URV

The House in Fata Morgana is a recent favourite of mine, and I think it can offer a lot of content to talk about. There are choices, but it doesn't split into routes like most VNs do, being closer to a kinetic novel.

YOU are your own best hope. The hiragana, katakana and kanji waits for you. Do it. Learn Japanese now!

Fata morgana

Technically one at a time, but I do have the tendency to play one VN for a while, get bored, and switch to a different VN. If that were to count as playing two VNs at a time, then I would be playing somewhere between 11-24 VNs at the moment.

Technically one at a time, but I do have the tendency to play one VN for a while, get bored, and switch to a different VN. If that were to count as playing two VNs at a time, then I would be playing somewhere between 11-24 VNs at the moment.

Technically one at a time, but I do have the tendency to play one VN for a while, get bored, and switch to a different VN. If that were to count as playing two VNs at a time, then I would be playing somewhere between 11-24 VNs at the moment.

AS MANY AS POSSIBLE

Man, even the site itself is being optimistic about it. We're getting that full translation eventually!

Bro is your keyboard okay??? 
EDIT: Wait I just realized you wouldn't be able to tell me if you're keyboard's fucked. Just like this post if you're okay.

Peak, peek, and piqued
I think that's too subjective to determine. When it comes to video games, for example, there are people that would say the 90s-early 2000s were the golden age of RPGs with their isometric views and complex gameplay. At the same time, others say they are complete dogshit and the modern vision of RPGs like Skyrim are much better.
With visual novels specifically I don't think there's any "golden age", especially because technology does not affect VNs very much. Just like with RPGs, some people will idolise older VNs and claim newer stuff is brainless, and some people will prefer the modern art-focused moeges (unless their name is VirginSmasher). Nobody is right, nobody is correct.
For the record, my personal opinion is that all visual novels have been trash thus far.

Apparently I engages in "Not Sexually Involved"

What's wrong with that? It's merely an abbreviation, like how I call my pals from Germany Germs.
There's nothing wrong with MTL. Learning Japanese is a time-consuming, arduous task with minuscule payoff and little to no professional or vocational benefits. Not everybody wants to invest so great a portion of their life into learning a language solely for the consumption of visual novels.
There's also nothing wrong with that. As long as nobody attempts to disseminate their MTL or pass it off as a translation project, there is no issue whatsoever. Please take your Japanese fetishism and elitism elsewhere, Kiriririri.

The Western VN fandom has long idolised the Japanese VN market. Before the recent growth of the EVN scene and official localisations, Western VN fans had to subsist only on the occasional fan-translations of Japanese VNs while being told how much better the untranslated VNs were. However this faith in untranslated VNs rested on an unspoken assumption: that Western and Japanese VN fans enjoy the same content. But is it true? Through comparing the largest VN fandom site in Japan (erogamescape) against the largest VN fandom site in the West (VNDB), we sought to find out.
Do we love the same VNs?
While the ability of a numerical rating to summarise a subjective experience (like reading a VN) is debatable, the average score a community assigns a VN provides a useful approximation of how highly esteemed that VN is within the community. Both EGS and VNDB allow users to rate VNs they’ve read, so comparing how the same VN scores on both sites gives us an impression of how much the communities agree on which VNs are best.
 


We can see there’s a strong correlation between the score a VN gets on each site, especially for higher rated VNs, showing that both communities tend to agree on which VNs are considered “the best” (despite the ferocious arguments within each fandom over that same question). But as the score drops, so does the agreement over the VN score. So while both communities tend to agree on what’s good, we disagree on what’s bad.
There’s also another trend that’s a little less noticeable, but becomes more apparent if we remove the untranslated VNs...
 


While the untranslated VNs in the last graph seemed to fairly evenly straddle the equal score line, the translated VNs are frequently below it (meaning these VNs score higher on EGS than VNDB). But is the translation a cause or an effect of the lower score on VNDB (i.e. does the release of a translation lower the score on VNDB, or are only low-scoring VNs being translated)? To answer this, we tracked how the VNDB score of a VN changes immediately after a translation is released.
 


