This is a Cliché I’m coining to refer to a specific Japanese writing convention that I noticed which is…kinda infuriating.

It manifests as the story explicitly explaining what the theme or intended theme is, usually thru dialog.

I initially noticed this in Isekai stories, but noticed that it’s more common than expected. It’s also a decidedly Japanese thing as Westerners (usually) aren’t as blunt.

Basically, instead of letting the story communicate the theme implicitly, Japanese authors will usually just tell you what the theme is. The most recent example I experienced was from Umineko no Naku Koro ni where a character talked about the cycle of abuse and how it’s bad and how breaking it is good.
A lot of the time this manifests as introspection or internal monologues, which has the unintended effect of making a lot of the characters doing the introspection come off as extremely egotistical and judgemental.

This cliché is a cliché (and thus bad) because it implicitly assumes the audience is stupid and can’t understand the theme unless it’s explained to them explicitly. What makes it even worse is that the themes that are being communicated are often not even that hard to grasp. Besides the Umineko example, I remember one Isekai basically said “this person is saying that this race should go back to their homeland, but they can’t because the land they’re on was stolen from them, so the person saying this is a colonist; this is hypocritical and bad”.
The other point is that it essentially removes nuance from the situation. In the colonial example, the story has painted the colonists as unambiguously evil. Further, it’s painting this hypocrisy as applying to all of them and not just the one guy. So it eliminates nuance and shuts down debate. What could even be debated, though, you might ask. Well, what if the colonists only arrived there because the native peoples were constantly raiding them? So this wasn’t originally aggressive expansion, but a defensive measure to prevent their own people from being harmed? And they only started settling there later. That’s just one example, but I think it showcases what you lose by just spelling it out. Though that’s also assuming the author even considers a possibility like that.

Unsurprisingly, this also somewhat overlaps with the Japanese Kumbaya cliché.

I’m not sure exactly why this convention exists but I assume it survives off the back of people who want to feel smart. Since the theme is spelled out in plain words, people who want to comes off as intelligent will point at it and go “see, it’s covering this theme and that makes it deep” despite them doing no analysis.

If you can only communicate a theme explicitly, you’re bad at writing. Full stop.

I’ll gradually fill this out later.