Humble reminder that good romance anime/manga benefits from the author's real world social experience

Humble reminder that good romance anime/manga benefits from the author's real world social experience.

The reason most modern romance is bad is because the author/writer are typically introverted otaku.

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The actual reason is because the most popular kind of romance is the one that sells the most and in the manga/anime market, it's the endless harem genre.
There are many good romances but they don't sell as much as harems.

And yet you're posting a show from an author who basically lived like a shut-in completely devoted to her work her whole life?

>maison ikkoku
>good

Are you retarded? Maison Ikkoku was heavily influenced by her college life.

But the author isn't Okada

I miss eighties anime/manga when guys had to chase the women they wanted and improve in the process, instead of having socially stunted girls falling in love for a mediocre sod with no distinguishing characteristics for no reason. These days the best you get is a tsundere, which is a stupid and frail simplification of a realistic strong personality. Hell, Godai was constantly berated for being wishy washy but he was bastion of virility compared to modern main characters.

Most modern romance is a lot like harem, just something for mediocre emasculated underachivers with inflated sense of self worth to self insert because they're too afraid to face reality, then some of these people grow up and make more anime based not on their experiences and maturity but on the ego masturbation and escapist powertrip fantasies they've had from the previous generations of anime, each generation of writing and art showing more and more socially and emotionally stunted characters and with character designs and behaviour resembling less and less normal humans, to the point most women act and look more like pets than people, as anything more than the bare minimum of assertiveness and humanity proves emasculating to creators and main audience and so is met with silent panic and revulsion.

Agree with every word

youtube.com/watch?v=9iwVuEpK0As

>Can't talk or relate to women
>No social skills
>No maturity
>No empathy
>No experience with others
>Thinks world revolves around self
>"smart but lazy"
>Entitled, narcissist, "unrecognized genius"
>When rejected it's clearly the other person's fault
>"Women have to be pure!"
>"Women have to be the best looking or I won't care!"
>Feels entitled to love from targets of his affection
>Sexually frustrated

Geez, I wonder why most modern romances are so completely devoid of realistic characters and struggles or any semblance of healthy human behaviour.

But pic-related isn’t a good romance. It was the usual Rumiko misunderstandings.

Like a true martyr.

Not OP, but even though it had quite a few misunderstandings it was still a really good series with very nicely written characters. There's also the fact that in the manga (don't remember if this is as prominent in the anime) Kyoko and Godai wonder about how their realtionship is so rocky, Akemi calls Kyoko neurotic and Godai admits that Kyoko is crazy jealous and prone to flying into fits of rage over tiny things, Kyoko just has an insanely bad personality overall. I was really hoping Yotsuya was gonna rub her face on how terrible she is, but Akemi ended up doing that lightly instead.

This made me laugh. It's awfully on point, even as recently as Toradora I wouldn't have thought in a few years we'd end up at Sakurasou no Pet but boy did we.

I try to care but most new romance I just give up cause I can't take the autism dripping off the pages

Stick to netflix.

>Sakurasou no Pet
I wasn't aware this was a thing, I recently came out of a break of 10 years without anime and I'm finding most newer trends very unsettling.

But Netflix doesn't make romances. Besides, Westerners don't know how to love anymore.

How is it any different?

Vile Evergarbage kinda invalidates that point.

Romance series that target male anime fans have always been fairly weak. It's just more obvious now.

The better question is why have romance series that target female anime fans gotten so bad?

I like my anime to be written by virgins for virgins.

I can't help but think the world would be much better if Tenchi didn't exist.

>pushing propaganda that you need to self-improve to be worthy of a woman's vagina
cringed, Japan has the right idea

It's not about woman's vagina, underage user.

I think there's been a significant devolution, namely in the depth and maturity of characters, not to mention modern romance has been almost completely sterilized and rid of humanity. I'm also bothered how 99% of the time the woman (several of them usually) falls for the guy first but any notion of an actual normal relationship is completely foreign to the audience and creators and thus not shown except for maybe a kiss at the very end.
Modern characters freak out at somebody dropping a fucking honorific like it's some kind of insurmountable barrier between people.


