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BunnyAdvocate

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Everything posted by BunnyAdvocate

  1. We'll see I suppose. My bet would be another wave of rumours about how I'm harassing insanityy. They won't mention what that harassment is (because if people knew harassment=this post, their claim might be dulled a bit), they'll just let imaginations run riot and not deny anything when people throw out wild theories about me mailing her the severed head of automod-chan or something.
  2. That's a good point, standards for what is and isn't an insult, what counts as a greeting, whether people should reply or just upvote/like something, they all vary per community. Like on twitter, whenever I see a friend talking about feeling a bit down, I'm never sure whether I should "like" it as a sign of support, or whether "liking" that they're down is insulting? I haven't really participated too much here on Fuwa as I'm kind of anxious about getting too attached to any community anymore, but so far it seems really nice. I love the alerts for when someone quotes you etc, as it makes it much easier to follow things if you don't have time to check all the threads. Hahaha, that's amazing. Even automod-chan got her route. My bet is on her and gambs being the last ones standing. In other news, I've been informed by one of the /r/visualnovels mods that this post counts as harassing insanityy and they'll react accordingly, even when the post is meant to be about how great a mod she was. It seems I can't do anything right.
  3. Thank you to everyone for being so supportive. I really didn't expect such a warm reaction to my post. I'm sorry to those who didn't find /r/visualnovels a welcoming place, I should have done a better job when I was a mod there in setting a more tolerant tone. Ah yeah I find that too, once they get a certain size it's so hard to engage in a conversation as it eats up all your time, you need to reply so fast and need the window open constantly. It's also harder to recognise people as there's a constant stream of new faces on busier servers, so it's hard to grow closer.
  4. Offhand, my guess is that the font used for the backlog doesn't support the Vietnamese characters you want. When he changed the font used by the regular in-game text, did he also remember to change the backlog font? If it's using a different font, make sure that second font is installed on your computer. If it isn't then it might be defaulting to Arial (which doesn't support the characters you need and shows those square boxes instead).
  5. I was quite surprised how widespread that authoritarian attitude was. My philosophy back then was that we mods were stewards of the community, trying to make it nice for everyone, rather than overseers on a powertrip. I was always happy to discuss why we'd done a mod action, and not just with an evasive "it's the rules," but to explain *why* that rule existed. Anyone who modmailed us got a prompt response within 24 hours, and I was always happy to give someone another chance if they apologised for whatever they'd done. I thought my fellow mods felt the same, so imagine my surprise when I was suddenly on the outside of that process and all my modmails, apologies, and pleas for help went unanswered. They wouldn't even tell me I was banned, they just had automod remove my comments covertly. As for the regular forum style, while it certainly has its merits, the problem I have is with it having just one chain of messages it's awfully easy to get derailed or have 2 people arguing and drown out the chance for anyone else to chat. Fuwa helps with that though as it has notifications for if someone replied to you etc, so it's easier to continue a conversation in between other messages, but still, I prefer reddit's tree structure personally. Ah yeah that's a major problem on bigger subreddits with more comments, so much stuff gets hidden. I think generally /r/visualnovels was small enough that comments being hidden was fairly rare, plus we discouraged downvoting except if someone was being rude, but yeah there can be problems with circlejerks. Haha. There was an even older shitpost that used to be famous, one guy posted an AMA (ask me anything) as he'd read 500 VNs (back in the days when the average on /r/visualnovels was 17). The guy went on about how he judged VNs by the quality of their "lighting" in the CGs. I still can't tell if the guy was just trolling, or just really weird (as much as I love the VN fandom, we do tend to attract an eccentric bunch - me included). Thanks Zedge, it was a pretty soul destroying experience to go through. I don't think she intended any harm, it's just that she was hurt and couldn't deal with it, and with all those around her wanting to protect her, an unhealthy atmosphere built up where no compromise could be considered. Yeah I doubt it'll ever grow significantly, it's a huge investment to learn Japanese. My respect to those who manage it, I don't have that willpower. It's made it kind of hard to trust people again, as I thought I could trust insanityy, I thought she was my best friend. Did I just imagine it? Did I just project what I hoped she felt too onto her? I hope not, but those kinds of fears are hard to shake after your world crumbles and those you thought were life-long friends just abruptly cut contact when you most needed help. I'm glad you enjoy the trend posts, I have a lot of fun researching it. The posts are only so intermittent because it's such a pain writing it up in a long post, but it's always worth it when someone says they enjoyed it.
  6. Thanks Drifter. Yeah it was really hard on me, it led to another couple of suicide attempts in the months that followed as insanityy meant everything to me, she was like a sister. I could accept her not wanting to be friends anymore, but to not ever get any kind of goodbye from her really tore me apart. That community had been my life, I'd put in so many thousands of hours into it, so it made me feel so worthless and alone when I was cut out and forgotten like that. However it's not fair to just focus on my pain, I imagine it must have been hard on her too. I wish we could have talked and maybe helped one another a little with that, but it wasn't to be.
  7. The only reason your h-scene post got past automod is because you were an "approved submitter" on reddit, so automod didn't trigger on any of your posts. By the time we noticed it, it'd already gotten so many upvotes and comments that we decided to leave it up. There were a couple of other people posting follow up tier lists but they never got past automod. Kowzz was never a mod on the subreddit, although he did create the Discord server and was an admin there for the first few months. He applied for a mod position when we recruited Cornetto_Man and FWG and he was a close to getting it, he had dozens of ideas for the sub like having a prize pool for banner contests, but insanityy felt he was a little too independent to fit in with the mod team.
