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What's A Light Novel?


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MrFox123



Joined: 12 Oct 2016
Posts: 22
PostPosted: Wed Oct 19, 2016 3:15 pm Reply with quote
Jonny Mendes wrote:

animenewsnetwork.com/news/2016-05-29/top-selling-light-novels-in-japan-by-series-2016/.102641

Many of the top selling are battle harem. After the "lost in parallel fantasy world" is the most popular trend in LNs.

And why is animated is simply promotion, promotion, promotion.

The line is more or less:
New LN have good sales.
Make a manga to promote that LN.
If sales are improving, make a anime to promote that LN.
If there is a good improve of LN sales, even if the anime BD's don't sale that much and the anime lost money, a new anime season may follow.


Based on those figures, what's the amount of sales for a novel to be considered a wide success for an anime adaptation?
SAO alone from those two on the list is ~800k
How about something like Re Zero or Gate?
Would love to see anime adapations Surprised Question
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HeeroTX



Joined: 15 Jul 2002
Posts: 2046
Location: Austin, TX
PostPosted: Wed Oct 19, 2016 3:25 pm Reply with quote
rizuchan wrote:
Edit: On the topic of one volume light novels, I offer up Welcome to the NHK.

Is Welcome to the NHK a "light novel"? It may be a SHORT novel, but I don't think it was referred to as a light novel. Which is why I think the distinction is necessary because I don't think book length is a defining characteristic.

I know wikipedia is far from "definitive" but it is not referred to as a light novel there:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welcome_to_the_N.H.K.

And the page even includes literary praise for the "novel".
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scrwbll19



Joined: 16 Jan 2006
Posts: 87
PostPosted: Wed Oct 19, 2016 3:33 pm Reply with quote
For those who are interested, these two FREE courses from Keio University (one of the best universities in the world) are available online that get more into Japanese rare books and pop culture:

Japanese Rare Books

Japanese Pop Subcultures

I took the first one, and I can say that I learned quite a bit about Japanese literature and bookmaking. I recommend it because it defines what light novels are not by default and where their influences came from. (You would be surprised.)

I am currently enrolled to take the second one when it starts on Oct. 31.
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Lemonchest



Joined: 18 Mar 2015
Posts: 1771
PostPosted: Wed Oct 19, 2016 3:42 pm Reply with quote
Would film adaptations of Kadokawa Beans Bunko titles be called Bean flicks?
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Polycell



Joined: 16 Jan 2012
Posts: 4623
PostPosted: Wed Oct 19, 2016 6:03 pm Reply with quote
rizuchan wrote:
I was originally very excited when more and more LNs started coming out in the States, until I realized that most of them were... not very good. I was also disappointed to discover that LNs are so "light" in content and so targeted toward the anime market that most of the anime adaptations match the content of the original so closely that if you've seen the adaptation, there's no gain in reading the original. People make jokes about the Lord of the Rings movies being longer than the book, but that actually is the case with most light novels. It took me an hour and a half to read The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya while the movie is 2.7 hours. I'd bet this is consistent if you compare episode run time to the light novel volume equivalents of most series, assuming you're a reasonably fast reader.
Manga adaptations are also fairly close to their source material, but that doesn't impact their sales. As for length, that's the nature of a medium that has to show versus one that can tell: a book just has to say "there was an awkward silence" before moving on; a TV show or movie has to feature that awkward silence.
Quote:
Of course, if the anime doesn't adapt the entire series, the light novels provide more story and the incentive to buy them. Personally, I've wanted to continue a few stories but it's such a struggle to get through the volumes covered by the anime I never get to the sequels. I should just skip them... but I'm always worried I'll miss something, even though I should know better by now.
Since they used it as the cover image, Danmachi is a fairly good example of a story that lost only minor(but helpful) details in the adaptation.

Black Bullet, on the other hand, is an example of a series that yanked out quite a bit. Nothing that impacted the plot of the episodes they adapted, but definitely necessary going forward.
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joac101



Joined: 31 Aug 2016
Posts: 56
PostPosted: Wed Oct 19, 2016 6:16 pm Reply with quote
rokka no yuusha is one of the light novels that are really good and almost like a regular novel
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DerekL1963
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Joined: 14 Jan 2015
Posts: 1112
Location: Puget Sound
PostPosted: Wed Oct 19, 2016 6:56 pm Reply with quote
kinghumanity wrote:
I mostly want to know how all these awful assembly-line made "magic high school battle harem fantasy" light novels get published and animated in the first place. Surely their sales aren't that great, especially after their 14th permutation of the exact same story setup?


If the sales weren't that great, the publishing companies wouldn't keep publishing them. If anime didn't pump up the sales, as well as generating revenue from disk and goods sales, they wouldn't keep putting money into them. None of these companies are in the business of losing money deliberately.

And really, you can find the same thing in the West... Cheap, disposable, and largely rote and generic fiction has a long history running back the penny dreadfuls of the early 19th century. You can find the same thing alive today in paperback westerns, a whole slew of cheap romance series and imprints, men's action series (such as Mack Bolan - 600 novels to date, and still being pumped by the dozen of so each year plus spin offs), etc... etc...

This stuff is largely invisible because it doesn't ever appear on any best seller lists and the publishing press largely ignores them, but they're out there and sell by the truckload. When I owned a bookstore, cheap westerns and mystery novels of this type was what paid the bills each month.
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Jonny Mendes



Joined: 17 Oct 2014
Posts: 997
Location: Europe
PostPosted: Wed Oct 19, 2016 6:58 pm Reply with quote
MrFox123 wrote:

Based on those figures, what's the amount of sales for a novel to be considered a wide success for an anime adaptation?
SAO alone from those two on the list is ~800k
How about something like Re Zero or Gate?
Would love to see anime adapations Surprised Question


You are talking about a second season, wright?