We tracked 117 of the most popular Japanese VNs that had an English translation released in the past 5 years. In the first 60 days after their translation was released, their score dropped an average of 0.146 on VNDB, with Fata Morgana being the blip on the far right that significantly bucked the trend and increased in score. There also seems to be slight correlation with lower-rated VNs on EGS dropping more than higher-rated ones.
So it seems confirmed that the translations are the cause rather than an effect. But why does this happen? This remains the subject of fierce debate among my friends, but we came up with a few theories:
Japanese VNs are made for Japanese tastes, so Western fans might not enjoy them to the same extent. Western fans who learn Japanese and use VNDB might align more with the taste of Japanese fans rather than with their fellow Western fans. Japanese VNs are made for Japanese tastes, so Western fans might not enjoy them to the same extent. Western fans who learn Japanese and use VNDB might align more with the taste of Japanese fans rather than with their fellow Western fans. The high barrier of entry for a Westerner to read an untranslated VN (they have to know Japanese) filters out those who have only a casual interest in the VN. So the pre-translation score is dominated by hard-core fans who are more likely to rate it higher.
The experience of reading a translation can be inferior to reading prose in its original language, so VNDB users rating a VN based on that translation might assign lower scores than those reading the original text.
The larger drop in score for lower-rated VNs might be because they don’t attract the same care and attention by their translators, with any official localisation likely done on a lower-budget.
VN popularity
It isn’t just through scores that we can measure a communities’ tastes, we can also estimate a VN’s popularity through the number of votes it gets. In comparing the number of votes the same VN gets on EGS and VNDB, we can see whether the same VNs are popular in both Japan and the West.
 

Note that this chart is using a log scale.

The most obvious trend is the clear split between translated and untranslated VNs. Unsurprisingly, translated VNs and EVNs do significantly better on VNDB than untranslated VNs. But we Western fans aren’t especially choosey, even fairly unpopular VNs on EGS can attract large fanbases on VNDB if they’re translated.
Given that translations aren’t random, they require either dedicated fan-translators or a localiser willing to invest in them, it’s surprising that the translated VNs span the entire width of popularity on EGS. So we might have expected it to skew more to the right, with unpopular EGS VNs being much less likely to get a translation. While the ratio of translated-untranslated VNs is higher for more popular EGS VNs, no VN seems to be beyond the prospect of being translated, no matter how unpopular it is.
Overall, while there remains a correlation in popularity between EGS and VNDB, it’s far weaker than the score correlation. This mismatch might partially be down to the age of the communities. VNs have been a popular niche of the Japanese market for decades, but were virtually unknown in the West before the 2010s. So there’s quite a number of 80s-00s era JVNs that have hundreds of votes on EGS, but are practically unheard of on VNDB.
Differences in taste
So far we’ve been looking at each VN as a whole, but can we delve deeper? A VN can be seen as a package of tropes: childhood-friend heroine, tsundere heroine, dumb male protagonist that’s inexplicably beloved by all (these 3 criteria should narrow us down to approximately 90% of all VNs ever made /s). Through comparing the scores of VNs that have a trope against those who don’t, we can get an impression of how popular that trope is.
Fortunately we don’t have to determine these tropes ourselves, both EGS and VNDB allow users to apply tags to a VN which denote the type of content it has. So let’s start simple and see which tags are correlated with a higher average score on EGS.
This world cloud ranks the EGS tags by the average score of the VNs they appear in, with higher scores being placed higher on the chart, so we can see what type of content is most lauded on EGS. The text size is proportional to the number of VNs that tag appears in, so we can see what’s a common trope and what’s rare.
 

A full size version of this image is available here, and a spreadsheet version is available here.  Note that this is mostly using google translate for the EGS tags, so the labels are… imaginative.

Generally, it seems like complex VNs (with tags such as “intelligent,” “to solve a mystery” and “difficult to get”) are the most highly rated, while more sexual oriented tags seem to be linked with lower average scores (which is probably due to nukige/porn VNs). It also seems Japanese fans value the *novel* over the *visual* element in their VNs, with “CG is beautiful” being rated quite poorly. Towards the bottom are tags mostly related to being old or low-budget (with tags such as “Low price” and “XP supported”).
This has only shown us what Japanese fans like, but we’re more focused on how Japanese and Western fans compare. So instead, let’s try comparing which VNDB tags are correlated with a VN scoring higher on VNDB or EGS.
 

A full size version of this image is available here, and a spreadsheet version is available here.

It seems like Western fans value romance and slice of life type stories more than Japanese fans do, whereas Japanese fans are more generous with their nukige/porn ratings. Perhaps we’re more judgemental in our view of sexual content here in the West? Japanese settings also seem to be more favoured among the Western fandom than the Japanese, the weeabooism is real /s. Slightly disappointing is how poorly female protagonists do in the Western fandom. While otomes are widespread in the EVN market, they remain a relatively unpopular niche on VNDB.
Differences in the marketplace
We’ve compared the taste between the Japanese and Western fandoms, but we haven’t looked at the differing availability of VNs in the markets. Are certain types of content more likely to be translated than others? How does the the home-grown Western VN industry differ from the Japanese one?
 

