Discussion WHY ARE MALE CHARACTERS IN FEMALE CENTERED STORIES SO BAD?

Weak and naive shou is so old. Power bottoms are the trend nowadays. You should keep up with the times gramma

 

It being old doesn't change the fact that it's still prevalent in bl novels/manga to the point of it being the standard. And your argument can be applied to straight novels but you clearly have a double standard since you put bl on a pedestal. I'm not even that old, but being ageist is wack.

 

Oop you took that too seriously~ Wasnt trying to argue tho.

 

I find that the assertion in the OP that female-oriented books have terrible male characters isn't entirely on the mark. Generally, they have pretty male characters - these would be ones that I find entertaining and would like to see more of in the story. The real problem with them is that the male love interest is usually awful and since he dominates large chunks of the story, he ends up making everything worse by comparison.

See, the reason why a lot of male authors have trouble with writing female characters is because they're not exposed to media with good female characters. So unless they have their personal experiences to draw upon, they're not going to be up to the task. Female authors don't have the same problem because male characters are the norm just about everywhere so they're easy to get exposed to. And I think that any of the authors worth reading will have the general skills for it. And so the main reason why the male love interests are so bad is not a question of inability; it's because they're not designed to be good characters. What I mean by this is that they're less characters and more designs meant to invoke specific fantasies. If these specific fantasies don't for you, then the character is going to feel awful.

For male-oriented novels, I find that there are writers who feel comfortable with female characters. And the ones that do this are often quite excellent. I get why some readers think that this is a myth, but I don't think that this is as rare as you might think; it's just that these aren't the kind of books that are popular on NU. I think that the biggest problem is discoverability. Even if only a tiny percentage of books do a good job, the sheer volume of books out there will still mean that there are way more of these good books out there than a person can read over their lifetime. The problem is that these nuggets are drowned out by all the mediocrity out there, and I'm afraid that NU and NUF do a very poor job of drawing these out.

 

My point was more about Mediocre writers.

Bad writers will always write trash, and all genres can get bad writers.

Similarly speaking, good writers exist in every genre, so every genre out there will have good stories with good characters.

But I was talking about the mediocre ones. Mediocre Shoujo tends to almost always have wish-fulfillment male leads which is just... Boring. I mean, it can be fun at the first times, but you just grow really tired of it after a while, even if the story itself is still decent and passable, even if you like the main character overall... The male leads are just soooooo bland and boring, and it ends up becoming hard to stomach.

Mediocre GL and BL OTOH tends to have properly developed main character and love interest. Even if they still fall under tropes to some extent, they still tend to feel more developed than "Literally perfect male lead" which you can often find in mediocre Shoujo... So they end up feeling better overall, because the love interests end up feeling like actual characters.

Again though, this is about the mediocre stories. The bad stories will still suck, and the good stories will be great regardless of genre. I'm specifically talking about those fairly average and unremarkable stories that you find by yourself and end up reading to the end (or maybe you dropped at some point for no reason in particular. Nothing seriously bothered you, but you just lost the drive to keep on reading at some point), but never felt particularly amazed by, and will definitely not recommend to any of your friends because it's not good enough for it. I'm talking about those very... "Okay" stories.

 

I'd say that this problem is actually most pronounced with the good stories. The way I see it is that, if you care about quality, the bad books aren't even in the picture, and there are enough good books to not even bother anything that's not up to par. Usually these two categories will reveal themselves fairly quickly so they're pretty easy to drop right away.

But when it's a different story when it comes to books that are good. For example, "the Princess Eats Pigeons" can come highly recommended; with tons of praise for the political intrigue and mind games, and the start is great! The prose is good, the characters spark off the page, and the conflicts are complex and interesting. Until you get to the midway point and the dreaded male love interest starts gobbling up more and more of the storyline until what was once charming to read ends up being unfun and tedious. And because it takes so long to get to this point, and the earlier portions were so entertaining, you end up wasting a ton of time on a book which seemed so promising in the beginning. The worst of all this is that nobody recommending the book ever mentions the negative elements and the ratings outright lie. I've seen this phenomenon happen again and again, and it's the reason why this thread exists.

 

I dunno, to me that's bad writing. It's a story that had a good start and a good premise, but that lost its goal midway through and changed its focus completely and ended up becoming a completely different story that couldn't live up to its initial interesting elements.

