for anime Aura Battler Dunbine from 1983 is generally considered to be the first proper isekai anime. Everything else since, in Japan at least, has more or less been made off the shoulders of those two works. |
Thanks for the info. I feel like for a lot of us, the term "isekai" has come to be used in a similar way to "anime" as a whole: a loanword that has a more general usage in Japan, but was later adopted by English speakers to refer to a specific subset of that general case.
| Shay Guy wrote: | And for anyone who doesn't know much about that site, Kim's piece from 2021 is still one of the best English-language rundowns of its significance I've seen. |
I want to second this shout-out. I'd never heard the term "Narou" before reading this article, and it did a great job of contextualizing the algorithm-chasing nature of these works.
|
| Back to top |
|
|
|
|
Satonamba
Joined: 19 Apr 2024
Posts: 10
|
|
Posted: Tue Apr 23, 2024 5:41 am
|
|
|
| Shay Guy wrote: |
Here's my spreadsheet of the ones popular enough to get anime adaptations. Log Horizon (2010) and The Irregular at Magic High School (2008) are of particular note. |
I didn't thought the trend was so massive in recent years. I don't think that the quantity of new Narou adaptations produced each year since 2022 is sustainable. A correction will probably occur in the coming years.
|
| Back to top |
|
|
|
|
Essedess
Joined: 03 Jan 2024
Posts: 48
|
|
Posted: Tue Apr 30, 2024 10:50 pm
|
|
|
|
OK, so 5 episodes into 7th Prince, and this is unironically peak isekai. Lloyd is literally psychotic in his love of magic, and will pull some absolute BS in order to learn more magic. The action is fantastic, but even more so is the voice acting. It's perfect. And the OST and animation both go HARD. They don't even need to go THAT hard, but they do. This show has not slowed down at all. I think we're just now going to get a bit of a breather episode... maybe.
|
| Back to top |
|
|
|
|