A full size version of this image is available here, and a spreadsheet version is available here.

It seems that action/violent type content -whether in the form of police investigations or wars- are especially popular subjects for translated VNs. Female protagonists are also surprisingly high, especially since otomes don’t seem to be translated that often, but that might be because an even smaller proportion of nukige/porn type VNs are translated, and they overwhelmingly have male protagonists.
Lastly, let’s look at the EVNs. With a negligible presence in Japan (there were only 4 EVNs on EGS with at least 4 votes), we can’t really compare what the fans prefer, but we can see how the markets differ in the kind of content they produce. This next chart tracks which VNDB tags are more common in EVNs vs JVNs.
 

A full size version of this image is available here, and a spreadsheet version that includes more tags is available here. The sexual content tags were removed because there’s so little sexual content in EVNs that it seemed a waste of space, and it gave room to include rarer content type tags.

The clearest difference between the markets is in the amount of porn, there’s exceedingly little in EVNs. This is likely due to the smaller budget for EVNs which would preclude h-scene artwork, and restrictions on adult content on Steam discouraging such content.
EVNs encompass a broader range of protagonists than JVNs with LGBTQ+ related content being much more common, and female protagonists being as common as males (unlike JVNs where female protagonists make up only a small proportion of VNs). But JVNs can be inclusive in other ways, like being the sole representation of protagonists who can turn into panties.
Stories relating to personal difficulties, especially regarding depression, seem much more common in EVNs too. They also seem more willing to break from the usual high-school settings of JVNs, having more university aged and above characters.
Criticisms
Before we get carried away with forming any stereotypes of Japanese and Western fanbases from this data, let’s consider a few issues with the data.
The VNDB and EGS userbase might not be representative of the wider Western/Japanese fandom. As per some of our earlier analysis posts, VNDB significantly undercounts the popularity of EVNs for example. So some caution should be taken in extrapolating what the wider fanbase likes based on this data. The VNDB and EGS userbase might not be representative of the wider Western/Japanese fandom. As per some of our earlier analysis posts, VNDB significantly undercounts the popularity of EVNs for example. So some caution should be taken in extrapolating what the wider fanbase likes based on this data. It’s easy to mix up cause and effect. Are sci-fi stories better than other stories and that’s why they’re associated with higher scores? Or is it that VNs that care about their story are just more likely to have a sci-fi setting?
Some trends, like what type of content is more likely to be translated, might just be tracking the changing tastes of the era. With older VNs being less likely to be translated than newer VNs, the charts might just be picking up on what kind of content has become more popular in recent years.
The dataset has some errors. EGS and VNDB catalogue VNs differently and that can cause some mismatches in the data. We’ve done our best to account for that, but with the dataset being so large, some mistakes will have slipped through.
Acknowledgements
A big thank you to /u/8cccc9, Part-Time Storier, and Cibelle for helping with this analysis.
I hope you enjoyed reading through this, and if so, you should check out my tumblr and twitter for more VN analysis posts. If you have any feedback, questions, or suggestions for further analyses then you can reply here, on twitter, or DM me on Discord (Sunleaf_Willow ／(^ n ^=)＼#1616).
Our next analysis post is likely to be on h-scenes. What type of content is most highly regarded by the fandom? How has the popularity in the fandom of certain sexual acts risen erect and fallen limp over time? How is the EVN market handling sexual content in contrast to Japan? Hopefully we’ll have lots of answers (and some painful puns) next time~

I'm finished with a visual novel when the protagonist finishes in the best girl.

Alright, let's try to keep things on topic.

Generally sensible individual. Somewhat humorous, refined writing style that I appreciate. Quality avatar, as opposed to animegirl#28291.jpg. Sometimes a bit cocksure, but not egregiously so. Questionable taste in visual novels relative to mine. Ostensibly experienced with VN translations, but I don't know enough to conclude that. 
Overall, not yet enough information for me to form a complete opinion. Keep posting here on Fuwanovel. We will be watching.

