Remove ads

Cliches you can't stand

Yeah, that's one of the few things that kills the Harem gerne for me.

It would be one thing if it was just like the four girls/boys/whatever. And if their personalities were actually delvoped, and if they actually made you wonder if the MC would end up in a monogamous relationship or go straight for the Harem route.

This way it would have the pull of, say, the bachelor show (which my mom loves watching) where you wonder which girl the MC will end up with. A good romance story with well-delvoped characters would definitely fuel shipping wars that way, ya know? where there would be a lot of discussion like, "Kiley is best girl. if the MC doesn't end up with her then the MC is blind, that's all I'm gonna say." and "Kiley? pfft. disagree, Sammy is the best one out of them all. gonna love a punk girl who can kick ass but can cook at the same time."

and so on forth.

But when all the women and young girls suddenly love the MC for no seemingly good reason, even if they're only background characters? Something about that gives me the creeps.

It's giving me heartbreaker (character from worm) vibes. or maybe Nice Guy (also another character from worm).

like it doesn't feel natural at all... and that he has a cheat power where everyone just loves him.
 
Simon_Jester said:
So just to be clear, do you feel that it is desirable to have internally consistent or well-reasoned opinions?

Or are you fine with the idea of going through life with inconsistent, irrational, and hypocritical opinions?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
My feelings towards other people's decisions on how they form their opinion, and how they implement that opinion, is not much of a concern.

Aurora Moon said:
But when all the women and young girls suddenly love the MC for no seemingly good reason, even if they're only background characters? Something about that gives me the creeps.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Well, harems are made for boys, so there is the explanation for that.
 
Kingcrusader said:
Well, harems are made for boys, so there is the explanation for that.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Nah, there's reverse harems too, and this happens too in the genderbent verison too.

the men see female MC and then act like they've never seen a woman before and go, "Whoa, she's amazing..."

The only difference is that it happens less often in the genderbent harem gerene, as typically they have some kind of gimmick that delays the romantic tension, etc.

Like in Fruits Basket, where most of the men only came to the girl (Honda) because she could do something about the curses they had that transformed them into animals but came to fall in love with her over time. But with animes like that one, it felt earned over time...

Whereas in shitter reverse harem animes the same exact thing happens as it does in the male-fantasy ones. The girl barely does something, and the men are falling all over themselves for her.
 
Valmond said:
Revenge is bad stories have existed basicly as long as there have been stories.
And keeping people from seeking it (or doing it only in formalized and limited ways) has been a major part of every society.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Also, blood feuds in some historical and modern societies have been seen as so disruptive to life and social order that multiple governments throughout history have enacted various measures and laws to try and diffuse them or stamp them out altogether. Whether that was the Anglo-Saxon practise of Wergild as mentioned by @Fourthspartan56 or more modern examples like the Ottoman Empire's attempts to suppress the tradition of blood feuds in Albania, which are so persistent and entrenched within some areas that they are still a problem in some parts of Albania to this day.
 
I don't care about whether a story has a "revenge is sorta bad" theme by itself. Though I do think that, because revenge is desirable, that like with other "vices" there's more depth in people having reasons to decide not to revenge, but in the end different stories achieve depth through different means.
 
As someone who watches RPG actual plays. I don't finish watching most of them since they aren't interesting to listen to. Especially if it's just a bunch of dudes talking in a voice call. Though I guess I'm spoiled since my favorite ones are ones with high production values like Mystery Quest or Norfolk Wizard Game.
 
Aurora Moon said:
genderbent harem gerene,
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Those are the ones I hate, because I never liked gender bending in any anime.

But for some reason, which is passable for me, many harems have gender bending characters that are two characters in one body. I honestly like that, because it's honestly more preferable for me, because you get two characters, instead of one being forced to change their gender for no reason at all.
 
Last edited:
Kingcrusader said:
My feelings towards other people's decisions on how they form their opinion, and how they implement that opinion, is not much of a concern.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
That's not what I asked.

I asked what I asked because it sounds like you, yourself, appear to be either adopting an internally inconsistent standard on revenge killings in fiction (and reality?), or doing a lot of evasion to avoid acknowledging that you have done so.

On the one hand, revenge killings are "not murder," with the clear if not formally stated implication of "it's killing but that doesn't make it murder which is bad killing."

On the other hand, when someone directly asks you, in the context of a specific movie situation, whether when Character B1 kills Character A1 out of revenge, if it's okay if Character A1's child Character A2 kills Character B1 out of revenge, and if Character B1's child Character B2 kills Character A2... Well, it seemed like you were basically doing a duck-and-weave routine rather than address the question.

