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Can Visual Novels really change you?


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11 hours ago, tymmur said:

Yume Miru Kusuri came to mind instantly. While it may not have downright changed me, it made me realize what happened at some events when I went to school. At age 17 (I think) one of the guys in my class turned into Nekoko. Sure some details differs, but overall it was pretty much the same thing, complete with even the crazy hat. Some days he was high and some days he kept falling asleep. He was a bit of a character even before this, but turning this weird ensured nobody wanted to have anything to do with him at all. One day after he had fallen asleep during class (again), I walked up to him and said "you know, this just can't keep up. You end up dropping out and throwing away your life". We then had a conversation about him not caring about his parents' expectations and I started talking about that it's his life, not his parents' life, which is at stake. It only lasted about 10 minutes, but within a week he was back to normal and he managed to not drop out. The answers he gave me were weird, but I didn't think much of it at the time. While reading YMK much later I realized what he said was sort of code to admit his abuse. In other words it was YMK, which made me realize what I had done. It's also a reminder how we can influence other people with what seems like minor actions. I just "wasted" a 10 minute break where my alternative was to just waste time. I never really had anything to do with that guy other than this, not before or after, though when I had a chance encounter with him a few years later, he was doing well and he clearly had a very positive impression of me.

Well, the "Nekoko case" is pretty common. Crazy things happen at high schools all the time. Maybe these were more common up to the good ol' 90s, probably they still happen now.

Adolescents do drugs like it's nothing. Some of them go crazy with the THC, but at any rate, trying to pass senior high school while drowning in gallons of alcohol is a pretty impossible task.

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I think they can.

One thing I've really struggled with over time, is regret - wishing I could change a few decisions here and there and do something differently. Last year I wound up reading Steins;Gate, and once I got pulled in to the story, I really really got pulled in, to the point where by the end I was left with a giant hole and wanting to read (after finding them) a bunch of VNs that I couldn't since I didn't understand Japanese or alternatively didn't have a system that could play it in English. I learned though, that (quasi spoiler for Steins;Gate)

Spoiler

that regret I had had was misguided, and that even if you change your decision it doesn't mean it'll go the way you want it to. I learned too, that it's really important to treasure what you have, because it can be so easily taken away, and really all you have is the moment you're in right now. 

I also started consuming FAR more Japanese content (translated though) than I had previously, and finding stories that were funny, interesting, weird, and different to what I was used to, whereas before I never really had the interest. 

Fast forward to now, and I'm trying to learn Japanese so that I can read things without having to wait for fan translations or official ones. I'd never have thought that would be a realistic (for me) option even two years ago (the idea of learning a language was daunting, let alone one as different as Japanese, and I never thought I'd use a language enough to make it worthwhile). I'm also taking much better care of myself and making sure to not burn myself out or put myself into situations I'm not able to deal with, where before I would treat myself pretty poorly and expect more of myself than I could realistically accomplish, then be upset at myself for not accomplishing those things. I'm also trying to spend more time with the people I care about, and let them know I appreciate them more as well. 

Edited by snowbell55
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7 minutes ago, Okarin said:

Well, the "Nekoko case" is pretty common. Crazy things happen at high schools all the time. Maybe these were more common up to the good ol' 90s, probably they still happen now.

Adolescents do drugs like it's nothing. Some of them go crazy with the THC, but at any rate, trying to pass senior high school while drowning in gallons of alcohol is a pretty impossible task.

I think you missed my point entirely. I didn't mention anything about how common it is. Instead it was about YMK making me realize what happened. Besides your statement about heavy drinking and drugs everywhere seems like a gross generalization. In my school time there was this case of drugs and one person dropped out due to an alcohol problem. A minority could drink Friday night, yet still do ok at school. I suspect that there are significant difference in this depending on where you are, but yes it is a huge problem in some areas.

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I think VNs have an impact in my personality insofar as everything you experience changes you in one way or another. I once heard a quote, whose author I can't remember, that said something like that: "Those who don't read only live one life. Those who read get to live many in a single lifetime". It was refering to books, but I think it applies to every piece of media and fiction. Experiences make you grow as a person, no matter where they come from, so yeah, I believe, call me native, that reading VNs can actually be productive. 

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Well, any things you accept surely change you.

Especially some darker themes arised in novels like Cross Channel, Tsukihime, FSN, Demonbane and others.

I was mostly play RPGs like Grandia at that sweet time of paradigma forming, but already started reading novels, adn surely my life looks different after reading mentioned novels.

Of course not all novels have so much impact but still.

