#despite the fact that this blog is supposed to be about VNs?

[dao-the-starlight]

HEY!! DO YOU LIKE GAY FRENCH PEOPLE???? YEAH?? WELL DO I HAVE THE WEBCOMIC FOR YOU!!!!!

This lovely webcomic is called Novae and it is available on this here website!! (it's also on webtoons but they had to exclude certain panels over there and also that place is kind of ass nowadays so you're better off just reading it on the official website)

The synopsis goes as follows:

Novae is a historical romance with a touch magic and a dash of astronomy. It chronicles the adventures of Sulvain, a sweet tempered necromancer and Raziol, a passionate 17th century astronomer. A connection forms between them and their relationship blooms, however when the body of a fellow astronomer is found on the steps of the Academy of Sciences, their lives are entangled in ways they could never foresee.

A gentle romance full of drama and adventure with moments that both tear and heal the heart.

I am not exaggerating when I say that this webcomic is one of the best pieces of queer fiction that I've ever read and I cannot reccommend it enough. It is such a fantastic read and it has served as one of my biggest inspirations for my creative journey ever since I first found it

The story? 10/10 Writing? 11/10 Art? 15/10 Characters? Oh my god, they're all so good they broke the damn scale!!

You get the point this comic is amazing I genuinely can't think of anything truly bad to say about it

And you know that meme thats like "fandom so small it could fit in this bus" THATS THE NOVAE FANDOM. I am in desperate need for more people to know about this phenomonal comic and give it the recognition it deserves cause this comic makes me INSANE.

So GO GO READ IT NOW PLEASEPLEASEPLEASEPLEASE-

Moots and followers this is a cry for help (/j) I need someone to be as insane about this comic as I am-

[white-tulips]

well, since it’s 5 in the morning I think now’s the perfect time to ramble about my thoughts re: OMORI vs Yume Nikki game design, Black Space, and how trying to copy something successful kind of sets you up for missing the mark 

these are thoughts I’ve been stewing in since january, I don’t want people to forget that I have a lot of opinions about OMORI as a game

(firstly, I’m sorry if this is all over the place or not worded well. it is 5AM)

I’ll preface this by saying that these are merely my opinions. I’m specifically going to be focusing on one aspect of game design here, so if you’re curious about any of my other OMORI game design opinions they’re scattered around my blog and are not hard to find tbh

okay so my thoughts about this are mostly Black Space exclusive, and considering that’s one of the climaxes of the game this might be a bit of a spicy subject to talk about KJFGHKFJG but I am passionate about good game design okay. especially in psychological horror RPG games. (also throwing out there jic that I don’t think OMORI is a bad psychological horror. pls reference this post) 

(also want to say that I genuinely like Black Space. okay? okay)

so this was something that I was talking about with a couple of friends back when I first finished OMORI around the beginning of january. actually, at this point I hadn’t even played Yume Nikki yet, but when I did finally play it recently my thoughts on this were 100% solidified

essentially, our thoughts on this can be boiled down to how Black Space was trying too hard to be Yume Nikki, but didn’t grasp exactly what made Yume Nikki so impactful in the first place

obviously taking inspiration from something you like and wanting to rework it into your own creation is normal, good, and even encouraged! however, the most crucial thing with that is the “reworking” part.  when being inspired by something, the goal is to take what you loved, and didn’t love, and mold it into something entirely new. it shouldn’t be “well I like this thing, and this thing did it like this so I’ll try to do it like that too” because it’s just not going to work. (this is actually an all around issue I have with OMORI, not just Black Space, but more on that later)

so to me, a good 50% of Black Space came of feeling kind of... eh...? it was like... you have 50% that feels so well thought out and meaningful, and then 50% that’s there just to. be there. and be like Yume Nikki, I guess. even before I played Yume Nikki, I couldn’t even remember some of the rooms in Black Space existed until I replayed it again, which is a shame because Black Space is the type of area where everything should leave an impact