I also don't think this is restricted to romance genre though, I'm pretty certain these trends that gained traction in the 1990s and hit critical velocity in the 2010s affect the whole medium (and further, like video games).

That and Love Hina, maybe the latter especially moreso.

it's because 90% of romance is shoujo

in other words it's written for 10 year old girls who haven't kissed a boy yet, stop over thinking it

You just need to find better shows.

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Not him but I highly doubt the kind of "romance" that user described is made to appeal to 10 year old girls since VNs, LNs, Manga and anime that feature it clearly target the male audience.

those are just porn games

.....

....

Is this real because, as someone who is a giant pervert, I am incredibly aroused.

I didn't say that, you can even get hitched being a mediocre nobody with no redeeming traits, the issue is deeper than relationships.

The striving for self improvement is constant component in man's search for happiness, which is why people usually don't feel fulfilled or satisfied just being handed their personally significant objectives or objects of desire, and this includes love.

Certainly men romanticize the notion of "courting" with things like a "chase" or something like that, which often leads to frustration at the women when rejected, and learning to some variables are out of your control when it comes to interpersonal issues is a part of maturing which includes working on yourself in the ways you desire as an important aspect of your life, not for others.

That being said, the fact the modern anime perpetuates the mentality that it's characters designed for the audience to insert themselves as are feeble, shy, inactive, unremarkable, uninspired, demotivated, low self esteem, status quo bootlicking, unassertive, socially inept and yet are the center of the universe despite their unabashed mediocrity and previous lack of notable tangible accomplishments is downright evil. It's like coddling and spoiling a person from birth all the away to adulthood and further, as this created deepset notions in the viewers that the world should accommodate their whims regardless, keeping them dependent on more and more ego stroking anime, leading to people being conditioned to deny the experience of living life properly, with all its foibles and struggles and the happiness, personal development and accomplishment that comes from surmounting them.

In this vein romance is an aspect of life, so expecting it to be a motivator, or better, a wake up call for growth is not only obvious but extremely common in humanity.

Dude they are just cartoons, calm down.

Where do you think you are?

Yes, it is real. High quality shoujo romance.

Thought it was an interesting analysis. We all chill here!

Anime is watched by millions of young people all over the world, and growing. This sort tacit (is it really?) encouragement of self destructive indulgent behaviour certainly has, and will have, significant negative effects on the lives of many people.

>Muh self improvement
A concept of the modern times.

it is.

And it's beautiful.

The red-haired guy calls her "Little Bitch".

Self-improvement is a meme based around compensating

Not to say it's inherently bad but most people use it as a crutch without addressing their underling psychological issues

The most important factor in getting girls is letting go of your hang ups and insecurities, you don't need to self-improve as such, just be comfortable and accept yourself

to be fair, people deserve it whenever bad stuff happens to them. You shouldn't concern yourself with their well-being, they deserve the opposite.

>just be yourself bro

"accept yourself" is just as much of a dumb meme.

There's no formula for "winning at life". Sometimes you're lucky, sometimes you're not, sometimes you're too fucked-up and lazy, sometimes you're too obsessive and tryhard, sometimes you want stuff you can't have, sometimes you want contradictory stuff, sometimes you don't really want anything. Success is a spook anyway.

What about shonen aimed at little kids that are all about getting stronger through hard work? I think you're focusing too much on anime that's already aimed at otaku losers that just want to self insert because they already wasted their lives anyway.
A kid is probably more prone to watch Dragon Ball or Boku no Hero Academia rather than your average Harem or rom-com where selfinsert mcboring gets all the girls on his dick.

I try to be tolerant of cliches of any kind, but whenever a female character tries to justify her being in love with a complete faggot MC with no redeeming qualities with "He's kind", I feel like dropping that series right then and there.

Your toxic mindset is why you aren't winning at life

You let go of your "hang ups and insecurities"(the severe one, not the ones that naturally go away as you grow up) through self-improvement, it doesn't happen simply by doing nothing.

This has been recognized as a primary concept in human fulfillment since at least Socrates like 2400 years ago. There's even an appropriate quote from his trial "The unexamined life is not worth living for a human being".

