Chronopolis

Aww, poor Lesiak.
The nicest looking sites which come to mind are:
https://vnreviews.blog/ Conjeurer's Blog
https://tanoshimi.xyz/ Moogy and Co.
https://mimidoshima.wordpress.com/ Kastel
https://gareblogs.wordpress.com/ Garejei
https://omochikaeri.wordpress.com/ New releases by Micchi and Zen
I don't really follow VN blogs though, I just go look for reviews or vndb comments after finishing a VN.

Aww, poor Lesiak.
The nicest looking sites which come to mind are:
https://vnreviews.blog/ Conjeurer's Blog
https://tanoshimi.xyz/ Moogy and Co.
https://mimidoshima.wordpress.com/ Kastel
https://gareblogs.wordpress.com/ Garejei
https://omochikaeri.wordpress.com/ New releases by Micchi and Zen
I don't really follow VN blogs though, I just go look for reviews or vndb comments after finishing a VN.

Aww, poor Lesiak.
The nicest looking sites which come to mind are:
https://vnreviews.blog/ Conjeurer's Blog
https://tanoshimi.xyz/ Moogy and Co.
https://mimidoshima.wordpress.com/ Kastel
https://gareblogs.wordpress.com/ Garejei
https://omochikaeri.wordpress.com/ New releases by Micchi and Zen
I don't really follow VN blogs though, I just go look for reviews or vndb comments after finishing a VN.

Aww, poor Lesiak.
The nicest looking sites which come to mind are:
https://vnreviews.blog/ Conjeurer's Blog
https://tanoshimi.xyz/ Moogy and Co.
https://mimidoshima.wordpress.com/ Kastel
https://gareblogs.wordpress.com/ Garejei
https://omochikaeri.wordpress.com/ New releases by Micchi and Zen
I don't really follow VN blogs though, I just go look for reviews or vndb comments after finishing a VN.

Aww, poor Lesiak.
The nicest looking sites which come to mind are:
https://vnreviews.blog/ Conjeurer's Blog
https://tanoshimi.xyz/ Moogy and Co.
https://mimidoshima.wordpress.com/ Kastel
https://gareblogs.wordpress.com/ Garejei
https://omochikaeri.wordpress.com/ New releases by Micchi and Zen
I don't really follow VN blogs though, I just go look for reviews or vndb comments after finishing a VN.

Whenever I read something like this, I always wonder about one major issue, which is unavoidable when investigating issues like this: cause and effect. Will reading make you smarter or are smart people more likely to read?
New Zealand has tested a bunch of people for decades and now they can say the more TV a 10 year old child watches, the lower the grades.... or was it IQ... Either way the question is if the brain is damaged by TV or if it is because children, who are already bright have too much going on in their heads to accept passive entertainment for a long time.
Another one is breast feeding (take that prude Americans). Substitute in a bottle is less perfect for brain development and the child will lose 3 IQ points on average as grown up if fed by bottle. Is it the food or is it because stupid parents are less likely to breastfeed, meaning children who are breastfed will statistically have genes for higher IQ?
Answering such questions is not an easy task because how to tell those two apart and how can we be sure it's not a combined effect of both? The same is an issue in the first article. The second article seems to have the same issue with the Japanese study while the Pompeii counters this issue better by having a before and after test, which should help to filter out the differences between people and get more precise readings of the effect of the book reading. As such, that specific study is more trustworthy than the other studies in regard to the effect.
I would say the premise for the studies are severely simplified and you can't say any TV show vs any book. For instance you will likely get completely different effect from a documentary than you will get for slapstick comedy. Likewise there are good books and then there are horrible books. I was forced to read one of the latter in school and the only thing I remember from it was the story was really boring and the author had spelling mistakes, which were not fixed prior to printing. I don't think there is any positive effect from reading such a book.
Sounds to me like the issue here has less to do with TV vs book and more to do with parents using the TV as babysitter rather than spending time reading a book for the child.
 