now I want to talk about the game design itself-

Yume Nikki is a game about experiences, and atmosphere. there’s limitless area to explore, so much so that it feels endless. there are so few things to interact with that sometimes it feels like you’re doing nothing at all. all you have is aimlessly wandering these huge areas, taking in the sights, and listening to vague sounds and music in the background that are often just a few seconds of audio played on loop. (this is one of my favorite OST in the game. having this be all you hear for 30 minutes as you walk around in a looping forest really does things to your head)

it uses all of these elements to make you feel lost, confused, and very alone. you’re just trapped in a dream, where even with all the space in the world to explore, the lack of anything to do makes it feel suffocating. even the small area you have in the waking world is designed in such a way that feels cramped and destitute-

Yume Nikki is a perfect example of “less is more” and “show, don’t tell.” 

then take OMORI, which doesn’t really know how to balance those things with it’s tendency to try and shove too much in. for instance, think about the over abundance if NPCs with irrelevant fluff dialogue. it was all too much and so dull it got to a point I stopped reading most of them altogether

(and something important to note I think, is that the general feeling of Yume Nikki is the same throughout the entire game. the tone never really changes, and neither do the expectations. OMORI, however, tends to just drop things on you out of nowhere. and that’s not necessarily a bad thing! it works for a lot of different sections of the game, I’ll say. 

however, Black Space was different. it’s kind of like, it just drops you in there and expects you to understand the way it works, despite the fact that all of the other horror segments lead you to have a completely different set of expectations for what you should be doing/feeling. it’s like shifting you into another game entirely, and it’s almost immersion breaking. up until this point, OMORI was not the same type of “show don’t tell” type of game, so suddenly jumping to attempt to do that can make it lose some of it’s impact)

like I mentioned before, Black Space is designed in a way that’s meant to mimic Yume Nikki. and I think we need to ask ourselves “just because we can do this, does it mean that we should?” again, taking inspiration isn’t a bad thing, but it’s the execution that matters

and here’s where my biggest issue actually lies, I suppose. it’s the fact that OMORI has multiple instances of trying to take inspiration from other things, and failing because it’s trying too hard to copy, not rework. it’s just most obvious because of Black Space, I think. because, like I said before, a good half of Black Space is just trying to be Yume Nikki without giving it any OMORI original flavor, and the fact that it’s trying to be something else is immersive breaking as hell to me

for example, take the red mazes. I don’t think the idea to incorporate it into OMORI was bad, but. you can plainly see when you compare the two maps that nothing was really reworked, made more interesting, or even given a OMORI flavored twist-

(Yume Nikki-1 ; OMORI-2)

another instance is less about the game design itself, but surprising/not-surprisingly, it actually has to do with OST

this is something my friend was telling me, because I myself have not read Umineko, but there are OST in OMORI blatantly trying to mimic songs from that VN, even down to their names

the biggest offender imo is GOLDENVENGEANCE which is a decent song, I won’t say it isn’t, but compare it to it’s Umineko inspiration, Golden Slaughterer 

it’s just another unfortunate instance of “this thing I like is good, so I’ll try to copy it!” with no clear grasp on why it’s successful and it’s disappointing. that’s really the only word I have for it at this point, disappointing

and the reason it’s most disappointing is because of things in OMORI that are obvious inspiration, but were reworked so well

let’s take this other Umineko OST, Worldend Dominator. this is a brilliant song, and it’s really fun to listen to. and, it very clearly inspired beloved World's End Valentine

World’s End Valentine slaps. it’s great. it takes aspects of Worldend Dominator and shifts them around to be a unique and fun piece of music that also fits into OMORI perfectly. 

something important to note about this, is that World’s End Valentine and GOLDENVENGEANCE were written by two different composers. what this makes clear to me is that there were people on the OMORI dev team that were better at reworking ideas than others. because, despite a lot of the criticisms I was talking about, there are things in OMORI that are obvious references that I love and think are great!

