What is a good dialog

"Let's start singing!"

My favorite.

a good dialgoue is one which is able to move the hearts of not only the characters in the show but us viewers as well. the delivery also matters as much as the actual words. it should be written in such a way that the person hearing it should able to understand what the person speaking is feeling and what they are trying to say. words hold a lot of power in this regard, their tone along with the correct words can make a really great impact on the listener.

there have been many great great dialogues in animes like the erwin speech during the monke part but one specific scene is really coming to my mind, i remmeber watching this on yt as gigguk made a video about it. ill try to find it and share it here.

found it:


watch the clip from 7:04

My problem is that it can be hard to tell sometimes if it is bad dialog or a bad translation. But generally speaking bad dialog to me is if it goes on longer than necessary, doesn't seem to serve much of a purpose, or if it keeps stating the obvious.

The worst example that comes to mind is from the manga version of Platinum End. In my notes i wrote:

There were some cringeworthy moments in the dialogue. Particularly where a companion of Metro pointed out that "it's now 3 versus 4 people" and Metro petulantly responded that he knows how to count since after all he taught his sister how to count in the bathtub. Another thing that bothered me was how much talking takes place in the middle of a battle. And that leads me to another gripe. The man-on-the-street depictions of various anonymous people commenting on what is happening during the 'god battles' felt completely contrived so as to bolster the arguments offered up by the main characters. It basically amounted to "wow what a great point" or "gee that guy is so smart he must be right". It felt out of place in a work striving so hard to deliver a profound message.

*edited to says oops, i don't know why i gave examples of bad dialog when the thread is supposed to be about good dialog. I think the sun got in my eyes.....yes, that must've been what happened! (that was my go-to excuse in baseball, though admittedly it may work less well here).

I'm just going to leave it here. I think this is an example of the epitome of great narrative dialogue. You may take it as a joke, which, honestly, it is. But upon seeing it, I just realized it's actually great. You can tell from this short, with almost no actual words, conversation about the characterization of each character perfectly without knowing the context of the character. I think that's one of the points about how to make a great dialogue, in my opinion.

Listen up! Let's say you drink too much strawberry milk, and have to use the bathroom in the middle of the night, but it's cold outside your bed. You don't want to get up, but the urge to urinate is just too strong! You make up your mind to go! You run to the bathroom, stand in front of the toilet, and let loose! You think that all your life has led to this moment! But then you realize. It isn't the bathroom! You're still in bed! That feeling of lukewarm wetness spreads like wildfire! But you don't stop! You can't stop! That's what I'm talking about! That's the truth of the strawberry milk! Do you get it?

Now that's a dialogue

BTW it's from Gintama

@SLEEK__ASSASSIN I better start Gintama ASAP 🤣🤣🤣

Good dialog is what real people would convincingly say in that situation. The problem with dialog in anime is that too often it's a device for exposition so that the author could tell you something that's too hard for the producers to show you by animation. Anime -- most anime -- are essentially lazy.

For some reason Light is the first one I thinked of

Any dialogue that borders the massive exposition instead of SHOWING is bad. Dialogues that are believable to the worldbuilding are good.

any dialog that makes me chuckle is a good one

Hmm... it's hard to pinpoint what makes a good dialog, but i can come up with a list of the wors dialog i've heard in anime

In order from worst of the worst makes my ears bleed to semi-shit

• 7 Seeds
  
• Demi-chan wa Kataritai
  
• Makai Toshi Shinjuku
  
• Switch
  
• Dragon Fist
  
• Ys
  
• C Danchi
  
• Towa no Quon
  
• The Sky Crawlers
  
• Yozakura Quartet: Hana no Uta
  
• The Marginal Service
  
• Tasogare Otome x Amnesia
  
• Hero Mask
  
• Uta no☆Prince-sama
  
• Kagami no Kojou
  
• AI no Idenshi
  
• Isekai wa Smartphone to Tomo ni
  
• Mushibugyo
  
• Tanaka-kun wa Itsumo Kedaruge
  
• Ghost Hunt
  
• Magic Knight Rayearth
  
• Psyco-Pass 2
  
• Fake
  
• Monster
  
• Madoka Magica
  
• SAO Alternative Gun Gale Oline
  
• Kaguya-sama
  
• Devilman Crybaby
  
• Edens Zero
  

My favorite dialogue writing comes from shows like Steins;Gate, K-On!, ACCA & Stand Alone Complex, but I don’t really know what makes them so good.