Picked up, or rather finally started Ace Attorney trilogy on my 3DS. Finished the first game, in the middle of Ep1 of the 2nd game, which is atm a shame because i expected Phoenix to start off veteran pro but nooo gotta blank slate him i guess for tutorial purposes? idk how long it will last but pls
Pretty fun, I always enjoy doing them active mystery solvings <- hardcore Danganronpa fan Cases did an overall good job of integrating all the characters involved- everyone feels important- and making you care for finding the truth -things get pretty srs- Ema > Maya pls Minor complaint is if you're marathoning the game, 3 investigative days on top of 3 trial days per episode can make things feel tedious. i hear the 2nd game does 2days/2trials so we'll see if i like it or not Enjoyed the 2000s 8bit Gameboy Advance Capcom musics or whatevers, reminded me of Capcom's other Megaman Battle Network BGMs  I did use a walkthrough towards the end srryz, mainly for the investigations cuz it's like where the fk do i go next and what the hell do i have to show to the next prick in order to progress >< Miles Edgeworth image was unfortunately ruined because I knew @Mr Poltroon for like 3 years prior now and that's all who i could think whenever Edgey came on screen is friggen' Teegan from Versailles ._.  

EDIT: Due to Fuwa anti-piracy rules this thread's usefulness was quite limited, since we couldn't ask for any files that we needed for further compatibility testing and the like. I'd say even posting direct links to our patch here was questionable to begin with, since it's not that different from the abovementioned files that we were asking for.
So in the end we decided to remove all links from here and move our main release thread to Reddit: LINK
That's where all further updates will be posted, so make sure to follow us there. I'll ask mods to lock this thread, since MeruP won't be checking it anyway, so all feedback should be posted on Reddit instead (we also have a dedicated thread for reporting bugs and other issues).

I don't have much in the way of funny scene screenshots but I do have one image of her with Akihito as she belittles him (as it was often the case) 
 

Not only is incest sacred, as it keeps the bloodline pure and your children won't receive any terrible genes such as the dreaded triple-chin syndrome, but it is also an important political move that ensures the titles stay within the family. The Habsburgs are an inspiration to us all. Praise Xwedodah!

I at least need to show wth I was doing for two weeks as proof that I'm not getting lazy. One was word-wrapping the text, two was editing my past mistakes, and three was the interface as shown below.

At the very least, it's really the interface that's giving me trouble b/c pictures. Word-wrap on kirikiri is a problem in of itself but I found a workaround. Everything is fine, folks, the delay is just me being a clumsy newbie.

Not only is incest sacred, as it keeps the bloodline pure and your children won't receive any terrible genes such as the dreaded triple-chin syndrome, but it is also an important political move that ensures the titles stay within the family. The Habsburgs are an inspiration to us all. Praise Xwedodah!

So what's going to happen if, in a very optimistic scenario, both this and izzeybee's translation actually reach completion status? Will the two be compared mercilessly until it is decided that one of them is the better translation, leaving all the effort put into the worse translation go to waste? To be fair, I doubt we would even reach this scenario, but I think the possibility is there. On one hand, it might be good to have multiple translation projects just to have higher chances for one of them to reach completion. On the other hand, perhaps it might be wiser to merge any ongoing projects, just to avoid any work going to waste?
I recall that @izzeybee intends to work alone on the translation. Perhaps they'd be willing to reconsider, depending on who and how many people are willing to work on this?
Edit: What's going to happen with partial translations such as this? Are we going to start from scratch over and over again? I worry that the translation is never going to go anywhere at this rate. Wouldn't it be wiser, perhaps, to continue from where others left off?

Online anime discussions seem obsessed with individual anime: there can only be one best anime (and it’s Rakugo, fite me irl). But rather than focusing on specific anime, could we look at what binds them together? I’m talking about anime fans. No anime fan watches only one anime, they watch lots, so if we chart the fandom overlap between anime we could how different anime series group together. Do they group together based on source material? The type of genre? The release date? Let’s find out!
I also posted this here where I can embed images in the post and I think it's a little easier to read.
The Analysis Process (skip this section if uninterested)
First, we need some data on anime fans. Fortunately, we don’t need to conduct an extensive survey, anime fans are happy to publicly catalog their tastes on sites like MyAnimeList.net. To get a random sampling of the active anime fandom, I downloaded the completed anime and profile data of anyone logging into MAL on a couple of days in January. I got data for 7883 users who had watched 1,417,329 anime series in total (enough for 4 lifetimes of constant anime watching).
I filtered out anything that wasn’t a TV series or movie, and any anime with fewer than 1,000 fans in our dataset, leaving us with 380 anime. I then merged anime entries of the same series together, leaving 268 anime to chart.
To map out the fandom’s tastes, I modeled each anime like it was a beachball floating in a swimming pool. Each beachball had several elastic strings tied to it of varying strength. The strongest string was connected to the anime/beachball that it shared the most fans with. The next strongest string went to the anime/beachball it had the second most fans with, and so on. This way anime with lots of overlapping fans would be drawn together. But to prevent the confused mess of a squeaky beachball bondage orgy, each beachball also bobbed up and down in the pool of water, causing waves that pushed away anything that got too close.
I let this simulation run until it reached an equilibrium point where the pull of the strings balanced against the push of the waves. The result would hopefully be an anime/beachball web where groups of anime with large fandom overlaps formed clusters.
The Fandom Map
After warming myself on my overheating computer processors, the simulation finally ended with the result below. The font size of each anime name is proportional to how popular it is, and the red lines represent the fandom overlap/elastic strings between beachballs.

