Shitty Western Light Novels - OELs: Electric Boogaloo

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When you're so creatively bankrupt, you make a shittier, edgier knockoff of Nekopara, except this time it's built on the male feminist niceguy delusion that every man save you you is rapist murdering filth.

Good lord.
 
LightDragonman1 said:
actually try writing my Magical Girl anime
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You already have my attention with magical girls.

DungeonMaster said:
When you're so creatively bankrupt, you make a shittier, edgier knockoff of Nekopara, except this time it's built on the male feminist niceguy delusion that every man save you you is rapist murdering filth.

Good lord.
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Dear God it reads like actual fan fiction, in this case, Chobits but replace "Persocom" with "catgirl".

The artwork's pretty good, though, I'll give Liremi that. Which is why it's too bad that the character designs are uninspiring.
 
This here is Brandon Varnell.
teehee.png

I don't know where to start with this. Everything about this picture is hilarious.
You have the man himself, in the tackiest nylon robe known to man, with a tackier pair of fox ears that I hope isn't accompanied by a tail.
The sash looks like it's flimsily held together by velcro. And I suspect the nagagi and the haori are part of the same garment, which makes it exponentially worse. The mysterious crease on his chest gives me the impression that the nagagi is made of construction paper.
He seems to be squinting in the sun, with a smile just as strained as his eyes, the effect further accentuated by the 5 o' clock shadow.
Behind him is the flimsiest McMansion I've ever seen. Granted, I don't see many of them as I live in an old suburb, but I'm sure even an asthmatic kid could huff and puff and blow this house down.
However, there is one redeeming trait: his astroturfed front yard.
I have to give it to him for sticking it to the Homeowner's Association.
 
That dude sure looks the part. Although, his works have been well received for who knows what reason, so guesses on how well he's doing.

I've actually started writing my own LN (finally). It'll probably make for great riffing material for you guys, but I at least hope it won't be too cringeworthy.
 
This here was advertised to me via Facebook. Now, whenever I see books from my home country that isn't unbearable cli fi or pretentious unreadable literary garbage, I hone one it like a hawk to see what it's like. I'll let you see for yourselves.
 
Skitarii said:
Is sonichu a light novel 🤔
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That would count as a doujinshi or doujin, no it doesn't mean porn, it literally means "self-published"

Also this makes me wonder, why Western countries doesn't have Cons that promoted self pub works like Comiket did? Things like that are pretty common in Asia now (at least before The Coof)
 
Rezza said:
Also this makes me wonder, why Western countries doesn't have Cons that promoted self pub works like Comiket did? Things like that are pretty common in Asia now (at least before The Coof)
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Copyright laws are different. In Japan, Comiket and other doujin conventions have long been tolerated. The closest Western equivalent was old-school fanzines distributed at conventions which would have literally published fanfic (like the Star Trek fanfic with the original Mary Sue herself).
 
Save the Loli said:
Copyright laws are different. In Japan, Comiket and other doujin conventions have long been tolerated. The closest Western equivalent was old-school fanzines distributed at conventions which would have literally published fanfic (like the Star Trek fanfic with the original Mary Sue herself).
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If it's a derivative works, I understand the reason. I'm just thinking of a con centered more on original work (something that I just realized I didn't include in my post, so apologies for that)
 
DungeonMaster said:
This is what happens when people who don't read try to write.
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DungeonMaster said:
This is what happens when you don't try to understand the source of what make the aesthetics appealing from a cultural perspective
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Additionally, from the preface given for his drafts, it seems like there's not any intentionality that he has in mind that has to do with the work itself. There's no message that he wants to convey. There's no theme he wants to demonstrate. Not even an emotion he wants to showcase. And I may be out of touch with proud weeaboos, but I'm unsure if he's having a particular kind of fun. Only thing I can say for sure is what was indicated-- that he wants to "make it big".

But making it big with soulless works is like being a J-pop idol. Even on the off-chance you make waves, you're still consumed, excreted whole, and then forgotten.

Kari Kamiya said:
I Love Beef said:
He really wants to be an ecchi/sex story writer, huh?
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Appears to be, yes.
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"Try beatings, that's a neat trick!

This reminds me... I actually have some chapter writeups for a project I attempted when I was 14 that also read more like scripts than book chapters, and your brother's work kind of reminds me of those... but then, I was actually trying to produce a comic.

Well, when you're 14-16 you're not likely to have money to really hire an artist, and you need money to hire artists that won't flake. I've actually considered returning to it at some point, now that I do actually have resources and probably a more developed writing perspective. But then... the kind of reworking I'd have to do makes me wonder if the foundation is too warped to begin with.
Kari Kamiya said:
Holy shit the reviewer literally clapped reading about "relationship progress", how is that even real? :story:
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Sounds like the reviewer is a romcom veteran, actually.

LightDragonman1 said:
This topic is, for me at least, kind of awkward, because I have been thinking about writing my own story as a light novel, as I feel that is the best format for what I have in mind (I'm even at a similar age as to the brother mentioned). Granted, it doesn't really have anything to do with the isekai genre, although it is still inspired by some of my favorite anime, and more specifically, my favorite FPS games.

