@yon@sakurajima.moe this and the shadow healer one have pretty bad and lazy source material, but the staff of these shows are giving them a glow up.

@NullNowhere @yon
I'm actually curious if any Shousetsuka ni Narou author actually showed writing improvement from their first anime series to their second, if any even exist.

I feel that popular titles on Narou rely too heavily on tropes, but can come up with amazing initial concepts but fail to execute them well.

@NullNowhere I like both. No masterpieces but solid and does what they intend to.

The unlicensed healer one has one hell of a weird scene in the first episode though (not a giant spoiler). He accepts a slave as payment, and frees her as “payment” for helping him get some spices (leaves).

I mean, nice in theory, but she’d have no food, no shelter, no money, and I assume no family, friends, or trade. Basically she’d just starve to death. That’s cruel as fuck. How didn’t they think that one through? He could have given her a coin or two at least.

But if the anime studio has pulled off a glow up adaptation I’m all for that. Well done!

@yon@sakurajima.moe

The unlicensed healer one has one hell of a weird scene in the first episode though (not a giant spoiler). He accepts a slave as payment, and frees her as “payment” for helping him get some spices (leaves).

Yeah this happens if I recall, but they changed the order of some things around. We get the whole meeting of the harem gang leaders first and it's a bit cringey.

I mean, nice in theory, but she’d have no food, no shelter, no money, and I assume no family, friends, or trade. Basically she’d just starve to death. That’s cruel as fuck. How didn’t they think that one through? He could have given her a coin or two at least.

Yeah I had that exact same thought. Like, what the hell man, take some responsibility. I suppose the only credit I can give him as an anime protagonist is that he doesn't collect slaves like gachas, but the whole scene is pretty off-putting given that she comes off as almost disappointed that he doesn't 'take advantage' of her.

I say glowup, but both of these had super low-effort writing in their first volume I perused, so the bar wasn't high. The whole first episode of the too-perfect saint spends about 5x more effort describing her situation in the beginning than the LN does, for example.

@anianimalsmoe@sakurajima.moe @yon@sakurajima.moe I can't read Japanese so I can't say. The selection that gets translated that I have read does tell me that a lot of the stuff is pushed quickly, without a lot of editing, no research (would it kill you to do one search on how the peerage system actually worked?), and by writers who have ... incredibly simplistic world-views.

I assume that many of these writers are young adults. I have no special hatred of tropes - tropes are tools. But I agree that they're often utilized extremely poorly here. What usually gets me is that the story sets up moments of payoff or development that are entirely unearned or are just accepted as fact without any background.

@NullNowhere Does sound like the adaptation writers are better then for sure.

Can’t help but guess that self published LNs aren’t exactly of the highest quality overall. More power to them for doing that, and I am very much for the removal of publishing corporations, but I’m sure they would benefit from some help.

Which is no shame, we all do to get going with a lot of stuff. And it could avoid big plot holes or uneven characters.

The saint one looks like it could be the better one, as long as it doesn’t derail. Time will tell.

@NullNowhere @anianimalsmoe I’ve been on the prowl to read a LN or two, but mostly to find out if what you just described was true or not. As I kinda expected that. But also how they are written. I’m wondering if they are written kinda like a script for a manga/anime as they constantly get adapted these days.

That said, I am not expecting deep and serious works out of a LN.

@yon@sakurajima.moe @anianimalsmoe@sakurajima.moe

LNs generally have a kinetic, very sparse style. I expect that. I don't expect a ton from these things, because they are light, and I generally read them to turn my brain off. They're just a kind of pulp fiction genre to me.

So I forgive a bunch of the tropiness; I usually criticize them on pacing, unsold development, sloppy writing, eye-rolling logical leaps, and the like. Basically to me: You don't have to be great, but too much mechanical incompetence forces me to turn my brain back on, and that defeats the purpose.

@yon@sakurajima.moe

We say "Self published", but that's not entirely accurate in this case. The Brilliant Healer's New Life in the Shadows started as a self-published work, and then was picked up by SB Creative, and it's that version that I read.

So these companies are kinda doing the music industry thing: they've thrown away developing talents and works, and are just picking thunderdome winners from the self-published world. You'd expect them at this point to polish up the work but ... I suspect they really don't. That's just extra cost for what they treat as a commodity product.

The saint one looks like it could be the better one, as long as it doesn’t derail. Time will tell.

I think this is the more enjoyable work of the two. It's main problem is break-neck pacing and leaping from thing-to-thing without proper developing anything. An enterprising writer could have easily turned the first volume into 3, instead you get one really short anemic one. At least it's not too cringey. In other words, there's a lot of room for a script writer here to insert their own thing here and not miss out on too many of the LN's actual plot points.