#visual novel discourse

[specterthief]

there is actually one thing i personally found ddlc did better than totono, which is monika's role as a character herself! miyuki is not only a love interest but the enforced first love interest, the Main Girl, but monika is hitting on a very specific character niche in bishoujo games and their fandoms (the cutely-designed female side character with no route who develops a cult fan following, inspires tons of doujin work, and maybe ultimately gets focus on a fandisc if fans are lucky) and an important mechanical role in genuine dating sims (the tutorial/info guy) and i think that actually serves the meta plot in a far cleverer way

she's a character evoking a trope all about the players, their desire for something out of reach and the creativity that can inspire, playing a gameplay role that in true dating sims is basically part of the user interface more than a character allowed to be part of the action - again, a role defined by interaction with the player themself. having that character be the one to fall in love with the player rather than the main character and rewrite the game to give herself the opportunity she doesn't have in a narrative she's not meant to be an active player in is really smart and something that really shines if you're familiar with the genre conventions she's playing with! totono might have done the game-altering fourth wall breaking metanarrative and tokimemo4 might have done the female info guy turning into a hidden yandere love interest, but the combination of the two is genuinely really good.

it's a shame plus seemed so determined to tear down so much of what the original built tbh

[rayoftruth]

Psycholonials' bottle epilogue has the only good reference to gamergate in any piece of fictional media.

Thanks Andrew Hussie.

[tkdb-confessions]

Ooh cool 😮

[trivorowo]

It's going to be both parts equally hilarious and sad when and if wrightworth gets canonised in some manner, as you know for a fact that certain gamers (tm) will somehow use this as an excuse to call the series woke or something.

[sadghoststudios]

Just thinking about the most recent ask about carrots, does Thyme and her family know any of the other high profile rabbits out there? Like Roger Rabbit or Bugs Bunny?

How does she feel about Bugs perpetuating the carrot eating stereotype that is so prevalent now?

Thyme herself has been something of a shutin, at least compared to her parents (she networks the required amount, but doesn't really find the same joy in fancy parties as others might). But I believe her cousin may have mentioned knowing a certain Lola that might be familiar...

She doesn't sound like my kind of bunny... but I'm sure she's lovely.

As far as Bugs is concerned, it's common knowlege among rabbitfolk that his specific kind of vaudeville is outdated, but some consider it a kind of purposeful tongue-in-cheek invocation of the trope that just flies under most peoples' radars, and actually reclaim him as their own. (Whether that's true as of Word of God, you'd have to ask e Bugs).

our ask box is OPEN! ✨

[agender-wolfie]

Lmao well I can’t play Touchstarved because it’s only on PC and MAC 🙃

They also didn’t announce any more LI like they said they would. 🤔 Was hoping for more non binary and at least one female character. Let’s hope they don’t follow the same path that doomed Nix Hydra 😬 It’s hard to find good representation.

[specterthief]

(games in other genres can have dating sim elements if there are fleshed out romance mechanics that work like this, i.e. modern persona games' social links and how they interact with time and stat-building, but for a game as a whole to be a dating sim it is by definition a simulation game about dating)

hello VN developer. You have said that your VN is "more than just a dating sim". In front of you is a computer with a copy of Konami's 1994 Tokimeki Memorial. You have to play through it and get confessed to by Shiori Fujisaki on your first try. Should you fail that, the bomb placed below the chair you're tied to will explode. Good luck.

[skeletonmob]

A lukewarm take I suppose, but the thing that irks me the most about AI art or cryptocurrency or whatever is that they don't actually solve anything.

Like, AI art is touted as a way to make animation easier and to bring more art to the public. But the problem isn't that the animation process is difficult, it's that the animation industry is kind of a shit place to work. Trying to get into the field is highly competitive, burnout is frequent, and it's highly likely that some executive will decide to destroy months of work because money.

Shoving a computer that can 'create' anything you can imagine into the mix doesn't fix all of that. The executive is just going to choose the computer because money, and now you have a bunch of starving artists on your hands. AI art doesn't fix the problem, just side steps it, and it just creates even more.

