So many anime are adaptations of them, including some of the most popular anime ever made, but i have never read a single one. Am i missing out? Are there any LNs that are actually better than their anime version?
>>284971489They're cheap to adapt. Whether its worth reading depends on the story and what you want out of it, but 100% of the time the anime is cutting chunks out and streamlining the fuck out of it.
>>284971489If you like The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya (the anime), I encourage you to read the light novels. They're very fun.
>>284971489Most of them are written by high schoolers so you aren't missing much
>>284971489I like holding light novels. It makes me feel like what Shaquille O'Neal must feel like when holding a normal sized book.
If you're trying to learn Japanese they're (often) easier to read than books that aren't light novels, and they're often anime adjacent so they're good for that. Just find something that sounds interesting, or a series that was adapted to an anime that you like and read past where the anime adapted. Just like with anime and manga, nobody's forcing you to watch/read garbage just to do it.
>>284971489>Are there any LNs that are actually better than their anime version?Kagejitsu, Iriya no Sora
>>284971919>If you're trying to learn Japanese they're (often) easier to read than books that aren't light novelsNot really. They're episodic novels, that's their shtick.A normal novel is written with a clear beginning and end. Light novels take the idea of a novel and put a TV series/manga spin on it, with the story continuing or ending based on sales and popularity. Heck, they sometimes get dropped simply because the author runs out of ideas (like Rokka no Yuusha).
>>284972196Nothing you said contradicts what I said.
>>284971489The problem with light novels isn't that they are novels. It's fun to read.It's fans thinking that every aspect of a story needs to be painstakingly written out to the point where one simple thing encompasses an entire volume.It's authors being too afraid to actually write to the plot and finish up the series in a timely manner so they focus entirely on filler.It's fans thinking that an anime adaption also needs to encompass literally everything in the light novel while also having blocks and blocks and blocks and blocks and blocks and blocks and blocks and blocks of expository bullshit in order for it to be good.It's fans having an absolute aversion to plot.It's the fact that light novels are basically the same as the english indie book scene where it is authors and fans looking at a list of tropes and strictly writing/reading to those tropes. At this point they're basically AI.It's that it's basically just an extension of romance, slice of life, rom com, and romantasy bullshit for the female audience or the audience that hates men.
>>284972651I thought it was obvious. But if you want the full version:"There is no difference in writing style to any other piece of Japanese literature. LNs are defined by the way they're created, not how they difficulty of the text."A completely normal JP novel (or JP translation of a foreign novel) doesn't expect of the reader to be any more of a Toudai graduate than the next LN about a girl who died during an earthquake and is now living in a fantasy world with the big tits she always wanted to have.
>>284971489If you liked an anime that's from a LN, sure. I wouldn't know what that is.
>>284973049>not how they difficulty of the text.not the difficulty of the text.*
>>284971489>Am i missing out?depends. do you like Young adult, but anime? that's pretty much what LNs are.
>>284973049So you're saying there's no difference in writing style between the average LN and the average non-LN novel? I don't think the distinction is necessarily drawn there but I do think the expectations of both do differ to some extent. But maybe the non-LN books I've caught glimpses of are just more serious literature and I haven't actually seen many lower tier Japanese books.
I read one called Gekkou which was pretty short and sweet.
>>284971489I would argue most LNs are better or at least as good as the anime counterpart. Usually they have to remove content from the source for the anime adaptation for time/pacing reasons, so the LN might have more content with better context than the anime. Basically if you like any anime in particular based on an LN, you may want to give the LN a try
>>284973049After seeing Japanese people speak to each other about ln writers, I take english speakers with a grain of salt. They tend to have high standards and a lack of respect for lns, enough that its difficult to get a genuine idea of how well something is written.
>>284973141Yeah. Like, try to scroll through a book about the experience of a woman in the AV industry on Amazon.Haruhi or Monogatari are absolute Shakespeare by comparison. Pretty much like there's a wide gap between world literature classics and Twilight or Battletech novels.
>>284971489If you like an anime adaption, you're gonna like the novels even more in almost every case.
I notice a lot that retards will say "book" but they don't mean all books or even most books. They pick one book that has high status from google and in their head that 1 book=all books.
>>284971489Light novels really suffer from the fact that you only get to see one picture of a cute anime girl like every 20 pages.
>>284975792
>>284975530That's because most people don't read as a habit. People who read every day know that you don't read "timeless classics" every time, and most of the time it's just normal stuff, something you read for fun, and it's usually nothing special in terms of style and novelty.When those retards say "I'd rather read a REAL book", they talk about it as if it's a big effort and not just a regular entertainment.
>>284971489Anime and manga adaptations mercifully mask how dogshit the writing quality is in LNs. Even when I find something that sounds mildly interesting I lose all interest as soon as I read the sample.
>>284971489Read real novels or manga, not a halfbaked inbetween.
>>284976270First time I really ran into this was with a series called Bofuri. Loved the anime to death, but Jesus Christ was the writing in the light novels bad.>Sally said ____. Maple said ____. Sally said _____. Maple laughedIt's written like that. I don't even fully understand what the word "prose" means, and even I could tell it was bad.
>>284981740LNs are like manga if you got rid of 90% of the pictures
>>284971489>Are there any LNs that are actually better than their anime version?Like, most? I mean, bad source material still won't be worth reading, but even competent anime staff rarely ever manages to surpass the original.
>>284981740Yeah, the writing in Bofuri is really bad even among the other lns, but it's still a rwally fun series.
>>284982474and then replaced each one with a thousand words
I find it depends on the LN. Like Index is so far way better as a series of books.
>>284971489>>284981740The real problem with LNs isn't that they are "worse written" than regular novels. It's that their localization utterly sucks compared to regular novels. They almost always cheap out on them. Most obvious exception that proves the rule would be "Min-Maxing My TRPG Build in Another World". The localization sounds almost poetic because the localizers actually give a damn about it. Compare that to, say, Shield Hero which just shits on any distinction made by honorifics, e.g. they translate all of "-san", "-dono" and "-sama" simply as "Mr./Mrs." with no differentiation, thus completely missing even the slightest nuance and thereby coming across as rather blandly written.Of course that only applies to LNs that aren't third-rate and that is true both before, during, and after isekai dominated the LN scene, however that is also true for regular novels.
>>284983303>It's that their localization utterly sucks compared to regular novels. They almost always cheap out on them.Anyone who wants me to take their complaints about the quality of writing better be complaining about the Japanese version.
>>284971489You could always try one that interests you and see what you think. But apart from the quality of the LNs themselves, translation quality can also vary wildly from acceptable to basically unreadable like the example >>284981740 mentioned, so keep in mind you might get unlucky and pick something on the worse side of that scale
