‘Tis the season for retrospectives. Since I don’t read or watch that much stuff the year it comes out, my annual lists are always about what I consumed during the previous year, regardless of when it was made. Last year I wrote about John le Carré’s A Perfect Spy. This year I have a little …
What The Kids Are ReadingPost + Comments (105)
There are two major subgenres here, isekai and LitRPG, which are not entirely new ideas, though in this context they share an important attribute: they are not, at a fundamental level, inspired by books, but rather by anime and video games. Add in the tendency for these authors to not use developmental editors, and you get some unusual (or all-too-typical) stories. One fun thing about them is the palpable, insane enthusiasm level of the authors–they love writing these things, and it shows. That’s great! A lot of trad-pub authors don’t manage this. But they can also get swept away by their own, ah, brilliance. Less great. Ultimately, though, what I take issue with is the lack of… I hesitate to say literary merit, barf… let’s just talk about the specific subgenres.
Isekai. Portal fantasy. Not a new idea. A person is displaced from their reality–usually our own–and ends up in a fantasy or science-fiction land. But these particular books are inspired by anime, usually episodic anime, and often originally written as web serials. This works well enough with an episodic structure, if you’re into that, but collected into a ‘novel’, it… does not. Especially when authors don’t try to fix the pacing and arc issues when it’s time to bundle it up for Kindle Direct. The novel is a form, with conventions and expectations, and these often just don’t engage with that.
Don’t get me wrong, I like a good serial. I’ve been reading Pale this year, a dark urban fantasy story inspired by “magical girl” shōjo anime (e.g. Sailor Moon; Puella Magi Madoka Magica). I’ll pick it up before bed sometimes. But it’s long, and it’s a serial, and it can be a grind, just a constant, episodic ratchet. I wish it felt like a series of novels, but it doesn’t. It feels like a series of cliffhangers. Still, I want to see how it ends.
LitRPG shares many of these flaws. These are stories like Ready Player One and Sword Art Online–a character is in a video game, engages with video game dynamics, gains power in video game ways, does video game stuff. Needless to say there is a lot of Japanese material inspiring these works. Video games usually take the form of episodic loops, so it’s no surprise to find that structure here. There’s a power progression, at least, which shares a lot with traditional hero’s journey stories, but these are mostly still serials with a fanfiction vibe. They also often feel like adolescent male power fantasies, which is hardly new in fantasy, but at a certain point, to quote Stephen King, everything starts to taste like beans.
So yeah. That’s what the kids are up to, I guess. I think I’ll go back to being an old fart who reads classics that have withstood the test of time, and leave the anime and video game stories for when I watch anime and play video games.
They say to end blog posts with a prompt, so: what disappointed you last year? Haha.