[specterthief]

ddlc is an interesting case with the whole "knowing the genre you're subverting" thing because salvato (known akiha guy) certainly DOES know bishoujo games and i do think that shows in a lot of elements about it western """dating sim parodies""" tend to drop the ball on (and, from what i've seen from the youtubers/streamers i've watched, its appeal among japanese VN fans just completely taken straight as a genre shift horror bishoujo game), and yet it still ends up having perfect appeal among the exact type of people who don't know anything about them and hate the idea that exists in their head, so what is actually a more-thoughtful-than-usual parody ends up going completely over people's heads and continuing to feed the whole misconception of """dating sims""" in a way the game doesn't really do by itself

plus is fully just shitting on the concept of romance VNs though i have no idea what the hell happened to it or why

[priropro]

sorry to hijack this post but i see a lot of people asking for more representation of "clockable" trans people in their media, and I make a game that has those.

hi, i'm a clocky trans guy who will probably never pass. i make clocky trans characters and put them in a visual novel series that i write, do the art for, compose all the music for, etc. just one guy on this project, besides a majority trans cast of voice actors.

a few examples:

here's luci, who's transmasc (he/they). his voice actor is also transmasc and currently on t, so throughout the series, this character's voice is going to noticeably change.

same with toulouse (she/him), a character I voice, also a transmasc person on t. my voice is changing, and i'm taking her with me.

and then of course dear lupino (he/him), who sports red trans tape through a translucent tank top. this man's getup does not let you forget there are boobs in there.

i also don't want to forget babygirl dash (he/her) who's just now exploring transfemininity after a life of identifying as a feminine gay man.

i created these characters and other very visibly trans characters because they represent me and my wonderful cast of trans voice actors, who have been with me through milestones of my transition and vice-versa. i cannot imagine being anything but immensely proud of such visible transness.

if we only represented trans people that passed, we would be ignoring those of us who will never pass/simply are just not in a stage of transition to do so. that is such a huge percentage of trans people. if it makes you dysphoric to see clockable trans people in media and you ask that people do not represent them, you are asking for trans people to not be represented for your personal comfort and disregarding theirs. "i am uncomfortable when we are not about me," much?

representing trans people means ALL trans people.

anyway you can play the first installment of the series on steam or on itch.

to cis artists, yr allowed to draw trans characters to be clockable, in fact i encourage it. it's not politically incorrect or offensive to depict trans people as being obviously trans, especially if you're drawing cartoons. its not a stereotype a lot of us just look like that

[arimiadev]

it's interesting how every month or so (usually on twitter) there will be male-centric discourse on otomes, typically "why won't more otomes let me play as a man" or "why do I have to date men in otomes", in much more volume than there was years ago. I can only imagine that these sentiments typically stem from general anime fans trying to get into otomes with the misconception that dating sim = otome and vice versa.

for those unaware, not every dating sim is an otome and not every otome is a dating sim (though quite a few are). otome, as we define it in English-speaking fandoms, is a game with a female protagonist and male love interests. the kind of MC (faceless; customizable look & gender; fully fleshed out background), the length of the game, and the amount & gender of the love interests have varied over the years, but the constant is that otome has the choice to play as a female MC with at least some male LIs. most otomes are a type of visual novel, while dating sims are a subset of the visual novel medium focused on stat raising. dating sims can be any kind of romance orientation and not all romance visual novels are dating sims.

so because there's this misconception some have of what an otome actually is, we get repeating discourse every few weeks/months where someone comes to the ice cream shop asking for chicken tenders. that's not what we serve here. a lot of times these people mean well- they just want a certain kind of game but don't know the right terminology for it. sometimes they don't mean well and the conversations devolve into misogyny, but we're not here to discuss that aspect of it.

as more people become aware of visual novels and dating sims as a whole, these are the kind of growing pains the audience is going to face sadly. aside from telling people to Google terminology, I will leave you with this- if you see someone or you're interested in playing otome-like games that aren't just female MCs or male LIs, mess around with tags on itchio and you'll find a plethora of indie romance visual novels.

gay visual novels - boys love visual novels - yuri visual novels - dating sims - lgbt visual novels - romance visual novels

[centrally-unplanned]

Japanese website Forest Page is shutting down ~today, a tragic loss of "Heisei otaku memories", as so many are calling it. Launched in 2003, Forest Page was a "Geocities for mobile", a site that hosted user-created websites and gave them tools to allow non-coders to make them. In practice, it became one of the premiere places for fanfiction in Japan, with the stories hosted on author-created sites.