A higher resolution version is available here: here
Eek, that’s a lot to take in! At first glance there are a few obvious clusters like the Ghibli movies in the bottom right, but it can be hard to identify what common themes are linking these anime. So what do we do? MAL tags to the rescue! (Surely this is the only time those tags have ever been useful). We can use the MAL genre tags the highlight different genres and see if they group together.

The green dots show which anime have the genre tag in the title.
What had once seemed a single unified blob is shown to be split into multiple clusters, but what does it tell us? Each cluster should be judged on two metrics: self-cohesion and its proximity/overlap to other clusters.
Self-cohesion is how tightly grouped a cluster is. The more tightly grouped it is, the more fans tend to stay within that genre and pick anime based on it. So for example, the ecchi cluster is quite tightly grouped in the top left area, telling us that the inclusion (or lack of) ecchi content is important to those fans in choosing what to watch. Alternatively the lack of cohesion can tell us something too, drama anime are spread out all over the place, suggesting there isn’t a unified group of fans specifically seeking out drama content like there is for romance, slice of life, or action anime.
The proximity to other clusters tells us where fandoms overlap. For example, the thriller and ecchi clusters are at opposite ends, suggesting that generally, the fandoms don’t overlap much. However psychological, mystery, and thriller anime all seem to overlap quite well.
It seems the most prominent split in the fandom is between romance and action anime, with the two of them taking up significant portions of the medium, but overlapping only in ecchi anime.
Recency Bias
As well as plotting genres, we can also see if the release date of an anime influences its position. If fans tend to pick anime based on what’s currently airing, that’d show up with anime of the same year grouping together.

While the middle area is quite mixed, the latest anime series from 2017 cluster significantly on the left side, suggesting anime aired in the same season do tend to clump together with a lot of fan overlap, but only while the anime is less than a year old. After that, the rest of the anime fandom who are pickier about the anime they try outnumber those who watch all the latest series.
Fandom age
Using the publicly listed birthdays of our MAL users, we can see which anime tends to attract the oldest users.

The age map is almost a mirror image of the recency bias map, with the unsurprising result that older anime tends to have older fans, and the most recent anime have the youngest fandom.
Gender differences
The number of women on MAL is likely undercounted as only 17% of those listing their gender state they’re female, but we can still analyse how the gender ratio changes between anime clusters.

Note that green nodes don’t mean a female majority (only 3 anime had a female majority fandom: Yuri on Ice, Free, and Ouran Koukou Host Club), it just means the ratio is higher than average.
There is clearly a gender divide in the anime each gender is watching. The female fans seem to gravitate more towards psychological stories and the Ghibli movies. Unsurprisingly, ecchi stuff is watched almost entirely by males. What’s more surprising is how few female fans there are among the recent releases cluster, suggesting female fans are less likely to follow the latest anime season.
MAL also offers a non-binary gender option. Only 1% of those displaying their gender picked non-binary, totaling just 61 users in my dataset, so I wouldn’t put too much stock in this result, but I was curious about the result...

It’s generally more mixed than the stark male-female divide, although the non-binary fan hotspots align much more with females than males, peaking on Yuri on Ice, Free, and Ouran Koukou Host Club.
Age ratings
Just for fun, we also tried plotting the age ratings of anime.

As would be expected, the R+ nudity ratings are clustered in the harem area, the younger ratings are mostly from the Ghibli films, and the R-17 violence ratings align with the action and psychological/thriller cluster.
Unrated anime
I have an obsession with rating anime, I must rate them all! But some users mark anime as “completed” without ever entering a score (what’s wrong with you?). I tried plotting the ratio of such unrated anime to see if they formed a pattern.

Turns out there’s a bit of a pattern here… ( ͡º ͜ʖ ͡º) The more ecchi it is, the less likely fans are to rate it. I guess they must scratch their rating compulsion itch through other means.
-----------------------------------------
I hope you liked our little analysis. It wouldn’t be possible without the help of Part-time Storier (https://parttimestorier.tumblr.com/), /u/8cccc9, and /u/Crabspite. Thank you all~
I always love discussing this stuff, so feel free to contact me here on Fuwanovel, tumblr, and twitter.
My next post (in a week or two) is going to focus on female fans and see how the female fandom’s tastes cluster.

