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6/21/2025, 1:03:07 AM
6/19/2025, 7:51:40 PM
>>528040674
Your point?
Your point?
6/15/2025, 10:41:52 PM
>>712750451
But there are plenty of absurdly long novels of Western origin which maintain beautiful prose for the full duration of their length. I'm a weeb and would like to enjoy more visual novels but but even the critically acclaimed VNs read like they were written by middle schoolers.
>>712750650
Samuel Coleridge once described prose as "words in their best order." Such a simple definition really strikes at the essence of what prose is (or ought to be), and so I can't imagine the Japanese don't feel the same way. At first I thought that it might be an issue of poor translation, but I can't say the original Japanese fares much better after having played through a few text-heavy games in their native language.
Have you ever known someone, maybe when you were young, who would always send messages in all lowercase and also probably without proper punctuation and spelling? The kind of kid who tried to give off an air of "I don't care, I'm too cool to spend an extra .01 seconds to spell correctly?" Well that's what Japanese prose reads like to me. It's like they want every line to be free of fat so the message or intent is delivered to the reader unobscured, but in doing so they've removed any personality while also failing to convey anything of interest. It's almost clinical. When most people conjure up the image of a writer they probably imagine someone who's older, gruff, maybe an alcoholic, maybe someone who sucks down cigarettes or has some severe personality quirks, someone with such strong character that it comes across in every word they write, but when I imagine the average visual novel writer I can only see some despondent Japanese man putting on a lab coat and sterile gloves before he sits down in front of his keyboard.
But there are plenty of absurdly long novels of Western origin which maintain beautiful prose for the full duration of their length. I'm a weeb and would like to enjoy more visual novels but but even the critically acclaimed VNs read like they were written by middle schoolers.
>>712750650
Samuel Coleridge once described prose as "words in their best order." Such a simple definition really strikes at the essence of what prose is (or ought to be), and so I can't imagine the Japanese don't feel the same way. At first I thought that it might be an issue of poor translation, but I can't say the original Japanese fares much better after having played through a few text-heavy games in their native language.
Have you ever known someone, maybe when you were young, who would always send messages in all lowercase and also probably without proper punctuation and spelling? The kind of kid who tried to give off an air of "I don't care, I'm too cool to spend an extra .01 seconds to spell correctly?" Well that's what Japanese prose reads like to me. It's like they want every line to be free of fat so the message or intent is delivered to the reader unobscured, but in doing so they've removed any personality while also failing to convey anything of interest. It's almost clinical. When most people conjure up the image of a writer they probably imagine someone who's older, gruff, maybe an alcoholic, maybe someone who sucks down cigarettes or has some severe personality quirks, someone with such strong character that it comes across in every word they write, but when I imagine the average visual novel writer I can only see some despondent Japanese man putting on a lab coat and sterile gloves before he sits down in front of his keyboard.
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