It wasn't quite the Fanfic.net of Japan, as for one the Japanese fandom just never centralized quite the way the 2000's western one did, instead being spread out over a half dozen or so sites. But additionally, it wasn't initially popular for fanfic so much as cell phone fanfiction, because in 2000's Japan the "cell phone novel" was a specific thing. These websites were being made for flip phones, not smartphones, and not only would people read them on those phones, they would often write them. None of that was very conducive to the creation and consumption of a "traditional" novel; so starting in the 2000's Japanese writers started making stories fit for the medium, namely:

Very short

A huge focus on dialogue and inner thoughts, with no/minimal description or scene detail

Using a limited POV of a specific character

Often employing the medium-as-message, like using emojis, structuring the story as IM's or emails, etc.

Also they all had huge gaps between lines, I'm not really sure what that is about:

Probably for readability on the phone given the small screen size? But it was absolutely part of the genre. A few of these novels actually made it big, got movie adaptations, people wrote articles about the "cultural phenomenon", it was the 2000's so Hiroki Azuma had a take on it of course, and so on. It slotted neatly into the vibe of the time of technology changing culture, paralleling discourse around otaku in the same era.

In fanfic those trends met up, and anyone familiar with fanfiction probably read that list of traits of the cellphone novel and thought "oh, this is perfect for fanfiction". Skipping out on description? I don't need it, I know what they look like already. Focus on conversation and POV? Perfect for shipping fics. Short lengths? Yeah, we are shortcutting to the good stuff, that is the point. Mirroring trends in the west, Forest Page's userbase was ~95% female, and the most common content on the site was romantic or edgy-dramatic stories in the franchises you'd expect. The closure page linked above actually summarizes the site's history by year, and lists the biggest fandoms:

Which is exactly what I would expect from a female otaku fanfiction website. Congrats to Pirates of the Caribbean for making it though, freeaboo's represent.

I do think the fact that the site was a website hoster as opposed to a fic hoster did align with the way the Japanese fandom was more "creator focused" and embraced the media mix more. There were "fic circles" a la doujin circles who made their own pages, people would make fanart, fan video games, and so own to host alongside it, and all of it was centralized to the creator; it made following them-as-a-person just a little bit easier. Most websites were simple text, but others did have the full Geocities experience:

Something that was somewhat common were basic visual novel concepts where the reader could make choices, or even insert their own name so they would be the "MC" of the story:

(Dream novels are in fact their own thing in Japan) My understanding is the site was quite popular through the 2000's and into the 2010's, though over time the "cellphone novel" as a concept fizzled out. People got smartphones, more people got PCs, and the constraints didn't make sense anymore - you can read ebooks and normal websites on your phone now after all. You can probably draw a line between these kind of stories and the webfiction/light novel boom of the late 2000's/2010's, something that was equally born on the internet, that streamlines the novel to "shortcut to the good stuff" but without the need to fit on a flip phone's screen. Though I will admit my own understanding of their histories shows them more as two sides of the same "youth demand for new literature" coin.

In 2017 Forest Page launched Forest Page Plus, a new service fully optimized for the smartphone era; but it did not transfer over all the old content, starting the clock ticking on the original Forest Page. My understanding is that in June they announced Forest Page was officially closing down; and from what I have gathered from reminiscing writers on twitter, they did not provide any easy, one-touch way to save any of the content, so people are archiving Wayback Machine links or sharing tips on how screenshot-save stories (I think the rub is they gave people a way to transfer content to FP+, but most don't want to do that, as places like Twitter & Pixiv are the content kings of this era).

