what’s the etiquette? where do i start? there are so many niches and such that i’m not sure.
i have watched some anime, but mostly things like dragon ball. i am looking to get more involved with the community to help discover anime and get more into the trends, etc.
Regarding titles, a lot of anime end up with really long official titles because they originate from a Japanese web-novel site where due to the design of the site people have to distinguish their works by the title alone.
I love Kono Subarashii Sekai ni Shukufuku o! but that’s a bit of a mouthful so I (along with everyone else) just call it KonoSuba.
Incidentally, this is probably related to the reason SailorFuzz suggested avoiding anime with long titles. Anime that originated from that site on average have more amateurish writing since it’s a site for self-publishing. I wouldn’t go so far as to discount everything there though; there have certainly been some good stories that originated from that site. In addition to KonoSuba I also really liked The Apothecary Diaries, Log Horizon, and Re:Zero for example. There are also plenty of great anime with longer titles that don’t originate from that site, such as Kaguya-sama: Love is War or Legend of the Galactic Heroes.
oo i didnt know that! so its people who write and draw their own web novels, and then sometimes they get picked up by a studio and made in to anime? thats actually really cool!
Many anime viewers (understandably) complain about the results, but it’s certainly nice that amateur writers have a place to publish and read each others’ works. The normal pipeline there is that something will start as a web novel, and then if it’s really successful it’ll get picked up by a publisher like Kodansha to be sold as a light novel and then if that’s successful it’ll eventually get animated. There will often also be a manga adaptation. I’m not certain how different the web novel and light novel usually are; my impression is not very! There is some editing that goes in though, and the light novels also have a bunch of included illustrations. This is both a good thing and a bad one. The web novel will usually have no art at all, just text. When those illustrations are made for the light novel adaptation, they’re locking in character designs that they’ll have to stick with later if those books ever get animated. But at the light novel stage it’s still relatively low-budget so the amount of talent and effort that goes into making those character designs usually (in my opinion) doesn’t measure up to the talent and effort that goes into making character designs for manga-original or anime-original stories. So in addition to a generic RPG fantasy world, you (often) end up with generic RPG fantasy character designs.