Discussion This is Baffling

I wear headphones no matter what nowadays because the sound from my laptop would irritate my family.

 

I wouldn't be able to read a novel with pictures like that. It would completely drive me nuts. That being said, I might do a review to let other readers know that this is something in the novel that may bother some people but I wouldn't actually rate the review. I feel like rating it on the fact that the author has a quirk that I personally don't like seems a little disrespectful. Rate on actual quality or story elements, not an author quirk.

 

The fundamental problem isn't about whether it uses pictures for dialog tags or not. I've learnt from personal experiences when people comment or review unreasonably, unless it's pure hate, there's usually underlying issue that they couldn't point out themselves.

In this case, the pictures are distracting because they steal the dialog baseline position, making them appear too obvious and harder to ignore even when readers already making an habit to depend less on them. It appears novel at first but when you've read a few chapters you'll notice it harder to get into "pilot mode" because when you jump from normal paragraph to a dialog, the first thing your eyes see is the picture instead of text. It breaks train of thought and makes it harder to immerse in the dialog itself.

I wrote a CSS snippet for a quick fix, override the site default style with browser CSS inject extensions like User JavaScript and CSS. Note that this snippet for desktop only:

Code:

.wp-block-media-text.alignwide {
    transform: translateX(-126px);
    border-left: 1px solid transparent;
}

.wp-block-media-text.alignwide:hover {
    border-color: #0002;
}

.wp-block-media-text.alignwide > figure {
    transform: translateX(12px);
    opacity: 0.6;
   
    transition: all 0.125s ease-in-out;
}

.wp-block-media-text.alignwide:hover > figure {
    transform: translateX(18px);
    opacity: 1;
}

 

There's also the fact that a novel is different from a script is different from a comic is different from a visual novel is different from a game is different from animation is different from live action. There are things we expect from them and when you bring aspects of them to other mediums you have to do it right or you may annoy people with them.

A good example of this being done right, for what I can remember of what I read of it, is Homestuck, that integrates a lot of things pretty well and not in a way that detracts or distracts.

 

Makes sense

 

I understand the possible helpfulness of such an addition but personally I'd never go near a book like that. Like NodiX has said, by placing the images in front of the dialogue tags, it distracts the reader and breaks the flow of the prose. I also don't like to have pictures because they never match the character I have in my head and it always throws me off to have to readjust my entire impression of the character to fit the image. Plus, I have bad memories of so many bad otome games and visual novel plots that this hits way too close to home for me to feel comfortable.

 

Some visual examples of what I was talking before:

Mobile


Firefox Reader View on mobile


Pocket on mobile

 

Tbh I even rather this style of translating

It helps me picture the imagine the characters speaking better in my head. The occasional pic in this particular novel n tln helps even more

 

I think it's experimental, the same way we have comics with onomatopoeia sounds like BAAMM! in mp3.
Not everyone likes a mix of things

 

I was wondering why this format looked so similar when I remembered that comico.jp had a novel section and it looked similar (btw: This is novel is called ReLIFE in Isekai):
Granted, this is a predominantly comic website stepping into webnovels, so the novel is a weird hybrid. I've read a couple on the site and they have whole panels of comics in the middle of the text.

I can see how this can bother people, but personally I just see it as a graphic novel and quite enjoy it.

 

If you Need pictures to tell characters apart then the writing is poor, Characters should have somewhat varied way of speaking , different enough for you to be able to tell.
For instance In my short story I would use the word "Bloody" for one of my characters. Only this one character used it excessively.
"We Bloody did it!".

Personally I don't mind pictures at all, assuming that the speech of each character is sufficiently different.

 

Hmm not really surprised, but it's good to know who is talking and we can see the characters. Webtoon in my country had published a webnovel like this. Does romance webnovel in Korea lately published in this kind of format? I don't really mind the pic, but it would be better if the pic can follow the mood from its actual lines.

 

Well, I am calling dibs in publishing your story..

 

I also dislike having other things except for words in my reading experience. It is distracting and stopping me from immersing in the story.

 

Part of the problem of not being able to tell who's speaking (at least in Japanese novels) is that so much information about the speaker is lost in translation. JP -> EN can come out very flat at times, and attempts to re-inflate the dialogue can change the characterization at times. Things like pronouns, politeness levels, honorifics and god forbid puns might not get through the translation process very well a lot of the time.

Taking pronouns and politeness levels: making a character sound say, motherly, or like a young girl, or like a butler etc. can be done of course, but it's probably way less subtle in english compared to the original dialogue, and you have to be a skilled translator to cleverly write around it. It's especially noticeable in long sequences of just dialogue between a couple characters. It's obvious from their speaking styles in the original who's saying what, but it can all sort of flatten out in translation, so you're forced to either change their words around to be more obvious or add in "he/she said / Name said" incessantly

Adding in the pictures (though I can see why some people would see it as distracting) is a really easy way to get around this tricky problem, while still staying more faithful to the original author's work in a way.

 

I give my applause to the person/people that took their time to insert pictures each and every time. Wow.

 

I also don't like the little pictures next to dialogue. Unless the dialogue is meant to be a series of Tinder messages or something like that, there's no point in it and it's distracting. Not to mention, I would feel like the author is either incompetent or lazy at writing dialogue if readers need pictures to know who's talking.

 

Imagine adding expressions to the illustrations that go along the dialogue.

 

(I can only use Japanese as a base, don't know Korean or Chinese sorry.)
But to give a concrete example: we have a dialogue between a young man, adult woman and old man. Written in Japanese, it would be obvious who's who as:
-the young man could use Ore/Boku as his pronoun and be more assertive in his statements, along with male speech patterns that would tip you off (kana, kai, da)
-the adult woman would use Watashi/Atashi and maybe even add the feminine particle Wa to the end of her sentences, and be less assertive in general with feminine speech patterns (kashira, no, nano)
-the old man might use Washi as his pronoun and append Jaa to the end of his sentences or use old timey sounding verb formations, again with male speech patterns

All of what I bolded above flattens out and is easily lost in translation. (Sentence endings are dropped, ALL pronouns with all their nuances become the pronoun I) The fact is that asian languages in general tend to have more social status relevant info built into some words - nuance acting like little flags to tell you info about who's speaking. Practically all those flags just fall off in english in a great flattening, the meaning of what they said is there but a lot of nuance is lost.

There are ways to make male characters sound assertive, female characters feminine and old guys sound old in English, but it takes some skill to write around, without overdoing it and majorly changing the character. eg. you could maybe make the old guy speak in 40s-50s era slang or even ye olde english but that's a major change to his character.

I wouldn't be so quick to just slam the translators as lazy or incompetent, as it can be quite the tricky problem to work around, even for skilled writers. A lot of translators on this site do it as just a hobby and some don't even have English as their native tongue, making it even harder to write subtly nuanced dialogue.

 

Hence why the review baffled me. It fixes the problem you mentioned above