if you can't read books, you probably won't be able to read the "greats" as they often are extremely lengthy,
It's been so long since I last picked up a book that wasn't required reading for school or when my mom made me read the bible during bible study (xd) that I can't even remember, so I think that might be a hurdle for me to truly get into visual novels. That's not that I
can't read books; I just don't choose to because I enjoy immersive media and visual storytelling, like film and anime, for example, which allow for instantaneous expression of emotion.
like my beloved Muv Luv triology. personally for me, I prefer it to anime, i've read way better stories "per capita" with them than anime, which often feels like sifting sand for gold
Wow, that's a bold thing to say when Evangelion exists.
I know of Muv Luv, and just from a glance at its character designs and cover art, I thought it looked like an amalgamation of every early 2000's anime thing ever, and not in a good way lol. But I guess I can kind of understand where you're coming from because novel format is more detailed in text than visual media. Unlike watching a piece of media, I think reading is a skill because it requires active participation, rather than passive consumption. As you delve into a book, your mind becomes a decoder, transforming the words on the page into a tapestry of knowledge and imagination. The way sentences are crafted, the flow of prose, and the choice of vocabulary all play a role in shaping your understanding and the insights you gain from the reading experience.
TV/cinema is a presentation of information that has already been prepared for you. You don't have to visualize the scene, it's all laid out for you. While critical thinking is required for complex shows or documentaries, it's not as demanding as reading, where you're constantly interpreting the words. But at the same time, I'm constantly dissecting every story I engage with anyway, regardless of the format. I speculate about what might happen next, anticipate the direction of the plot, and evaluate the quality of the scriptwriting. I guess this is not a common trait though, since most people like mindless slop like Jujutsu Kaisen and, even worse, Solo Leveling.
Visual novels are a unique case though, and can't really be categorized as either, as not all of them include narration or prose. Take School Days, for example, which is practically indistinguishable from an interactive anime with subtitles. From a Westoid perspective, they may not fit the traditional definition of literature, but that certainly doesn't diminish the medium's value. The English literature community has a reputation for being slow to embrace things like this (in the case of weebshit, that's very much a good thing.) Many acclaimed authors today cite inspiration from pulp books of the 1950s and 60s, which were once considered lowbrow. Japan, on the other hand, has its own unique standards for what constitutes literature, which may not align with Western norms. It should be kept that way because Westoid influence would destroy its value entirely, as it has with everything else. The wandery, flexible kishotenketsu model of storytelling, for instance, may be unfamiliar to many, but discovering a fresh and innovative narrative style can be both rare and exciting.
You're right that most anime isn't good. Having at least one seasonal anime that breaches a 7/10 on my personal rating system is a rarity that almost never happens. Frieren was the last show to achieve that, and I must say, it pleasantly surprised me. Well, at least up until the pseudo-tournament arc if we're being honest, but even despite that fault, and even though it didn't quite reach the level of greatness that everyone and their mother claimed, it still ended up winning me over that much.
In some ways, visual novels offer a more thorough opportunity for narrative building due to their inherent literary merits, while in contrast, it feels like an overwhelming amount of anime often serve as nothing more than a promotional tool to bring more eyes to the source material. If you were to scroll through the seemingly endless waterfall of seasonal anime which aired this season, intentionally paying each promotional image nothing but a mere glance, combining every entry which your brain subconsciously finds difficult to visually distinguish into one anime, you would end up with I’d wager something like five or six. There simply isn’t enough pizzazz popping out, nothing to get your neurons firing in different enough directions. My eyes simply could not in rapid succession pass by the MAL entries for, for example, “The Reincarnation of the Strongest Exorcist in Another World” and “The Iceblade Sorcerer Shall Rule the World” without my mind fumbling incredulously at the alleged uniqueness of the two properties.