As for VNs vs amine. I would say it's likely that VNs are better for your brain than anime. Anime will likely have the same effect as TV shows. Generally speaking, anime is fast paced, has a tendency to be shallow and in any way acts like sitcoms. There are exceptions, but generally speaking they aren't brain challenging. If it is say a sengoku era anime and you pause whenever there is a name and try to remember what the real person did, then you become active and push/train your brain and as such train your memory.
VNs on the other hand can be beneficial, but they don't have to be. It depends on how it's written and what goes on. If it's a machine translated nukige, then good luck trying to convince yourself you will benefit from it. If it is a well written story where you try to keep track of past events in order to understand what is going on and perhaps see if you can predict anything, then you train your brain and you could benefit from it.
Another factor, which should not be overlooked is the reader. If you read a masterpiece and speedrun through it without digging into the story, pausing to recollect the scenes etc, then you will not get the benefits other people might get from reading the very same title. This is yet another layer, which makes the question even harder to answer. Your language skills comes into play as well. If you have language shortcomings and miss out on the details, you will not benefit as much if at all from having a well written VN. You might benefit from the training of a foreign language though.

I think VN's have more detail and exposition, which does make you a little bit smarter.
I agree with what soraa said. You'll see and experience new things, but you're not doing analysis probably so it's not a direct brain exercise. Maybe reading various types of prose will make your mind flexible unlike mind-numbing TV. But performance in other areas depends on skill and experience which aren't going to transfer at all from VN's.

if anything i am dumber now and starting to enjoy seeing the same 3 stories told over and over

Some graphics are still not ready and some things still need to be improved, but we really like this "point the name with your mouse to read it's description". It changes a lot of the writing as well, since this format allows us to easily avoid bad dialogue such as "as you know, I was always your friend and your father never liked me..."
Everything is still work in progress. : )
 

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~

Yeah, but I also don't think that experience alone can make someone a good critic or their opinions reasonable, even beyond the fact that we all have our subjective preferences - you can very much be a veteran with a terrible taste or outlandish stances that makes your take on various titles or issues completely useless to an average reader. Also if you stay within a niche community for very long it's often hard to resist groupthink and being apologetic towards the persistent flaws of the genre you're emotionally invested in. So, experience gives you perspective probably necessary to properly judge VNs, but doesn't make your opinions automatically more valid (and if you lack critical distance, it might actually make them conventional and heavily skewed - lacking in different ways than perspective of a newbie, but equally so).

For Children: Nothing
For pre-teens: Clannad
For Teenagers: Tokyo Babel
For young adults: Narcissu (teenagers are too easily influenced, but this is best read before you hit your mid-twenties)
For full Adults:  Dies Irae
For Middle-aged or older: Erect!  (lol)

Actually I am able to do the whole translation, however I will NOT work without a translator that is better than me to translate check what I've done. Doing To Heart 2 without a checker was very soul destroying since I simply could not be sure that I got it all right. I'm a decent translator, but not professional quality, and two translators back to back checking over a script has a massive effect on accuracy. Back when I finished To Heart 2, I described my accuracy at the time as 95% literal accuracy, 85% nuance. 85% nuance isn't good enough for this game; it simply has to be over 95%. Even if there was another translator that could do 85% nuance, that would have made a massive difference because every translator has different areas they know well, and two 85% translators back to back ends up with about 98% accuracy. This is the main reason I want another translator. I don't want people reading the final translation and going "well he fucked that kamige up", and this game as you can see increasingly from those who read Japanese that are posting on this thread truly is god tier status. I'm confident in my writing skills which is why I feel up to doing this but I want the final version to be a solid representation of the original work so English writing and editing that looks fine but isn't entirely accurate isn't going to cut it.

The heroine paths in this game are incredibly long and the common routes (there are two of them) are short.  This means you spend a lot of time with each individual heroine, which is a huge plus... but it also means that all the character development normally done in the common route gets done in the heroine routes.

Luckily it's proving a lot of fun to translate this one so fingers crossed for all of you that I still have plenty of time and it remains this much fun to translate and progress should be good speed compared to previous projects. Kudos to @VirginSmasher for being persistent enough to find the necessary staff to get this project underway. Some experienced people there who have a history of success so it bodes well for this project.