Not to mention Nietzsche becoming the posterboy for it about 140 years ago, before his sister butchered his writing to serve her political purposes.

>The striving for self improvement is constant component in man's search for happiness
Improving yourself to get some snatch?
Bro, the bar is not that high.
As a matter of fact, if you only want to get laid there is no bar there at all.
Not even 20/10 chicks are hard to get if you have a few grand.
Plus when you realize that women are taught to be insulted when they realize that you're doing it for them(and to not want to fuck/hook up with/hangout with the guy who sacrificed for or helped them) or that the women they're going after will be beneath them once they do achieve whatever nebulous goal...then
Shit.
What's the point?

The need to improve has to come from inside, most external motivators will not work for very long or be very strong.

not at all, your insecurities go away from acquiring wisdom and life experience, not from reading books or going to a gym

>The need to improve has to come from inside, most external motivators will not work for very long or be very strong.
But I said that like twice.

I know. It’s horrible. I just want heartfelt romance stories back again.

My idea of winning at life is stomping on someone's face until they apologize for being alive at some point before I kick the bucket. What about yours?

Seriously, who wants realism in their anime?

Realism can be good. It's not always the bad kind.

>addressing their underling psychological issues
>letting go of your hang ups and insecurities
But that's self improvement, I mean, addressing your psychological issues is like a textbook example. It's not restricted to doing curls on the squat rack or reading a bunch of novels (which a lot of people think it makes them "better", but what's really the point of spending time reading something if you're just speedreading for social purposes rather than investing the necessary time, work and introspection necessary to understand the work properly?). Of course maintaining a healthy lifestyle is also a positive, but the notion of improving yourself isn't tied to fitting the status quo better or being more attractive or anything.

The anxiousness of being a leech to your parents doesn't go away by acquiring "wisdom and life experience" sitting in your room all day.

this

>Humble reminder that good romance anime/manga benefits from the author's real world social experience.
Rumiko Takahashi proves this wrong. Or are you an idiot who thinks UY and Ranma are based on real experiences. If so, that just makes Takahashi look like a Tsun asshole.

I'm not a big fan of Tenchi. But it didn't invent harems or delayed love stories. KOR and Fishugi Yugi came out before and were much worse. And they weren't even harems. Then there's other shows like SMJ and Vandread which are harems and were pretty good.

It's not about the author translating their experience 1 to 1 into the story and characters, it's about the author having experience with interpersonal relationships and dynamics such that they can make a better story exaggerating and dramatizing those social interactions. Just like how the best cartoonists understand and have practice proper anatomy and motion so as to better create exaggerations of those characteristics and movements.

Goku is a superpowered alien who is somehow always one step above everyone (sure he trains hard, but he still has plot superpowers beyond any measure), Midoriya happened to run into his idol who happened to be able to give him his super powerful quirk and also happened to be in a situation where it would be wise for him to do so ( butat least he earned the quirk).
Naruto is even worse, because it started on the premise Naruto would overcome the prodigy Sasuke through hard work and determination but then quickly went the complete opposite way, while Rock Lee, the character who epitomized dedication and hard work in the face of adversity can't stand up to a housecat.


That being said, battle shounen is still full of decent examples for everyone, BnHA I think is one of the best in this aspect.


But I really doubt the main anime audience, even for these shitty harems who keep getting more seasons, like every bloody harem isekai, is composed mainly of adults.

Hey, KOR is great and most definitely not a Harem, just a love triangle with a little twist. Also, Kasuga, just like Godai, was chastised for being "indecisive" when the guy was active as hell, nearly every chapter that guy was taking the initiative on something and definitely wasn't afraid of women like every other modern mc.

Besides, Tenchi's principle was exactly this, pick the most boring, mediocre, personality lacking, initiative lacking eunuch you can and make the whole universe about him. It's a ridiculous fantasy with not a single shred of maturity, as is seen when it's found out Tenchi is literally the overgod of the universe. Kajishima is nuts.