As communities age, a mythology tends to build up around their origins, with past eras vaguely alluded to as “golden ages.” I’ve seen this happen with reddit’s /r/visualnovels, a place I moderated during its most transformative stage, so I thought I’d offer my insider’s take on its history: what we’d hoped to achieve as moderators, the unintended side-effects of our policies, and why I think /r/visualnovels is stagnating these days. Fuwanovel isn't /r/visualnovels, but there's a lot of overlap in the fandom and I thought that given Ange's recent "state of the fandom" post, you guys might find it interesting. Given my acrimonious departure from the subreddit, you should take this with a grain of salt, but hopefully you'll get something from it~
The Birth of /r/visualnovels

The very first posts on /r/visualnovels.
/r/visualnovels was founded in late 2009 by /u/Hpdarkman525 (the former account of /u/gambs), who made one post about the upcoming Umineko ep5 fan translation and then promptly forgot about the sub. At this time, the VN fandom consisted primarily of those who had learned Japanese to read VNs, and those who wished they had. Official localisations were almost non-existent, and the fandom hung off the words of the few fan translators. Knowing about VNs felt like knowing a secret, like a secret handshake to be acknowledged as a fellow western otaku.
This didn’t really change until early 2012 with the release of Katawa Shoujo. We now had a Western VN that was free, easy to install (no fiddling with system locale), pretty well written (no cliche cries of “baka” or “onii-chan”), and handled a delicate subject (disability and self-identity) with a sensitivity that really spoke to a lot of gamers. The optional nature of the adult content helped attract horny teenagers while still retaining an air of respectability. KS managed something no other VN had: attention from the mainstream gaming crowd. It drew a huge wave of new fans to the medium, among which were /u/coldacid and /u/Kuiper who became mods on /r/visualnovels and began to promote it.
While the influx of new members gave birth to the community, with newbies becoming veterans, the continued dominance of KS in the VN scene began to wear thin (it wasn’t until 2016 that the number of /r/visualnovels subscribers outnumbered /r/katawashoujo). Especially grating for veterans was the cry of KS as “the best VN ever written” from those who had only ever read that one VN. The constant stream of “what do I read after KS” and rudimentary technical questions on getting Japanese VNs working drowned out the rare news posts or broader discussion threads. The mod team had a hands-off attitude to it, they’d only remove spam or blatant trolling. This only changed in early 2014 when a relatively unknown user, /u/insanityissexy, requested a mod position...
The Rise of Insanity

Insanityy was a member of the old-guard, being drawn to the medium for Japanese VNs and caring little for what she saw as a pale-imitation in Western VNs. With no regard for the old mods, she singlehandedly brought order to a community that had been lawless. She began with a ban on posts for technical support questions and VN recommendation requests. Instead, they should be asked in the new weekly questions thread so as to clear up the front page for news posts and more substantial discussion threads.
While this move was broadly welcomed by most of the subreddit regulars, it caused some disruption as activity on the sub plummeted. With the western VN scene so small, news was rare and the number of daily posts dropped from 2-4 to just 1. While some grumbled, others were enthused in having an active moderator who cared about the sub. /u/kowzz started a discussion thread on what we could do to improve activity on the sub, and from that discussion he started the weekly Sunday discussion posts and I started the weekly “what are you reading” posts. Unlike the questions sticky, the intention wasn’t to curtail activity outside of these weekly posts, but to provide a supplement to the usual discussions and encourage users to comment more.
With such regular discussion posts, users started to bump into each other more often and a sense of community began to build. On a personal level, I also grew to know insanityy better as we exchanged dozens of increasingly lengthy PMs (so much so that each reply wouldn’t fit within the 10k character limit, we had to send our replies in 3 parts), with us quickly becoming close friends.

Later that year, I proposed an overhaul of the user flairs. The subreddit only offered a basic vndb icon. I wanted to expand that to hundreds of options with a larger profile picture offset to the side of a user’s post as a way to personalise each user. With enough options, I hoped it’d be easier to identify users at a glance and it’d add some character to the subreddit. I was admitted to the mod team to oversee the flair changes, but was soon upgraded to full mod status after a few months on insanityy’s urging.
The two of us fed off each other’s passion as we sought to build a more active, mature, and compassionate community. We never paid any heed to the old mods, mod policy was discussed between us on google hangouts and implemented immediately.