That i don't know. Depends of the sales target the publisher wanted to achieve. How many volumes the LN sold before the anime and how many volumes sold after varies from LN to LN.

For ReZero before the anime it don't even appear in the top 30 of sales for 2015 so i don't know how many volumes it sold but after the anime it jumped to #10 in just half of 2016, so the probability of a 2 season is high but far in the future because the anime caught up with the LN.

Gate also don't appear in the top 30 of sales for 2015 but is only #28 in the 1 half of 2016 (is still a good increase) . Depending if the increase meet the target of the publisher or not, the probability of a second season is high or low.
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Cetais



Joined: 02 Feb 2012
Posts: 507
PostPosted: Wed Oct 19, 2016 7:23 pm Reply with quote
Parsifal24 wrote:
I like the fact that Light Novels are gaining some popularity in America as it's at least encouraging people to read actual novels and literacy is becoming sadly scarce in this day and age.

Literacy is actually wayyyy bigger than it has ever been in the whole world, in this day and age.
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Kadmos1



Joined: 08 May 2014
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Location: In Phoenix but has an 85308 ZIP
PostPosted: Wed Oct 19, 2016 7:34 pm Reply with quote
Another thing that sets LN apart is popular ones like Shinmai and Magika have sex scenes.
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Karasu-Lacryma



Joined: 20 Feb 2015
Posts: 113
PostPosted: Wed Oct 19, 2016 8:30 pm Reply with quote
Treeborn wrote:
The way I generally look at light novels is that they are writings made purely for entertainment purposes, rather than for artistic merit. It's a story written by someone who isn't necessarily trying to tell a cohesive and meaningful story, but has these characters and scenarios that they want to see in print and (lets face it) turned into an anime. Which is why they tend to be lacking in things such symbolism, motifs, foreshadowing (I don't consider pointless prologues foreshadowing), and all that other artsy-fartsy stuff. And also why LN series are just volumes of arcs which don't really amount to anything in the end.

As far as the "poorly-written" part goes, that mostly falls on the publisher. No surprise that they higher random amateurs who write solely to appeal to a target demographic, as I would imagine it is very cost efficient. They probably only pay the author pennies, and I would imagine the publishing house doesn't even edit the work before sending it out into the public.

Of course, this isn't to say that all LNs are bad and they all consist of the flaws I mentioned. But, I think after a certain quality is achieved, it no longer falls under the category of light novel; its considered a [insert genre and sub-genre] novel. The illustration has certainly become a staple in light novels, but I don't think its a defining characteristic. I could definitely see some new adult novels here in the states using manga art :p

It's interesting, I started reading some samples of Keichii Sigsawa's LNs after loving the anime adaption of Kino's Journey, and found most of them outside of that one to be fairly generic by-the-numbers sort of things. Yet Kino's Journey manages to be something completely different from anything else he (or almost anyone's) written. I get the feeling most of the other LNs of his I've tried were boilerpots to pay the bills (even with the occasional flares of psychological insight), and Kino was his own personal creative project that he really lets loose on. I wonder if that's the case with many authors?
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_Quasar_



Joined: 10 May 2015
Posts: 51
PostPosted: Wed Oct 19, 2016 10:26 pm Reply with quote
They always just seemed like Japanese Young Adult fiction to me.

And generally I seem to of the view that the anime made based on them turn out to be worse watered down versions. Frequently focusing on ecchi elements and making that the dominant part and throwing away most of the more interesting bits such as world building character and plot.
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majimeichan



Joined: 20 Nov 2015
Posts: 2
PostPosted: Wed Oct 19, 2016 10:52 pm Reply with quote
Treeborn wrote:

As far as the "poorly-written" part goes, that mostly falls on the publisher. No surprise that they higher random amateurs who write solely to appeal to a target demographic, as I would imagine it is very cost efficient. They probably only pay the author pennies, and I would imagine the publishing house doesn't even edit the work before sending it out into the public.


well you have to remember that these authors were originally amateur web novelist who posted their works on sites like http://syosetu.com/. When their webnovel becomes a hit, the publisher will seek them out. The publisher already prob does as much as they can to "polish" these webnovels into light novels
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relyat08



Joined: 20 Mar 2013
Posts: 4125
Location: Northern Virginia
PostPosted: Thu Oct 20, 2016 12:17 am Reply with quote
Parsifal24 wrote:
there is also the fact that Light Novels to quote the TV tropes page on it
Quote:
Modern light novels use simpler, easier-to-read everyday kanji as opposed to "hard" novels, which generally contain much older words which, even for Japanese readers, may necessitate keeping a dictionary on hand to understand. The closest parallel in the Western world is probably the distinction between "Modern English", "Middle English" and "Old English".
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LightNovels. So the language is also "lighter" or easier to understand in the original Japanese.


I don't know if that is necessarily the case across the board though. I am not good enough at Japanese yet to really know, but both Narita's work, as well as NisiOisin's work, struck me as particularly complex, kanji-wise, compared to most other LNs I've tried.
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samuelp
Industry Insider


Joined: 25 Nov 2007
Posts: 2228
Location: San Antonio, USA
PostPosted: Thu Oct 20, 2016 1:40 am Reply with quote
*shameless plug alert*
Best way to figure out what light novels are, is to read some yourself!

Like say, on j-novel.club?
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