Zalor

Thanks. Although you should thank @Clephas for supplying most of the lore through his comments, which I really like, so it was greatly appreciated. I have yet to come up with the lore for the OEL Union and Keyland, though I do have a rough idea for the former, and it involves a certain western VN that took the world by storm in 2017.

It's always fascinating reading these little histories of sites and all the drama that went down. This definitely makes me glad though that I never sought out Reddit. I was mostly content to frequent a small vn group on the Escapist back when I was seriously playing vn's. There were only a few of us and I don't remember any drama going down except when some loudmouth would post something disparaging about vn's on the site proper. It's a shame you had to go through that and I'm glad that you are doing better.

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. 

I hate its structure because it's upvote, downvote thing promotes a circle jerk community. When people have the ability to downvote an opinion out of sight I immediately become suspicious xD
EDIT:Well, that and I find its threaded nature difficult to hold a sustained discussion on. Might just be me, though.

This is honestly why I hate Reddit as a whole so much. It's so god damn authoritarian. This doesn't relate to the vn sub-reddit, but once I had a few questions about something really niche. And the only active community I could find to ask these questions was a reddit community. But the mods wouldn't allow me to post my own topic until I had a certain post count and "like" ratio. I mean, wtf!? I just wanted to ask a simple question, get an answer, and leave. That kind of authoritarian structure really bothers me and makes it a pain in the ass for new users. 
The regular forum style like fuwa is way better. Fuwa has good mods that do their job, and they aren't authoritarian. They pretty much never try to control the discourse that happens on the site. Fuwa users are free to talk about what we want with only a few reasonable exceptions. 

It should be noted that to have a slow build up, the story needs to be consistently ... well, built up. Stories that dick around for 30 hours can be fun, but it's hard to describe that as "building the story".
Usually I do enjoy a slow build up, where the world is gradually peeled back or new facets and skills of the characters slowly revealed that sort of thing. But only if the scenes had purpose and weren't just "hijinks".

This is honestly why I hate Reddit as a whole so much. It's so god damn authoritarian. This doesn't relate to the vn sub-reddit, but once I had a few questions about something really niche. And the only active community I could find to ask these questions was a reddit community. But the mods wouldn't allow me to post my own topic until I had a certain post count and "like" ratio. I mean, wtf!? I just wanted to ask a simple question, get an answer, and leave. That kind of authoritarian structure really bothers me and makes it a pain in the ass for new users. 
The regular forum style like fuwa is way better. Fuwa has good mods that do their job, and they aren't authoritarian. They pretty much never try to control the discourse that happens on the site. Fuwa users are free to talk about what we want with only a few reasonable exceptions. 

Nah, Ren loved doing stuff for the community but I think he just bit off more than he could chew with that project and didn't want to disappoint people. Community response was a bit over the top though, I agree 

Here's a little something I've made that was influenced by the Fire Emblem mod I believe @Zalor showed me (or so I think, correct me if I'm wrong). It's a geographical map showing Fuwanovel and other VN publishers as nations.

I apologize for the quality of the text. I tried my best to make the text readable without it being washed out by the colors of the map itself.
Special thanks to @Clephas for supplying most of the lore. It was really appreciated.
The lore of the world:
"Much of the world's economy is reliant on the great Steamvalve Mercantile Guild, which controls the circulation of Erogeemite and its accompanying technological advances."
"Fuwa, a nation of peoples from all over the world, has become the neutral ground for other nations to discuss matters of mutual interest and for the exchange of information."
"Mangagamia, a federation of many lesser nations of varying interests and cultures, remains one of the world's great powers.  However, due to its nature as a collective of nations, it lacks the sheer force and aggressiveness of its rival, the Sekai Empire, and it at times makes poor choices in its Erogeemite research and deployment, preferring numbers over quality."
"The Sekai Empire, having swallowed innumerable nations and tribes of the Fantranslasian Federation, opportunistically eyes the weakened nation of Moenovia, ever hungry for more Erogeemite, the ore which powers its engines of destruction."
"Moenovia, whose Erogeemite technology is far behind the curve, struggles to put up a resistance, unable to compete against the Sekai Empire's Eroo Pacch bombs."
"Frontwingia, having declared independence from its colonial masters, the Sekai Empire, has pursued a policy of internal development and deployment of new Erogeemite weapons, and it has begun to experiment with Eroo Pacch technology."
"The JAST Republic, while once the greatest of the world powers, has begun to stagnate as a society due to the glacial speed with which its legislature takes action and the frequent delays in the deployment of its Erogeemite weapons."
"An abortive invasion from the Mikandi Islands resulted in their forces being repulsed by the Fuwa Militia, staining the seas red with their blood.  This has resulted in an all-out effort on the part of the islanders to improve their Erogeemite technology, hoping to once again make advances on their larger neighbor's rich lands."
"The Typemoon Kingdom has fallen silent, save for limited exports to other nations of its advanced Erogeemite technology.  The age of its king has led to increasing worries over who will succeed him in his duties."
"The arrogant people of Nitroprovence, having gained wealth long ago by submitting themselves to the JAST Republic, now finds itself increasingly dissatisfied with the partnership."
"The Aaeru Ocean was once a feared place to sail, for which it is named after the fearsome pirate Aaeru; scourge of the eroge seas.  Most nations that dared to cross this ocean were unfortunately attacked and raided by her pirate fleet, taking their precious Erogeemite back to her base in Fuwa.  Her reign persisted for years until a her fleet was sunken by a great storm.  Some say there are survivors of her crew that still roam the seas, but these are rumors."

