"Yeah this is a blog post about light novel title lengths, so what?"

If you're into anime (Japanese animation) or light novels (Japanese young adult novels), you may have noticed that in recent years, titles have gotten a little... long. And not just long, but distinctly sentence-like. You'll have titles like "So I'm a Spider, So What?", "I've Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level" and "Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?" Compare this to previous titles like "Bakemonogatari" (a pun on 'bakemono', monster, and 'monogatari', stories).

YouTuber RedBard has already made a video covering when this change happened, which I recommend watching:

This looks at the change of length in English language translations. I also recommend this accompanying piece at Otaquest, which looks at the change in Japanese, and this genre-based analysis by jgeekstudies.

Both Red Bard and jgeekstudies seem to agree that light novel title lengths began increasing dramatically in 2014. The jgeekstudies paper mentions that the long titles are most common in the fantasy and isekai genres. 'Isekai' is a genre based around a person who is transported to another world and has to live there now. "Sword Art Online" is an example of a popular isekai work. The three titles I mentioned in the open paragraph are also either fantasy or isekai.

Red Bard speculates that light novels have become so long as a way to give a very neat plot summary and hook readers in right away. Light novels are displayed with the spine outwards, so having an attention-grabbing title can cause a potential reader to check out the book and its actual summary in a way a one-word title might not.

I'm not a big consumer of isekai anime, so I don't have a representative sample, but I have watched "I've Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level" and I don't know if I'd really call the title a good summary of the story. The plot begins with a young woman who dies of overwork, and is reincarnated as an immortal into a video game fantasy world by a goddess who takes pity on her. She decides to live a carefree, slow life and only kills a handful of slimes each day. After 300 years, she has, indeed, 'maxed out her level' by killing slimes.

However, this barely has any relation to the real story, which involves her becoming an adoptive mom for two slime spirits, building a chosen family, and generally getting into hijinks. Her having maxed out her level is more an excuse for her to be overpowered; her killing slimes for 300 years is related to the overall theme of avoiding overwork and choosing a slow life (raising her level slowly instead of grinding out powerful enemies every day). I would consider the title more of a hook of the absurb elements of the show than something that really has much to do with the rest of the plot.

Indeed, I think it's worth pointing out that these sentences are all humorous, or at least a little absurd. "So I'm a Spider, So what?" could have been called "I got reincarnated as a spider" - already a silly premise - but goes the extra length of being defensive about being reincarnated as a title. "Is it wrong to try to pick up girls in a dungeon" takes a funny concept and also makes the asker sound defensive or curious.

It's funny to consider that light novel titles are becoming full sentences compared to English language pop songs, which have gone the opposite direction from favoring sentences or titles to single words or phrases (previous posts here and here). I mention in a previous article that having a song title be a sentence picked out from a song's chorus was a good way to make your song memorable, which was important in a time before Shazam and internet on cell phones to look up song lyrics. Today, it's relatively easy to find out what a song's title is, so there's little risk to naming it something short and sweet from the beginning or end of the chorus.

It's just another part of enregistration, where something becomes popular due to some reason (an early innovator who struck gold with a highly recognizable example, random chance causing a cluster), is copied by people, and ultimately becomes a genre marker. If I see an anime titled something like "Yeah, it's true - my little sister got reincarnated as a yogurt after beating a video game", there's a pretty good chance it's going to be some kind of isekai or fantasy adapted from a light novel. The fact that it's so easily parody-able, as I just showed, also makes it very easy to produce - find something absurd in the premise of your book, add some kind of emotional coloring to it with a discourse marker, and you have a title that can intrigue readers and make them laugh while not challenging them stylistically. Profit!

Will light novel titles continue being sentences? Probably for a while, until people get tired of it and are ready for something new. Titles of things tend to fluctuate over time, and trends come and go, just like one-word titles for songs. Nevertheless, it's fascinating to see just how fast the convention of "light novel titles as sentences" got adopted and enregistered.

A Research Question

I'm not going to be able to get the article I wanted out before the end of the month (work, school, and volunteering will do that to you), buuut I wanted you all to know that there are articles in the pipeline. Classic rock has been on my mind for a while now, being the genre that sort of sparked my interest in the question "why and how can singers sing in an entirely different accent than their speaking one?" We more or less seem to have the answer, which is that singers copy linguistic features of other singers that they think are part of the genre. But I'd really like to elaborate on this:

• How conscious are singers of these changes they're making?
• Not everyone is good at copying accents, so how does natural talent play into which features get copied and which don't?
• How do these features spread? i.e. which singers and records are 'vectors of transmission'?
• When doing covers, most singers don't copy the accent of the original singer. What triggers the sense that "this song wouldn't be right without the accent"?
• Once a singing-linguistic style becomes the norm in a genre, what has to happen for that norm to be challenged and change?

The sketch I have so far is something like this: at some point, a certain group of people with a consistent linguistic feature produces music. They use their own native variety because they're making music for themselves. This music is then carried across some kind of linguistic border and is introduced to an audience that is not familiar with the music.

The uniformity of the music and the language are noted by the new audience. Many of them find it so inspiring (bestowing status on the musicians) that they choose to make their own version. Some will try to make it speaking their own native variety, and some will try to imitate the accents. Depending on factors (how high status are the foreign musicians? is there a very strong sense of local pride?), the localized version or the foreign version may win out. If the foreign version wins out, it may then spread to across a different border, increasing the hegemonic sense that music produced in this genre must have that accent. Repeat.

I have some examples from non-music genres where something similar happens (the association between genre and variety is so strong that it even crosses the language boundary), but that will be for a different article, one probably much farther ahead in the future. There's a lot to potentially discuss (effects of recording media versus live performance, American hegemony, purposeful pushing back, variety spread as a type of cultural/soft power, questions of appropriation) and it's going to take a lot more work. But I wanted to get the question and my attempt at answering the question out.

Next semester I hope not to take any classes, which should give me a little more time to finish up the articles I do have. Pray no extra strange things happen.

- Karen

Blog Update: Quick Book Reviews

This month (and likely the next) has been very busy, but I did find the time to finish reading up some language-related books, and I will provide some quick reviews for you here.

Millennials Talking Media: Creating Intertextual Identities in Everyday Conversation by Sylvia Sierra. This book works from the perspective of discourse analysis, looking at how millenials use references to pop culture for different purposes - to smooth other difficult conversations; to create an in-group identity; to allow people who don't know about an event to participate anyway by reminding everyone of a shared pop-cultural heritage; to have fun; to reference stereotypes. The book is academically-focused, so it may be a difficult read if you're not familiar with discourse analysis.

One concept I found interesting was the idea of 'play frames' - that is, 'framing' a conversation in a playful way to focus on fun. Sierra references how the subjects of the study, her roommates, have different levels of willingness to engage in 'play frames.' The book also tackles the meaning of 'intertextuality', including a very funny conversation where Sierra discusses with her roommates, in a very casual matter, how intertextuality is different from mere 'references'. Overall, I found the book informative - I was not familiar with discourse analysis beforehand, so many of the concepts were new to me. If you're interested in how conversation works between millenials, and the ways in which pop culture can reinforce group identities, this book may be of interest to you.

Women, Men and Language: A Sociolinguistic Account of Gender Differences in Language by Jennifer Coates. This book focuses on gendered differences in conversation, and specifically on examining certain well-known claims in sociolinguistics about how men and women differ in language. If you've ever heard that women are more likely to use hedges, that women are more likely to use standard forms than men, and that female conversational style is more 'collaborative' than male conversational style, which is 'competitive', then this book will be relevant to you - and likely challenge many of these preconceptions.

The book is a collection of studies. The one I found most interesting was one on the difference between teenage girls' social networks and teenage boys'. Coates is critical of the Labovian notion that women speak a more standard version of languages due to seeking 'upward prestige', and instead she suggests that a social network-based explanation does a better job of accounting for these differences. The social network study found that teenage girls had more diffuse social networks than teenage boys, who had dense social networks, and that denser social networks were correlated with having more 'regional' features. This means that women speaking a more standard version is not because they want to be seen as more middle class, but because they have less exposure to people who speak these variants, and less identification with them.