like this one, the most pointed out nod to Yume Nikki-

I think it’s great. it’s taking a very memorable bit of imagery from Yume Nikki, and giving it a reference while also giving it it’s own deeper meaning beyond just the aesthetics of it. it’s just good, I love it

and yeah, not all of Black Space feels like one giant copy of Yume Nikki. there are plenty of doors that I think take the same aimless, empty, and unsettling feelings and use them in a new way that feels more grounded in OMORI. my personal favorite door is the “Sunny... I love you.” room. 

actually, funnily enough, the area in OMORI that felt the most like Yume Nikki to me wasn’t in Black Space at all. it was actually the snowy area right before Snowglobe Mountain. something about the vast empty space, simple yet atmospheric OST, and little things to find scattered around just gave me a nice Yume Nikki vibe, but mixed with the OMORI style (hell, the OST there and the one for the snowy area in Yume Nikki even have a pleasantly similar vibe, and not in the “oh this is a copy” way [X] [X])

gosh, I feel like if I keep talking I might end up going in circles more than I already have

hopefully my words made sense!! I’d love if anything I said resonated with anyone aha. I just hope that I’m not coming across as hating on something because I’m biased towards something else or something... almost all of the critiques I have about OMORI come from a place of genuine interest

thank you if you read all of this!

[mysmess-seol-blog]

Jumin's Feelings for Rika - Korean vs. English Comparison

Hi♡

ㅎㅎ안녕하세용^^ 저도 생각했을때는 너무 다행인것같아요~^^

Before I start, I want to also thank all the encouraging messages I had received for my decision to continue this blog! I really want to be able to continue posting, and to be able to create interesting, fun, and informative posts in regards to Mystic Messenger~ Thank you all for such kind words! ^^

Okay, so back to the subject at hand. Imma be honest. This made me on edge for a fictional character since Jumin is my favorite. I just ugh, I can’t. Love me instead.

But all that aside, I will go ahead and state that if you have not played Jumin’s route yet and do not want even the tiniest spoiler (for Jumin’s deep route and Christmas DLC) to ruin your gameplay, just completely ignore this post! It shouldn’t be too bad since I am just going to analyze the comparison of the Korean version to the English version in terms of how clarified it is that Jumin may or may not have feelings for Rika. Not the actual plot itself.

Please join me under the cut for a full on analysis for this issue!

Please note that although this is an analysis, there may be opinions that may differ or be consistent with mine! While I can give some sort of Korean background, for debatable topics, I do not represent all of the Korean minds for respective topics. Also, please excuse any errors or let me know if clarifications are needed, for English is not my first language! Thank you and enjoy!

So, to start, this is an interesting question because I also thought the same thing. In the Korean version, Jumin’s actual route implies that he had feelings for Rika. It was very puzzling for me considering the only time he talked about it was the last sentence of the visual novel that you sent (bless your soul, you saved me so much time and work ;w;) and also through references that he would “visualize Elizabeth the 3rd” as Rika, hence his attachment and love for said feline.

I also went ahead and went back further to see just where I decided that there might be misunderstandings or a possible foreshadowing of Jumin’s feelings towards Rika.

Let’s start with this.

This was from the VN where RIka and Jumin are talking about why he doesn’t try to make any friends, express his feelings, etc.

그렇지 않아. It’s not like that.

넌 멋져, 리카. You’re cool, Rika. **so while literally translated to “cool” it can be taken in the context of wonderful, splendid, etc.

English translation: If I remember correctly, it was something like, “No Rika, you’re beautiful.”

This statement by Jumin does not really show much evidence (in the Korean version anyway) that he has feelings for Rika. This is something friends can say to each other, and considering that in the Korean and English version she asks Jumin if she is pretty, I feel there is some sort of misunderstanding. The English version does say beautiful, but the Korean version is much less so.

Okay, so with that out of the way, let’s move on to the mentioned VN during Day 10 that the anon kindly mentioned.

The questioning phrase at hand is,

혹시 내가 V를 만나기 전에 널 먼저 만났다면… If I met you before I met V…

우리 둘이 잘 되었을까? Do you think we would have worked out?

