The Problem with Light Novel Animes

Nowadays as you go through anime, you’ll find a lot of anime with a very set story and possibly a really long name.  From “Is it Alright to Pick up Girls From a Dungeon” to “Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody,” many of these anime originated from another source of medium, Light Novels.  Most of the time, these light novels adaptions are hit with severe criticism either from the name or the content of what’s inside it.  With the recent release of Death March, many have vocalized how it’s a really bad story with a really over powered MC and his harem.  Here we’ll talk about the problem with light novel anime adaptions, as well as acting as a review for the Death march anime.

The biggest problem with these Light Novel adaptions is that it’s an adaption.  The story wasn’t originally made for the medium of… well being an anime.  It’s made for a book that you read whenever you have the chance to, at your own pace.  For an anime however, you watch a show for about 22 minutes or so, and then that’s all.  Although 22 minutes isn’t a lot of time, you still have to go through the story at the pace it’s presented to you compared to your own pace like with Light Novels.  Anime doesn’t let you take a story in at your own pace, and your forced to go through it.  Plus, since everything is voice acted, you have to watch every event.  What ends up being a five minute read can take up an entire episode!

Now I fully understand that I’m a fast reader, but that’s my personal pace in reading.  What takes 5 minutes for me to read can take up an entire episode, but for others it might take the same amount of time.  This only furthers the point of how Light Novels are written.  Very rarely were going to get animes like Re:Zero or Konosuba who properly adapts the pace of the Light Novel to fit into the anime.  Many animation studios look at the success of Spice and Wolf or Index and believe they can just follow the story and the anime will be a hit.  The Light Novel was big for what it was, so it’ll be big if we just convert that into an anime.  However, not all stories work well like that or we’ll simply get another Isekai Smart Phone.

Another big change is the difference in communities.  Light Novel communities tend to be more relaxed when it comes to standards than an Anime community.  This is once again based on how the community takes the entertainment through it’s medium.  When it comes to Death March, for Light Novel users we get an Isekai story where the main character becomes over powered.  However, despite being over powered we slowly learn more about the world as well as the character’s thoughts.  The anime, getting too much of the characters thoughts is just an over flow of information, so some things are cut to make it less boring for the viewer.  However, the story ends up bland in the end and it becomes another generic over powered MC story.

Further into the communities, there are other several factors that change from the translation of anime to light novel.  How the community interacts with each other.  Going back to the story of Death March, the community at first was unsure of what to think of it.  Before long, the community fell in love with the story, never taking it seriously and calling it: “A cooking anime where world threatening demon lords are merely side quests.”  Whether it’s going to volume discussions online or chapter discussions from a translators website, the community is always active and keeps the traffic going on the story.  For the anime?  With how much anime comes out and how little time there is to watch they, they judge it at a moments notice and take stories like these too serious, which I can’t really blame since the translation from text to animation is most of the time never really good!

Light Novels are an amazing source of entertainment.  They can be quite fast to read and can have various different moods between them, from serious to just the story of a guy exploring a fantasy world with his smart phone.  However, once it’s brought into anime, what some would call a more “professional” form of entertainment, many of these light novels were just not written for that form of medium.  Sure, Index, Danmachi, Konosuba and Re:Zero did a fabulous job in their adaptions, but not all light novels are good for the translation.  Companies see the success of a light novel and adapt it in hopes it’ll be just as successful as an anime without realizing how the change in medium will affect the story.  Animation companies need to really look at the medium they’re translating.  If they truly believe they can make it into a good anime, then they can just push it as is.  However, if it needs some polishing like Re:Zero, they should take their own liberties and change some parts of the story to better the pace of the anime.  After all, if the adaption is boring it only hurts the original story in the end.