As of tomorrow I would bet the large majority of the content will be gone; quite sad given both the quantity of stories there and how many got sometimes millions of readers. I am sure most of the biggest stories are archived at least, but particularly the early stuff was a very ephemeral genre, one that doesn't make sense to revisit once you aren't a 16 year old teen writing and reading fics on a flip phone in between classes. Which means another legion of the ghosts of the Wired is being born today. May we pour one out for a fellow online community that lived and died!

[azaracyy]

to the next stage of our adventure! digimon survive week 2024 day 7: post-game / future personal thoughts under the cut - less about the artwork and more about shuuji and lopmon themselves. a long rambling containing major spoilers and heavy topics. will cause whiplash. proceed with caution.

other than the fact this may be boring and long-winded, cw and tw: there will be mentions of self-harm and suicide. if these topics make you uncomfortable, please step back. if you're sure, then alright. i'm aware this is a weird place to ramble about shuuji and lopmon considering the notorious highlight of their story would match the themes of day 5 (villains) and day 6 (dark & loss) better. unfortunately (ironically?) i never planned to feature them for those days, so... pretty sure i'm not the only one feeling this, but when i discovered that a good part of the fandom seems to loathe shuuji with utmost passion, even after they claimed to have completed the game, i was confused. the way his death happened and (understanding) the cause made me uncomfortable for a while, but never drove me to the point of hate... once i recovered from the initial shock, what i felt towards him was more pity, then respect (on truthful route). i feel shuuji should have been one of the most appreciated characters in survive. yet it was the opposite that happened. (between you and me though, knowing there was this discourse with the fact digimon survive is a visual novel, i'm not that surprised it turned out this way...) from my point of view, lopmon evolving into wendimon then killing shuuji symbolizes suicide, the act of taking one's own life. it was the climax of shuuji's mental breakdown, leading him to basically self-destruct, causing damage to everyone around him and ultimately himself. lopmon evolved, just like he hoped. but failed to do it like other kemonogami partners (maintaining control of themselves and fending off enemies). the next and final outcome was death, through his own partner actually eating him alive too. it reminds me how when someone thought they have prepared well for something important yet it failed spectacularly, the devastation and frustration would eat them in the same way from inside. and they probably would for one second think, "i'm better off dead". the more i pondered about it, the more it hit home, so of course, the last thing i could do is hate him, when his struggles sound similar to my own - having to rely on consistent achievements to prove your value, to feel you are worth living and not a waste of resources. the part where shuuji went all abusive on lopmon felt like the equivalent of pushing yourself to the extreme to reach your goal, to the point of neglecting your own needs. it's like a student so absorbed in their study, sacrificing food and sleep, until their body eventually snaps and shuts down for good (...this in fact happened to one of the students at my previous workplace. she was in her last year of high school. life was just about to truly start for her when her classmate informed us of her sudden death). even in truthful route where shuuji and lopmon survive that point, things aren't immediately nice and easy for him. you can see that he still has self-doubts, and what i think is impostor's syndrome. he could be making a great contribution to the team and still put himself down for having done "nothing". i have found it interesting that artists and writers tend to be especially fond of shuuji. so perhaps it's not just the matter of one's upbringing - whether you were raised in a harsh, competitive environment and/or with family with (unreasonably) high standards so you can relate more easily to him - but also whether one can see just what every struggle shuuji and lopmon went through symbolizes shuuji's mental state. out of all survive characters, i think shuuji and lopmon pulled off this thing called "surviving" the hardest, no joke. which is why i almost always gravitate to drawing them happy because that's what they deserve :') after all this, what i also would like to say is, it's okay if a character makes you uncomfortable. it's okay if you hate a character. but never, ever bring down the character to people who like them or even consider them their favorite or comfort character. if you must, do it in your own space and only with like-minded people.

