A Sister’s All You Need Volume 1 Review

[Demelza]

A Sister’s All You Need is a good read for an older audience. It's certainly not without its issues, but if you're looking for a story about creators working in the light novel industry with a focus on comedy then this is a good choice.

Continue reading...

 

[ayase]

all of his books revolve around characters and their little sisters but, surprisingly, his works have been popular enough for him to publish 20 titles in five years.

I dunno, that doesn't sound too surprising given some of Japan's recent output. This definitely sounds more interesting than I would have given it credit for from the title alone. I would have presumed it was one of those stories the main character apparently writes...

On the rating point - As far as I know there's no requirement to provide a recommended age rating for books, so I guess it's at least somewhat thoughtful of them to even bother. It sounds like 16+ is probably a fair advisory, given that sex scenes and nudity are allowed in 15 rated films. Hell, you can have sex when you're 16 (but not view pornography, even fictional cartoon pornography, until you're 18, make sense of that if you can). Where drawings become pornography is a very blurred line - Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie's Lost Girls for example isn't considered pornography but it does feature explicit drawings which, if they were photographs or even animated, would be considered pornography.

tl;dr if you don't ever want to be subject to censorship in the UK, write books! Unless you're David Britton, I guess.

 

[Demelza]

I dunno, that doesn't sound too surprising given some of Japan's recent output. This definitely sounds more interesting than I would have given it credit for from the title alone. I would have presumed it was one of those stories the main character apparently writes...

I do kind of wish light novel names weren't so often disconnected from what the books are actually about. I love some of the whacky examples, but stuff like this and Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? show no evidence that the book could be about anything else, lol.

On the rating point - As far as I know there's no requirement to provide a recommended age rating for books, so I guess it's at least somewhat thoughtful of them to even bother. It sounds like 16+ is probably a fair advisory, given that sex scenes and nudity are allowed in 15 rated films. Hell, you can have sex when you're 16 (but not view pornography, even fictional cartoon pornography, until you're 18, make sense of that if you can). Where drawings become pornography is a very blurred line - Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie's Lost Girls for example isn't considered pornography but it does feature explicit drawings which, if they were photographs or even animated, would be considered pornography.

You're right there are no requirements here or in the US where everything is published (and therefore being rated for), so it's on the goodwill of the publishers to if they want to. Some manga publishers do have ratings and some just leave them off completely, so it's a tricky thing and not every publishers ideals of what makes a 13, 16 or higher is going to match which I'm sure is really annoying on the consumers side.

What caught me off guard here is that if this was a manga then it'd probably be shrink-wrapped and labelled with a mature age rating (which Yen do have for books like High School of the Dead) so it just stood out. Totally get what you mean about the rules being quite blurred though and that explicit drawings don't always = outright porn. I know the anime adaption did shy away from or heavily censer the sights we see in A Sister's All You Need light novel illustrations, so I think in that case it definitely gives away what those scenes would be labelled as were they adapted one for one...