Plk_Lesiak

I'm just starting Go! Go! Nippon!, bought it today on the newest Steam sale along with the DLCs. I have a rare free day tomorrow so I think I'm going to read through most of it. It's an important part of the history of VNs in the West, no matter how shameful. When I'm done with that, I have A Kiss For The Petals - Remembering How We Met next in my queue. I really want to know when that English release of Maidens of Michael is coming out. I WANT IT NOW.

My Yuri-RadarTM is always active and always vigilant. Shared your campaing on the HellaYuri group on Steam, hope it helps.

Ah, what would western yuri fans do without precious developers like You? We would starve to death for sure! There's barely anything good translated into English for us. Welcome to Fuwa, can't wait to learn more about your project.

I'm sorry, I don't think this is going anywhere. Most moral conflicts of today, such as gay rights, drug laws etc. center around a liberal understanding of individualism, that is personal freedom of choice and pursue of happiness, coupled with respecting the same freedom of others. This idea of individualism is struggling against a conservative notions of tradition, established moral order, religion etc. The form of individualism you've described, the one I would call libertinism or moral nihilism is an absolutely marginal factor here. The main arguement for gay rights, gay marriage is not "we just want it", but "we need this to fulfill ourselves, to live our lives with the same hapiness and dignity as others". And it's at its core a collective issue, because it's about the ability to not just take these moral stances ("I'm gay, I want to marry a person of the same sex"), but to act on them within the social and institutional order we live in (being able to actually marry that person or at least be in a relashionship with him/her without facing discrimination) - after all, a human being without a collective of some sort is just an animal. This does not mean that every such claim is credible and should be accepted, because there is the fundamental barrier of the good of other free individuals - not some collective interests per se, but personal autonomy of every citizen that has to be protected. That's why pedophilia (or rather - child rape) cannot be accepted, it will always be predatory behavior that infringes on the best interest and safety of the child. With animals, even of they are not moral creatures, it doesn't mean they should be necessarily excluded from moral limitations on the part of humans - if they're aware, feeling creatures there's a good reason to think we shouldn't abuse our power over them. I really don't see any good arguement against this stance, apart from questionable sense of evolutional superiority. On the bestiality, yeah, it might be somewhat complicated. And surely in most cases isn't worse than what's happening daily on pretty much every animal farm out there. This still doesn't mean it's not morally questionable - I'm pretty sure than an average goat or horse would choose not being fucked by it's owner if that was a possibility.

Really, this might be the first time I've seen anyone trying to sell such Nietzschean/de Sadian nihilism as "individualism". Even if we set a dychotomy where this kind of egomaniacal freedom is "individualism" and every sustainable ethical system, no matter how minimal, is "collectivistic", it will be completely useless for the discussion at hand. Because for acceptance of incest or LGBT+ interests this kind of fringe stance is not in any way necessary. It's also nowhere close to being an agenda of most progressive groups or a dominating trend in society IMO. Probably it is, from a moral point of view? Most of the animals we eat have personality, can feel pain etc. There's a reason we outlaw animal abuse, bestiality in most cases is simply considered one form of it. So, it's not something easily defendable on the grounds of personal freedom. Whether eating meat is, I will not judge, I don't claim to be a moral person anyways...

I think that's a misrepresentation of what individualism would mean in this content - what you described is a pretty extreme version of moral nihilism (a'la that in de Sade's writing). For individualism to work as any kind of ethical/ideological stance you must accept one basic principle - that the limit to your freedom is the good of another person. So you should be free to reject any kind of moral and intellectual stances that the collective tries to force on you, but can't use that freedom to hurt others. Pedophilia and bestiality are not defendable on the grounds of individualism, because a child or an animal cannot consent to sex and can be expected to suffer from that kind of action. Gay sex or an incestous relationship between consenting adults, in most cases, is absolutely justified from this perspective, because its an expression of freedom and intent of those involved and fundamentally shouldn't be a concern for anyone not directly affected by it.

Hello hello! If you're more into the mystery/horror side of things, I think you should enjoy Danganronpa series a lot. All three games are available on Steam I think.

We're all so weird? Well, thank you for the compliment. I actualy find it surprising how strong the taboo of incest still is nowadays, people are super uncomfortable speaking about it and the discussion can pretty much instantly jump into child molestation and stuff like that, instead of relationships between consenting adults and whether we have any right to judge them/get in their way. I think that with siblings, cousins, step siblings etc. it should really be no one's business, even the medical dangers are usually grossly overstated - in most cases inbreeding can have negative consequences if continued over longer periods of time, not in single generation. With parents and children, even foster parents it's obviously much more complicated due to inbalance of power/emotional dependency of children. What I've observed in the past is that people that actually have opposite-sex siblings are much more disturbed by the idea of incest. I think people unconciously put a long-term effort to desexualize these relations and any attempt to breake that activates some defence mechanisms. In anime and VNs, it's usually the cliche of non-blood related siblings, falling in love with each other and then discovering they can actually pursue their love. Oreimo tried something different, but from what I heard the producers blocked authors from pursuing an actual incestous conclussion to the story, turning the ending into the mess we've got in the end. Going back to VNs, one of my favorite western ones, Love Ribbon, did quite a good job of tackling the issue, with a romance between two sisters - pointing to the logical fallacies used to support the taboo, but never ignoring the costs of breaking it. Still, no matter what we say or how logical it might sound to us, I think that people are by nature dogmatic and distrustful towards everything that's different from their experience. These kinds of cultural battles are always long and hard and some people will hate everything that threathens their worldviews and the order of thing that they're used to, no matter how wrong it might seem from our perspective.

Don't know that much about it, but Korean is usually considered easier to learn than Japanese or Chinese, mostly because of simpler script. When I've started with Japanese a few months ago, I've used YouTube to learn Hiragana and Katakana + some basic grammar, it was very helpful before I've started a straighforward Japanese course on my university. Here is a channel about Korean by the same organization I've used for Japanese (Language 101): https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCsgBUobNGksxIKTagZayKEw I think such free internet courses are a good way to start, but unless you're in a hurry or can't spend money on it, a RL course with proffessional lector is the way to go.

I envy you, having time to be bored. When I'm on the forums too much it means I'm procrastinating, while a huge pile of urgent reading, writing etc. is waiting for me. That's maybe a good confession material BTW? I'm dyslectic and a slow reader because of that, while I'm also trying to pursue academic career (which requires huge amounts of efficient reading) and recently stopped playing games other than VNs. Am I doing that whole "life" thing the wrong way?

Is it still broken? I've replaced it once, I think the new one should work for everyone.

Maybe it's not a typical thing to post here, but my tablet gave me this notification today: Not sure what it meant, but I guess it's OK...?

Aye, aye, although I'm generally not into nukige, so I might pass either way. Continuing the search, to the list of western VNs on mobile I should add Ace Academy (maybe the only good attempt at copying the typical JP romance VN formula with English voice acting) and Seduce Me the Otome (has yuri routes - the whole thing is cheesy AF but can be amusing exactly because of it, also it's free).

"Unavoidable Harem Ending" - I like how ominous this tag sounds. Still, the fact that any version of this game made it to Google Play is actually pretty amazing. Also "Sticky Rice Games"...

Although I'm still missing a $500 144Hz monitor for that truly smooth, dynamic VN experience. Yay. I've even managed to miss that second typo while doing it. E-e-e-m-m-m-m-barrassment C-c-c-c-c-c-ombo!!!

Once sec... Can I remove my own accidental post? I've managed to quote myself instead of editing the previous one...

A "VR ready" vanity rig I've inherited from my brother (as he got married and moved out without taking most of his stuff): * Intel Core i7-5930k, 6 cores, 3,5GHz * 16GB DDR3-2133 RAM * Geforce GTX 970 4GB * 128 GB SSD + 2 GB HDD * Windows 10 Home Runs all my VNs at consistent 60 FPS (although it's hard to click fast enough to test that correctly).

