I swear, looking at some reviews on NU brings the same impression as observing some interesting animals in the zoo. Some elite-wannabe critics that can be called review meisters are particularly special. You can find some of them basically in any random review section under a novel with 10+ chapters. If you're wondering 'what kind of animals they are?' or how to become one of them? I will show you by sharing some of my observations: Spoiler: 1. Be strong! Be strong! In order to appear confident and filled with worldly wisdom + show everyone that you're unlike some ordinary Joe - you need to show these poor peasants that you're a true elite right from the start! Use your ace immediately! Start your review by claiming that protagonist is a Mary/Gary Stue and this whole novel is a wish fulfillment! Yes! Just like that! Show them! Remember! The keywords are Gary/Mary Stue and wish fulfillment! After all, no one but you have seen it coming just by looking at cover/description and tags like 'overpowered protagonist' that MC will be particularly amazing in this novel. The fact that typical web novel protagonist is successful much more often than not in his/her any endeavor is a huge secret! Spoiler: 1.1 More elite route? More elite route? Wanna give off even more expert vibes and impress all the underaged girls on NU? No problem, we have a solution even for you! Your key words/phrases: true literature/not some cheap light novel, the quality we expect to see, not for everyone, mature, not for kids/childish It can be combined into something like: A flawless masterpiece! This is the quality we expect to see from most popular novels! A piece of true literature! I'm shocked that I found it here! Maybe it's not for everyone, but those who know will understand! Certainly not something childish like works for fans of MGA, ATG or Emperor's Domination! Your aim is to act as a being of a much higher spiritual level, a chosen one, something akin to a superior mature humanoid. Imagine yourself as a true fan of Stanley Kubrick or David Lynch. You can find lots of 'excellent' examples of such acting in review sections about their works. In all honesty elitist literatis on NU are kinda low level in comparison. Spoiler: 2. Typical XXX Typical XXX After successfully establishing your 'not like everyone else's persona it's time to show all loosers how well-read you are. This step is very easy. You can basically reach the heavens in a single move! Step 1. Find any normal looking novel of any genre with average rating. Step 2. Enter its review section and type something like: Jesus Fcking Christ! What the heck is this? It's just a typical JP/CN/KR novel! How is it possible to read it? Fck you and your whole novel author! Where is my mechas against aliens plot in this cultivation novel??? Completely unreadable! 3. ??? 4. PROFIT!!! Spoiler: 3. Harem Harem. Harems have a special place in hearts of all review meisters! You see this fat Harem word in 'Genre' category, right? And maybe Polygamy in tags is here too? Well, completely ignore them! It's basically a 'now or never' moment of your life! It's time to express your completely unneeded opinion on harem genre! Specifically mention that you took away 1* from your review because this hateful novel contains harem in it!!!! After all, as a chosen one, you have special eyesight! Not everyone is as gifted as you! Condemn this author and hypocritically praise yourself as a pursuer of one true love! Or say that true men don't need Thots! One arm is enough! We all know that as a true upright human in such situations, you will ignore all the advances of opposite? gender (even if they don't mind and it's normal in this new for you world) and stay true to yourself! Also no matter the quality of the actual romance in novel, you still need to mention that it's shitty. Even gods can't imagine what can possibly satisfy your tastes! It's hareeeeeeeem boyzzz! Spoiler: 4. Some random drivel Some random drivel MC's personality is bad! - Yes, a true meister never approve anything. You use hard 'facts' and confidently declare your conclusion! No need to describe it or think that maybe it's actually something that someone else is looking for. As long as you don't approve - it's bad! Mc is too edgy! - No matter what protagonist's true personality is, as long as he killed someone once you can justifiably use this phrase! Show them that you're a truly mature and thoughtful boy! All plot is forced!!! A phrase that works in every situation. As long as it doesn't follow review meisters' Holy Bible's canon, all world buildings hereby declared as sloppy and heretical. It also needs to follow all rules of physics and economy extremely precisely. Otherwise expect to see the appearance of the members of said society in comment section denouncing author at every opportunity. That's all I guess. I'm tired, sleepy and can't think of anything else. ***I wouldn't be surprised if somewhere here exists this dark underground community of review meisters. It's like they are promoting their 'unique' review template or smth idk, you literally can find reviews like that almost under any novel. Though it's probably because people see a lot of such examples and maybe some of them even find them rather appealing? It can also be subconscious influence or whatever, my point is that these useless reviews can be found no matter what novel you're looking at. They take a lot of space and absolutely aren't helpful in any way. Ok, my outburst and 'inspiration' are over. I wish reviews like that will be more rare and helpful ones will prevail!
I probably have been guilty of a couple of these examples lol. I agree with you. Technically, reviews are supposed to go beyond mere opinions. When you have a public review system which is as polarized as it is here, with people only wanting to read specific types of genres/languages/troupes, it quickly devolves into a canned version of another review. However, we cannot really blame anyone. Personally, I look at the number of reviews a series gets. If one has a lot of them, whether good or bad, then it means that it has left a strong imprint on the reader. However, this fails when it comes to those 500+ chapter series. In that case, you just gotta go with personalized recommendations.
My biggest problem are the tags. I understand that not everybody has the energy to edit them, but at least the translator should edit the common tags like: Fe-/Male Mc or harem, action, Wuxia.
Well, the thing is a review can be written for many reasons, including, but not limited to, personal satisfaction, persuasion, satirizing, spoiling, warning, venting, showing off, genuine desire for helping, or sheer boredom. For my part, I only take umbrage with those who critcize a version of the story that exists only in their own minds (even subjective interpretation has limits) or who feel that not agreeing with their preference somehow makes one a poorly read imbecile.
isn't that just the nature of reviews? Remember when yelp started to become a thing? Suddenly everyone and their mom was a food critic.
it's a food review app/site so when you look for places to eat in your locale, you can see how people liked or hated various places you're considering. They review more than just food places, but that's what it started off as. I guess it's not big where you live, but quite awhile ago, they exploded into the mainstream here and there was even a South Park episode mocking yelp and its reviewers.
oh, anyone can leave their review on yelp. Just think about instagram and all the people asking for free stuff because they're "influencers" and just replace that with asking for free food because they're "yelp critics".
