Discussion I've been wondering.....

Lol... However if I used all my knowledge..

Demon lord and hero should come from dragon Quest...

Vr goes to. Hack.. Nothing beats them.

Harem will belongs to eroge..

 

really guys, I wanted to know what started the boom of LNs similar to shield bro....

 

It's like asking when did people start writing fiction about magic.... It's hard to trace back..

 

What!? Banned from playing!? Who would do such a nefarious thing!?

 

His parents obviously

 

I guess this is a good example why sarcasm and rhetorical questions should not be said online

 

is everybody really forgetting kuro no maou? i'm willing to bet hero to another world craze started from that.

 

LOL

 

I thought kuro no mao is quite new and not that popular though?
btw imho your signature is funny and awfully disturbing at the same time.

 

The oldest series I remembered about transfer to another world was Kanata Kara (From Far Away), a shoujo manga where the MC got lauched to another world by a bomb. She also became a heroine and defeated the world's source of evil.
Game element's definitely the HACK franchise though...that, or Ragnarok...I forgot which one's older...

 

Fufufu~
The origin of the story of hero defeat demon king might come from a game called Dragon Quest... it's very popular in Japan...
In fact... early hero stereotypes came from that game...

 

History
Popular literature has a long tradition in Japan. Even though cheap, pulp novels resembling ranobe were present in Japan for years prior, the creation of Sonorama Bunko in 1975 is considered by some to be a symbolic beginning. Science fiction and horror writers like Hideyuki Kikuchi or Baku Yumemakura started their careers through such imprints.

In the 1980s, epic novels by Yoshiki Tanaka— Heroic Legend of Arslan — took young male Japanese audiences by storm. Also, RPG-inspired Record of Lodoss War novels achieved popularity. All of those were later animated.

The 1990s saw the smash-hit Slayers series which merged fantasy-RPG elements with comedy. Some years later MediaWorks founded a pop-lit imprint called Dengeki Bunko, which produces well-known light novel series to this day. The Boogiepop series was their first major hit which soon was animated and got many anime watchers interested in literature.

Dengeki Bunko writers continued to slowly gain attention until the small light novel world experienced a boom around 2006. After the huge success of the Haruhi Suzumiya series, suddenly the number of publishers and readers interested in light novels skyrocketed.

Light novels became an important part of the Japanese 2D culture in late 2000s. The number of ranobe series put out every year increases, the most celebrated artists frompixiv illustrate them and the most successful works are animated and made into manga and live action movies.

 

Right! Magic Knight Rayearth. How could I forgot that legend...

Yep, Dragon Quest. This one's definitely one of the origin

 

I've said dragon Quest earlier but nobody just care.. Xp.. Just take attention to my post about Ln history then..

 

Fufufu~
But I think... the Western literature are influencing many Japanese fantasy novel... mainly stuff like The Lord of the Rings...
Did you know that the word mithril is first used on that novel?
And the idea of Goblin and Orc in Japanese novel are also come from it?
Goblin is actually a type of small fairy according to literatures... not a monster...

 

Oh yeah...sorry...somehow that passed by...

From the history, I remembered Lodoss (the elves were very pretty ^^). It could be an influence to another world imagery in novels nowadays. Slayers' more like a slapstick comedy though, and Haruhi may have started the LN-based anime trend.
...dunno about the others...

To add to that...
I looked back at some titles not mentioned in the history, and suspect around 1993s perhaps the boom of transported to another world for manga (at least, the shoujo side of it). There were Rayearth, Kanata Kara, The Twelve Kingdoms, Curious Play...