I could be misunderstanding what's going on here, but it really seems like either you're trying to avoid acknowledging the specific (and potentially self-contradictory or undesirable) implications of your own 'opinion' on revenge killings and the morality of such... or that something even stranger and very hard to even begin to understand is going on.
 
aattss said:
I don't care about whether a story has a "revenge is sorta bad" theme by itself. Though I do think that, because revenge is desirable, that like with other "vices" there's more depth in people having reasons to decide not to revenge, but in the end different stories achieve depth through different means.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

I distinctly remember an episode from, of all things, the 1980's D&D cartoon which was, as a rule, generally very mired in the sort of preachy, moralistic content restrictions typical to mainstream US TV animation of the 1980's that handled this exact idea in a surprisingly interesting way.

The main characters in this show were children who had become trapped in a fantasy world and the running plot of the show was them trying to find their way back to their world. But throughout their journeys, the main cast were constantly and relentlessly pursued by a menacing villain who repeatedly thwarted their escape attempts and placed them in jeopardy (or at least as much as a villain from a children's cartoon was allowed to do).

In one episode, one of the characters actually manages to convince the others to set aside their usual "fetch quest to return home that will inevitably end in failure because then the show would end" and actually seek out and kill the villain who is pursuing them.

This kind of story arc would be fairly trite by modern standards but it should be noted that the cast of a typical 80's Saturday morning action cartoon actively discussing and enacting a plan to kill (not just capture or defeat but actually straight-up kill) their enemy was shocking by the standards of the period.

The main cast actually does succeed in a risky but very cunning plan to lure the villain into the lair of a powerful dragon god and in so doing weaken said villain enough to kill them. And at the point where they could very easily have chosen to kill the villain... the main character ultimately decides against it. Because the moral cost of killing would be too high for him.

It is a surprisingly well-executed arc on the morality of killing not from a societal but rather a personal standpoint.
 
Aurora Moon said:
the men see female MC and then act like they've never seen a woman before and go, "Whoa, she's amazing..."
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
A woman does a scandalous thing that shows "she is not like other girls" and then every single man in her vicinity goes "omoshiroi onna" and try to marry her.

Edit: Spelling mistake
 
Last edited:
FelOnyx said:
Omoshiroi is "interesting" or "funny", not "white."
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I put it in the translation from Google, and it comes out as "white woman."

Edit: I added the onna, that might have been why.

Edit 2: oh no, it got auto corrected to omoshiroi. It was originally omishiroi, not omoshiroi.

Omoshiroi means white
Omishiroi means interesting.
 
Last edited:
Kingcrusader said:
I put it in the translation from Google, and it comes out as "white woman."

Edit: I added the onna, that might have been why.

Edit 2: oh no, it got auto corrected to omoshiroi. It was originally omishiroi, not omoshiroi.

Omoshiroi means white
Omishiroi means interesting.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Omoshiroi means interesting.
面白い

The 白い (shiroi) on its own would mean white, but in this compound word it doesn't.

Jisho.org: Japanese Dictionary

jisho.org jisho.org
 
Translation to and from Japanese is particularly tricky, I gather, because Japanese language absolutely does not adhere consistently to the Latin alphabet and there are often several different words that mean different things but have the same Latin-alphabet transliteration.
 
Simon_Jester said:
Translation to and from Japanese is particularly tricky, I gather, because Japanese language absolutely does not adhere consistently to the Latin alphabet and there are often several different words that mean different things but have the same Latin-alphabet transliteration.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Uh...Japanese transliteration into the Roman alphabet seems about as solid as writing English in the Roman alphabet, I'd say? I mean, if you do that you lose any non-phonetic information that would be conveyed by kanji, but Japanese can be written in kana only. Homonyms, if encountered, are not a distinctively Japanese problem...
 
Simon_Jester said:
Translation to and from Japanese is particularly tricky, I gather, because Japanese language absolutely does not adhere consistently to the Latin alphabet and there are often several different words that mean different things but have the same Latin-alphabet transliteration.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Most languages using the latin alphabet does not adhere consistently to the latin alphabet in the first place.
 
Axslashel said:
Most languages using the latin alphabet does not adhere consistently to the latin alphabet in the first place.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
It's a matter of degree. English is significantly worse about having clear pronunciation rules than, say, Spanish or German, but at least in English the language grew up alongside use of the Latin alphabet and there is in the modern day a convention that even if different words are pronounced the same, they are spelled differently to avoid problems in written language.

Since Japanese did not grow up alongside the Latin alphabet, such conventions are necessarily going to be a lot shakier if not outright nonexistent.

