1:01 AM (of Sunday, October 6th 2024)
Today is Saturday, October 5th 2024 and I fully recovered today. When I woke up, I think I was still slightly sick. I was definitely coughing, and I definitely had a runny nose, but I don't think I felt achy and sensitive all over like I did yesterday. I kept on coughing throughout the day until around 4 PM, and I had a very runny nose until around 4 PM. Since then, I've barely coughed and I've barely blown my nose, and now I don't even cough anymore, I just have a runny nose still and blow my nose every hour or so.
I woke up at around 10 AM, getting a decent amount of sleep from the night before. I continued reading this Manhwa I was reading last night, called something like "Everyone Regressed Except Me." I just looked it up and that's the actual title. A common trope now that started a few years ago, maybe in 2018, is that the market is so flooded with light novels, manga, manhwa, manhua, and anime, that story titles don't try to be unique anymore, they just try to describe what the story is about instead.
Here's some literal anime examples of this trope which can be called "plot as the title" trope:
And more.
These are actual names for real anime. I don't know if this is depressing or not, but I've seen all of these from beginning to end. Well, reading through the list, for two of them I got bored with and didn't reach the end of, but I have at least seen the beginning of all of these, and have watched to the end basically all of them. Anyway, anyone can tell the general plot of all of them without even seeing a single episode.
Due to most series being around 12 episode long, each episode being 22 minutes long, at 1.5x speed each episode is shortened to basically 15 minutes long each (rounded). So it's possible to watch 4 episodes in an hour, meaning it's possible to watch an entire series in just 3 hours. So it's not crazy for me to say that I've basically seen every anime.
I know I haven't seen every anime or even close to it, what I'm saying is just an exaggeration, but basically true. There's a lot of series' that I'm just not interested in ever watching like PatLabor or Gundam or .hack// and others. Even then, even for the three I've just named, I've seen a few of their first episodes and just lost interest. These are old anime too, like 80s and 90s anime old. I'm talking more about having seen every recent and decent anime, 2006 and later basically.
Speaking of PatLabor, Gundam, and .hack//, you have to read their plot summary to know what the shows are about. Anime like Naruto, Bleach, Dragon Ball Z, Charlotte, Bungo Stray Dogs, Fairy Tale, One Piece, One Outs, Attack on Titan, Aquarion, Code Geass, Magical Index, From the New World, etc. all of them I have seen from beginning to end by the way (well not Aquarion and Fairy Tale, the rest I have seen from beginning to end or close to the end), you literally don't know what their plot is from the title alone.
This "plot as the title" trope hasn't made its way to the western market yet. You still have films like Joker 2 (starring vegan Joaquin Phoenix) where you have to read the summary to know what it's about (if you don't already know who the Joker is). Maybe "Star Wars" is like the plot as the title trope and George Lucas just couldn't come up with a better title. Maybe it's the same with Star Trek. Maybe it's the same with Back to the Future. But there's still no American or Western film with a title like "I became a superhero in another world" or "I came back to life after everyone thought I died."
We can give famous movies this plot as a title trope:
And so on.
Imagine this trope hitting the United States one day and many movies suddenly start naming themselves something like the above. Right now there's no reason for this trope to exist for movies yet. It only exists for anime because anime is usually adapted from a manga, which is usually adapted from a light novel. Everyone can write a light novel, maybe 1 in 1000 light novels becomes a manga, and then 1 in 100 manga becomes an anime.
Light novels have to compete against each other, and the main way to stand out is to have a title that attracts attention. I think all of the above Plot as the Title anime originally come from light novels with names that long. There's just so many light novels, even I've written 3 of them, that it's extremely hard to stand out if you don't have your plot as the title. It's happening in Romance novels in the west. Romance has been the number one selling book genre for years if not decades, and now even romance novels have titles like... well I just proved myself wrong, I just looked up the top romance novels in 2024 and none of them fit the plot as the title trope. Maybe it hasn't entered the western market at all yet. It might one day though.
There's pretty much only two companies in the U.S. that makes comics, and that's just Marvel and D.C. If there's any others, I unfortunately can't think of them right now. There are some independent ones, I think they're independent, like Scott Pilgrim comics, oh yeah, Garfield, Dilbert, Calvin and Hobbes, Archie, and other popular ones that aren't by Marvel and D.C., but they're not really in the fighting / combat genre like most anime are in.
It's interesting that the most common trope in all of anime is probably the fighting and combat trope. It's ubiquitous in every anime basically (not really but it's extremely common). Pretty much every anime has combat involved in some way, whether it's actual fighting like in DBZ or games like in Yu-Gi-Oh or wits like in Death Note, there's some sort of "combat" loosely defined involved.
Anyway, my point is that, for the few American comics and graphic novels out there, there's like 100 times more manga, manhwa, and manhua out there. There's literally so many. For just manga alone, not including manhwa and manhua which there are also so much of, looking at the site called Anime Planet, apparently you can click on "View All Manga" and there's 2834 pages of 35 manga per page, that's 99,190 manga. Well the last page only has 14 manga, so 99190-(35-14) = 99169. I think this list is very incomplete too.
The website MangaDex has a more complete list of manga, but there's no "View All" manga page that I can see. MangaDex also has manhua and manwha, but incomplete.
Anyway, you can imagine why titles have to be extremely long, because for the over 100k manga out there (assuming the 99169 listed on Anime Planet is incomplete), there's 100x more light novels. Probably 1000x more light novels than manga, I'm not even joking. Even I've written 3 light novels (arguably not really "novels" if they were just 1-3 chapters long each, but they're listed as individual "light novels").
Anyway, what did I even do today? I came up with the name for the "plot as the title" trope. It took me a while to think of, and I had a few different attempts for it, but I think it's perfect. I'm just giving myself credit since this is an original idea, there's no post or anything about this topic on the Internet that I'm aware of. I did some searches on the trope while writing this entry too, and couldn't find much. The closest entry on the "TVTropes" website is "Exactly What It Says on the Tin" and it lists some anime, but even my own list is more complete and has better examples, and I think "Plot as the Ttile" is a better name for this trope.
I went to the grocery store with my parents. We went to Costco first, then Wal-Mart, and then Lotte. Yeah there were no more Beyond Burgers at Costco, so we bought them at Wal-Mart instead. It's basically the same price for a similar size and amount. The ones at Costco are $15 for 10 patties, the ones at Wal-Mart were $15 for 8 patties, so it's basically the same. Plus there's so much more plant food variety at Wal-Mart, we also bought some Impossible meatless meatballs, Gardein chick'n nuggets, and some Impossible Patties to try out, they were $7 for 8 smallet patties.
At home I ate, did brain training, vegan activism, and watched random anime, read random manga/manhwa, and browsed the Internet.
Anyway, that was my day today.
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