To foster a sense of community, we aimed to have a community event once a month: best X contests, census surveys, recommendation charts, fanart contests, halloween/april fool themes being among just some of the activities we organised. We even got Mangagamer to sponsor some contests with free VNs. To foster a sense of community, we aimed to have a community event once a month: best X contests, census surveys, recommendation charts, fanart contests, halloween/april fool themes being among just some of the activities we organised. We even got Mangagamer to sponsor some contests with free VNs.
We downplayed the seedier parts of the medium, nukige news was banned and discussions on “fapping” were frowned upon. Neither of us were against porn, we’re both fans, but we feared it’d attract a more neckbeard-type audience.

We aggressively went after trolls, but not by banning them. We had automod automatically remove comments from users prone to cause drama, then we’d manually approve non-trollish comments. That way everyone was able to participate in our community, but bad behaviour wasn’t rewarded with lots of attention.


In the following year, insanityy asked the inactive older mods to resign. Kuiper recognised that he was no longer needed and respectfully stepped down. Coldacid said his inactivity was only temporary and he’d be back, but later left reddit for voat as part of an anti-censorship protest. Gambs asked us to drop the subject as he didn’t want to step down, so we carried on ignoring him.
We also added new members to the mod team: /u/FunwithGravity for his knowledge of Japanese, /u/Cornetto_Man because he got along with everyone, and /u/Avebone because he was active at times when the rest of us were asleep. They were added primarily to approve posts mistakenly removed by automod when me and insanityy were afk and had little input on mod policy.
Everything seemed to be going great, we had a growing community that we got along with, trolls were few and far between, and our moderation seemed popular. Then we got a modmail suggesting we try out a new chat program called Discord...
Discord on Discord

When /u/Kowzz and /u/Arcanus44 suggested creating a Discord server, we were initially skeptical. It sounded just like irc, and the /r/visualnovels irc channel had been comatose for years. However Kowz and Arc promised to take care of it for us, Kowz would create the server and Arc would drum up interest. So in Sept 2015, Arc hosted a “meet n’ greet” in voice chat on Discord. While it was by most accounts a success and quite popular, we got some complaints about inappropriate conduct by a couple of users and decided that if this Discord server was going to be linked with /r/visualnovels, we’d need to take an active hand in making sure it maintained our standards.
Kowz was happy to have us onboard, making us admins on Discord. It all seemed smooth, but underneath the surface, the seed of turmoil had been planted in our differing beliefs on who owned the server. Kowz and Arc considered themselves the owners and we were partners, while we considered them to have created the server on our behalf and that it’d run on our principles. Up until then, we’d not had any disagreements on mod policy. Me and insanityy would talk an issue out, if we agreed, we’d propose it to the rest of the mod team and vote on it. We’d picked mods who generally thought the same as us, so votes were normally unanimous. That wasn’t the case with Discord. Kowz and Arc had different ideals on how to run a community, and our usual resolution process of voting felt unfair to them as we outnumbered them 5 to 2.
The problem only got worse with time as insanityy hated arguments so she avoided the staff discussions on Discord and popped in only to vote. Arc and Kowz felt increasingly marginalised by this and that their opinion wasn’t being heard. This led to a standoff where Kowz and Arc demanded their 2 votes should count for as much as the rest of us combined, while we /r/visualnovels mods threatened to create a new server unless we kept one vote each. Discussions got heated until Kowz and Arc eventually backed down. In protest, they chose to stop participating as mods.
While Discord helped bring friends together, it also brought those that disliked each other together. It’s easy to ignore someone on reddit as its tree structure allows for parallel conversations, but the format of Discord makes that harder. This started to become a problem on the server, especially as Discord attracted a different type of user to the subreddit, those who had little patience for the more verbose and patient discussions of the subreddit. We got complaints from the subreddit veterans about some of the newbies but we weren’t sure what to do. Being disliked isn’t a bannable offense, but it was driving away some valued community members.
We didn’t want to create a separate server that split the community, so our misguided solution was the creation of a hidden channel: #sub_regs (a.k.a. the fanclub) that was invite only and accessed via the tableflipper role. The hope was that it’d serve as a backup channel for when #general was annoying and that it’d keep the community veterans on the server. However it ended up encouraging an elitist attitude that divided the community further.
The Fall of /r/visualnovels

