Even though the show is more based on vidya, I still can't help but feel like this was based on someone's campaign

Definitely basing my next character off of her. I feel like it would be a nice twist for the other players to figure out since none of them are weebs.

>Bitches swooning all over him despite the fact he doesn't even try?
The arc 2 bitch likes him specifically because he tries (and also because she's a needy bitch and he's desperate).
The arc 1 thot doesn't start liking him until arc 4 when she has an emotional breakdown and he lends his shoulder.

I don't really remember any girl in Re:Zero swooing after him before he "tries", tough. I mean, there is a grey zone (Emilia likes him because he saved her and... reasons), but I dare to say there is no Rory or Tuka situation.

>Lia still best girl. No, seriously.

Be sure to let her have a chuuni nickname and THEN they realize her real name is some ridicolous bullshit

>Lia still best girl. No, seriously.
Wow, there really ARE incorrect opinions...

Rem is overrated.

There, I said it.

>actually, best girl is Priscilla, but I don't like too much feetfags

Overrated or no, Rem and Subaru actually have chemistry together. None of that between Subaru and Emilia.
Subaru doesn't love Emilia, he just thinks he does. What he really loves is the feeling of trying to win Emilia's heart, because that's the only way he can get motivated and overcome his laziness/limits.

I bet you read Your and My Asylum.

My man, 100% agree

Just an FYI, this series is written by a very kinky female masochist which is why there's so much humor based around that, and why Kazuma is such a "bad person" - because it's the author's fetish.

>When you are such a humongous cuck that you can only see yourself with a waifu that treats you like the human garbage you are

Thank God for that too

Makes sense to me. Thank God for her.

I guess. It still doesn't make her best girl.

>female
Natsume Akatsuki is a dude.
youtu.be/NU31MozuIPo

Have we been bamboozled this whole time?

>A superpower available only to the protagonist? Check.
Objectively wrong.
The setting is full of people who have superpowers that are only available to them, starting with the apostles.
In fact, compared to what else there is in the setting his Groundhog-Day power is fairly weak.

>Suspicious...
Its suspicious how you talk out of your ass despite not knowing anything about the series.

Actually, he was cucking the other girls, if anything.

There's also at least one other guy (Aldebaran) up to Groundhog Day shenanigans.

"Dude, don't worry. We're gonna ACE this trial!"

The Gang Gets Sentenced To Death

>idekai garbage
>luck stat meme

>fun characters
>fun story with solid comedy
>neat world that looks like it'd be a blast to live in
or are you one of those autists that thinks "fun" is a buzzword?

>hating on isekai

Subaru is the jap name of the Pleiades star Cluster in the Constellation of Taurus.
Aldebaran or Alpha Tau is the brightest star in the very same constellation.

He IS Subaru or Subaru Alter, my dude.

Highly speculative claim, my dude.

to be fair tough I don't think relying on people like them to be safe would be that much of a blast

Dont tell me you missed how only the archbishops of sin are named after heavenly bodies in the series, my dude.

>relying on pop culture shit banter
>shitty vidya references
>immediately relying on the word 'fun' word to defend the show
>characters talking about their fucking stats
>worldbuilding garbage

>Rigel

It's also a plot point that Petelgeuse *isn't* named the same as the star.

>highschool boy getting transferred to another world through a badly written bullshit scenario is on the same level as 'muh western isekai'

Have you read Three Hearts and Three Lions? It is the most cliche tripe. It was decades ahead of its time.

And by being so, it paved the way for all low-to-none effort isekai that flooded the market not long ago.
The subgenre is fun when it's a spoof. It's not fun when it's serious and/or everyone and their dog is doing their own series.

>WN
What?

Web novel.

KonoSuba was a WN before it was a LN, and a LN before it was an anime.
Not sure if it got a manga before or after the anime. Before, probably.

The KonoSuba WN (the oldest iteration) started as a parody of Isekai wa Smartphone to Tomoni.

>neat world that looks like it'd be a blast to live in
It's a fairly shit world for everybody that isn't either protected by adventurers, or living with powerful sorcerers like the Crimson Magic Clan

Wait wait wait, you're telling me that Konosuba, while a parody of the isekai genre itself, was primarily a parody of Smartphone no tomo ni!? I figured smartphone was recent and got an anime last season cause isekais sell.

