feel free to give me criticism in any magnitude. be as hostile as you want idc. also anything after the "Yahari picked up on these trends..." is probably gonna change i use the word "shit" three times in 20 words. actually never mind, if i really wanted to do this, i’d have to reread all 14 novels which is an incredibly strenuous task for something i’m not a huge fan of anymore. i hadn’t specified this but this but this part is abt the novels
A work with tons of latent potential, ultimately hindered and destroyed by its laziness and incompetence hiding behind a masquerade of metahumor and pseudo-witty dialogue. First off— the writing sucks. Not the writing itself, I mean Wataru-sensei's writing style. Before you all go off on me and bring up the "it's an English translation, of course the prose is gonna be WEIRD!" card, I don't even mean the prose (but yes, that sucks dick as well)— I'm talking about Wataru-sensei's godawful habit of cramming as many metajokes as possible in the story. Sometimes it's a simple namedrop and sometimes it's a skit between Hiratsuka-sensei and Hachiman, but they're completely tactless, too in-your-face, and too numerous in the state they're in. If it was one, or even just a couple, it would be easy to forgive. But there are far too much, perhaps hundreds of them in just the first four books. They become too detracting to the experience and completely lose the magic and the purpose of what a "joke" is. The ideal metajoke, in settings like these, is to not be too encroaching and disrupting on the story itself, yet still have enough of a presence where the audience has an idea of what's going on. The main purpose of them is to make the audience feel clever for "getting the joke", rewarding them in a sense. As stated prior, Yahari's references aren't too annoying as standalones, sometimes they're somewhat clever and sometimes they're just flat out uncreative and done as a cheap and lazy excuse to pander. But detached from quality, in the quantity they're given, it becomes increasingly excruciating to handle them as you read on (thank god the tone changed). It's sometimes outright unclear what direction Wataru-sensei is trying to take the story in, especially in the early novels (this statement seems contradictory in it of itself but trust me it's not). Hell, as insult to injury, the pages upon pages of translation notes in the back of both the Yen Press and unofficial fan translation novels, as if it already hadn't happened, completely and utterly defeat the purpose of the joke. This isn't just the case with Yahari, either— in addition to absurdly long novel titles due to the globalists's attempts to breed a world similar to that of Idiocracy, the meta trend, along with a couple of others have become a growing force in the LN industry, some working well and some completely flopping flat on their faces in their unoriginality (y'all jumped on it too late, meta died in the 90's). Yahari picked up on these trends and tries to parody(?)/subvert them, but when it comes down to business, shit is still shit. This brings me down to my next point— surprise, the writing is actually shit, too. It really sucks, because I actually enjoyed the anime quite a bit when I first watched it a
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