@DigiCat


BRUH.

Monster is one of the prime examples on how to write well written dialogue, there are so many back and forths and lines in that show that have been praised, and remembered for years.

I can forgive kaguya sama, because you need to get to much further than one episode to see how brilliant it stacks up on jokes and uses them to develop its characters, and i know you never watched more than one episode.


but you need to explain monster.

bashing monster for dialogue is about as bad as bashing something like berserk or one punch man manga for bad art.

@L1feHasNoMeaning what if its just laughably bad?

@APolygons2 I mean i didn't get very far with Monster either so this is only based on what i've seen of it T^T
I'll give it the benefit of the doubt that it possibly improves later on on the series, but what i did watch the dialogue was one of the reasons i dropped the show, to me it felt overcomplicated and overused and thus like it lacked substence, there were things i think could've been better conveyed in fewer words or even simply just observing the characters behaviours rather than constant dialogue

@DigiCat

Can you give an example?

and also tell me if you got to episode 4 where the main premise of the show is revealed. and you get the back and forth between our 2 main driving forces of the story?



cause this doesn't really make sense to me.

Monster's dialogue is not really complicated, specially at the start the story and dialogue are both pretty straight forward.

and then you say it's overused, because you could have conveyed the same thing through fewer words or just observing the characters... to which...

dialogue IS observing the character's behaviour. it's not exposition, it's you seeing how the characters talk and think, which along you seeing the choices that the characters make and their reactions to things, gives you a full picture of their character. and while yes fewer words could have send the basic parts of it, more dialogue, only means a clearer picture of how the characters think or act like.

and more importantly, how does either of these even relate to substance? Neither of these complaints really relate to how much actual substance is in the dialogue to begin with. you can have a single character talking for 20 minutes about something that could technically be said in less than 1 and all of it have substance, hell THAT IS EXACTLY what "free churo" is, which is one of the most beloved bojack horseman episodes, with it being the second highest rated in that show sitting at a 9.8/10 right behind the 9.9 of "the view from halfway down" on imdb.

@APolygons2 It's been a while since i watched it so it's hard to pinpoint an example, and no i didn't reach ep. 4


I didn't say it is complicated, i said overcomplicated, def: make something more complicated than necessary
Exactly because the dialogue is straightfoward at this time it is overcomplicated, it's basically word filler


Sorry but this i disagree with 100%

More doesn't always mean better, clearer, there is such a thing as too much of a good thing can be bad

Like i said before i can't really pinpoint specific examples for Monster as not only has it been a while since i watched it, but not liking or being interested in it nothing has really stuck with me

But to give a similar example from something i have watched to completion, Re:zero has a similar problem at times (especially s1) of overcomplicating and extending to no end dialogue

I'll give the most extream example, there is an entire episode which is literally just Subaru and Rem talking to eachother, 25 full minutes of back and forth between the 2 of them, which don't get me wrong, that ep. did give them both a lot of character developement, but it could've been done just as well if not better in half the time


I haven't watched Bojack Horseman yet so don't really get the reference

it's just not though, like by no standards it is more "complicated than it needs to be"

ten simple lines is still as simple as a 100 simple lines.



The problem with this is, monster is not like rezero in the slightest.

The reason rezero's amount of dialogue is worthless, is because emotions are something that you show. it has entire scenes of characters explaining why they are sad, what is their thoughts, why it's important that go on and on and on for soo long.

Monster doesn't have a single part even close to that. all the dialogue there serves a purpose, and every line add something that the show would be lessened without it.

there is a lot of dialogue, but big or small, every line adds something that the other lines didn't fully.

which is why I asked for an example.