[greatwyrmgold]

It sucks that visual novels are stereotyped as the worst version of the medium. Most media and genres get stereotyped as the big-budget high-profile examples; shooter games as CoD or Gears of War, action movies as James Bond or the MCU, fantasy novels as LotR or ASoIaF. Not always things that I would call "good" without qualification, but they always have something good about them.

By contrast, the stereotypical visual novel isn't Phoenix Wright or VA-11 Hall-A or whatever, it's some ambiguous mush of cheap dating sims and trashy hentai.

I appreciate your fight to get people to read vns. I have been working to get my friends into type moon. I just finished F/sn myself, and it was amazing. Though getting my friends to interact with the series outside of the anime might be a losing battle for me.

glad you liked fate/stay night! it's a classic for a reason. now do fate/hollow ataraxia

I'll never understand why it's so hard to get people to read visual novels because when I first found out about the genre my reaction was basically "oh this rules". if you read books with any kind of frequency you will also enjoy visual novels. if you play text heavy mobile games like fgo or arknights you will also enjoy visual novels. if you play story driven rpgs you will also enjoy visual novels. if you watch anime with subtitles you will also enjoy visual novels. if you read homestuck you will also enjoy visual novels.

[haru-dipthong]

I'm learning more about "localisation discourse" in the anime fan community and my god it is so stupid. The arguments are so incestuous, like people in these discussions (both sides!) haven't ever considered what translation or localisation is outside of the context of anime and manga. Like lots of anime fans say they "hate localisation and want accurate translation" - and then the translators are like "localisation is accurate translation". Both sides are just talking past each other.

I believe that the translators are doing nothing wrong - if a translation reads naturally and conveys essentially the same meaning as the original, that’s a good and accurate translation. The “anti-localisation” crowd are abusive and awful. But both sides of the discourse are terrible at communicating.

First of all, the word “localisation”, as it is understood outside the weeb community, means “adapting a work or product for use by a different population than the original (usually a population of a different geographical region)”. As a programmer, I deal with localised text in our product - for example we have different localisations for Australian english text (en-AU) vs British english text (en-GB) vs US english text (en-US). Yet, many anime/manga/etc translators call themselves localisers - what variety of english are they supposedly localising the content into? Probably US english, but it’s certainly not specifically americanised a lot of the time (e.g. Kimetsu no Yaiba isn’t being americanised in any translations I’m aware of), and the days of jelly donuts are far, far behind us. Erasing japanese cultural references is no longer "more marketable", and hasn't been for a long time. Most anime translations (including the ones that the “anti-localisation” crowd complain about) are simply translations into an international variety of english, and decidedly NOT localisations.

So if the “anti-localisation” crowd aren’t complaining about localisation, what are they complaining about? They often say they want “accurate translations”, but this isn’t true either. An “accurate translation” is a translation that simply conveys all the information from the original. おはよ！→ “Sup bro” can be an accurate translation, but I’m sure the anti-localisers wouldn’t agree (おはよ and sup bro are both just phatic greetings, we don’t need to specify morning unless it’s not obvious from the visuals that it’s morning). What they actually want is a translation that “sounds right”. This may seem impossible to deliver since it is so unspecific, but I think it’s actually quite simple - in short, overly-weeby translations have become their own variety of english, which I’ll call en-WB. Often fan translations are in this specific dialect because the fan translators haven’t studied actual translation and simply know what “sounds right” in en-WB.

For example, these anti-localisers often say they are annoyed that honorifics are removed. To a regular old translator with no knowledge of the anime discourse, this is very silly because -chan and -kun are not present in any common variety of english, so why would they appear in the translation? To divorce this discussion from anime briefly, a very good translator who is translating a full length Japanese novel would adapt the relationship/hierarchy dynamic via speech patterns and phrasing, rather than using the honorifics directly. But the anti-localisers don’t want a brilliant translation into international english, they want a passable translation into en-WB.

Both sides of the discourse are misunderstanding each other, using dumb arguments that completely miss the point. Anti-localisers are saying shit like ”fan translations are better!!” which really means “fan translations sound like how I expect the translation to sound, and pro translations do not sound like that” which means “fan translations are translating into the english dialect I expect and pro translations do not”.

