An anime series I like, Six Flower Braves Rokka no Yusha

[berserkfan]

Let me intro you guys to an awesome new series. Rokka no Yusha.

The anime is available online, and the light novels and manga are easy to find with a search too. I am giving the following link for the first 5 Chinese novels.

http://xs.dmzj.com/1184/index.shtml

 Or if you have to read in English, you can find the manga, anime, and nanodesu's fan translations as well. The English fan translations are better it's just that I couldn't wait and had to read the Chinese first.

It has been years since I read a light novel series, but I would definitely put this guy on par with famous Chinese authors Golden Mean and Ancient Dragon. (TP4Tissue should know who these guys are.)

That said, let me make a few caveats. Braves of Six Flowers is at its core a Mystery. Every novel has a Main Mystery, and there are many other smaller or larger (multi volume) mysteries as well. That's how the author wanted it. It is set in a fantasy world. One critic compared it to an Agatha Christie novel hidden inside the pages of a JRRTolkien fantasy. If you do not like mystery novels, I would not recommend this series to you. Most of the people who gave the anime poor reviews, felt conned by the mystery aspect.

The author also wrote The Book of Bantorra/ Fighting Librarians which is also a fantasy/ mystery series.

[mauri]

the first season was aight but i doubt we'll see another.

[tp4tissue]

This isn't one of those animes about boys swimming and those ridiculous six pax n' semi-ghey stuff is it?

[jacobolus]

World building and characters were interesting. Animation was pretty good. Actual plot of the first season was kind of boring and anticlimactic. The mystery seemed contrived to fill up time.

[OTD]

I like this anime. Do you know who the 7th brave is?

I like how the manga did it better than the anime but the anime is still very good.

[jacobolus]

Basically, as a mystery, there was not really enough information given to the audience to figure out what had happened. So we were mostly blindly following along the author’s story, full of implausible and repetitive feeling “twists” that seemed like they were made up by the screenwriter/producer on the fly. The show didn’t do much character development or relationship building, despite spending lots of time on everyone sitting around talking (maybe 2–3 relationships were explored a bit, but when there are 6–7 main characters all in the same place you can’t just leave like 15 of those relationships hanging). The show did a decent job of setting up the story and building an atmosphere of suspense/tension/mutual distrust in the first few episodes, but after that there was a lot of overdramatic talking interspersed with occasional action, and I felt like the last ~7 episodes could have been compressed into about 2 without losing much.

A lot of aspects of the show were okay. Props for the quasi-Mesoamerican setting and character designs. Also some decent voice acting. Overall I’d give it like 5 or 6/10. I have strong opinions and pretty high standards for fiction writing. YMMV.

[berserkfan]

A lot of aspects of the show were okay. Props for the quasi-Mesoamerican setting and character designs. Also some decent voice acting. Overall I’d give it like 5 or 6/10. I have strong opinions and pretty high standards for fiction writing. YMMV.

One of the most enduring problems of all TV, is the very bad habit of scheduling everything into seasons. That's a procrustean bed that hurts the vast majority of adaptations. Unless you wrote a script specifically to fit 12-13 episodes, there is no chance of your random novel or anything fitting so comfortably. With the inevitable result of either padding or important scenes cut.

But if you have such high standards for mystery fiction writing, why not suggest something that fits your standards? I think even in Sherlock Holmes mysteries we are blindly following the author's story. Agatha Christie gives us enough info, but at the cost of character building and exploration. And so on.