Go look through the episode. if it's as bad as you say finding an example should be easy

@APolygons2


That is technically true, but, you mentioned about substence


Ok, so you're basically saying the 10 simple lines have the same amount of substence as the 100 simple lines correct?

Now imagine the lines as cherry syrup (the one you mix in water to make a drink)

You're gonna make 2 drinks with the exact same amount of cherry syrup (the substence), but one drink you'll make with 10ml of water, the other with 100ml, question, will these 2 drinks with the same amount of cherry syrup (substence) have the same exat taste (impact)?

The answer is obviously no, the drink with 100ml of water is gonna be way more diluted than the one with 10ml

Ponit being if you streach out the substence that fits in 10 lines to 100 lines it can feel like theres too little there for the amount of time dedicated to it, aka overcomplicating a simple matter

Same can be said the other way round, if you mix the same amount of cherry syrup in 10ml of water and in 1ml of water, the one with 1ml will be too sweet, that is describing something that is too rushed, there's too little time to understand and savor the substence


Again, i can't comment on what i haven't seen, but as far as i've watched it did not convey that at all


I'll look trhu it when you look thru Tokyo Revengers and give me examples of bad time travel :P Then we can trade examples
Or alternatively if an italian dub of Monster ever comes out i might give it a second chance, might be more bareble if i don't need to try and read most of the dialogue

"I've been feeling down lately"

"It's been a while since time last time I got up out of bed and felt truly alive, these past few days have been a headache to say the least. I have been conflicted, depressed, and stressed about.... everything, so yeah, I've been feeling pretty down lately"



No, these two do not have the same substance. They both send the same general idea across, but the second one is more effective, more detailed, more everything.

your example doesn't work, because more dialogue about the single core idea, is not the same thing over and over again.

using more dialogue to convey something is more like adding detail to a painting. if the details are unnecessary and not well used, they make your painting look like a mess. with extra lines scattered on unneeded places, and shadows being on all the wrong areas.

but if used well, detail, is good. your drawing the same imagine, but just adding details to it.

Again, unnecessary detail done wrong, can make the painting look messy. but the key is "done wrong".

none of the dialogue in monster is bad. not even close.

Any time monster is adding more dialogue than necessary, it's because it's giving it more detail, it's not stretching it for the hell of it.



Bad dialogue is constant. If the show as a whole has bad dialogue, you wont need to spend more than a few minutes or less to find an example.

For tokyo revengers, I need to rewatch the show, to fully remember how everything is explained and what where the countless plot holes I found while watching it.

and more importantly, for a show to have plot holes, it needs to break it's own rules. which means I would need to at least rewatch 6 or 7 episode, to have gotten far enough to make an argument even close compelling enough to convince a super fan (If I were to be right that is).

And that is really not something that I want to do. It's a whole ass commitment. finding bad dialogue again, shouldn't take more than a few minutes, if it's actually common enough for you to say the show as a whole has bad dialogue.

Plot holes, even in shows where there is a lot of them, are only there every now and then and need a full understanding of the plot. Dialogue, specially in a dialogue heavy show like monster is literally everywhere. if it were to be bad, finding it would be a piece of cake.

@APolygons2


Ok... but here you just gave me an example of 1 line vs 4 lines, 1ml of water vs 10ml, now if you tryed to streach that to 20 lines, chances are it'll be as effective as the 1 line, cuz now you are overcomplicating what was coveyed decently to well (this depends also on the VAs performance but that's a debate for another time) in just 4

If those are lines from Monster, yes those alone are good lines, but if every line/s of the series is said in that format, it can feel overloaded, repetitive, and drowened on


You're basically telling me to just fine the first piece of bad dialogue and run with it, but that doesn't prove the rest of what i watched is bad T^T
So i would also need to spend a whole hour looking thru what i've watched to confirm if it's as bad as i remember

Anyways, i took a look at the eng dub cast for Monster and it doesn't seem half bad, i actually really like the VA who does Anna, so i could even try the eng dub when re-watching... in december when i renew netflix, it's on there, i'm paying for it, i might as well use it

any dialog that makes me chuckle is a good one