I've been waiting for this particular game to get a project going so that I could translate it, but I didn't want to be project lead (and everything else) as well as translator this time. Luckily no one noticed I was free for translation between finishing Clover Day's and now so I could jump straight into it. I'm really looking forward to translating this and hope we get enough staff to make it a great release. Given my history with my previous projects I'm sure you all know I definitely see things out to the end, so at the very least you have one translator that is dedicated to it, however we do need another translator as this is a well known kamige and the standard required really needs the highest quality translation and checking to do it justice. Translators and editors step up and join in.

Even though I only recently had posted that one, the reality is that I had it for a long while and I decided to change my whole desktop around this time, because why not ?
 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Finding this amazing Megumin wallpaper helped me make up my mind about it.  
 

I've always avoided anime-ing my desktop as I prefer neutral wallpapers (that is, mostly pretty landscapes), but then I saw this Albedo drawing and...
After that, it only felt appropriate to find something for the login screen too (yeah, it's a photo, because I couldn't be bothered to work around not being able to just click printscreen)...
I think I'll get some heat for this from my GF, but, well, you only live once.

Wow, this thread is pure gold.
My story will be super tame compared to some of those above, but stil... I was reading the all-ages Sonohana spin-off, you know, one that doesn't even have much romance in it, and decided to finish it in the morning before my gf wakes up. So, obviously she woke up earlier than usual and walked into my room exactly at the beginning of the only kissing scene in the whole game.
Maybe I looked unreasonably engrossed in the romantic conclussion of the story, but the look she gave me nearly made me wish I was cought reading some actual porn. 
Hmmm... 
I think I have to go through that scene again, I couldn't really focus when finishing the read that day. :] 

He will be remembered. 
I like to think that he himself considered that he lived a good life, as it's well known his optimism and way of thinking. 
It's always sad to say goodbye, but in the end we must accept that is the fate we all share. He has become now one of those undying stars that will inspire the future generations. It was his books that made me interested in physics in the first place. So thank you and good night, Mr Hawking, have a good sleep. 

This is slightly beside the point, but I consider any OELVN published before 2014 as pretty much "prehistoric". It was around that year, with Sekai going official and games such as Sunrider and Sakura Spirit coming out that the western VN scene become something more than just a small circle of fan-producers.
With VN in general, I guess I always thought of stuff from before 2010 as "old stuff". After all, it was Key in early 2000s that cemented the formula with Kanon and Air, so everything from before 1999/2000 would be basically a proto-VN, and I think those games from the 90s are often heavily dated, while those made between 2000 and 2010 just have different feel to them.
 

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)

This, more than anything else I think. If I actually care about the characters and they're consistently well-written, there can be no such thing as the story going "too slow", I'll just enjoy the casual moments for what they are and most likely never complain. Well done SoL should be more than just means to an end ("necessary character development" etc.) and as I'm a sucker for anime fluff, a VN that really does it right will receive similar praise from me as one that delivers intense drama - I would even argue that it's paradoxically easier to cover poor writing and characterization with fast pacing than it is in case in a really slow, relaxed story, if you don't want to bore your audience to death.

Being consistently good is way harder than begin low and then peak higher, the inability to be at least digestible in all the sections is like a plague that infects most of story driven vns and make them crap.

I've just released my free Visual Novel Audio Pack and thought that you all might be interested! I'm especially proud of it because I got the chance to collaborate with some awesome singers on stylistically totally different songs, which can be used for opening and ending/credits sequences.
Included in this pack are: 
- 14 Pieces;
- 3 Songs (each with a TV length (->shorter) and a full length version);
- 10 UI SFX;
- 12 Transition jingles;
- Convenience Store Audio Pack (3 Pieces, 12 SFX);
- Horror Piano Audio Pack (5 Loops, 8 SFX);
- Simpsonill Pack (1 Piece)
You can download the pack by following the link below!
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1d4cOFw_pr6Gh_hUid6S88WFwz7XrFFOe?usp=sharing
The SFX can be used under the following licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
And the music can be used under the following licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
If you're wondering who created the character illustrations: They were all made by asabuchuo-tdi! You can find more of their work over here: 
https://lemmasoft.renai.us/forums/viewtopic.php?f=62&t=45306&p=472044
It's not a requirement but feel free to let me know if you've used a track in your project, I'd love to play it!
You can also listen to all the pieces and songs on soundcloud without having to download them first ^^