The anime industry has gradually been scrapping down to the bottom of the barrel.

Why are these isekais stories so bad? You have an entire world to explore but we always get stuck with the most dense and retarded person in the would as our protagonist.

Konosuba was good, I'm taking about the genre in general.

This

>Isekai wa Smartphone to Tomoni.
I actually like isekai anime/manga and I'm actually following quite a few, and I never got why everyone hates them so much.

BUT THEN I SAW THE FIRST THREE EPISODES OF THE SMARTPHONE ANIME.

The premise is interesting on paper: some kid is sent to a fantasy realm with nothing more than the clothes on his back and his trusty smartphone. Alright, so God capital G? U wot Japan? When did this become a thing? gives him an eternal battery and constant wifi connection. Fair enough, now his smartphone isn't entirely useless. He's still a regular weak-ass human so it's interesting to see how he'll develop and use the many apps in his phone to get out of stick situa- oh wait, God I thought you wuz polytheists 'n shiet also gives him stats so incredibly high nothing is a challenge to him. He also learns that there's 6 main schools of magic, a seventh 'null' school and that people who can master 3 schools of magic at the same time are considered geniusses. Well, good fucking thing that he can master all six of those schools and master every null spell after seeing it. Which he literally uses to cure someone's blindness in the second or third episode. Is that why you did the capital G God thing, Japan? To literally make him anime Jesus? Last time you tried this was FFXIII-3. Stop this, it never works out for you.. And then there's the fact that as far as I could tell nobody has a personality, and I think three episodes in you should have a basic idea of who the main cast is. There's the protagonist. He's the protagonist. Then there's the twins, one of them focuses on melee combat and the other on magic. That's their personalities. Then there's the samurai girl, who speaks in an old fashioned way and loves to eat a lot giving her the most personality of the main cast.

This show is everything wrong with Isekai, and every aspiring mangaka should watch it to learn what NOT to do.

Protag has to be a boring slate or an edgelord for isolated directionless teens to self-inseet upon. Protagonist must be right always for the same reason.

Because how is some Japanese NEET supposed to relate to the protagonist if he isn't a boring fucking loser? And who doesn't love the idea of attractive women throwing themselves at you even though you're a boring fucking loser? Better yet, how about a world where a boring fucking loser is made into someone special without them having to put in any effort for it?

Japan's obsession with self-insert fantasies with easy love, admiration and power are what makes this genre garbage. You can't really work with anything outside this because those hordes of self-loathing NEETs desperate for escapism won't buy your manga if they can't self insert.

An omnipotent overdeity doesn't really conflict with traditional Japanese kami, so it's not really uncommon for Japanese media to play with the idea of a capital-G God.

Also, there's Megaten.

Personally I think that's a pretty pleasant niche. I stopped expecting a lot from isekai protagonists because I've realized that most of the time they're not really the stars of the show. The star of the show is often the world around them, and the more (and in more interesting ways) they explore that world the better.

I'd compare it to the orginal Sherlock Holmes novels (don't drag me to the stake yet, I'm going somewhere with this!). Sherlock Holmes is obviously the star of these novels (they're named after him obviously) but he's not the protagonist, that's Watson. Sure, Watson isn't a flat self-insert but he serves the same purpose as these self-inserts in isekai: he's a relatively normal person through whom we see Sherlock, through whom we observe how interesting and unusual and special Holmes is. If Sherlock Holmes were the protagonist himself and we could read his thoughts every step along the way, we wouldn't even have a murder mystery but a "watch the protagonist do everything without mistake" book.

Interesting little tidbit: in the novels Watson and Sherlock most of the time have the same information available. Sherlock adresses Watson as a friend and constantly repeats something among the lines of "we see the same thing, you just aren't observing". In the BBC show Sherlock only appears smart because he can suddenly and out of nowhere introduce clues and observations we have never even seen before. He also talks down to Watson a lot and constantly calls him an idiot. In both cases Watson functions as the stand-in for the audience. Draw your own conclusions.

I guess Isekai functions in more or less the same way: if you expect too much from the protagonist, you're putting too much of your attention on the wrong thing. Not to say that any of them can compare to a literary classic, I just couldn't think of a better comparison at the moment.

what the hell is reimu doing in this shitshow ?

