Discussion Why are Chinese novels written in third person?

Isnt Wattpad an erotica fiction site? Ya I wouldn't have been able to read anything too if that was my first experience with first person pov lel.

 

Totally opposite for me. I read books solely cuz its the only form of literature or media that allows one see the world from someone else's eyes, understand their thought process, know their life philosophy and experience their life by entering basically into their mind.

Two kinds of people I guess.

 

Not all there are erotica. Whenever I browse, there are still decent ones but you gotta dig deep

Also, I like your avi and I'll have to remind you not to double post. You can try the +Quote button to reply to multiple messages at once

 

I think there is a heavy selection bias at play. As I mentioned earlier, because of the strict copyright enforcement philosophy of light novel publishers in Japan, most of the good quality works struggle to be translated. Secondly, web novels just aren't of the quality in Japan as they are in China. Japan excels in paperback light novel material that is heavily editorialized, and even if the material is relatively childish, you will struggle to find poor syntactic writing.

Most novels for translation from the JP reading community suffer from three issues.

1. Lack of access to translation of quality novels because of copyright and no clear player like webnovel or wuxiaworld that can officially translate the relatively better quality works in their rosters under people who are being paid to maintain some semblance of quality.

2. Amateur translators mostly trying their hand at practicing learning japanese who can only pool from unregulated webnovels from sites like syosetsuka which has loss poor quality of writing.

3. Unlike China, Japan doesn't have absolute censorship of anything contrary to their government's ideology. There's more freedom on the topics to write about. Most good authors follow the western cliche of writing literary fiction and JRPG/Anime style writing is usually the domain of either otakus or not really that great writers. It's the equivalent of Harry Potter and twilight fan fiction writers on Wattpad in the English speaking world.

The dynamic in china is completely different. Censorship has ruined most literary and expressive art forms. Any form of realism and even the hint of criticism becomes an excuse to run the ban hammer there. This has led to those interested in writing transfer over to the genre scene of fantasy, oriental history or sci fi (particularly sci fi for the published scene), which tend to overpopulated the kind of books common here on NU. It is why the quality of the written word is better in CN webnovels than in JP webnovels. If we talk about novels in general, leaving the confines of JRPG, fantasy, and other teen pulp genres, then there are tons of Japanese authors with worldwide renown. Harumi Murakami, Sayaka Murata, Taeko Kono etc.

 

These are good points, but I don't think that this fully explains the quality disparity between Chinese and Japanese webnovels. The difference primarily comes from the fact that these Japanese writers don't seem to care about the quality of their writing. Instead of drawing inspiration from all the great works in Japanese literature, they ignore it; I presume that they may consume only otaku works. As a result, a lot of the books feel like manga scripts with all the visuals stripped out of them.

 

wait, how do you know if Chinese or japanese books are written by amateurs or pro,, or are good or bad? Can you read both chinese and japanese?

 

Well yea CN are generally better than Jap novels. Dont know is it because of higher volume of CN translated novels or Larger Author ratio compared to japan.

CN has huge market and reader base. Its like japanese anime industry. JP novels on the contrary are just small market and small reader base as most of the people watch anime rather than read a novel. Comparitively speaking when you get into novels you are bound to be exposed to CN market rather than JP novel market as there are huge variety of translated novels on many different genre.

JP novels i have read are mostly for Teenagers and Weebs while CN pleases more mature audiences most of the time.

 

It has everything to do with what gets translated. The overall Japanese literary market is one of the best in the world; filled with great writers and tons of variety. But what shows up on NU tends to be just the popular books on Syosetu and there's a huge gulf in quality between Syosetu and the rest of the Japanese market. The most notable point is that the readers and writers on Syosetu are incredibly insular and this insularity is probably the main reason for the lack of quality.

The Chinese equivalent to Syosetu is probably SFACG, but we get books from tons of other webnovel sites. It should be noted though that we don't get a good sampling of the full gamut of what Chinese readers get but it's still a lot more varied than the Japanese books that show up on NU. I'd say that even Chinese otaku are influenced by a greater variety of material than Japanese otaku, and this makes a big difference in the kinds of books that are produced.