Meanwhile pro translators are saying “pro translators are fans too!! And how could an amateur be better? We studied to do this professionally!”. But this is flawed logic - the lack of formal training in translation is ironically what enables fan translators to translate into en-WB correctly. Pro translators of course could translate into en-WB if they wanted to/were told to, but they don’t - they want to make the translation as accessible as possible to all viewers, meaning that making the language natural and internationalised is the correct course of action.

To me as a half-japanese person who has grown up with smatterings of anime from an early age, anime is just cartoons to me. It's just another tv show, there's nothing special about it. So when I talked about translation as I have in previous posts, I was basically unaware of this stupid discourse and was simply discussing translation as it exists outside of the anime/manga industry - rewriting a work as if it were originally written in the target language. In principle I don't believe anime should be treated any different to other tv shows when being translated, and I personally hate en-WB, it's like nails on a chalkboard to me. But that's what a bunch of anime fans want, and that's fine. They can have their (in my eyes) terrible translations, and I can have my (in their eyes) terrible translations.

If we were talking about translating literature or live action tv or news articles instead of anime we wouldn't be getting any of this discussion. I think it's almost entirely the fault of anime's history with fan translations and heavy handed cultural erasure by 4kids etc that's led to the current state of things. And unfortunately those things still influence how people think about anime translations now. I just want to approach anime translations like I would any other translation - but the existence of this discourse adds an annoying layer over it all.

[olderthannetfic]

So I know I'm like several years late to the party with this, I just played it for the first time recently, but for those in this F/F discourse who like me, their big stumbling block with a lot of F/F fanfic is that they're specifically into messier, kinkier or more "toxic" dynamics between women than the romantic friends-to-lovers fluff that seems to predominate these days (though considering this is a common complaint, is probably already on the way out): cannot recommend the visual novel Ladykiller in a Bind enough. Especially the route with the Beauty - not gonna spoil, but you'll have fun, at least if you're not totally turned off by BDSM.

Anyway, has anyone noticed that it feels like even if F/F fandom is moving away from the fluff-only stuff, a lot of people who sign up for F/F in fanfic exchanges seem to be realllllly fluffy in their preferences? Like even in a lot of kink-centric ones (like kink in the BDSM/fetish sense, not the way fanfic uses it as just "trope you like"), it's a lot of stuff like that "consensual sex pollen" thing people were ranting about a few asks ago. I feel like the only way I can get the kind of F/F I really like in exchanges is if I get like five of my like-minded friends to sign up, and then we either end up just writing for each other, or are writing and receiving some M/M or F/M ship we also requested.

I sometimes wonder, because this is a trajectory that I went through myself and have seen so many other lesbians and bi women go through, that it has to do with comfort level about your sexuality. Like I was kind of afraid when first coming out to admit the freakier, less "good representation" style stuff I liked, and then once I got over it I was like making up for lost time. Especially when it seems like a lot of people with those preferences also buy heavily into "anti" thinking (like people have discussed with the Rhaenicent stuff), I do kind of wonder if it's motivated by shame in your less "moral "desires. THough obviously a lot of people just like fluffier stuff naturally and can process all they want and that's still goign to be what they like. I tend to have fluffier, more romantic preferences in M/M for whatever reason and all the processing in the world hasn't made me more want to read whumpier or kinkier fic.

(I'm a lesbian, ftr, and again I don't wnat to seem like I'm shaming anyone else, but I have kind of wondered what it means that /I/ am into one thing with the gender I'm actually attracted to IRL and one thing very different with the one I'm not. And then my preferences in F/M seem to be a lot more situational, depending on the ship or the fandom in question or the fanfic writer, etc.)

Also wondering if even more generally, what y'all have noticed is the difference in the overall patterns of preferences of people who sign up for fanfic exchanges vs. fanfic writers as a whole. As someone who does a lot of exchanges, it's something I've kind of wondered about in myself, too, especially compared to my friends who aren't as into them as much.

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