Do you believe in VNs?

[tymmur]

On 9/4/2016 at 0:37 AM, Vorathiel said:

Good point with YMK! It actually had a nice, 'realistic' characterisation. But did I believed that? No. Because even if VN is portraying somebody with down to earth manner, whole medium accustomed me to it's fakeness I just straight rejects any links to real life human beings.

Yume Miru Kusuri was the first VN, which came to my mind when reading the first post. I don't know about Mizuki's route, but the other two seems shockingly realistic. I spent ages reading it because I kept taking breaks to reflect on my own time at school. It was quite hard, but it made me realize stuff I didn't understand while they were happening.

 

I went to class with somebody, who was a weirdo. He suddenly turned into something sort of like Nekoko (in some aspects so similar that it's downright scary) and reading YMK made me realize why. Sometimes high, sometimes sleeping. This made him completely isolated. After a few weeks like that, I woke him up, said something like "This is not working out. We need to talk" and then we had a lengthy conversation about how he hated his parents, his future and stuff like that. After that he turned around in a few days, became his usual odd character, who paid attention in class and the last time I saw him, he had manage to get into a university. It wasn't until I read YMK years later that I realized what I had actually done.

 

The bullying part is also shockingly realistic, both in terms of how the bullying is performed and how the school reacts. Speaking of personal observations, no bullying in YMK seems extreme. Presumably the most extreme story I can tell is 2 guys suddenly trapping me in a corner and holding on to my arms and then a 3rd one wanted to test how many kicks to the head it will take to make somebody pass out. Apparently he had seen a movie and wanted to try it himself. I'm not quite sure how, but I somehow went into survival mode and seconds later he ran away screaming and bleeding. The other two made a run for it too and they never bothered me again. It's the only time I have been in a real fight and I think I would suck at it in general. The school didn't care at all. Based on other stuff I have seen and people telling me they have been exposed to, the list of stuff taking place involves a bag full of urine, pouring water into schoolbags to ruin the books (forcing the student to pay for new ones), forcing minors to watch gay porn against their will, random assaults due to entertainment value. The list goes on and on and generally speaking the schools simply don't care. What YMK doesn't touch is when the teachers joins or even starts the bullying. With all this in mind, YMK seems extreme, but not unrealistically extreme.

 

However reading what other people write about YMK has made me realize that quite a lot of people fail to realize how realistic it is. If people discard it as 100% fiction, they learn nothing. I learned a lot from it and I leveled up my understanding of live/awareness so to speak. However realizing that perhaps most people miss that makes me sad, though it tells me of human ignorance as well. I can't say I'm happy with what I have learned (it's only bad stuff), but given that it is the real world, I'm happy that I have an understanding how the kind of people I can encounter in life as well as better insights in my past.

 

Wish upon a shooting star also made me learn something. No, it's not the fake science it tries to explain. What I actually learned the most from was the translation notes. It tells about Japanese history and culture to make the reader understand what goes on and what is told in that TL notes pdf file is actually quite interesting.

 

On 9/4/2016 at 11:24 PM, Fiddle said:

I sure hope nobody's studying the female anatomy with VNs.

How can anybody be on the internet and not be exposed to female anatomy all the time? Before I started using add blockers, nude women showed up everywhere, even in places you wouldn't expect, like regular newspapers. One would expect them to trigger on viewing habits, but my experience is that they show up even in browsers never used for viewing adult content.

 

On 9/4/2016 at 0:19 AM, Funnerific said:

When was the last time you or anyone saw good and proper English in an untranslated Japanese work? The answer is never, because they just don't care - all that matters is that they shove in some English and make it look cool. That's merely one area where our standards are different.

I saw an anime, where an American went "mip mip mip" or something like that and it was hard subbed in Japanese to tell what he was supposed to say in what was supposed to be English. The fansubber even had to write it was supposed to sound like English. I forgot which anime it was though.

 

I'm not sure how much they care. I fear it's more like they do it as good as they can. English proficiency in Japan is kind of horrible to be honest and how to teach English at school is a hot topic because the vast majority learns too little and ends up hating the language. One major problem is that in order to get better conversation skills, they teach English in highschool in English. It might be good for some, but the students who aren't skilled enough to understand the teacher ends up learning nothing at all. Sadly this problem is not unique to Japan.

 

On 10/4/2016 at 6:43 AM, littleshogun said:

What I learned from VN, well I know crack, registry edit, patch, ISO, system locale, and torrent if you mean that involving in VN give me something to learn.

By the time I encountered a VN by chance, I knew all that except for system locale. I'm not saying I used it, but I knew how to use it, which is close enough. Interestingly enough I later ended up needing knowledge about system locale while providing support and it ended up as telling some Russian guy to use AppLocale to use English locale to get it working as intended. Totally unrelated to VNs, yet it solved the problem.