>The star of the show is often the world around them
>JRPG/MMO environment

Serious question from a stupid man, what's the difference between a relatable character and a self-insert one?

And there's why a lot of them disappoint.

From what I've seen, these worlds only exist to create problems for loser protagonist-kun to fix through some bullshit combination of OP powers and real world knowledge and everyone can't help but praise him for being so smart and special and handsome. Loser protagonist-kun is also the lens through which you see the world, so it's inevitably going to get grating when he's a cowardly, convictionless loser who only exists as some sort of central anchor for the rest of the world and story to revolve around.

I have had to write a lot of loser protagonist-kuns and I have honestly developed a psychotic hatred of them, so take what I say with a grain of salt.

>I have had to write a lot of loser protagonist-kuns
>write
What? Reading them I understand, but writing them?

...

well, you can relate to someone having a mother, a job, a brother, etc
so i guess a relatable character is a character you have a lot of empathy for, you can feel for their personnal problems and struggle
you can relate to bilbo who has to get out of his comfort zone, but not to gandalf, who's an old geezer who carry the party(except if your yourself an old geezer)
a self insert is just an empty shell you can slip in. Think about video games characters, like in zelda, pokemon, the elder scrolls, etc

Wait, you're the guy behind those Sakura VNs? I like 'em, they're a guilty pleasure.
Explain Sakura Swim Club, motherfucker. The entire appeal is that there's to babes who want your dick and you can give it to them both. Why the hell isn't there even a single threesome scene?! What were you thinking nigga?

user, please don't talk about Swim Club. I am at my wit's end with writing these stories. My employer wants me to start work on the Swim Club sequel soon and all I can think about is how much I don't want to do it. I am stuck with a handful of shitty anime tropes to work with, I get an infinite amount of shit for writing these garbage stories and all I am known as is "the writer" while Wanaca and Inma have a cult following and adoring fans.

But you have a good point about the threesome scene, I'll bring this up with my employer later.

Fake and gay.

Pic related is a drawing that Wanaca made for me as a birthday present.

A self-insert is a character who is literally the author, presented in a fictionalised form. It's considered a derogatory term because most writers who employ the device do so with zero self-awareness, using their self-insert to project an idealised version of themselves into a power-fantasy of their own design. Generally speaking, no-one wants to read the literary equivalent of masturbation, so using self-inserts in this way is frowned upon.

Self-inserts can be used well, but they're more suited to comedic meta-fiction, where it's clear the author knows what a slippery slope they're standing on, and is willing to laugh at themselves.

A relatable character, on the other hand, is just someone who you, the reader, identify with. That could be any character - all that matters is that you, personally, can relate to their feelings, their reactions, their desires and their worldview. Maybe they're a selfish character in a crowd of moralising heroes. Maybe they're a do-the-right-thing hero in a crowd of assholes. Maybe they're someone who just really likes cakes, or cats, or gardening. Maybe they're someone who lives in the moment, or someone who has to plan everything down to the finest detail.

That's not to say you can't relate to an author's self-insert character. It's just that self-inserts, by their very nature, are often written too specifically for anyone but the author to identify with them.

I believe that these stories are much harder to write than it looks, especially when you're trying to turn smut into something enjoyable. Work hard writer-kun, you can do it.

We're all anons here user. Best to just treat these things with plausible dependability.

A relatable character has realistic traits that you can, as the name implies, relate to. They're written in a way that can make you empathize with them. A relatable character feels a bit more real.

A self-insert is not this. A self-insert is often something you would want to be. Self-inserts are generally lacking any relatable characteristics - after all, anything that would make them into their own person in any meaningful way gets in the way of you being able to fantasize that you're there in then. Which leads me to the next point, the corner stone of the self-insert: power fantasy. Self-inserts are things like absurdly powerful, or absurdly beloved, or anything else of that nature. The nothing slightly personalityless loser who somehow is the best at everything and has a harem of girls throwing themselves at him for just being so super special awesome, that's a power fantasy.

You absolute nigger, I played your games.

