What are light novels like? How are they written...

What are light novels like? How are they written? How do they differ from western young adult novellas like Harry Potter?

>how are they written?

The one in your pic is written pretty fucking terribly.

Well if you look up japanese light novels, theres plenty of examples on how they look like inside. just text and sometimes theres a picture.

My understanding of Japanese written is terrible, but that doesn't look like a lot of words for a page.

>What are light novels like?
Like YA novels
>How do they differ from western young adult novellas like Harry Potter?
They don't really, well there's a lot that are worse, a lot that are the same and a lot that are better, it depends.

If you know Japanese then try reading one, it's basically the same as a western YA novel except with a different format(LNs usually go for like 10 volumes easily), have in mind that if you read english translations you won't get what the author wrote because Japanese is just really weird and translations can't usually be done correctly because of the way they use moonrunes, sometimes it might have to be translated literally while in moonrunes the author is giving another feeling or 2-3 meanings to what he's saying.

Not to mention the prose gets lost in translation, it's simply impossible to translate to english without making it look like it's written by a 10 year old.

They place the focus on characters.

What book doesn't do that? Well, other than a "history of the world" type of book.

>What are light novels like?
Like fanfiction really, mostly action phased with basic (and mostly bad) descriptions
>How are they written?
I guess like fanfiction, you should ask this one to other people.
>How they differ....

Most of them are pretty awfully written, like, turn off your brain and imagine the shit that you are reading and don't ask questions. There are some exeptions tho like Spice and Wolf that are better executed overall and you can enjoy.
Compared to HP and other young adult books they have less quality as most are written by non-versed authors who most of their library is composed of manga and other LN. Popular West author tend to have a little more culture

>How are they written
Very basically.

Sometimes a book veers off to describe a scene or lay a lot of groundwork. Light novels cut out a lot of unnecessary details to keep mostly oriented to the characters. Most people read for characters, anyways. LN's are logical in this way.

>I don't know Japanese yet I think I should be allowed to have a say
killyourself

LNs have shit dialog 90% of the time

t. can read japanese

Twilight is literally reformatted and marketed as a Light Novel in Japan.

That says a lot for the medium.

t. not Japanese

I only read light novels and VNs.

What I hate about LN is that it's now so utterly flooded with isekai memes that I really don't have much inclination to delve in them.

Twilight is pretty much a standard shoujo romance plot. I'd watch it if it was anime.

What does that make 50 shades? Apparent twilight fanfiction.

Every light novel I've ever read spends way more time than it should on terrible world building that the reader could figure out on their own. Needed to get my complaint out of the way first.

As for how they read (function) think of them like old sci-fi serialized stories or the stories they you split out in reader's digest. They aren't high brow reading in anyway. The volumes read liked episodes of a show. They all fight together for one character's story.

kuzu no honkai

you take fanfiction run it through google translate two or three times then get your buddy who can draw to add in pictures of cute girls every few chapters so people keep reading.

Light novels are shat out by a veritable army of authors who are competing with each other to produce a product.
Every wannabe fanfic author creates walls of text and its up to editors for established publishers to sift through mountains of garbage, not for art, but for product they can easily market and sell in their pulp magazines.
Only once someone gets enough recognition by an editor will they be able to actually publish a stand-alone LN that isn't serialized in a periodical.
LN authors are literally the infinite monkeys pounding away on infinite typewriters.

LN are a separate category that are meant to be easily readable, stuff like overlord are considered normal novels instead of light novels.

Would you consider LoGH as a light novel?

Like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

>Anything of lesser quality than HP series

back to /lit/tv/ with you

When talking of Light Novels there's either

originally published Light Novels, which yeah do have the quality of YA

and Webnovels which have the quality of webcomics and fanfiction

True

I got the vibe that western novels focus more on the scene while LN's focus more on the characters and their interactions.

For example, in western, I would see "dialogue" and then a jump to describing the situation in a detail. In LN's however, I see that the protagonist talk and then go on to describe his or her thoughts and move on to more dialogue.

Its like a detailed scenery with a stick figure vs a kiddy drawing with a very detailed person, for analogy sake. That's how I see it at least

And that's retarded.

What you're actually describing is that they spell out all of the characters' every emotion and motivation. That's what's called "exposition" and it's not a positive quality.

Why do LN translators REFUSE to use proper verb tense/grammar?

Because most of them are ESL.

smutty josei

It's a race to see who can create the next seasonal waifu for otaku to gobble up.

t.shitposter pretending to read moon