If you start good and end bad, I put you in the mediocre category. You were unable to keep your story's quality throughout its entire narrative, so you still have a long way to go before you become a good author.

I could say the same about Otoburi tbh. Super fun and lovely slice of life with nice comedy that was done on a genre that was quite new at the time it was written (as in, it was innovative for its time)... Until it started a war arc of sorts that took most of the funny and lovely parts away, got a possessive male lead that completely ignore the MC's accomplishments and was just kinda bothersome, started focusing on a bunch of side character's PoVs when the story was primarily told by MC's PoV at first... It just completely changed the core essence of the story and ended up becoming something completely different. That's bad writing to me. If your story on the latter arcs can hardly resemble what you were going for in the beginning, then you messed up badly, and I can't call a story that messes up this badly as a "good story".

To me, those are stories with particularly high highs, and particularly low lows... They're not the kind of "meh" mediocre, but more like the frustrating type of mediocre. The one that gets you angry about why the author didn't keep up with what they were doing best at the start.

 

+1

It seems like it's hard to find quality stuff via the aggregator these days. It'd be nice to have a separate section in the description for translators to leave a note about why they picked a given work to translate, and for ratings to separate translation quality from story quality, for people who can review the original story.

I'm guessing a lot stories that would appeal to OP aren't making it into the translation queue to begin with.

Besides that, I think there are a lot of translators using MTL as a shortcut even if they understand the original language of the work they're translating, or they're only half-fluent in one language or the other. Lots of details can get lost in translation that way, which can drag a decent novel down.

TL quality isn't going to make a weak cast better or anything. But, I'm guessing a TL or TL group's ability to translate at least affects their ability to pick more developed stories for translation. If they're picking based on what an algorithm pushes to them or based on reading the first few chapters, rather than reading and enjoying the whole work, then what makes it to the aggregator isn't likely to be of high quality.

@AndyIvres
I'm going to recommend Smash All Pots and Pans to Go to School, even though it's not josei or shoujo. Technically I think it fits under shonen. MC is a chick and there is an ML, but the story is about a bunch of kids teaming up to save the universe. Romance is background noise.

If you're specifically looking for romance and are fine with reading about an ML who is a totally awful person but feels real as a person and experiences a growth journey, you can try Rebirth of the Excellent Daughter of the Marquis Household.

That ML is legitimately a terrible person but pretty interesting to read about. This couple HEs though so if going back to your previously abusive partner bothers you then skip it.

Similar concept as Excellent Daughter but much shorter with a FL that has self-respect from the beginning: Why Harem Intrigue When You Can Just Raise a Dog Instead

 

i personally feel like NU translators just tend to translate the so called "mediocre" novels at a higher rate than the so called "good" novels. as a GL reader who mostly reads novels on the sites where raws are pulled from [jjwxc], it seems to me that the "mediocre"/"bad" novels with unbalanced leads are 50/50 with the "good" novels where the leads are balanced in the relationships, or approximately that amount, since I never have too much trouble finding a romance with interesting and likeable leads. I don't really have an idea of what it's like in the het or BL section with jjwxc but I have a feeling that it might be a similar case.
The problem, I think, is that the "mediocre" or "bad" novels tend to have a quicker emotional payoff in the beginning of the novels. The authors aren't trying to develop the characters or anything, they're trying to quickly setup the stage for whatever gimmick they're going for. Then 5 or 10 chapters in, the romance or whatever plot starts, with only one or none of the leads actually developed and made interesting or "real".
With the "good" novels, or what I consider to be good novels, the majority of them are pretty slow burn. Not to mention 30 chapters, sometimes it can take up to 50 chapters for them to develop the relationship. But in that time, you get to learn more about the characters and actually get attached to the world the novel has written.
But readers on novelupdates can't wait 50 chapters. The thing that I'm noticing, is that on raw sites such as jjwxc, the authors usually have a a pretty strict schedule, many times uploading a chapter a day since they're usually getting paid. But a lot of translators might be uploading once every 3 days or even less, because translating's just a hobby for them, and they're getting paid even less than the authors. Readers need a quick pick me up. They usually aren't waiting for months for 30 chapters to get translated [and maybe dropped] and for the leads to finally get together. They want the novel that'll give them a payoff in a week or two.
The "mediocre" or "bad" novels are just more popular on this site is what I think is just happening.