English translation: If I met you before I met V…do you think we would have ended up together?

Okay, while the translation is a liiiiiittle bit different, roughly, that is what Rika does mean. That is there a possibility that could get together. In the Korean version though, it is slightly vague. The way she asks in Korean is a phrase that anyone can use in terms of if their relationship, whether it be friendship, family, or a significant other of sorts in terms of whether their relationship could have ended up better.

Now, the reason why I said virtually the English translation is passable is the fact that their relationship is already fine. So the only other context she could possibly mean is a romantic one.

In the end Rika says it is a joke after seeing Jumin’s face.

I would be too, because this is a very rude gesture on her part. I am not sure how it is in other cultures, but in Korea, especially since it is about a friend that Jumin trusts very much, that is not something to say. Also the fact that V introduced Rika to him to begin with.

Jumin responds with,

그런 농담은 날 곤란하게 만들어. This kind of joke makes me feel complicated.

English translation: Jokes like that make me uncomfortable.

I am guessing his meaning of complicated would be more towards the way he thinks and acts throughout his route. And the way he sees Rika in Elizabeth the 3rd. Like in this statement,

물론이야…너와 엘리자베스 3세는 닮았으니까 더 아껴줘야지. Of course…I treasure her even more so because you and Elizabeth the 3rd are alike.

English translation: Of course…more so since you and Elizabeth the 3rd kind of look alike.

Okay, I found this weird because how does Rika look like Elizabeth the 3rd the slightest lol. In Korean, he meant that the things he feels from Elizabeth the 3rd are the same with how he feels from Rika.

The last thing I wanted to discuss today was the big big thing that Jumin says to Elizabeth.

☆☆ 너도 리카처럼…결국에는 똑같이 내가 가질수 없는 존재였던 걸지도 몰라. ☆☆ Like Rika…maybe you were just never supposed to me mine.

English translation: Rika, you…maybe you two were just never supposed to be mine.

This is where I was convinced that Jumin did have feelings for Rika. That is before the Christmas DLC, which I will talk about in a few.

I was thrown off guard with that last statement, and of course that is where the VN ends.

This issue gets brought up again when V comes over to take you back to the apartment. Jumin says,

난 엘리자베스 3세를 보면 리카를 떠올려. When I look at Elizabeth the 3rd, I see Rika.

English translation: Whenever I see Elizabeth the 3rd, I remember Rika.

As Jumin says himself, it is not that simple. The way he thought of Rika was a lot more complicated and there was more to it that just the fact that Rika and V had gifted him with Elizabeth.

리카는 살아생전 비뚤어진 내 마음을 볼 수 있었어. Rika despite how *살아생전(?) it means best translated to my whole life up til now* crooked/twisted I was, she could see the real me.

그 당시에는 몰랐지만 지금 생각해 보면 난 그녀에게 의지했어. I didn’t know then, but thinking about it now, I relied on her (Rika).

In short, he always thought fo Rika, looking at at Elizabeth. Which you guys may know already because the English version states that well enough.

The real question is though, did he have romantic feelings for Rika?

Let’s go over one more think before I personally answer that.

During the Christmas DLC, Jumin’s route concentrated more on his friendship with V. He even said in Korean that after V met Rika, he felt that his friend was taken away from him.

Conflicting much?

I would put up a screenshot but right now I am so exhausted guys, I’m sorry ㅠㅠ

Before this DLC, I thought that Jumin would explain more about his feelings for Rika that are still debatable, but it was more about his friendship with V. Which is fine but I did think this puts more confusion for me personally about how he did feel about Rika.

To conclude, I want to at least tell you guys what I got from my playthrough and I think that Jumin did have feelings for Rika, but not in the sense that it was actually romantic. A lot of the way he says his words in the Korean version were thankful that he had someone like Rika, but none of the words actually had his feelings invested in him.

He relied on her since she listened to him.

He found her to be a magnificent person.