Yeah, that's bullshit. Good writers are able to write things outside of their experiences. And again, Takahashi wrote tons of things she never experienced. Her characters are nothing like her own personality. I've met her and she's extremely introvert and quiet. She writes characters that are the opposite of her.

Needless to say, her love life is obviously not like her work either. She has said in interviews she writes love stories she would like to be a part of, but never was.

So she wants to be a bitch to the person she loves?

and it was shit

>2400 years ago

There have only been 2018 years smart guy

People like you are the reason shitty romances keep being pumped out.

>it's just cartoons lmao!

reminder that only dorks watch romance anime

I'm pretty sure that the people who consume those shitty romances are the reason they keep being pumped out.

>Hey, KOR is great and most definitely not a Harem
Read my whole post.

>Also, Kasuga, just like Godai, was chastised for being "indecisive" when the guy was active as hell
He's a horny teenager. But the entire show could have been avoided if he just cleared up the misunderstanding in episode 1. But he and Ayukawa knew they liked each other, but he was too afraid to ever tell her or hurt Hikaru's feelings. KOR sucks beyond this though because, aside from the initial misunderstanding, every single episode is yet another self-contained misunderstanding. Where the male MC is always being blamed by both girls despite Ayukawa clearly knowing that he isn't to blame. This gets old after just 5 episodes.

what a stupid conjecture

This. As long as there are enough mouthbreathing otakus in japan paying for that garbage, they'll keep coming.

Since she said Shinobu and Akane are her self inserts, I guess so. But again, that makes little sense considering her personality is nothing like theirs.

What about the modern japanese romance movies/series that aren't anime? Are they just as bad?

Can I get a source plox?

Maybe she meant they're her ideal self? Expressive, emotional, etc.

>>complete faggot MC

How so? Example?

WTFFF is this?

Again, numbnuts, by having a solid basis in how things work, you can better understand how to make entertainment outside of what actually exists or whatever you've experience personally in a one to one comparison of people and personalities. Takahashi doesn't have to experienced what it's like to be an angry demon, but by knowing something about people and life, she can puzzle out how their motivations might work and how they'd respond to stuff. You'll never be good at creating stuff if you don't get some experience with the baselines, whether its writing, drawing, composing, or whatever. You need to dig down into how things work and then you can build up impossible dreams.

Someone may be able to write a story beyond their personal experiences, but they'll never do it well if they don't have some understanding of people beyond just sitting in a room and reading a book.

Seiren

I don't know, real people are gross

Reading about or going out and noticing other people's lives and experiences are not the same as the person themselves having those experiences themselves. Which OP was implying.

And again, Takahashi proves this point, as she didn't have anything close to the types of experiences she wrote about. And considering her stories are Hallmark level idealized fantasy, it's not hard to see that. She probably read a lot of manga and watched a lot of movies and just used the parts she liked. She didn't personally experience these things herself however.

I haven't watched very many. But the few I saw were really overacted and hammy. Like a Mexican drama.

You can define 'good' however you like but I don't find realistic romance to be entertaining in the least. I read a lot of shoujo manga and I don't like seeing the exploits of awful people who cheat, gold-dig, rape, etc. common as they may be in real life. It may be "bad" by your criteria but I read manga specifically because it can offer unrealistic stories in which all characters are good people at heart, where love is pure and overcomes all obstacles, and I hope these stories continue to be made.

The point isn't that you have to go and personally experience every single facet of life to write good personal character stories. It's that you can't be a shut in and still write good characters. You need to learn how people act and what motivates them. These are then applicable to a wide variety of situations and lifestyles that you yourself do not need to be intimately familiar with. The OP isn't saying you need to have been in a rom com to write rom com, it's that you need to have actual life experience with people to write good people. It's about the underpinning dynamics, not the overall idea. It's the difference between a good idea and a good execution of that idea.

The comparison is again to drawing and animation. You don't need to personally see impossible animals, fantasy monsters, or machines to draw those things well. But you'll be better at it with understandings of how to draw motion and anatomy from the real world and then you can create something from what you understand as applicable. Takahashi doesn't need to have been in these exciting or complicated situations, but she can draw from what she's seen and learned about people and social situations to better create a good execution of these ideas.