  8. Thanks, and yeah, I'm doing better these days. It's taken a couple of years to try and get over, but I'm getting there. It'd be nice if someday me and insanityy might talk and I could get some closure, but that's up to her. As for ages, I'd love to do a more recent census, but in the last one I did the average was around 21 on /r/visualnovels, and the mod team was a bit above that. I imagine it might have changed quite a bit with Discord however, as that seemed to attract a younger crowd.
  9. 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)
  10. Yep, that was a problem. While the average VN fan had read ~17 VNs, the average anime fan had watched ~180 anime! So with the VN results you'd get distinct groups of VNs forming their own clusters with VN fans just reading that type of content, but with anime you don't really get that. People are watching such a wide range of stuff that you end up with every anime overlapping significantly with every other anime. That's why I had to change the algorithm to the ranked system rather than use the overlap values directly.
  11. Yeah, basically those series are so popular that they break free from their usual genre groupings and are pretty universally enjoyed. Unfortunately it tends to mess up the clustering a bit as it's then like a black hole in the center, sucking in everything towards it. Thanks @Dreamysyu and @Thyndd! That's kind of you to say. I have a bunch of other VN analysis posts like this you might enjoy if you check the tumblr link. I also got my hands on 50,000 user's data on steam via the steamspy dude, so I'm hoping to have some fun analysing that in a few weeks too~
  12. I guess producing everything from scratch would be around a week's work. However I already had much of the clustering code from a VN analysis I'd done before, and I spread out all this over a few months. A couple of hours here and there. So it never felt like that much.
  13. Oh god no, that'd take weeks to do that. I wrote up some Java code to do it for me. Hopefully the next post will be interesting. Right this moment I'm just currently trying a similar cluster chart on the plan-to-read lists of MAL users to see how they group up (or not) which should be fun~
  14. I polled the users page on MAL (http://myanimelist.net/users.php) every 10 seconds to get a random selection of active MAL users. There's a slight bias because I wasn't running it 24/7, so users in certain timezones were more likely to be picked up than others, but overall it should be a fairly impartial selection. @PalasThanks!
  15. 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.
  16. For those who might be interested, a playlist of all the speeches at VNConf18 and my presentation on Trends in Visual Novels is up on youtube here. I'd highly recommend them, there are some really interesting (and hilarious) presentations on all sorts of topics. HD versions of my charts as well as a few extras is up on my accompanying blog post here.
  17. Aww that sucks Ange. Apparently there were 34 submissions and only 18 slots for presentations this year, so you were up against some stiff competition. Aginyan mentioned possibly doing a podcast type thing in the months ahead for those presentations that he wasn't able to squeeze in, so perhaps you might still be able to present it via that?
  18. For those interested in the development side of VNs, VNConf is coming up soon on Jan 13, 2018. There will be 18 speakers from various parts of the industry including 2 from Japan: Kio Nachi and Watanabe Ryoichi. I'll also be doing a fun little presentation on trends in the VN medium. The presentations from last year's conference are online for free here. Tickets can be bought from the VNConf website here. It's priced to just cover the streaming and web hosting expenses, but for those who can't afford it, the presentations will be going up online a few weeks later. It should be a lot of fun~
  19. To what extent could you map out the VN scene? All the various fandoms, the EVN vs JVN split, translated vs untranslated. Using the VNDB voting stats, I did a little analysis of the VN fandom and came up with some clear clustering. I hope you enjoy it~ https://bunnyadvocate.tumblr.com/post/168412595697/visualising-the-vn-market I'd love to hear any suggestions for other categories to investigate as I'll do a follow up post in a week's time.
  20. I just finished up reading ebi-hime's new short VN, Lynne, and wrote up a few thoughts here if anyone is interested: https://bunnyadvocate.tumblr.com/post/167163373682/thoughts-on-ebi-himes-lynne
  21. If anyone is interested, I wrote up my thoughts on DDLC here: https://bunnyadvocate.tumblr.com/post/165810990262/thoughts-on-doki-doki-literature-club
  22. Yep I'd certainly like to use more data, I'm hoping for more on any follow up post I do. However we found that the results for 4k users and 6k users were pretty much identical. A few genres moves up or down a position or two, but overall the results seemed steady. So I'm fairly confident that our results provide a decent picture to the state of things, although of course they aren't definitive and could be more reliable. Unfortunately because MAL only allows whole number ratings, the median wouldn't be very useful. You'd have all the anime clustering on 7, 8, 9 and 10. This is what I'd have preferred to do, I'd have just weighted the male ratings a little lower to balance out how many more of them there were. However I wasn't responsible for the data collection aspect of this, my partner did that, and they cut the data down so I used what I had. I'm hoping to do a follow up post in a few weeks and I'll be doing the data collection myself, as I'll also be collecting far more data on such things as stalled and dropped anime. No worries, I appreciate the feedback. It's the only way I can make sure the next post is better (:
  23. Oh we limited the dataset so there were the same number of fans of each gender. However on average, males watched twice as many shows as females did, so they tend to be the majority of most genre's as multiple shows watched in the same genre counts multiple times. I did a breakdown here listing what ratio of each gender had ever tried an anime of that genre, which I think better captures the differences. Thank you for your feedback though. You raise some good points.
  24. I was curious how much the anime fandom split down gender lines. What do men and women prefer? Is there a difference in how they rate things? What anime most divides them? Using the profile and rating data on MyAnimeList, I tried to find out. I'm not too sure how to list tables in this type of forum, so I hope you'll forgive me if I link to my analysis elsewhere, here on tumblr, and here on reddit. I hope you enjoy the results (:
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