 

First-person POV is lazy writing, don't quote me on that, lmao. In most cases it is tho. I know for sure it was easier for me to write first person that third person. It is the standard to write in the third person and it gives you more freedom in narration, the reader is the omniscient observer (though you could limit how much info they get if you want mystery). When you write in the first person, you get those boring non-MC chapters that start with "I am XYZ, and I'm gonna explain my POV of the same events that happened in the last chapter." First person lets you put the reader into the MC position, though realistically, it puts the author in the MC position, lmao. Third person lets you have more directorial freedom when writing settings, character appearances, mood, thoughts, etc. In short, one of the main reasons I gave up on Japanese webnovels is the writing style. Nothing personal, if you prefer the simplistic style, it's a choice.

 

While the majority of English-language novels are written in the third person, first person narratives are still pretty common. Famous examples are works like the Sherlock Holmes stories and Huckleberry Finn. It's probably especially common in things like YA novels where a more personal voice is important to telling the story. It's a useful tool so you're going to see writers use it whenever it serves their purposes. First person narratives are only going to be especially rare in languages where there's no real difference between it and the third person.

The laziness in Japanese webnovels goes way farther than this so I can't blame you for giving up on them. Hell, "writing settings, character appearances, mood, thoughts" is barely an afterthought for a lot of these writers! It's also sad that too many translators decide to render the original directly into English rather than rewriting it so that it flows properly.

 

Not all Cnovels are in third person pov. Actually, I think it depends more on the translator or the way the novel is written? I'm not exactly sure about that. Also, there are tons of third person pov western novels, I don't know how you've never come across them.

It's funny how you say “For now let's forget about my hate for jap novels” and then there's “And I am not interested in Japanese wonderland cause most of them are filled with Gary stu, beta, pussy, spineless Mc.” I don't blame you for your hate of JP novels, but this is so extra lmao

 

That's not really the difference in first and third, in published writing at least. There's plenty of well written classic First person books. Most of western literature is written in third person because first person limits you to one spot unless you use multiple viewpoints, which is very jarring for readers. It also turns off people who don't like the main character since that character is much more in your face. Third person lets people tolerate very flawed main characters a bit easier than first person.

For example I don't like Naruto and would eventually put down a 3rd person book of him, but if it was a novel in first person I'd burn the book.

 

Translators are highly unlikely to ever change a piece written in first person to third person and vice versa. That's a lot of extra work for no reason. First person works are just much more rare in Chinese than in other languages; largely because this change in voice doesn't come with the advantages that you'd see in those other language. It's the same reason why you'd almost never see a Chinese novel written in anything other than present tense.

I think that it depends on the genre and the target audience as well. For example, I'd expect YA novels to have a lot more first person works than adult fiction.

 

Well...this thread turned into shitting on first person pov and jap novels.

 

Third person is always better, unless it's a comedy.

 

Because there's an information constraint writers have to consider when writing first person pov. When you do bad writing practice like heavy-handed exposition on first person pov the noobish feels really shows. I guess when Chinese WN industry booming noobish 1st POV webnovels got eliminated by their noobish 3rd POV webnovels counterpart in term of popularity--you know, survival of the fittest.

Then again, there are excellent stories written by Chinese authors that use 1st person POV, like short story Our Second Master, and I'm sure more on Chinese traditional publishing scene that still prints 1st POV novels. But again, those are written outside Chinese webnovel community so I don't know if that really count.

 

First person narratives are probably even less common in published Chinese novels than in web novels. At least the latter has SFACG that has strong Japanese otaku influences so they'll be more likely be written in the first person.

 

There is no past, present and future tense in japanese or chinese. Eastern languages simply don't have this complicated rules as english. Same as old english.

In times of war, even english will become one or two words like "loose' meaning firing all your arrows because grammar only kills the communication.

 

Japanese at least has conjugation and something that roughly resembles the split between past tense and present/future tense. Chinese is notoriously loose with grammar rules and just how flexible the word usage can be and it doesn't have any of the above. Japanese is a very different animal and I don't see any reason to lump the two together. I suspect that it's not quite as rigid as English is but it's not nearly as loose as Chinese.