Should I still go through with it?
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...why not?

If you have ideas you want to actualize into art and you have the wherewithal, you should actualize them. Everyone who reads it will have their reactions to it, all based on how they understand it and what they're looking for. Even then, what matters is that you're able to hold your head up about what you produced at the end of it all. Even if you struggle to establish your "voice" or find your "soul", those are circumstances that can be ameliorated by struggling towards achieving those things.

There's no problem with working to make something people can enjoy, but you should also be concerned about making what you want in the first place.
 
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DungeonMaster said:
This one was advertised to me on facebook. It genuinely has some of the worst writing I've seen in a while. It's Jim Theis tier.
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I'm curious about the details of your impression.

I'm pretty ambivalent about it-- the excerpt you linked to is... well, an excerpt, and I don't know where the excerpt would be placed in the book, so I withheld some sense of judgment. It didn't tickle me, for sure. Didn't really sell me on his book. Other than that, I think the way that the visuals are described is decent. They did their job and I wasn't at a loss as to how to imagine the scene and the changes within.

The author himself seems to think and dissect a fair bit, going by his blog. I appreciate the article he made on self-inserts, since he's also of the mind that "anything goes as long as you do it well", but I'm just not on board with the examples he gave. I also don't appreciate his suggestion to use the MBTI and Enneagram in the quest to make "three-dimensional characters"-- aside from not caring for those, I think that's largely unnecessary compared to seeking to purposefully make a character that demonstrates a theme/message/emotion. If anything, you could use people you know as personality models or references for how some personality traits fit together. Even then, I agree with him when it comes to handling backstory (you can write as much as you want, and you're obligated to demonstrate it all, but you're not obligated to explicitly present it all).

I must admit, though-- I didn't know who Jim Theis was until... 3 minutes ago.
 
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So I've been posting some of my writings to Royalroad for experience and such, I won't say what and which because of PL, but what bugs me the most about that site is the sheer amount of LitRPG there. I mean, why? How? What's the appeal for that sort of things?
 
Rezza said:
So I've been posting some of my writings to Royalroad for experience and such, I won't say what and which because of PL, but what bugs me the most about that site is the sheer amount of LitRPG there. I mean, why? How? What's the appeal for that sort of things?
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From my understanding they were a sort of flash in the pan niche that exploded big time in popularity for self-publishing, a kind of perverse cancer that metastasized after the popularity of anime like Sword Art Online and game-based isekais. They took a while to kind of get off the ground here in the West, but there was an audience hungry for that kind of content and once a couple of decent works in the genre came out they made bank, and once you make bank everyone and their mom wants to hop into the same boat. Anyone could drop a couple of litRPG stories on amazon and make decent money for a while there, so now we're dealing with the runoff slush.
 
Rezza said:
So I've been posting some of my writings to Royalroad for experience and such, I won't say what and which because of PL, but what bugs me the most about that site is the sheer amount of LitRPG there. I mean, why? How? What's the appeal for that sort of things?
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Here's probably too much of a history lesson so maybe it'll maybe make sense.

RoyalRoad's origin is as a site for fanfic of a Korean VRMMO novel, Legendary Moonlight Sculptor. Up until a couple years ago the site was RoyalRoadLegends (domain royalroadl.com), named such because the game in the LMS setting was named Royal Road. Anyway, the site stitched together an abomination of blogging and CMS frameworks to make a fairly functional site for posting webnovel stuff and invited its members to post their own stuff, and so it all started with stuff like what they came to read, original VRMMO stories. LitRPG is just a half-skip away from VRMMO as a genre (the fundamental difference being that VRMMO knows it's a game while LitRPG has game elements in a fantasy or very soft sci-fi setting) so it was a natural fit to have new original LitRPG stuff there too. Those were the only things posted on there for a good while.

Then translations of xianxia/xuanhuan/"cultivation" novels took off and people started wanting to do originals of those. Wuxiaworld, the site that really popularized that stuff, teased about having an originals section but the site owner ultimately didn't let it happen (a combination of him wanting to be an absolute control freak and also him keeping too many plates spinning and losing track of all the promises he was making), but they had a contest partnership with what was then still RRL to write fanfic for one of the popular series on Wuxiaworld and RRL added tags to support discoverability for that kind of stuff. When nothing panned out on Wuxiaworld itself but people wanted to put out their own stuff, a lot of them decided to do so on RRL. That's when the base officially broadened from VRMMO/LitRPG and added Cultivation novels as a genre, (and it's also when the people running it started gearing up to run a business rather than just a hobby, refactoring the publishing side of the site to not just be a CMS/blog frankenstein). The core audience of the site to this day attaches to those genres.