With many of the friendly conversations and community atmosphere moving to Discord, the subreddit began to suffer. Inside jokes that were incomprehensible to those not on Discord were frequent, and the community split between those using Discord and those not.
There was also a degree of burnout among the mods. It’s inevitable for all mods, you spend long enough dealing with the worst of the community, the trolls and the spammers, and you begin to develop an us-vs-them mentality. You retreat from the community and draw closer to your fellow mods, looking down upon the normal users. We mods gradually stopped being members of the community and instead became overseers.
Then there was my messy departure from the sub in April 2016. Due to a range of factors: financial difficulties, gender dysphoria, and some toxic “friends,” I became deeply depressed and tried to commit suicide. My fellow subreddit mods (and best friend insanityy) decided the best response was to out me as transgender, block me on social media, and ban me from the subreddit I’d loved so deeply. Insanityy never spoke to me again.
The rest of this is speculation, I was no longer an insider, but from my perspective it looked like this event accelerated the emotional distance insanityy felt from the subreddit as she stopped caring about the community. She tried to carry on as normal at first, running a few contests, maintaining the animated banners I’d once made, but her heart wasn’t in it. She resigned later that year.
With her went the desire to innovate, to improve the community. The remaining mods were followers, not leaders. They could maintain some cosmetic updates and copy the old contests, but they were unable to do anything new. They enlarged the mod team with an additional four members, but it only increased the sense of inertia and made it even harder to get anything done. The subreddit began to feel stale.
The mod team had also become unbalanced, where once me and insanityy spoke up for minority tastes in EVNs and otomes, now the mod team was dominated by Japanese VN fans just as the VN scene was increasingly embracing EVNs. The subreddit felt more elitist than ever just as the medium had never been more diverse.
Unintended Side Effects
While our policies may have made sense at the time, some of the decisions me and insanityy had made began to have a detrimental impact on the subreddit:

We’d brought on Automod to help remove posts when only me and insanityy had to manage everything. We found having a bot leave the removal comment sparked fewer arguments with OP than if one of us did it, and it was more effective at catching spam. But while we strived to reapprove mistakenly removed posts promptly, sometimes OP deleted their post before we could. Psychologically, it also made it dangerously easy to leave some content removed. As we mods burnt out over the years, our standards for what counted as a worthy post kept getting higher with fewer and fewer posts being approved. The end result has been a severe drop in discussion posts on the sub. We’d brought on Automod to help remove posts when only me and insanityy had to manage everything. We found having a bot leave the removal comment sparked fewer arguments with OP than if one of us did it, and it was more effective at catching spam. But while we strived to reapprove mistakenly removed posts promptly, sometimes OP deleted their post before we could. Psychologically, it also made it dangerously easy to leave some content removed. As we mods burnt out over the years, our standards for what counted as a worthy post kept getting higher with fewer and fewer posts being approved. The end result has been a severe drop in discussion posts on the sub.
When recruiting new moderators, we sought people who thought as we did so mod decisions would be consistent and there wouldn’t be arguments in the mod chat. Modding is stressful enough without the stress coming from within the mod team. However, as you add more mods who agree with you, you can start to have an inflated view of how widespread your opinion is. A circlejerk mentality builds and outside opinion is increasingly easy to dismiss. This can leave users feeling like their opinions don’t matter to the mods and builds resentment.

Insanityy was a kind soul and hated conflict, she avoided disagreements as much as possible. As a friend, this was fine, but as a mod it meant she avoided openly discussing mod policy on the subreddit as inevitably there would be some disagreement. This lack of discussion with the sub made it hard for users to object to the direction the sub took, allowing the mod team to grow out of touch with what the userbase wants.


Hopes for the Future
While I may have been quite critical of the current state of the subreddit, I think the community is a good one and there’s hope for improvement. A smaller, more motivated mod team would help, as well as scaling back some of the restrictions like the question and image-post ban. Let activity on the subreddit explode. Should low-quality content grow to become a problem, perhaps /r/visualnovels should split just as /r/gaming and /r/games have, or perhaps a split between Japanese and English VNs would help?
Not every idea will work out, but what’s important is to be trying new ideas and be responsive to change rather than clinging to an outdated format.
As I said at the start, please remember this isn’t an impartial view on the history of the sub and that this isn’t meant to downplay the hard work of the current mod team. Modding is exhausting, it’s a constant burden with little praise. Even if I consider them poor mods, it doesn’t make them bad people.
I know she won’t ever read this, nor will she care what I think, but I still believe insanityy was an inspirational mod and a wonderful friend. It’s incredibly hard to go it alone like she did when she first took over /r/visualnovels. She stood up for what she thought /r/visualnovels could be and put in so much effort, every day, rain or shine, she never shirked from her responsibilities. I miss her every day.
If anyone wants to know more or say hi, you can contact me here on Fuwanovel, tumblr,, twitter, or Discord (Sunleaf_Willow ／(^ n ^=)＼#1616)