 

Sure you can reduce any books you don't like the development of as bad writing, but I don't know how constructive this is for the purposes of this thread.

These are some great points! I don't read Chinese translations so I never really noticed it, but going by how often such books are recommended on NUF, it really does ring of truth. The readers here seem to like these terrible male love interests so it only makes sense for translators to pick them up over books that won't get as many readers. Thinking about what I see from recommendations, it's pretty rare for anyone to bring up things like the how compelling the male love interest is or how varied the main romantic relationship is. In my mind, these should be the biggest draws for reading Romance novels in the first place so their lack says a lot.

 

Not liking the development of is completely different from the book completely changing tones and direction and hardly feeling the same genre because it is nothing like its original premise was like.

If your slice of life novel became an action novel, then you're no longer writing the same novel and your target audience completely changed. That is bad writing. Stick to your genre at the very minimum if you want to write a good story.

 

I criticize authors who mainly write for profit. Heard that is a trend in Chinese webnovels, they mostly study troupes and genre that makes it to the top and copy their formula which is mostly wish fulfilling, wife pampering, crematorium style novels. But that also show how much popular the novels you read here that they ended up getting translated.

 

Most of the time, when you are reading a light/webnovel, you don't expect a high quality human drama.
this kind if books are the equivalent of McDonalds: Just entertainment.

 

Alas, and here I was going to pour out my list of "Interesting/Powerful Female Characters in BL" List and my "BL Deep MCs" List.

Feel good BL novels are usually the most to use this dynamics, while novels with actual plot and character devlopment tend to go outside of this troupes exactly because of the charachteristics mentioned before.
As another poster said, like in every genre there will be trash and hidden gems. I have found a lot of interesting BL novels with reversible couples/non conventional gong-shou dynamics, power/smart couples.
Besides, personally, I feel old japanese BL are the one most likely to carry these things you mentioned. (Not saying they don't appear anymore, see Shui Qian Cheng, she's the chinese queen of "rapist and/or asshole MLs")
I think you statement shows a lack of understanding of the wider range of works BL has. The "ML asshole rapist, MC petite and cute" is mostly a stereotype of BL, it really depends in which type of BL you're reading. If that is your concept of the genre, it only shows what your approach to it has been since time immemorial, so either you have been reading the wrong content, you specially like it or you have really no understanding of it and only talk based on other's peoples words or on scattered experiences.

 

Uh, please do drop the "interesting/Powerful female characters in BL list". I'm very interested.

 

Sure! >.<

-Zhao Ge
-Stray
-After Becoming the Tyrant
-Devil Venerable Wants to Know
-Governor's Illness
-Estranged
-Thousand Autumns
-Silent Reading
-Saye
-Imperfections
-Saving Unpermitted
-I Was Once a Legend
-Necromancer Survival
-No.6
-Fake Demon Lord (The one here doesn't have much participation in the story, but her background story and impact in it is very important)
-Age of the Sirens (Minor female characters with an important impact to the story)

I will note down any other I remember! ^^

 

Thanks!!!

 

I feel attacked.

 

Some writers are unable to make the main character appealing so they make characters that would serve as stepping stones of sorts. These characters are the arrogant masters, bully in the guild and many more.
They are also fridging their characters



some successful writers have suggested in characters making they follow "each character is the protagonist of their own story". The mediocre writers would write the protagonist and the other exist just to make the protagonist look cool. Sounds familiar? it is one characteristic of mary/gary sues.

 

Damn... I just came on here to complain about the evilness of Good Morning, Mister Dragon's male lead and here I find this post. He's truly a sick bastard.. literally everyone in this novel except for maybe the fl, her brother, and the ml's guard (or whatever he is) are actually disgusting, and the body guard dude still isn't actually good. The author of this novel just emphasized the fls beauty, how ethereal she is, how she's seductive yet has the purest eyes ever kind of thing. And she has literally been raped by the male lead since chapter one. He for some reason desires her so much when he never has had such desires ever before! Only her! Her can cure him! *barf* maybe because he's looking at her with his "monster sized" d*ck? And the fl, would rather be raped continuously and bare him a child then get raped by an ugly old man. Though understandable a little bit, she has disgust for others when they grope her, but for some reason, when he does it, she doesn't seem to mind.. bro.. I don't even know why I've read it as far as I have.