Discussion Totally fed with almost every recent novel being reincarnation/transmigration.

I'm just so fed up. The problem isn't necessarily that the MC is reincarnated or came from another world, but that MC being one seems to be of no value.

Most novels with transmigration MC, never act as though they were once in a completely different world. They just start killing in a few chapters without a blink, and the fact that MC was once in a completely different world is never recognized or is of any significance after 30 or so chapters. Also how come not a single character notices just how different MC is compared to whoever's body the MC stole 3 chapters ago? Almost 100% of the time, that person would be the complete opposite of how the MC would start acting, and no one questions. If they do, it's "Oh wow, he changed so much since I saw him 7 hours ago this morning. Must be nothing.", but never seen a serious dialogue with MC's parents, friends, family, etc about the sudden change.

Nowadays, if I start a novel with transmigrated MC, ill just skimp through how he came to the world, who he was before, and what he did. Cuz I'm sure ill forget he ever was from a modern world in a maximum of 10 chapters anyway. And it makes reading much better.

Then comes reincarnated MCs. And god they sure are awful.
Previous Life: Powerful Sword Emperor
Second Life: Sword skills? Cultivation techniques? No... Why would I have them?

If there is reincarnation, then MC can almost never use the Martial Arts of the previous life. The excuse the authors give is always the same. Which is "The Martial Art is a too high level". As if in the first life, the MC was born a Heavenly Emperor outta the womb, so he never needed to learn low-level skills in the first place. Absolutely dumb. All cultivation novels tell how once cultivation rank increases, memory increases to an unprecedented level, where one would memorize everything. So even if MC never learned Lower leveled skills, he never even came across one? BS.


But even if I look behind all of these things, one thing in particular just makes me lose my head. What's that? Reason! More than 90% (i am being very generous, I know) never explain this. Suddenly MC's soul flew to another new world, but it's never explained.

That's probably one of the reasons I like "God of Slaughter", "Unrivaled Medicine God", and some others more than I should despite their shortfallings. Despite the above novels mentioned lackluster explanation for the cause of MC being transmigrated/reincarnated, it's certainly better than "Truck-kun hit me so hard that my soul flew to another realm".




Don't know I suddenly felt like ranting at 6:30 am, probably I was reading shit novels all night, but yea. Gratz to anyone who actually read through whatever I have written.

 

honestly, when it comes to JP novels, at some point, I started recognizing certain phrases as a warning sign. They include:

• kicked out
• tired
• office
• salary
• lazy
• weakest

There’s so many of these fuckers that I recognize there’s an issue in Japan for these kinda things to be so popular.

 

tldr;

 

Personally I would like to add qiet/ slow life to the list.

 

THANK YOU. I was starting to think I was the only one who'd noticed. Sometimes the "I'm from another world" thing just seems to be used as an excuse for why the MC is such a COOL, OPEN-MINDED REBEL! instead of being an actual plot point. I think part of the reason is that writing from the point of view of a character from modern-day Earth is just plain easier. We're so used to the attitudes of our time that it's difficult to get into the mindset of someone who would have been raised in a situation where the attitudes were so different--like a society where it's perfectly acceptable for an aristocrat to openly have a servant beaten to death for failing to grovel sufficiently, and feel no remorse or hesitation in doing so.

Some of the writers seem to get around the "Uh, why are you so drastically different than you were when I saw you at breakfast?" thing by having the MC "recover" from the fatal injury/illness that actually killed the original owner of the body they're inhabiting, and their radical personality change can be chalked up to memory loss or brain injury or something. Sometimes the original person was severely neglected and ignored by their family, or outright sent away for years, so nobody actually KNOWS what their real personality was like, and their total change in attitude is dismissed as them somehow having "forgotten their place" as the family embarrassment and punching bag.

As for the existential question of "Why Am I Here?", I think that gets glossed over a lot because it's just... not seen as important. The character used to be There, now they're Here, commence story. In many cases, there's no logical way for the MC to discover the explanation in-universe, but a lot of them don't even try to find out. They just go "oh, guess I'm in this new world now, how strange" and get on with the plot. I've only seen a few that even search for information. Again, I think it's simply because that's not an important part of the story from the writer's perspective, but for the reader, we put ourselves in the character's shoes and think that we would be freaking out and doing everything we could to find out what happened to us. (Also, in some cases, realizing that we would die inside of five minutes because we didn't kowtow to the right person or use just the right deferential tone in saying "good morning" to somebody important.)

Since you've started off a quality rant, may I join in?

What's with transmigrated MCs instantly deciding that the best possible use of this new life they've fallen into is to take elaborate revenge on the original owner's enemies, as if those people did those things directly to the MC in the first place? "Oh, poor original person, your siblings bullied you, and your elders always sided with them and punished you unjustly. In exchange for the use of your body (which neither you nor I arranged or agreed to, from everything I know), I will avenge you with all of the incredible intelligence and creativity I possess!" And then they spend 300 chapters taking elaborate revenge on a family of total jerks, instead of jumping over the wall and running away to "invent" the flush toilet, the steam engine, major-league sports, or something else stolen from modern times that would let them make money hand over fist and live the life of Riley. It's like "Avenge Previous Body's Owner" is the tutorial quest.

 

It's one of the reasons I stay away from long novels with these themes. Most of the time it's heavy with filler. Don't get me wrong, there's a few interesting novels that are interesting reads, but if you read enough of the same theme then you'll become jaded.

As for the OP's question points, I've thought about it and I think the main reason outside plot armor for the family and friends to not pick up on personality changes has to do with memory dumps of the previous armor and muscle memory. Most people stop thinking about their past as they live it, aside from the really high-emotion parts. Suddenly getting dumped a decade or more's worth of memories to sift through would cause changes to a consciousness. That, coupled with that body's programmed responses, would ensure that someone acted enough like the original owner to not throw too much suspicion.

Most people are self-centered anyway and see what they expect to see of the world, so it's not too far-fetched for a body's change of ownership to pass unnoticed unless they act very differently than expected.

I'm with @Vindictivity on leaving a trash family and starting over somewhere else if it's feasable, though. If righting your body's previous owner's wrongs is needed to give you full use, it can often be done away from them. There's no reason to stick around if you don't have to. Operate against them via third-parties or indirectly by shrinking their business contacts. If your past-life knew some great medical knowledge and your trash family is in a related industry like pharmaceuticals and beauty then you can deal with their suppliers and set up shop with a rival/new company and hit them with low-end-mid-range daily use, then later one with high-end luxuries to slowly shrink their market share. Rivals would probably start their decline to bankruptcy as well.

If that is too slow, then some "accidents" could happen that are done in such a way that you don't get karma if that's a thing in your new world.

I think it's mainly about word-count, though. So many plot-holes come up when you have authors that are just looking at padding easy story arcs. That and realistic scenarios often aren't dramatic enough to hold the attention of people who want to live vicariously through the MC.

 

yeah it is rare to find that their past lives hold huge significance. I remember 2 , Please Save my Earth, their past lives are they are aliens that is on the moon base and whatever kill them is still there( it is implied to be a plague) and the plot is them discovering what really happened and it is race cause sooner or later it will be discovered and might bring to earth the plague hence the title

Other one is about a master swordman that born as a prince. Everything he do is due to his past lives and it became very significant in the latest chapters as things are being revealed about his past life.