I simply wish they will be more imaginative and original. At least it will be more interesting to read than a load of generic phrases that describe some obvious things. Complaining/trolling can be a form of art too. I've seen this one guy not long ago complaining about Gary Stu protagonist in novel, I've checked his other reviews out of interest and found 10+ recent reviews describing how op protagonists in other novels are. Basically a typical example of 1st option in my post here. And I was like 'wtf'? This guy literally reads similar novels and then writes similar reviews full of Gary Stue complains/references
The way I see it, you seem to just take issue with the fact that they take themselves too seriously. If it was down to how unoriginal their complaining is, I'd see you criticizing positive reviews that gush about their preferred/favorite novels for the same reason.At the end of the day,it's just two absolutes, one person only looks at the pros/their preference and the other looks at the cons. Half-full glass of water or half-empty glass of water.
It is not just NU reviews, the same or worse plaques most manga/manwha/whatever sites as well. To me it seems like a lot of the problem is from whiny immature wannabe edgelord posers. One manga site I visit has to many comments from one psycho complaining about how there is not enough bloodshed, and claiming series are trash because there are not filled with blood, or he might just post pics of gore. Then there are all the idiots with extremely unrealistic expectations complaining that something is a uninspired/knockoff/"copy/paste job"/etc because the story has the gall to start using one of the template examples for its genre. they have read 1-2 chapters and rant how nothing is original and it is a predictable repetitive crap story, when all they have seen is here is the MC and how he got in to the situational the start of the story. It it was a western it would be the same as complaining that the movie is garbage because the first 2 minutes are a gunslinger walking into town and meeting the sheriff/deputy, the rest of the town has not even been introduced, or its plight, but they feel they can judge the story. Keep in mind that there are only so many starting points, or ending points. the journey from the start to the end is what is important, yet people constantly judge stories before they have even started that journey. I believe the phrase you are looking for is internet trolls, not reviews.
While I do agree with the pitfalls you mention, in which I have splendidly planted myself face-first quite a few times like an ostrich learning to fly. Chances are, that the people who write these kinds of reviews are, in one way or another, reaching a boiling point with the novel they are reviewing. They go in with high expectations, lured in by the "Ranking" filter and the glam of the overall rating; only to be greeted with what, in the moment feels like a sub-par product. Can these reviewers articulate better, given that there's practically no word limit on their reviews? Yes. But in the heat of the moment- all they can dredge up is a simplistic "Reeeeee!". Like I said before, I've been prey to the exact same shortcomings you mention above. Take the harem tag for instance, I don't mind the harem influence on a novel as long as it doesn't warp the story and end up being the core focus. The exception to this is when the harem does contribute to an overall good story and is actually supportive of the MC or whoever. "I got caught up in a hero summoning but the world is at peace" being one such example. A sort of unrelated example to this would be "reincarnated as a dragon's egg", where in my very succinct and crass shit talking of the novel, I bash the MC. Why? Because the MC of the novel brilliantly puts themselves into life-threatening dangers and then proceed to complain and cry into the sunset. The trampling down on a potentially good plot with a bad MC got to me in the heat of the moment, and thus- my outburst. These bad reviews, and by extension- pretentiousness could be avoided completely if one takes time to articulate. But, well, taking time to pause and letting the story sink in is an art known to few. And, unfortunately, fewer still bother to pen what they think.
Ugh.. Your example of successful harem is certainly rather unique? I've actually wanted to ask this for a long time on NUF, but didn't actually bother, so I will use this opportunity. You see I've tried reading isekai at peace quite some time ago and dropped it at around c170. It simply feels like author treats readers as complete idiots or mentally challenged people. He keeps introducing new heroines, most of them 10k+ years old monsters/goddesses and all of them fall in love with this completely unremarkable average looking protagonist almost at first sight? How does it work? His personality is close to being pushover, albeit not completely, he is a little bit edgy. He has nothing remarkable about him. The only two proper heroines who had justified reasons were his childhood gaming buddy and goddess of death/frost? It's so damn ridiculous that I couldn't take it any longer and dropped it. At c170 there were already about 10+ such heroines in love with him for no reason. Will author introduce a proper excuse for it later? Is he a reincarnation of some heavenly gigolo or what? Even Chinese autistic xianxia harems have more proper relationship building than isekai at peace.
That is there own fault, using NU's ranks for reading novels is asking to read meh or sometimes even plain bad stuff.
While that is true, the ranking system is there for easier sorting and as such people do tend to rely on it. Hell, I used to go down the rabbit hole the series finder tosses me into to get at least something good. Finding worthwhile reads is like half of the process, and if the pick is a dud, then they'd have to start over. Edit- I don't know how, but I ended up fat fingering and copy-pasted another reply from above. My bad. I swear I wrote a long ass reply and ended up deleting it like a dumbass. Anyways, the story takes a lot more than the 170 chapters to improve. I think it's around 200-220 ish when the author thinks of giving each character a convincing backstory. Their past actually meshes well with their current interactions with the MC. And the MC utilizes that to act like a sponge and accept their sentiments. Sure, I don't think it's everyone's cup of tea but I feel like it turns out to be quite enjoyable later down the line. Edit- Uhhh pretty sure I didn't want to write the same message twice so I deleted the previous one but it turns out NU wants to toast the remainder of my brain cells. I'm a mess LMAO.