I even heard the Everlasting Summer do change people.

I wish I can read more, but most of my favourite things left untranslated.

Which includes: Demonbane 2, Full Metal Demon Muramasa, Sakura Wars 3-4 (I can read 1-2 since I understand russian), Witch on the Holy Night.

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6 hours ago, tymmur said:

I think you missed my point entirely. I didn't mention anything about how common it is. Instead it was about YMK making me realize what happened. Besides your statement about heavy drinking and drugs everywhere seems like a gross generalization. In my school time there was this case of drugs and one person dropped out due to an alcohol problem. A minority could drink Friday night, yet still do ok at school. I suspect that there are significant difference in this depending on where you are, but yes it is a huge problem in some areas.

Well, whatever. You changed schools because of bullying, but nothing remarkably bad happens normally in high school, right? Sure, man.

Edited by Okarin
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I'm sure it can, like any other mediums. Personally, while it never makes me feel like a completely different person, it does change some of my outlooks in life. More frequently though, rather than "change", it makes me conscious of some views I've always had, enriched it and brought it to the surface.

The most significant for me is probably The House in Fata Morgana. There are a lot of things I like about the VN, but one idea that really affected me was that "you are what you do" is not always...accurate. Sure, whatever you do usually creates everyone else's opinion of you, and a different person might have done things differently in the same circumstances, but understanding someone is not so simple. What is of equal importance is the reasons someone do something: their motives, emotional condition, and the circumstances they are put into. There are better ways of wording it, I'm sure (the best way to get the idea is by reading the VN itself), but that's the gist of it.

Edited by RadicalCarenChan
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22 hours ago, tymmur said:

Speaking of bullying, research has indicated that it has nothing to do with not being friendly towards bullies. What happens is a lack of leadership. This power vacuum will make one person decide to be leader and collect a group of henchmen. The leader then orders the henchmen to bully a victim. The goal is to make the henchmen not want to be the victim. With this setup, the leader will gain complete power over the henchmen because if a henchman refuse to follow an order, he/she will be the next victim. The victim is often picked semi or completely random and can't do anything about it. The whole "let's talk it over and be friends" will never work because somebody has the goal of power rather than friendship. I didn't actually learn this part from YMK. It's just an important fact regarding the topic from YMK.

I'm really glad you mentioned YMK, and thanks for sharing your experiences. Its been so long that I often under appreciate YMK because it was essentially my first serious VN, or at least my gateway into this medium. These days I think it is a bit of an under appreciated classic, but I really do think people would be better off reading it. Especially if you felt kind of lost in High School (or are currently a lost High School student).

To address the part I quoted, I can tell you that it 100% the experience of bullying I witnessed in middle school was just like that. There is such a random element as to who becomes the victim, that it kind of scarred my ability to make genuine friends with people for years. It wasn't until Senior year of High School that I finally became comfortable enough with people to trust them. In 5th grade I was the new kid, and I was kind of shy. I became the victim pretty soon, and for the whole Autumn and Winter quarters I was the kid that the "leader" chose to victimize. Some kids seemed to feel sorry for me, and eventually developed a kind of friendship with me. But of course, they had to hide it. But do you know what really horrified me? When I stopped being the victim.

After winter break, for god knows what reason. The leader turned on one of his henchmen. And not just a henchmen on the sidelines either, but someone who seemed like one of his good friends. All of a sudden I was accepted into the group as though nothing had happened. From 5th to 8th grade this continued. At some point in 7th grade I think the bullying got too much for that kid so he transferred, but the "leader" just found some other kids to replace the victim role. Throughout those years, for no discernible reason, my rank in the group increased. And I can tell you this, my one goal throughout that whole time, was simply not to fall back down to the victim role. I was never explicitly mean to the victims, but I did stand in the sidelines as the "leader" tormented them with people that were lower in the foodchain. I always felt kind of guilty for the passive role I played. And how I passively just accepted these promotions in that group. But I went to a really small school. If you were ostracized by that group, there wasn't another group you could join. 

By 8th grade though, enough of the leaders followers (including myself) all recognized that none of us liked him. And simply ran along with his antics for the same fear. So we split off and did out own thing. His group shrinked dramatically, to the point that he started befriending the people he was bullying before. To this day this is why I hate kids, because I still very vividly remember how shitty they are. And the fake masks they put in front of adults.  

