But speaking as someone who has been personally involved in more than one syrupy vanilla romance with no plot, they aren't actually unrealistic. People fall in love and are happy about it ALL THE TIME.

Cgdct is not the same as realistic happy romance. Just sayin'.

There's something I'm astonished nobody has mentioned yet:
This whole business about having to pay an indemnity for adultery is a farce and an open door for all sorts of scams. Kon is absolutely right.

Say you and your wife are shitty people and in need of money. How to make a quick buck? Easy! Send your wife to a bar and have her seduce some poor sod and sleep with him. After that, reveal that she's married, tell him you're the husband, threaten him with a lawsuit and demand settlement money. Rinse and repeat.

No wonder Kon's first thought when she heard Ai's story was that she was the victim of a fraud!

Realism. I love it so terribly. There's only so much cgdct you can take before reaching the point of oversaturation. Even more so since the people who cultivate the cute 'n moe genre tend to think that cutesy antics can replace plot (hint: it doesn't).

Thanks the heavens for Flowerchild, Akiyama Haru, Uozumi Ami, Kodama Naoko, Iwami Kiyoko and all the other great ladies ot realistic psychological drama. And all the Chinese and Korean authors too, of course.

[...]

And contrariwise, I'm pretty sure at least one or two of the authors you mention are not known for realism, but rather for trainwreck-for-its-own-sake. Which is fine--not my cup of tea, it is some people's, but that's all good. But what bugs me is when people who are into stories about people being ridiculously dysfunctional, where the co-incidences always twist the plot towards more twisted, where everyone is basically all self-destructive all the time . . . go around claiming that's "realistic". Gritty is not the same as realistic; lots of gritty things either just don't really happen in real life, or maybe happen but are incredibly rare, much rarer than either real-life saccharine sweetness or real-life kind-of-averageness with bits of good and bits of dysfunction. Melodrama of trainwreck stories are not "realistic" any more than "A Series of Unfortunate Events" is and I wish people would stop claiming they are.

Yeah, while I don't recognize all the names mentioned, I think claiming that Kodama Naoko is realistic is a bit absurd. She herself recognizes that her stories are basically soap opera drama. I'm not sure if I'd call Flowerchild's Detached Relationship realistic either, though it's been some time since I last read it. Stories with toxic people in horrible relationships can be fun to read and a nice break from sweet slice of life stuff, but that doesn't make them any more realistic than cgdct; they're both about fictional people behaving in ways you'd very rarely encounter in real life.

Yeah, while I don't recognize all the names mentioned, I think claiming that Kodama Naoko is realistic is a bit absurd.

Realism is in the setting and the context, not in the melodramatic love story of the mcs. If it's about people in real life, with real problems, it's realistic. Try this one, it's very good.

Yeah, while I don't recognize all the names mentioned, I think claiming that Kodama Naoko is realistic is a bit absurd.

Realism is in the setting and the context, not in the melodramatic love story of the mcs. If it's about people in real life, with real problems, it's realistic. Try this one, it's very good.

I thought realism is also about the characters behaving in a way that real people would. In my opinion, Kodama Naoko doesn't even attempt to depict real life accurately and her characters often act in ways that serve the contrived drama of the story, rather than reflect real people's bahaviours. That being said, I'm no expert in literary terms, so I might be wrong in my assessment.

Regardless, I wasn't trying to say that her works are bad (not all of them at least). I think we sometimes use "realistic" as synonymus to "high quality", but a work doesn't need to be realistic in order to be enjoyable or meaningful. And it also doesn't need to be (overly) dramatic in order to be realistic.

In literary terms, “realism” can mean a lot of different things; at its simplest it points to the lack of speculative or supernatural elements that alter the known human relation to the physical world.

But it’s also true that “realism” is used to denote the depiction of plausible or “typical” human behavior and causality (sometimes “unrealistically” so—outlandish coincidences do happen in real life that would be criticized as unrealistic in a fiction. But they don’t happen all the time.)

It’s been argued that “realism” is best understood as a relational or comparative term rather than an absolute one—if asked which animation is more realistic, The Simpsons or SpongeBob SquarePants, most people immediately say it’s The Simpsons, while recognizing that neither of them correspond to reality in any ultimate sense.

Purple Library Guy's comment on realism reminds me of Ursula K. Le Guin's The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.

The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.

Writing stories about awful people is not bad, and neither is liking such stories (I certainly do). But there should be nothing inherently unrealistic about a story with kind and happy people as opposed to one about mean and unhappy people.

Writing stories about awful people is not bad, and neither is liking such stories (I certainly do). But there should be nothing inherently unrealistic about a story with kind and happy people as opposed to one about mean and unhappy people.

Except that, as another poster said before, cgdct is not the same as realistic happy romance.

This whole business about having to pay an indemnity for adultery is a farce and an open door for all sorts of scams. Kon is absolutely right.

Say you and your wife are shitty people and in need of money. How to make a quick buck? Easy! Send your wife to a bar and have her seduce some poor sod and sleep with him. After that, reveal that she's married, tell him you're the husband, threaten him with a lawsuit and demand settlement money. Rinse and repeat.

No wonder Kon's first thought when she heard Ai's story was that she was the victim of a fraud!

This. Kon clearly isn't as slow as they say. The deal is seriously shady.

Except that, as another poster said before, cgdct is not the same as realistic happy romance.

Cgdct is more akin to those children's books with baby animals who act as stand-ins for humans. Whether you read the adventures of a podgy bear and his woodland-based chums, or a cheerful moeblob and her school-based chums, the effect is expected to be the same.

And I gotta say that I've never heard anyone claim, never ever, that the stories of Winnie the Pooh are an example of realistic literature.

Some people got a bit mixed up here, I think, trying to describe cgdct as stories of happy romance in a realistic world - and even bringing up quotes from U. K. Le Guin to sustain it. Wrong genre altogether, lmao.

last edited at Mar 8, 2024 2:56PM

Yeah, while I don't recognize all the names mentioned, I think claiming that Kodama Naoko is realistic is a bit absurd.

Realism is in the setting and the context, not in the melodramatic love story of the mcs. If it's about people in real life, with real problems, it's realistic.

From what I know about literature, I pretty much have to agree.