Back when Fuwanovel was really active back in 2013, 2014 and 2015; we had topics like this all the time. Like 5+ a day sometimes, lol. Honestly I miss those days of Fuwa. It really shows how much the forums have slowed down that we only get like 1 of these threads a day. But I'm glad that people are trying to keep the forums a live. Its kind of like keeping a fire alive. And damn, the fire of fuwa used to be raging!
But yeah, one of the problems I had when the forums was that active was that I spent a lot more time talking about VNs then actually reading them, lol. 

A lot of developers don't really see the value of getting involved in a community. A lot of them don't do much in the way of marketing, even.
It takes a few games--if you last that long--before you realize that it's a privilege to be able to create and have people give you their attention.
People respond well to mutual respect and grace.
Poor thing really did mess up here. Not only did they get a lot of negative attention, but they also missed out on one of the great VN communities available to them.

I doubt he'll come back. Most of these VN promoting users show up on Fuwa once to advertise their work, and then vanish, and we never see them again.

Honestly, the evident lack of interest in properly promoting their VN shows that the more readable version of the text is unnecessary.

The fact that this post got you a post count 

Aaaaaahhh, thank you so much! ^^ There's a lot of interesting stuff here though, especially if you gather everything worthwhile from 2-week or monthly periods. And everything that gives a bit of life to the frontpage is a great thing, so I'm excited about the idea far beyond my own stuff possibly being featured. I'm a bit too busy producing content for the blog and handling RL stuff to really participate though... :<

Honestly, I would vote for you to be one of the first features on Fabulous on Fuwa if I could. You are a relative new-comer that has been putting out some great content. Its great to have you on the forums!

I had this same exact experience when I started with unTld. Reading VNs that were around my level bored me to tears and felt like studying. Except, even with studying I had more fun. Then I found a VN way out of my level but that really interested me. And although my progress was kind of slow, it was really fun.  

Back in 2015 Hmsful (or whatever his name was) and Monmon would spam your name and references to your group chat all over the forums and it really started to get on my nerves after a while. There was even this one day where they created like 5 threads that were just inside jokes from your group chat or discord or whatever. Regular shitposting can be funny, but spamming inside jokes that only people in the group chat will understand is annoying. Just keep it in the chat, you don't need to bring the rest of the community into it. Thankfully the mods conjoined them all into one thread, but it still bothered me. Honestly after that I always saw the people that associated with you as shitposting spammers. Strangely enough you didn't seem to spam much yourself, but your friends did a lot. Anyway, it seems that after all this time your group has matured a bit (I think). But I will still always remember you guys as the biggest spammers on fuwa. 

I had this same exact experience when I started with unTld. Reading VNs that were around my level bored me to tears and felt like studying. Except, even with studying I had more fun. Then I found a VN way out of my level but that really interested me. And although my progress was kind of slow, it was really fun.  

Hi everyone, I'm glad to be able to be part of this community, since it seems rather cool and warmhearted! ^^
 
I'm Pahn, also known as pahncake and I come from France. I've got half of my blood Japanese/Korean and therefore have grown a particular interest for Asian culture (Not just anime omfg). :3
Writer, Designer, Polyglot but most importantly Dank memer , I newly introduced myself to VN's and quite enjoyed my time spent on those so...
 
