Manga/Anime conventions transposed to verbal medium

[KatieTay]

Hello, everyone.

I hope y'all can weigh in on this question I want to raise.

I'm starting a new series, and it's a homage to a fairly well-known manga/anime. As such, I want portions of my stories to have slightly quirky, off-beat manga/anime-esque humor. Nothing too left field, like Azumanga Daioh! But incorporating a few of the commonly encountered tropes when it comes to set pieces and jokes.

Has anyone here ever tried it or encountered some good examples? Any advice for me in general?

Thanks!

 

[KatieTay]

Nobody?

 

[Black_and_White_Writer]

I haven't encountered it much at all in erotica, although this doesn't stop me from writing some more 'Manga/Hentai' inspired erotica, not just in settings and characters and their deeds, but also in the general abiance of the piece and the mood I want to convey.

 

[KatieTay]

Ah, ok! So, in your experience, what kind of things work best, and what don't? For example, expressing shock in humorous situations - how would you best do it in writing?

 

[Handley_Page]

Hello, everyone.

I hope y'all can weigh in on this question I want to raise.

I'm starting a new series, and it's a homage to a fairly well-known manga/anime. As such, I want portions of my stories to have slightly quirky, off-beat manga/anime-esque humor. Nothing too left field, like Azumanga Daioh! But incorporating a few of the commonly encountered tropes when it comes to set pieces and jokes.

Has anyone here ever tried it or encountered some good examples? Any advice for me in general?

Thanks!

Until I saw your entry, I'd never heard of it !

 

[Black_and_White_Writer]

For me what works is the stylised nature of the prose, the way characters are described and their attributes and what they can and cannot do.

The more 'unreal' aspects actually ground the stories far better than the more over the top so called realistic stories that they try to do.

 

[PervOtaku]

You're asking about how to do sight gags in prose?

Lots of popular anime/manga series started life as light novels, so there's not really anything inherently visual to these kinds of stories. Certain subject matter tends to be done more by anime/manga than by western animation, though the lines are blurring these days.

I think mostly, if you are directly inspired by anime and manga, it will come out in your writing naturally. Of course you can always pull out some very specific tropes just to reinforce that.

I'm working on something right now that's pretty much the manga I would have always wanted to do if I were an artist or had an artist at my disposal. When I realized I could just add some sex and post it up with the erotica account I already had, the ideas started flowing like gangbusters. Just to be extra tropey, my chapter titles follow this:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ExcitedTitleTwoPartEpisodeName

I've done some other experimental things too. I have a fanfic that's not posted yet that uses popular comic book characters. Of course they have been adapted to animation and live action many times, but I decided to actually write it in a comic book style. This mostly meant keeping the narration very visual. Rather than third person omniscience where the narrator is in all the characters' heads, or third person limited where the narrator is only in the protagonist's head, I made it third person with the narrator in nobody's head. I also used extensive internal monologues, in quotation marks no less, the stuff that would be in the thought balloons in a comic. It all plays off rather oddly, actually, but it's short and doesn't have much outside the sex scenes, so I think it works okay overall.

Ah, ok! So, in your experience, what kind of things work best, and what don't? For example, expressing shock in humorous situations - how would you best do it in writing?

There's two main things that you see out there. One, the face. Known in western animation as the "wild take", usually not quite as outrageous in anime. These are all exaggerated forms of gaping. You can describe it straight up, "his eyes went wide and his jaw dropped". You can give it a fanciful spin, "it felt like his eyes were bulging out in surprise" or "his jaw hit the floor". If you're going for the full comedy angle, you might even try to pull off "he hit the floor in surprise". For that it helps to be familiar with the sight gag of falling on your back with your legs up in the air due to shock at something outrageous, but enough context is there that it can probably pass off as a plain old weird idiom to those not familiar.

The other thing is the ellipses in a voice bubble that manga (and some comedic anime) use to reinforce the idea that a character has been rendered speechless. In anime it's easier, they can just actually be speechless for enough time to drive the point home. In prose it's even easier than that, you can actually use the word "speechless", which kind of removes it from the manga trope, but comics rely on "show, not tell" much, much more than prose does. Narration is the norm in prose while it should be used as little as possible in comics and animation.

Let me know what kind of stuff you've got in mind with some more specifics, and I'll try to toss out some ideas for you.

 

[KatieTay]

Thanks so much! This is exactly what I needed!