He did say that he couldn’t have Rika, but that I found to be his misconception of what “having something” is. You can already see that he has a thing for the topic of “possession.” V and Rike were engaged and even with V, he couldn’t really “have” him too.

^I actually have no idea what I just blabbered. It made a lot more sense in my head. This is the struggles of translating >

I will probably come back to edit this later ^^

For now, I am going to nap because dioshhaghlsgahgijla

Thanks for reading!

- 류설♡

[gopherchuck5]

My Struggles with Self-worth

This is going to be a bit of a serious blog post today, just as a heads-up.

I want to let people know about the internal struggles I've had going on with me since I was a child. I want to explain the highs, the lows, the fears, the conflicts, and everything in-between. Yes, I know that this blog is primarily dedicated to updates and behind-the-scenes info for my projects, and I intend to keep it that way. My struggles with self-worth and all that is wrapped up in that package have a direct influence on the media that I create.

So let's start at the beginning with the most long-running issue that I've let plague me since grade school. I'm the third oldest in a family of 6 children (plus two step siblings in later years), and the oldest male of them all. With things as they were, my younger brothers practically idolized me. I was the male to look up to in our single mother household, and I became the standard of what they sought to be like as they grew older. I did my best to be strong, proper, independant, and always chivalrous. There was just one major problem: I never saw myself as "manly". I was always much more interested in feminine things, whether it be toys, TV shows, or anything else. (As an aside: I couldn't tell you whether this had anything to do with me growing up with two older sisters. I had a head injury at the age of 10, and only remember key events and whatever was recorded via home video. By this age, I didn't play much with my older sisters, but usually just with my brothers and my friends from school and the neighborhood.)

So as time went on and I became aware of this feminine side of me, I would actively cover it up with pretending to be interested in the more male-oriented things that my friends liked. Fifth grade me had no idea what a Beyblade was, or was able to tell the difference between any of the characters in Dragon Ball Z, but I would play as my assigned character out at recess before heading home and watching the Powerpuff Girls. I would write in major female characters into my comics that I wrote, but always had them surrounded by males, so that I could excuse her presence to my friends when it would come up.

By middle school, there wasn't much I could do to hide this part of me. Times were different back then, and picking on the girly-boy was always on everyone's to-do list. My ears were pierced, my hair was long, I sang in the school choir, and I hung out with my girl friends more often than the guys. Things turned especially sour when many of the guys that I called my friends one day all turned on me, calling me names and generally bullying me whenever they had the chance. Our friend group was split down the middle, with some standing up for me, and the others ridiculing me. The fact that these were people that I had called friends just days previously hurt me down to the core. I turned to my school counselor who suggested that I tried to like the things that they liked (aka the "guy" stuff) in order to become their friends again. All around me, all that I heard was one common theme of "you aren't supposed to be like this". It wore me down until I was nothing. I cursed God for making me wrong. And one day in 7th grade, I took a knife from the kitchen and snuck it to school in my cargo jeans.

Needless to say, I'm still here. This doesn't mean that I got over this issue. Time moved on, and in 2017, I finally accepted that as part of who I am after over a decade. The problem is, these types of issues don't go away, they simply change shape. Now that I have a duty to provide for a family, I've quickly found that in the American midwest (the do it yourself, manual labor capitol), I'm just not cut out to be like everyone else. Thanks in part to my super high metabolism leaving me scrawny and weak no matter what I do, and in part to my useless right shoulder after an incident in high school, I'm just not physically cut out to do much. I've been unemployed for months on end multiple times throughout my adult life, which could have been remedied quickly if I was able to do simple manual labor.

When living in the midwest and possessing a list of skills that are primarily creative, out of the box, and self-driven, there's just not any need for someone like me around here. Where has my degree in animation gotten me? Food service, retail, and revising paperwork. IT work is expected of me no matter where I end up, despite my active efforts to never have that title near me. I don't know anything about how computers function, and yet this is something thrust upon me. So this is where I am now, asking why I was given such a great skill set that is useless where I am?

