Manga Vs Light Novel

Manga Vs Light Novel – Which One Is Better And WHY?

Source: Quora

There are 3 types of people in a debate:

  1. Those who agree with you.
  2. People who disagree with you.
  3. And the rest who are neutral.

The debate between light novels and manga is no different. If you are looking for the differences between manga and light novel, please find in this link

Unless you’re a diehard fan, most people tend to consume one medium over the other. If their first encounter with the series is through a light novel, then they’re going to prefer the light novel version until the series is completed. Same goes for the manga too. If their first encounter for the series is through the manga, then they’re not going to bother with the light novel version.

Manga and Light novels - Both versions are great. However, manga and light novels are never equal, to begin with. In fact, one of them is so much better when it comes to conveying the details in the story, the world-building, and the characters. 

Clearly, manga can give us a clue about the characters’ thoughts and their feelings right through their facial expression, but it’s hard to know what goes into their head visually. So, the best way to do that is to explain in words. It’s much easier to convey that in writing rather than to convey the same thing in visual form. Light novels are a lot more context-dense, or at least can do so without harming the format. Comic books and manga are primarily visual media; you don’t want to add more text than is needed.This means that, while they can provide inner monologues, it’s generally something to be avoided.

This means that a sequence of events that takes place in a very short time span can be expanded to give it fitting ‘screen time’ by going in depth into the explanation. Fights can be portrayed as a cerebral battle of wills for several paragraphs, even if the fight itself only lasts a few seconds. Obviously, showing a match being decided in a split second like that would be anticlimactic. The anime, manga, and light novel all effectively or literally go into slow-motion to show the sequence of events over the course of several pages in both light novels and manga form. For the light novels, the advantage is that it can spend more words on describing in detail what is happening, while the manga can give you evocative pages like this:

Either way, you’ll get chills if you're into it enough.

Basically, a picture can be worth a thousand words, but there are some things that only do justice with significant word counts. 

As you read until the end, here are some light novel recommendations for you: