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lunaterra

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Everything posted by lunaterra

  1. From what I understand, lesbians in Japan prefer the term ビアン (bian) to refer to themselves. レズ (rezu) is an insult roughly equivalent to calling someone a lesbo. There's a great article about the history of the term "yuri" and other ways Japanese creators refer to GxG works here. tl;dr: "yuri" is the term used by the Japanese lesbian community; "girls love" was coined by publishers who wanted an analogue to the "boys love" term. I can't really speak to the topic of the thread, but I would bet that there are more yuri VNs by WLW in Japan's doujin scene, similar to how LGBTQ+-themed games in the West are pretty much exclusively the domain of indie games. But because doujin games almost never get translated, we don't hear about them.
  2. I took issue with lolicon specifically because of how accepted it is among VN fans. And yes, unfortunately, BL games tend to be rather rapey. :/ I'm not a fan of that kind of content either. I wouldn't recommend it without a content warning, though honestly, I probably wouldn't enjoy something with rape very much anyway. I also don't think it should be banned. I specifically said I wasn't advocating for a lolicon ban. That's outside the scope of this topic, and my own feelings on the matter are complex. The OP asked what we, as fans, can do to lure people into the medium...and that'd be a helluva lot easier if we didn't have so many people advocating for VNs with child sex in them.
  3. I never said that loli content should be banned. I said that we, as VN fans, shouldn't promote it. I consider this a moral issue, not just a reputation issue. Promoting that content (especially without adequate warnings) alienates actual, real life victims of child sexual abuse--this is why the Fuwa recommendation site (which I help out with) includes all loli/shota content under the "underage sexual content" warning, regardless of the characters' actual ages; someone who's upset by pictures of children in sexual situations is unlikely to be comforted by "oh, but she's actually 120, not 12!" Comparing lolicon to LGBT+ content is totally ridiculous. What's the worst thing that could happen by someone discovering BL? They discover that they're gay? Oh no, the horror.
  4. The biggest one: We need to stop treating VNs like they're Video Games Lite. I think we're all guilty of this (myself included), but by doing so, we're effectively limiting VNs' potential reader base to just gamers. An assumption I see often is that gameplay VNs like Ace Attorney or Danganronpa are inherently more newbie-friendly than normal VNs or especially kinetic novels. This only makes sense if you're assuming that you're trying to market VNs to gamers. I'm not saying that it's bad to try to get gamers into VNs, but why should we limit ourselves to that? Why are they the only audience that we're trying to get? Other groups who might be interested in visual novels: Regular novel readers. Yes, they still exist. This is such an obvious thing to me (after all, we're trying to promote visual novels) that it almost amazes me that almost nobody considers that people who like to read might be interested in...well, reading. Comics fans, especially fans of indie comics. We're seeing a tiny bit of overlap between indie comics and EVNs already. I read a short yuri VN named Serre by Adrienne Bazir not too long ago that does really nice things with CGs and sprite animations (especially considering she did everything except the music/sound effects). There's also an interactive graphic novel (which I haven't had the opportunity to buy yet) that came out recently named It Will Be Hard that I've seen get a good reception. I don't know if it'd be called a VN per se, but surely it'd be of interest to people who are interested in interactive storytelling? There's a lot of things that our mediums could learn from each other if we bothered to expand outside our normal horizons. People with disabilities who can't/don't want to play "normal" video games. After all, 99% of VNs have no interactivity beyond clicking to advance the text and possibly making choices. This makes them inherently more accessible than 99% of video games. There are some things to keep in consideration (for example, making sure you can access the menu easily; adding screen reader or text-to-speech support for visually-impaired readers; adding an option to use a dyslexic-friendly font like OpenDyslexic), but overall, making a VN accessible is much easier than making your average video game accessible. More things that would help VNs' reputation and encourage people to check out the medium: Stop pretending that porn is a necessary component to VNs. I'm not saying "drop the porn" (that'd be hypocritical of me, since I've wished for more 18+ otome in the past), but it's off-putting to a lot of people, and a lot of time it's shoehorned in anyway. Sex in VNs should be treated the same way as it is in books: some books have sex in them, in some books (erotica) sex is the whole point, but you don't need to have sex in a novel for it to be considered literature, nor does having a sex scene in it automatically disqualify a book from being literature. Longer is not always better. I personally like long stories, but a lot of people just don't have the time (or, yes, attention span) for a 50-hour epic. There's value in shorter VNs that tell a good story not just despite, but because of their length...similarly, by holding longer works up on a pedestal, we're encouraging creators to add pointless shit to pad the length of their stories, which just wastes everyone's time. We need to support diverse VNs by diverse creators. Diverse settings, diverse characters, diverse plots, diverse artwork. Basically have something for everyone. There's nothing wrong with high school stories, but it's boring when it seems like that's the only setting that people will read. Part of this is supporting EVNs and EVN creators, who may not have the budgets that the big Japanese eroge creators do, but who are still doing cool stuff. (There's this weird perception that EVNs try too hard to be like JVNs and are all set in Japanese high schools, which hasn't been the case for years? Katawa Shoujo and DDLC aren't representative of the EVN scene as a whole, for a lot of reasons. I will say that there's a disproportionately high number of anime-style EVNs, but even then there are plenty of exceptions. That's just the first few I found when going through my VNDB collection.) I think the reaction to this year's AX announcements really shows how much pushback there can be against stories that don't fit into the mold of "normal" eroge: JAST USA announced three BL VNs, and MangaGamer announced one BL and one yuri VN, and people are complaining about this year's AX being "overly gay," or about how MG has supposedly "abandoned" the "traditional eroge audience" (never mind that they also announced two Rance games and already have plenty of "normal" eroge in the pipeline) and is now a "fujoshi paradise." I understand the appeal of self-inserting, but some of my favorite stories have been about people very different from me--in fact, a fully-fleshed character who's very different from me can be easier to relate to than a blank-slate protagonist. Basically, if I can read through VNs with straight male protagonists and manage to enjoy them, a straight guy can read through an otome or BL game without...dying, or whatever you think will happen if you touch something not aimed at straight men. Don't promote lolicon/shotacon stuff. This creeps out the vast majority of people, myself included. Maitetsu was a mistake. Just because it's legal (in the US) doesn't mean we have to support it.
  5. Yeah, I did put that in the title. That is pretty notable--console -> PC ports do tend to be pretty rare--but honestly, from my experience, otome game players tend to prefer handheld/mobile releases. I often encounter people who don't play otome games on PC at all. I'm in a minority as PC is actually my preferred platform.
  6. Source. The game will be playable at Anime Expo 2018. It'll be digital-only (notable because most other localized Vita otome have received physical releases). VNDB page for Eikoku Tantei Mysteria
  7. Not exactly; the "patch" (it's actually just deleting a file from the game install) just makes certain characters' clothing more revealing and adds largely non-explicit nudity during the final love scene. Most of it is roughly equivalent to the content of the first Dragon Age game (which Loren the Amazon Princess clearly takes after in a lot of ways). You'll get to see Chambara's breasts, but that's it. This was when Steam was a lot less lenient about the types of sexual content it would allow on its platform.
  8. Visual novels on sale Even if you prefer to have your games on Steam, it's well-worth checking this sale if you like indie VNs. Many itch.io games come with Steam keys (all of Fruitbat Factory's games do, for instance); a game's page will say if it comes with a key. Combined with the fact that, by default, developers get a larger cut of the profits compared to Steam (default 90% vs 70%), you get a DRM-free copy of the game, and some games aren't available on Steam at all, and I'd say that it's better to buy from itch.io when it's an option. (And if you go with the DRM-free copy, itch.io has an app that allows for automatic updates.) /shill I just wish it had a proper wishlist function...
  9. I'd take those numbers with a grain of salt for two reasons: Valve changed their privacy options not too long ago so that a user can choose to hide their game collection. This makes it impossible to get an accurate estimate of how many people own a game. (Note how large of a range 100,000-200,000 is.) If My Heart Had Wings was part of a Humble Bundle a few months ago. Many of those owners (including myself) likely bought that bundle for Higurashi, not for IMHHW. There's no way of knowing how many people bought IMHHW directly vs. just getting it in that bundle.
  10. English Otome Games English Visual Novels OtomeSweetheart Visual Novel Reviews (mainly focuses on otome games)
  11. Thanks for the welcomes! That's a tough question to answer. My favorite video game is Mass Effect 2 (ironically, since I generally prefer turn-based combat to real-time) and the other two main trilogy games are also pretty high up there. 80 Days is my personal favorite piece of interactive fiction (I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say it's a VN, even if it does have its own VNDB page). My favorite VNs that I've read so far are Butterfly Soup and Digital: A Love Story. eden* is really good too. Other games I like include (in no particular order) Final Fantasy X; The Away Team; Chrono Trigger; Bastion; Papers, Please; Knights of the Old Republic; the Dragon Age series; To Be or Not to Be; Undertale; The World Ends With You; and Remember Me. I also have a soft spot for the writing in Fallen London, even though I don't quite have the patience to play it regularly... (I own Sunless Sea but haven't gotten to it yet. Story of my goddamn life.)
  12. It's been a while since I've made an introduction post; I'm a bit rusty at it. I've been reading VNs for who-knows-how-long. I don't remember what exactly was my first, but some of the earliest ones I played were Narcissu, Hotel Dusk, the first two Ace Attorney games, and Katawa Shoujo. I'm mostly interested in yuri, otome, and BL (usually in that order), but I won't turn down a well-written galge. I don't watch much anime or read manga very often, and I don't read light novels at all, but I do listen to a lot of Japanese music, especially j-metal and visual kei. Both my avatar and signature images are from j-power album covers. I play a shitton of video games besides VNs (my backlog is embarrassingly large) and have a major soft spot for narrative-focused games, which is one of the reasons I'm so interested in VNs. I'll read just about anything put in front of me, which is both a blessing and a curse. I'm a professional editor/proofreader and do writing commissions, including for VNs. Among others, I was a proofreader for Pairs and This, My Soul. I'm the writer of a yuri KN named A Tale of Two Extras; it's unfortunately stalled at the moment, but I'm determined to get it released someday! I've been studying Japanese for a while now, though I still consider myself beginner-level (as in "not even N5" beginner-level) and don't plan on translating anything anytime soon. It's nice to meet you all!
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