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13 minutes ago, Zalor said:

I'm really glad you mentioned YMK, and thanks for sharing your experiences. Its been so long that I often under appreciate YMK because it was essentially my first serious VN, or at least my gateway into this medium. These days I think it is a bit of an under appreciated classic, but I really do think people would be better off reading it. Especially if you felt kind of lost in High School (or are currently a lost High School student).

To address the part I quoted, I can tell you that it 100% the experience of bullying I witnessed in middle school was just like that. There is such a random element as to who becomes the victim, that it kind of scarred my ability to make genuine friends with people for years. It wasn't until Senior year of High School that I finally became comfortable enough with people to trust them. In 5th grade I was the new kid, and I was kind of shy. I became the victim pretty soon, and for the whole Autumn and Winter quarters I was the kid that the "leader" chose to victimize. Some kids seemed to feel sorry for me, and eventually developed a kind of friendship with me. But of course, they had to hide it. But do you know what really horrified me? When I stopped being the victim.

After winter break, for god knows what reason. The leader turned on one of his henchmen. And not just a henchmen on the sidelines either, but someone who seemed like one of his good friends. All of a sudden I was accepted into the group as though nothing had happened. From 5th to 8th grade this continued. At some point in 7th grade I think the bullying got too much for that kid so he transferred, but the "leader" just found some other kids to replace the victim role. Throughout those years, for no discernible reason, my rank in the group increased. And I can tell you this, my one goal throughout that whole time, was simply not to fall back down to the victim role. I was never explicitly mean to the victims, but I did stand in the sidelines as the "leader" tormented them with people that were lower in the foodchain. I always felt kind of guilty for the passive role I played. And how I passively just accepted these promotions in that group. But I went to a really small school. If you were ostracized by that group, there wasn't another group you could join. 

By 8th grade though, enough of the leaders followers (including myself) all recognized that none of us liked him. And simply ran along with his antics for the same fear. So we split off and did out own thing. His group shrinked dramatically, to the point that he started befriending the people he was bullying before. To this day this is why I hate kids, because I still very vividly remember how shitty they are. And the fake masks they put in front of adults.  

Yume Miru Kusuri is unfortunately underrated. I remember liking it quite a bit back when I first read it in 2014.

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On 08/03/2018 at 12:32 AM, tahu157 said:

The only instance of this I can think of is in F/SN where Shirou talks about how wanting to be a hero is the same thing as wanting something to go wrong for someone else so you can fix the problem. Alternatively worded, you want someone to suffer so you can gratify yourself for being a good person when you help them, which is kinda twisted. That passage genuinely did change my outlook on heroics and humbleness.

 

Incidentally I thought the rest of F/SN's philosophy was pretty awful.

It's kind of bullshit though. You're not being twisted for "wanting" bad things to happen to people so you can be a hero. Well, surely there are heroes with mental disorders in games and movies who might think like this. 

 Bad things will always happen to people, the important thing is that you're a person willing to step up and help those people.

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10 hours ago, Stormwolf said:

Bad things will always happen to people, the important thing is that you're a person willing to step up and help those people.

I'm certainly not advocating for people to not intervene or help people. I'd even say you have an obligation to be a hero, if and only if the situation arises. Idealistically though you should not want the situation to arise. 

To be perfectly clear, I have absolutely no problem with heroism in and of itself. It's only the fantasizing about being a hero that I have a problem with.

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12 hours ago, Zalor said:

I'm really glad you mentioned YMK, and thanks for sharing your experiences. Its been so long that I often under appreciate YMK because it was essentially my first serious VN, or at least my gateway into this medium. These days I think it is a bit of an under appreciated classic, but I really do think people would be better off reading it. Especially if you felt kind of lost in High School (or are currently a lost High School student).

Actually I don't think it's a good choice for a first VN as it is quite harsh to read. I'm not sure I would have read it to the end if I had no experience with VNs. Also I view it as mainly for a very mature audience, like 25+. If you read it too close to your own school years, you might have a mindset where you are still part of "the game" and not fully grasp what's written here. I suspect that's part of the reason for a lot of the dislike for YMK: it's from readers too young and inexperience to fully understand what they are reading.

 

At first I thought it would be best to recommend everybody to read YMK because if everybody gets this insight into bullying, it would help alot towards stopping it. However today I know that some people read it and fail to understand what they read. In fact I fear more than half of the readers get absolutely nothing, or can't relate it to anything outside the VN. The biggest problem seems to be confirmation bias. If people believe bullying to be justified due to the victim's actions and that it's harmless fun, that's what they will keep thinking and intentionally not notice any evidence to contradict their point of view. Now I have no idea what to do or say regarding this topic.