Hello there, I think I'm just as much asking for recommendations as I'm trying to compile those Android releases in one place - (non-Apple) phones and tablets seem strangely underutilized when it goes to VNs (maybe because of how popular handhelds are in Japan?). It's surprisingly hard to find a proper one to read while on a toilet or sitting in a bus. ;p When it goes to ports, I know there are good ones of Everlasting Summer and Lucy -The Eternity She Wished for-, and supposedly pretty bad ones of Narcissu and If My Heart Had Wings. There are also a few more or less decent western VNs from Steam available on mobile for free, such as One Thousand Lies, Sepia Tears, Trick and Treat and Humanity Must Perish. With dedicated mobile releases, I've had a surprisingly good time with Stellaren (clunky AF, but the story has its moments), while the only mobile-oriented JP VN that I've found on Android and which seems to be considered decent is Fragment's Note (brother/sister romance, yay!). Anything I've missed that would be worth looking at?

For the past few years I've actualy tried comic writing (mostly comedic one-shots based on My Little Pony, with some pretty dark humour - my RL friend is a hugely successful brony fan artist and brought me into that community), had a lot of fun doing that and working with various fanartists in turning my ideas into proper comic strips. But I've realized I don't have the imagination necessary to be really good at it, so I pretty much abandoned it lately, journalistic and academic writing works much better for me. The things I do on my studies are also a hobby of mine in some ways, some projects I've definitely done just for the fun of it. I'm nominally a sociologist, but mostly deal with fan studies and porn studies, both are evolving into pretty serious disciplines lately.

I protest this notion. You don't sacrifice abominations. You turn your righteous fury against them and make them burn in a holy fire.

I agree, the more choice we get the better. Maybe we'll see more of that in future VNs, just as we see it in western RPGs nowadays. And with Flowers, it's definitely beautiful, has wonderful aesthetic and atmosphere. The rest is maybe more up to personal taste. It's very slow and sentimental, which is fine with me, and the OBVIOUSLY BEST GIRL is not the canon ending, which is unforgivable. ;p But seriously speaking, I've loved every moment of it and I pretty much recommend it to anyone. Sadly it's hard to tell when the sequels are going to get their English releases (if ever), the second one in theory should be on its way but that's all I've heard about it so far.

I think not, or there's two of us at least (or at least there will be two when I get to it, once more, reading priorities...). That's actually another thread I wanted to start at some point, asking whether anyone around here does that.

TBH, there are some artistically stunning, highly regarded Otome games (western ones too, ex. https://vndb.org/v19912) that I haven't played through mostly because I always have something higher on the list (as a VN newbie, pretty much years of reading waiting in that damn quote ;]). Even though I'm definitely not the target demographic, it's obvious they would be worth my time and there's still a pretty female to root for in there. So while most of mainstream VNs are definitely targeted towards man, there's still some pretty awesome stuff made for females or using a formula that makes it less centred on protagonist's penis and reasonably enjoyable for both sexes. ;p So I'm slightly surprised how huge the disproportion is around here, but maybe it's really about female VN fans having their own, separate spaces around the web. Aren't we all around here? And if we are, we're the best kind of weird! I'm actually with you on the H-scenes BTW and that might be another reason why I'm into yuri so much - it's pretty much always about both of the girls, each of them having actual personality, face etc. In general self-insertion doesn't work for me, both when it goes to sex scenes and general storytelling. Probably no VN so far immersed me more than Flowers -Le volume sur printemps-, even though the protagonist was a teenage girl (very much like me when it goes to personality, but still...).

So, I've just wondered, I've seen quite a lot of woman active in the Steam VN community, do we have any ladies on the forums? I'm mostly curious, but I also like discussing different perspectives on the VN genres and commonly used themes. With yuri titles, which I'm especially interested in, I think it can sometimes lead to very interesting and enlightening conclussions. I hope no one will take offence to my post, I'm the last one to mindlessly iterate gender stereotypes, but I think especially when it goes to romantic and erotic content, male and female perspective usually differ quite a lot (and simply, females have experiences I could never have myself and which are often important for the stories we read).

What is a point of any thread? Talking about stuff. We started from why is tentacle porn a thing in VNs. Ended up talking about fetishes in general. Not the worst or most OT discussion I've seen. ;p