Believe me, user, it is. Thanks for being nice. I can't reveal too much about what I'm working on, but there will be some fun things like that Alarune character who is styled after a Victorian era lady, whose name is Miss Primrose.

Thank you for taking the time to reply.
I'll ponder on this.

Not really into e-celebs, but that's a solid point and reminds me of some video where some basement dweller explained why shonen protagonists make better harem protagonists than harem protagonists. In shonen the harem is a secondary piece of eyecandy and the story is mostly about the protagonist and the challenges he overcomes. He's actually a person, and you can more or less see why everyone wants his dick.

They're wrong, because a good chunk of shonen protagonists are personalityless losers that have special powers that make them amazing.

Don't get me wrong, harem protagonists are also generally awful but harem protagonists suffer from their own problems. One of which is that they tend to also be their own form of bland self insert, and their series often hinge on them being non-committal and passive, even when girls actively want his dick. Though occasionally shonen protagonists will suffer from this too. Or, at least, series that like to brand themselves as seinen series while just being a shonen series with bigger, lewder titties

Oh yeah, and it's worth bearing in mind that for some people, all it takes for them to "relate" to a character is for said character to look like them. I put relate in quotes, because in these kinds of surface-level cases, the viewer isn't really relating to the character's personality or goals, but rather they're projecting their own personality onto a figure that superficially resembles themselves.

This is the "audience surrogate" or "audience self-insert". A character might be a bland, personalityless husk, but as long as they're visually similar to a certain subset of the audience, that subset will happily fill in the blanks themselves. These characters usually appear in power-fantasies, to allow that subset of the audience to imagine themselves living out said fantasy.

This is also why those same subsets gets angry whenever their blank-canvas characters are given a "canonical" personality. It breaks the illusion that they are that character, and makes it harder for them to project themselves into the character's shoes.

See also: any argument about "shipping" in fanfic communities, and how batshit fanfic writers can get about authors "sinking their ships".

How do you get a job like that anyway?

I made a post on the Lemmasoft forums, got picked up by my employer and generally did a better job than the previous writers he employed. As it turns out, many writers in the industry are lazy, arrogant and generally annoying to deal with.

Something else I want to add in about audience surrogates.

They generally come with a lot of assumptions and some moralzing to your audience. Because if you self-insert into a character, the story is basicly telling what "you" are doing when describing the character. Because if the character's actions don't align with what you would do you start to seperate from the character.

This also means that these stories have to make assumptions about their target audience to create a workable character and it's why you usually get some mix of generic good guy and I'm too cool for this as a protagonist. And consequently, the target audience is rather specific. That's why we see so much this stuff aimed at teenager. When we grow up we learn to find a place in the world and frequently struggle with this, it's easy to anchor a story here.
That's not to say there aren't self-insert characters aimed at adults, but we recognized those aimed at teenager better because we can look back at ourselves at that age and have more experience with media in general.

The harem anime protagonist syndrom also roots in the self insert nature of the story, doesn't it? Your audience is presented with a variety of fantasy girlfriends and if the protagonist commits to a real relationship, a larger portion of your audience breaks their projection onto him.
Dunno how it works for shonen though, the only one I watch right now is Hero Academy and there is a fixed pairing for the protagonist.

It's worth noting that, due to Japan's mono-phenotypic population, it's SUPER easy to create stand-in protag's that match 90% of their audience's physical traits e.g. black straight hair and pale-to-very-lightly-tanned skin tone. Couple this with a strong culture and other unifying factors (the most obvious of which is school uniforms) and you get a recipie for cheap, easy stand-in protags. These factors don't exist in most other major populations (even if their are physical similarities due to being a mono-ethnic society, there still tend to be large divergent subcultures and fashion ideals, breaking the uniformity), which is why it's so damn popular in Japan and it's other mono-phenotype, strong-culture neighbors like China and Korea.

Got any particular funny/horrific stories?

Well damn, I have negative interest in these sorts of games, but that sounds like a character I want to meet.

I do have some stories about some of the idiots I met through Lemmasoft. Some guy contacted me to convince me that Winged Cloud was going under and that I should jump ship as soon as I can. The same guy also never saw the Steam pages of the Sakura games and the sheer amount of reviews on them, concluding that he was full of shit. He also told me that when he told me to, I should shut up and come with him. I was sure that he thought his farts smelled like rich mahogany. Some time later, the person who put me in contact with him told me that he had stolen money off her and basically stolen her project too.