Aineko said:
Uh...Japanese transliteration into the Roman alphabet seems about as solid as writing English in the Roman alphabet, I'd say? I mean, if you do that you lose any non-phonetic information that would be conveyed by kanji, but Japanese can be written in kana only. Homonyms, if encountered, are not a distinctively Japanese problem...
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
My impression is that homonyms are a bigger problem in Japanese than in most European languages, which is not to say European languages don't have them, and the thing about translation is that it can be entirely possible and still lead to exciting screw-ups.

If I'm not completely off-base altogether, and I might be, then I guess my real point is about how translating Japanese to English lends itself to exciting screw-ups more easily than translating European languages to English. And me attributing this to there being fewer common assumptions about how it is normal to represent things in language.

[shrugs]

I could just be wrong, or explaining myself badly. This is not an area where I'm an expert and I've had a lot else going on.
 
Last edited:
Simon_Jester said:
It's a matter of degree. English is significantly worse about having clear pronunciation rules than, say, Spanish or German, but at least in English the language grew up alongside use of the Latin alphabet and there is in the modern day a convention that even if different words are pronounced the same, they are spelled differently to avoid problems in written language.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Romanization of Japanese is simply direct transliteration of the Japanese 'alphabet', which in turn is pretty good about having clear pronunciation. (Most written Japanese mixes the sylaberic kana with logographic kanji, but all of it can be written in kana.)

And in English, we do have a number of full homograph+homophone homonyms, as well as homograph-but-not-homophone words.
 
Last edited:
Simon_Jester said:
If I'm not completely off-base altogether, and I might be, then I guess my real point is about how translating Japanese to English lends itself to exciting screw-ups more easily than translating European languages to English. And me attributing this to there being fewer common assumptions about how it is normal to represent things in language.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

You're not entirely wrong... Japanese has a lot of words that are pronounced the same, but are written differently and have different meanings, which then get used for puns which aren't always obvious let alone readily translatable. (Probably the most well known one being "koi", which can mean love, but it can also mean fish.)

But I'm pretty sure the bigger difficulties in translation are usually things like the very different grammatical structure, things like politeness levels and honorifics that don't always have direct equivalents, and ambiguity from words that are implied rather than actually spoken/written.

-Morgan.
 
Aineko said:
Romanization of Japanese is simply direct transliteration of the Japanese 'alphabet', which in turn is pretty good about having clear pronunciation. (Most written Japanese mixes the sylaberic kana with logographic kanji, but all of it can be written in kana.)

And in English, we do have a number of full homograph+homophone homonyms, as well as homograph-but-not-homophone words.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
While not wrong about romanization being a simple transliteration and Japanese generally being good about having a clear pronounciation, it is not perfect on this regard.

Both 箸( chostick) and 橋( bridge) are both romanised as "hashi", but they have a slightly different pronounciation.

And this is also discounting the fact that there is at least three different romanization systems in place for Japanese, which doesn't help matters.
 
Simon_Jester said:
My impression is that homonyms are a bigger problem in Japanese than in most European languages, which is not to say European languages don't have them, and the thing about translation is that it can be entirely possible and still lead to exciting screw-ups.

If I'm not completely off-base altogether, and I might be, then I guess my real point is about how translating Japanese to English lends itself to exciting screw-ups more easily than translating European languages to English. And me attributing this to there being fewer common assumptions about how it is normal to represent things in language.

[shrugs]

I could just be wrong, or explaining myself badly. This is not an area where I'm an expert and I've had a lot else going on.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
In proper translation I'd argue homophones are only a direct problem if you don't understand what you're trying to translate. (And if you're actually dealing with adult-level japanese text, they'll be clearly distinguished because they aren't homographs when written in kanji.)

I agree with @Morganite that difficulty translating Japanese is more likely to relate to higher-level issues rather than not being able to figure out what the words in the text are.

How exactly the root of this thread wound up with getting the translation of "shiroi onna" instead of "omoshiroi onna" is and will likely remain a mystery, but it is not because the latter is particularly difficult to translate. (I just got Google Translate to do it - even with the 'omishiroi' misspelling copied.)
Omegahugger said:
While not wrong about romanization being a simple transliteration and Japanese generally being good about having a clear pronounciation, it is not perfect on this regard.

Both 箸( chostick) and 橋( bridge) are both romanised as "hashi", but they have a slightly different pronounciation.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Oh yeah, the unwritten tonal stuff. My limited Japanese education never actually got to the point of trying to teach that, and as it's unwritten it has no impact on text translation...but I assume it's quite important for speaking Japanese without sounding like an idiot.
 
Last edited:
For me, I just don't play early access games simply because I'm not really a game replayer, so playing games in EA has meant I play them, kind of "burn" them, and by the time he full game comes out I don't feel like playing it anymore so I never experience the full version. This happened to me with several games, and so I've made a point of not trying games until the full version is out.
 
You must login or register to reply here.
Remove ads
Back
Top