Pleased to meetcha! 
 

I had this same exact experience when I started with unTld. Reading VNs that were around my level bored me to tears and felt like studying. Except, even with studying I had more fun. Then I found a VN way out of my level but that really interested me. And although my progress was kind of slow, it was really fun.  

I have had my ups and downs with VNs. Since I started reading back in 2015, I have multiple times, during several months, almost completely stopped reading VNs, only to come back newly encouraged and be once again be dissapointed, having read another novel in which I found myself more reading for completion's sake than anything else, and once more leaving for months upon months. 
I think what has kept me going this long is how at the start of me reading VNs I also started learning Japanese (why I honestly have no clue, I am one of those guys that just goes ahead and does something and will not be discouraged I guess). Once I had then gained enough leeway in the language I started pretty recently reading VNs once again (in Japanese) and found it a whole lot more encouraging and enjoyable, both from a learners perspective - getting to see your own progress in the language, and from a perspective of being able to read VNs that I were more interested in than perhaps I was others I had read purely based on them being translated.
As a side note I will give a tip for Japanese learners - read a novel you really want to read and not just one purely based on your skill in the language. I had previously tried reading various VNs purely because they were easy and I found myself not able to stand it (whether this is the case for you is, of course, not certain, just my experience).

Like @VirginSmasher I am also one of the more (shall we say) serious people when it comes to this medium. And I wouldn't be surprised if part of what motivated you to start this topic was because of the topic I started around a week ago. Which if you did read through that, then you would have found out that I do genuinely love this medium a lot. And it is precisely because of that love which is exactly why I hold it to high standards. Just like how parents who love their children have high standards for their kids because they want their kids to succeed in life. I similarly want to see this relatively obscure medium be treated with respect as it grows in popularity. Regardless, I don't want to make this an extension of that discussion, because you brought up some other interesting points that I would rather discuss. 
I think the Japanese VNs vs EVNs is stupid, but I understand why there is such a split. Even just 7 - 8 years ago, VNs were super obscure. And back then EVNs were pretty much complete trash. I think at best we had only Act 1 of Katawa Shoujo, Memo, and at most 3 other titles that were okay. But none of those even compared to the epic proportions of stories that Japanese VNs had. Fate Stay Night, G-Senjou no Maou, Swan Song, Kanon; these were decent length to long stories that had good production values. And thats just stuff that was fan-translated at the time. If you ventured deeper into the untld realm, you could find a lot of gold. And thats also not to mention good Japanese VNs that were officially licensed and released in English, such as Ever17, Crescendo, Kana Little Sister, and Yume Miru Kusuri. If you wanted a good VN around that time (which is when I started), your only option was Japanese. I think a lot of older fans still have that negative predisposition towards EVNs. We started with Japanese because thats all we really had at the time, and we have stuck to Japanese because of the large library. We haven't had a need or reason to look at EVNs. That said, with titles like Katawa Shoujo, Dysfunctional Systems, Va-11 Hall-a, etc. I actually think that EVNs have some pretty solid titles to offer now. But they still only have a really small library in comparison to the Japanese library.
A big problem I think though, is that because of this historic divide. The divide has only gotten worse as VNs have started to grow in popularity. In the past at least, the Japanese VN crowd was mostly filled with fans of VNs. People who liked reading VNs. The EVN crowd however, was filled with people who just liked making them (i.e Lemmasoft). But often the people who made EVNs had read relatively few VNs if any at all. From what I have seen, it seems that they pretty much only read each others VNs. But largely ignored commercial Japanese titles. Like wise, Japanese VN fans usually didn't venture into EVNs, because the quality was much lower than what they were used to. So there was a complete disengagement with both communities. We might be seeing the repercussions of that now as these medium is growing in popularity.  

I'm one of these negative people you talk about usually, but that's because I like to think more realistically about this medium. All the moege hate and shit like that is personal preference and if you let it bother you, that's not my problem.
And for the community in general, I usually can't stand the Steam sector of the VN medium, mainly because they're the ones promoting stuff like the Sakura series as what VNs are represented as. The reddit sector went sour on me because of the Aokana incident back in 2016 and I haven't liked them since. Fuwanovel's the only community with people that I like to talk to and can have conversations with and that's why I (occasionally) stick around here.
Sorry for all the negativity, but this is just how I see things.