That girl was your typical tumblr user and what she proposed for me to collaborate on was a thinly veiled social justice story on an alternate fantasy world where one of the girls was a rape victim and the other one was an elf which served as a stand in for black people. Much later down the line, she told me that she had gotten a position in a studio and was mad because her employer wouldn't let her insert a genderfluid character into the novel that he was paying her to write. What was interesting was that she lived with a bunch of people who shared her political views and admitted that they were all awful people.

I liked Everworld though.

To be fair, they could be awful people due to reasons other than their political views. Still, the person seems like kind of a bad writer and certainly unprofessional.

It's the curse of the moldbreaker. Do something new and do it well, everyone will copy you. Heck, I got a plot about being stuck in a videogame in my head since before I got into anime, simply because there were so many one-off tron jokes that I though it was a standard story.

Which Sakura do you think is the 'best' one? I liked Angels.

Those were my main issues with her. My own views are conservative, but I don't believe in inserting them where they're not welcome. I think that's what she failed to understand. She later told me that she respected the effort I put into my games, but couldn't respect that my games weren't promoting feminism or breaking female stereotypes.

I personally think the best Sakura game is Sakura Dungeon. Its plot was lacking and I could have done a much better job of revealing the final boss, but I think I did an okay job with the character interaction. It also has gameplay, which is a big deal. Second would be Sakura Fantasy, but my employer put a lot more money into that and it probably wouldn't stand out on its own merit if it didn't include a good OST, voice acting and professional sound engineering.

Protag can't commit to one of his harem members because it upsets shippers. Just look at Love Hina.

>wanting recognition from weebs and neckbeards
That will not end well. You'd get a lot more "WRITE IN MY KINK" people that you don't want to interact with.

I know that our fanbase isn't the best, but there are times where I just want a little bit of appreciation. I don't think my writing is the hottest shit ever or that I'm the next Tolkien, but it would be nice to read one or two guys saying "Hey, that guy did pretty good."

You're not wrong about people wanting their kinks catered to though. I think the first time I talked to people on /v/, the first things they asked for were flat chests, futa and traps.

Tolkien's erotica would probably be garbage anyway.

Do you write scenes for the arists to draw, or do they draw the scenes and then tell you to write for them?

It depends. Sometimes my employer commissions his own list of scenes ahead of time and I just have to work with what I'm given, as was the case in Swim Club and Magical Girls, or there's some spare scenes lying around and I have to use them somehow. In other games, I'm the one who sends off a scene list to the artists and work with them on it. I have to admit that in this case, the scenes tend to be better.

In most cases when I request art assets, I always leave my descriptions vague so that they have plenty of room to work with while still getting the general idea of what needs to be done. It's not just scenes from the artists, but I also have to request background art, send off a music list and manage whatever other assets need to be made.

Sounds like an interesting job if nothing else. Do you enjoy it, or does the shit outweigh the fun parts?

The name is literally “summer dawn” in English. It reads like a pseudonym. That should’ve been the first clue.

It's been a good job, but I just haven't been able to cope with it lately. The project I have been working on for the last eight months is currently stuck in development hell because the programmer hasn't been on in weeks. I'm desperate to work on something new that isn't just another generic ecchi harem story, but I can't do that because this eight month project has cost too much money and my employer needs to make some bank first.

What I really want to do is make something that can be legitimately admired and praised for its story, but I don't know if I have the skill to do that or if anyone would even care if I did make a Sakura game with an amazing story. I'm in a bit of a rut, user.

Someone, in some dark corner of the internet, will praise you if you create an ecchi game with a great story. Hell, isn't that how the fate series began?
Pic and link related:
youtube.com/watch?v=3IcOx1u94mg

I mean, people love oglaf, and that's just really well written funny porn at its core.

Can you put a very hidden mention about something Veeky Forums related in the next game you are writing? For example thin your paints etc.

>oglaf
>well written

Well drawn certainly but 9 out of 10 comics dont make sense.

If it makes you feel better, more people are probably reading your anime porn then would ever read anything you wrote based on it's own literary merits!