 

I still highly recommend YMK, but I no longer expect it to be the eye opener I once thought it would be.

 

12 hours ago, Zalor said:

To address the part I quoted, I can tell you that it 100% the experience of bullying I witnessed in middle school was just like that.

It's amazing how researchers can spend ages studying a problem and then end up telling what we already knew. They did however find a bunch of signs the schools should look for, which is then given to the schools. I know of at least one school which has every single sign on the checklist, which after being informed said "we have no bullying here" and then did nothing.

12 hours ago, Zalor said:

The leader turned on one of his henchmen. And not just a henchmen on the sidelines either, but someone who seemed like one of his good friends. All of a sudden I was accepted into the group as though nothing had happened.

Some of the signs of a person being a clinical psychopath

  • Charms a lot of people to gather a crowd with him/her in the center
  • Charms followers to be against his/her enemies without the followers fully understanding what goes on
  • Charms followers to idolize himself/herself
  • Always have at least one enemy
  • Switching people between friend and enemy seemingly completely at random
  • Changes the rules of accepted behavior in the group completely at random
  • Has no bad feelings for bad treatment of others, regardless of how bad it is
  • Have no sense of justice or right or wrong, only personal benefits

Sounds familiar?

12 hours ago, Zalor said:

I was never explicitly mean to the victims, but I did stand in the sidelines as the "leader" tormented them with people that were lower in the foodchain.

It can be shockingly easy to bully others even if you do not want to do so. In my early school years, two names covered 5 boys in the class. To avoid the confusion with name clashes, each one got a nickname, often based on last name. It seemed obvious to me and like everybody else I used those nicknames. In 3rd grade (I think), one of them legally changed his last name to get rid of the nickname, which he apparently didn't like. At the time I didn't get why it would be a problem, but didn't think much of it. It wasn't until much later I realized his nickname wasn't only a word sounding like a nickname for his last name, but it was also slang for feces. I have no idea who started it, but the entire class called one kid feces for more than two years and most likely nobody but the kid in question and whoever started it realized what was going on. Well the teachers knew, but the school had complains from parents that those teachers ordered kids to bully other kids, yet the school did nothing. Actually at some point the school had to remove one of those teachers instantly, but that wasn't because of bullying. He had physically beat up a 10 year old for no apparent reason.

 

Teacher bullying is an overlooked topic, which is not touched by YMK. Around one out of three bully victims in school claim the teacher to be one of the bullies. Not only that, if the teacher is a bully, half the time the teacher is the leader or the only bully.

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5 hours ago, tahu157 said:

I'm certainly not advocating for people to not intervene or help people. I'd even say you have an obligation to be a hero, if and only if the situation arises. Idealistically though you should not want the situation to arise. 

To be perfectly clear, I have absolutely no problem with heroism in and of itself. It's only the fantasizing about being a hero that I have a problem with.

I'd say you're under no obligation to be a hero where your life might be at stake. Only after an accident do you have an obligation to call for emergency and do the basic tasks they tell you over the phone, if this counts as being heroic.

Edited by Stormwolf
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On 3/7/2018 at 6:32 PM, tahu157 said:

The only instance of this I can think of is in F/SN where Shirou talks about how wanting to be a hero is the same thing as wanting something to go wrong for someone else so you can fix the problem. Alternatively worded, you want someone to suffer so you can gratify yourself for being a good person when you help them, which is kinda twisted. That passage genuinely did change my outlook on heroics and humbleness.

 

Incidentally I thought the rest of F/SN's philosophy was pretty awful.

Umlimited Blade Works was my favorite route, but I agree that the philosophy at the end boiled down to this.

Shirou: "heroic ideals are awesome!"

Archer: "Ideals suck."

Shirou "You're wrong!"

Archer: "How?"

Shirou "You're wrong because being a hero is awesome!"

Archer: "Wait, how--"

Shirou "Trace ON!!!!!"

 

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On 3/8/2018 at 3:22 AM, Overlord87 said:

Some of the greatest VNs I've read definitely changed me. MuvLuv, Sharin no Kuni, Cross Channel are the first that come to mind. It applies to all kind of great stories though.

And it doesn't have to be a radical or immediate change. Maybe years down the line you'll be faced with a choice, or a situation, and you'll think of that VN/book/movie/etc. and it will have an impact on your actions.

I can understand this. Unforutnately, I haven't found any VNs that are like evangelion to me. I mean my life was changed after Evangelion. Because I told myself, I would never be like Shinji. In fact Shinji doesn't even want to be shinji.

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