She used the tropes she liked, basically

amen

Stop being so bitter at life, realistic romance doesn't mean it's all about rape, gold digging and bad people.

I get your premise and I agree with it somewhat. But again, some people prove that you can be a shut in and write stuff. Takahashi is actually one of those examples. But I would argue it shows in her writing, as her characters are very shallow and repetitive. As if she learned how people act by watching a handful of movies and Japanese tv shows.

Werner Herzog espouses this opinion

"I prefer people who have worked as bouncers in a sex club, or have been wardens in the lunatic asylum. You must live life in its very elementary forms. The Mexicans have a very nice word for it: pura vida. It doesn’t mean just purity of life, but the raw, stark-naked quality of life. And that’s what makes young people more into a filmmaker than academia."

Essntially Herzog argues (if I understand him correctly) that to be a filmmaker you need a lot of real life experience and that real life experience is more important than technical or academical experience. That's Herzog's opinion though. He's a bit of a maverick.

Well there's also a difference in desire. If Takahashi has said she writes the kinds of stories and characters she's dreams of being a part of, even if she doesn't actually want her life to be like that, it makes sense why it's the same stuff over and over again. There's more to be a good writer than understanding people. It's just one thing to work on. Different stories also require different skills and knowledge of the world. You can write a good story with the most basic of characters and plots, it just has to be engaging to read. There's a skill to actually writing down the story. You can spend your life interacting with people and learning about the world, but it won't help you if you can't even write an interesting sentence.

Manga/Anime are also a primarily visual medium as well. You need to not only know what people should look like in different situations, but how best to emphasize those emotions when appropriate. Panel layout, layout within the panel, detail, etc. There's a lot of skills involved.

There is also the distinction that sometimes people just want to see the same thing, but done well. You don't need to be a master of social situations to write something like Nozaki-kun. There's different kinds of "romance" stories that require different things of the writer or artist.

It's art, high or vulgar. There's no one way to do it. But better practice in life is going to be helpful with more character driven stories.

I agree with him. Sadly, Hollywood doesn't. They just want a director who can create a film by the numbers. So of course they're going to keep hiring the same few people who get through expensive film schools and recommended by people already in the industry. They don't want experimental film makers because they want to do things opposite of the formulas Hollywood sticks to.

Way too miss the point. You can have realistic romance with "characters that are good people at heart, where love is pure and overcomes all obstacles" where characters actually feel like real people instead of the shallow shit where the girl falls madly in love with no personality MC because he called her cute, pat her head and gave her an eraser.

>Humble reminder that good romance anime/manga benefits from the author's real world social experience.
that is a Fallacy

What

Maison Ikkoku is definitely about
>characters are good people at heart, where love is pure and overcomes all obstacles
and it has well written realistic characters.

Even more mundane realistic romances are unappealing because they rely on realistic human behavior.

>You can have realistic romance with "characters that are good people at heart, where love is pure and overcomes all obstacles" where characters actually feel like real people
No you can't. It's unrealistic because real people are cunts who act in their own self interest and true 'love' doesn't exist, people just choose partners based on physical attraction and social gain. However, the beautiful ideal of true love is common in fiction and after constant exposure we're able to suspend our disbelief and appreciate it despite the departure from reality.

>instead of the shallow shit where
It's possible (and probable) for a story to be bad. It just doesn't depend on the author's life experiences unless you're evaluating quality strictly by how much a story adheres to reality.

I want to read romance that's well constructed and portrays the ideal love that I find entertaining. Such a story is a considerable departure from "real-world experience" because an entertaining story demands more elaborate justifications for events than shallow reality, and likewise the 'true love' values can only really be experienced by consuming fiction, so "real-world experience" is again irrelevant.

You could argue that it's important to have life experience for an author to be able to construct a fantasy romance story without pushing the reader's suspension of disbelief too far but I think someone who reads a lot of fiction would have a better set of 'experience' in that area, despite not experiencing 'life'.

>Kimagure Orange Road
>Bad

I and my four year old self will fight you. My first love was Madoka.