Through our research, we explore the contents of light novels, a medium of short young-adult fiction novels in Japan, through a dataset of light novel titles of the past 50 years. Through analyzing this dataset, we examine the recent explosion of light novel title lengths as well as the genre shift of light novels over time. We see that not only has the explosion of light novel title lengths been extremely drastic, but also that it is an extremely recent phenomenon, taking place most notably in only the last 5 or 6 so years. We also see that the genre shift has mainly consisted of a shift from romance and mystery-oriented stories to ones more focused on fantasy, video-game settings, and supernatural elements.
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