The second struggle I have feeding into my miniscule self-worth is my relationships with friends. There's a reason that I love to write about characters and their relationships with others; it's nice to imagine what it would be like. In college, I gained a small handful of friends in the form of two of my classmates. Since then, both of which have moved to different states. My best friend in high school, basically ignores me whenever I attempt to talk or meet up with him. In the odd event that we do run into each other, things are always great, and I'd love to have it happen more often, but if I can't get any response ever, then how can I make that happen? Lastly, I gained a good friend at a past job of mine, but the differences in interests, background, maturity, ideals, and now location, has left the entire relationship strained extremely thin. My only solace happens once a year, for a short while, I get to reunite with a group of people with whom I get along really well with and we are all genuinely interested in each others' lives. Connecting online is out of the question when only one or two of them use social media, and it's very limited use, at that. A year or so ago, I actually had found a friend. He was a good influence, had a wife and daughter right around the ages of my wife and son, we all got along really well, and they lived nearby. Things were finally looking up for me; I had that friend I was looking for for so long. But life intervened, and they soon found themselves moving back south after being here for only a few months.

The problem isn't that I'm an unlikable guy. In every major job I've had where I've worked with people around my age, I've been easily regarded as a fun and relatable co-worker, someone to depend on, and a friend to call on when clocked out. The problem is, when you're a 21-year old assistant manager to a bunch of high school girls, you can't exactly hang out with them or get too close without people getting the wrong idea. Years pass, and the appropriate timeline to reconnect fades quickly.

Social media plays a large part in how I view myself, as well, and it really ties into the "friends" aspect of this all. It all plays into who I am, and that is, a content creator. Over the years, I've done everything from animation to short stories, from a written novel to a visual novel. That's who I am and that's what I do. My greatest desire is to make stories that can touch people around the world. Yet as much as I can tell all of my Facebook friends about how hard I've been working on my visual novel, or how proud I am of an animated short I just finished, it goes completely unnoticed. My wife is typically the only person nice enough to leave a "like" on anything I post. Is it just a matter of people not seeing my posts thanks to how the site operates? Of course not. The moment I post a picture of my kids, there's 14 likes and 6 comments. It's become such a frustration to me, that posting anything to that site makes me think of it more as a social experiment on what I could possibly post that would garner any sort of interest from the people I call friends.

In a bit of a side statement to that, the creative portions of the internet have been incredibly toxic to my self-worth. I joined Discord with the exclusive reasoning of finding "good vibes only", positive places to post and share artwork and chat. Of the three channels that I found, one of them actually voted to remove me on the grounds that I was a straight white male, and didn't need any more attention. Another channel became too hard to visit, as all of my artwork was completely ignored, which is generally what I'm used to, but other artists' pieces that were just... not very good... were talked about and praised for twenty minutes. It was painful to watch the notifications come in over and over until I posted something and they came to a grinding halt. Lastly, the real killer for me was when I was graciously invited to join a channel specifically for VN creators in order to try to drum up some more interest in my project. What ended up happening was a three-hour attack including people telling me that "no one would ever read this", "the artwork looks like s**t", "stop wasting your time", and my favorite, "if you want to get a single reader when it looks like this, you'll need to try to sell it as a hentai". The platform became such a reminder of my own insecurities, that I haven't been able to even launch the app without being reminded of the heartache it caused me.

Combine everything I've talked about, from my physical and mental being, to my lack of meaningful friendships, to the negative influence that the creative world has had on me, and I think you'll come to understand a bit more about who I am, and why I work the way I do. The past week has been hard on me, with these feelings weighing down especially hard on me and putting me into a depression yet again. I haven't worked on Melatia for maybe two weeks now, and the guilt of not progressing with it makes me feel even worse. I can sit and stare at my computer for hours, but it has always ended up with half-hearted artwork that I need to remake later on for quality reasons. It's a battle. It's a battle that I'd love to be able to win someday, but as for now, please bear with me as I fight through this all.​