Eventually the site owners were able to secure the royalroad.com domain and since they obviously weren't just about LMS fanfic anymore decided to drop the L. Then Wattpad, which is just super saturated at this point, had a kerfuffle involving them shutting down their forums and basically destroying discoverability for new writers, so a lot of them migrated over to RR and really muddied up the genre list. The core reading audience there, though, remains the "power progression fantasy" audience: LitRPG, VRMMO, and cultivation stories get the most eyeballs. And that shit's a decent income. The top-tier Patreon and publishing types have $5k-$20k/mo. Patreons plus their Amazon incomes. And they just churn out popcorn fic month after month and keep that income. It's pretty bonkers.

(I know this stuff because one of my online gaming friends had a top-rung novel there once upon a time and rambling about it all was a hobby of his when he could fit in the time to actually sit through a session of a 4x game with us. The pressure of keeping up on it all eventually made him flip out and nuke everything from orbit and watching that fallout was pretty popcorn-worthy too.)

TL;DR: The site was built on a related genre so its core audience wants "power progression" stuff like that first and foremost. It's everything else that's the aberration there.
 
Jubileus said:
Here's probably too much of a history lesson so maybe it'll maybe make sense.

RoyalRoad's origin is as a site for fanfic of a Korean VRMMO novel, Legendary Moonlight Sculptor. Up until a couple years ago the site was RoyalRoadLegends (domain royalroadl.com), named such because the game in the LMS setting was named Royal Road. Anyway, the site stitched together an abomination of blogging and CMS frameworks to make a fairly functional site for posting webnovel stuff and invited its members to post their own stuff, and so it all started with stuff like what they came to read, original VRMMO stories. LitRPG is just a half-skip away from VRMMO as a genre (the fundamental difference being that VRMMO knows it's a game while LitRPG has game elements in a fantasy or very soft sci-fi setting) so it was a natural fit to have new original LitRPG stuff there too. Those were the only things posted on there for a good while.

Then translations of xianxia/xuanhuan/"cultivation" novels took off and people started wanting to do originals of those. Wuxiaworld, the site that really popularized that stuff, teased about having an originals section but the site owner ultimately didn't let it happen (a combination of him wanting to be an absolute control freak and also him keeping too many plates spinning and losing track of all the promises he was making), but they had a contest partnership with what was then still RRL to write fanfic for one of the popular series on Wuxiaworld and RRL added tags to support discoverability for that kind of stuff. When nothing panned out on Wuxiaworld itself but people wanted to put out their own stuff, a lot of them decided to do so on RRL. That's when the base officially broadened from VRMMO/LitRPG and added Cultivation novels as a genre, (and it's also when the people running it started gearing up to run a business rather than just a hobby, refactoring the publishing side of the site to not just be a CMS/blog frankenstein). The core audience of the site to this day attaches to those genres.

Eventually the site owners were able to secure the royalroad.com domain and since they obviously weren't just about LMS fanfic anymore decided to drop the L. Then Wattpad, which is just super saturated at this point, had a kerfuffle involving them shutting down their forums and basically destroying discoverability for new writers, so a lot of them migrated over to RR and really muddied up the genre list. The core reading audience there, though, remains the "power progression fantasy" audience: LitRPG, VRMMO, and cultivation stories get the most eyeballs. And that shit's a decent income. The top-tier Patreon and publishing types have $5k-$20k/mo. Patreons plus their Amazon incomes. And they just churn out popcorn fic month after month and keep that income. It's pretty bonkers.

(I know this stuff because one of my online gaming friends had a top-rung novel there once upon a time and rambling about it all was a hobby of his when he could fit in the time to actually sit through a session of a 4x game with us. The pressure of keeping up on it all eventually made him flip out and nuke everything from orbit and watching that fallout was pretty popcorn-worthy too.)

TL;DR: The site was built on a related genre so its core audience wants "power progression" stuff like that first and foremost. It's everything else that's the aberration there.
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Thanks for the explanation, but you know you just can't tease me with that story of yours. On scale of 1-10, how bad was your friend's shitshow?
 
Rezza said:
Thanks for the explanation, but you know you just can't tease me with that story of yours. On scale of 1-10, how bad was your friend's shitshow?
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It's rough to give a number just because the thing was originally written as a "hold my beer" thing that ended up turning into more. The whole point of the thing was making fun of typical cultivation novel shit so it had intentionally really bad bits but do you score that low or high? The thing basically got carried hard by the fact that my dude was anal with the grammar/syntax and kept up a 2000 word chapter/day pace. Given how many people on RR fail at one or both of those things that was apparently enough to get it in the top 50 or whatever, and that was getting him a lot of nasty mail from the super srs auteurs on the site who were buttmad they aren't top 10 with their five chapter abortions.

I had a good laugh when he decided to tease people with a reboot and then stopped after two chapters. Apparently having to write the buttmonkey fake protagonist of the first arc was an experience he didn't want to repeat, so he just logged out and didn't go back while autists whined that they were baited. I should prod him and get him to just repost up to where he stopped the novel before and really get people's hopes up, that might be funny (and clog up Latest Updates for a day or so).
 
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