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What is purpose of this community?


Happiness+

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11 hours ago, Zalor said:

Honestly, after torrents got taken down I think the website as a whole kind of lost its purpose. The forums are nice, and the blog gets decent amount of attention I think. But back when we hosted torrents, we had a very clear purpose. Make VNs more popular in the west, and piracy is our method for doing that. Now don't get me wrong, I think the move to get rid of torrents was required so we could pursue a more legitimate cause. But 3 years after that, I still don't think we have found a new purpose. The forums and blogs really are the only main attraction to the website at this point. But honestly, who cares. Most VN related news you could learn if you hang out at /r/visualnovels/. That sub-reddit also has a much larger community. VNDB, has the purpose of cataloging every VN. But Fuwa? I don't really know what we do. We have a nice communal blog feature. We used to (maybe still do) have VN reviews on the main blog. Other than that though, no purpose. If it weren't for the fact that we got famous for hosting torrents back in 2012, 2013, and 2014, I don't think we would still be around. We are still living off of the momentum we got from our pirating days.  

Couple in the fact that the community is much smaller than it used to be. I wouldn't be surprised if Fuwanovel is dead in 5 years. I really don't want that to be the case, but I remember having this discussion with Clephas via pm a few years ago. He's been involved in multiple VN communities, and he said that once a community no longer has a purpose, it is on the road to death. So I think it is really important to find a new purpose soon. Hell at this pace, Fuwanovel might be dead in 2 years.

@Zalor is completely right.

Every community needs a purpose. So, I know the goal is to make Visual Novels popular in the west, but let's dig deeper.

How popular in the western world?

Are we talking like mainstream popularity, like you could walk up to a random person on the street and tell them

"So, I was reading this visual novel...." and they immediately know what a Visual Novel is?

OR

Your average anime mainstreamer is aware of the existence of VNs.

I am not saying these outcomes are impossible or anything, but is that Fuwanovel's desired result?

How would we do that?

Are we a fan translation group?

A community of English Language VN creators analogous to newgrounds? (I mean that's where I lost my VN virginity.)

What are we? What is our purpose?

I came here because I didn't feel welcome after posting on the VN subreddit.

It would be horrible that we fade into obscurity over the next few years, while the ever growing salt deposit that is r/vns maintains relevance. 

 

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It's a good place for English speaking VN fans to hang out, I guess? I don't think it's anything else as of now. I agree with @Zalor that something probably needs to be done about that, but I don't have any clear suggestions.

As for making VNs popular in the West, I think it was more or less done already, to some degree. Compared to 2013 when I started reading VNs, the number of the official releases and their average quality definitely increased. Do we need to push it further, to the point where basically every newly released VN gets an official English release? I'm not so sure. I personally don't believe that VNs will ever stop being a niche hobby, but we'll see what the time will bring.

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1 minute ago, MaggieROBOT said:

B-b-but this place still have the purpose of finding weeb friends without going outside! :kosame:

Going outside is for lame-os.

The purpose of this community was to make VNs popular in the West, but since that's already happened to a degree, we're just remaining here to talk to other weebs with bad opinions that align with our own.

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Honestly I have never seen Fuwanovel as anything other than a place to loiter around with people that have similar interests in a niche hobby. I don't really like the idea that Fuwanovel needs a concrete specific "purpose", having a specific goal will at some degree limit who would want to join the community by adding another qualifier. To be a member of the community you have to be a fan of visual novels and actively champion this "purpose". 

Sure, it might create a small group of fanatical individuals, but I don't think it would draw in a large crowd. We are talking about a niche entertainment medium, not a civil rights movement. 

Visual novels have become as popular as they will ever be in the west, at least for the next century. There is zero chance that we would see hard copies of MuvLuv sold next to COD at the local Walmart without a huge culture shift the likes the world has never seen. Having a decent handful of localizers publishing the biggest titles with some random extras, is the best we could have hoped for.  

Edited by Soulless Watcher
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2 minutes ago, Soulless Watcher said:

Honestly I have never seen Fuwanovel as anything other than a place to loiter around with people that have similar interests in a niche hobby. I don't really like the idea that Fuwanovel needs a concrete specific "purpose", having a specific goal will at some degree limit who would want to join the community by adding another qualifier. To be a member of the community you have to be a fan of visual novels and actively champion this "purpose". 

Sure, it might create a small group of fanatical individuals, but I don't think it would draw in a large crowd. We are talking about a niche entertainment medium, not a civil rights movement. 

Visual novels have become as popular as they will ever be in the west, at least for the next century. There is zero chance that we would see hard copies of MuvLuv sold next COD at the local Walmart without a huge culture shift the likes the world has never seen. Having a decent handful of localizers publishing the biggest titles with some random extras, is the best we could have hoped for.  

Well, having a purpose doesn't mean coercing everyone to fulfill it. I mean, I don't think everyone active on Fuwa in the "Golden Age of Piracy" was actively involved in setting up torrents - you just need some people being involved, for example writing reviews and editorials, the rest can hang around and have fun just the same, but the site gains a bit more personality and appeal that might bring in new people. We're talking about some general, positive idea, not a totalitarian ideology everyone have to subscribe to if they want to stay alive. ;p

And while I agree with you and @Dreamysyu that VNs will never go mainstream, it doesn't mean they have no space for expanding whatsoever. Especially when it goes to getting a bigger playerbase. Whether Fuwa can do something about it is a though question, but it's at least something worth thinking and talking about IMO.

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1 hour ago, Happiness+ said:

Are we a fan translation group?

Is there any other community where fan translations can be coordinated, announced, discussed regularly etc. without dropping off the "front page" of reddit to be forgotten till the next time they post? There is much more permanency to a forum thread for posts and others seeking information than any other community type. I came to fuwa for this - once the other community I posted on died it was the most suitable place, and I'm still here for this. I post more about anime since that's what I spend more time on, but there's nowhere else for me to discuss the fan translation aspect (especially my contribution there.) Now the fact is that fan translation is also getting more and more fringe and less common compared to official localisations, but there's no sign of localisations reaching the epic proportions that anime did that virtually killed off fansubs. With trillions of VNs (okay maybe an exaggeration, and most are likely crap, but you get the point) there will always be material that only fans have a chance of localising. If the fan translation scene dies off, is this a good thing for VNs? I don't think so, unless we get 100x more official releases than we currently are getting. Fan translations are what spawn a much larger whole official localisation market in the first place. To me this is what fuwa has to offer that nothing else does. That may or may not be how the admins and much of the audience sees it, but that's why I'm here.

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It's a place where people who like a somewhat foreign fandom can conglomerate and mingle in with each other. Like Minitokyo was to anime/manga and a host of other sites before/after that. I wish I had known about this site when me and my escapist brethren were hiding away on our little user group.

Things need a baseline in order to grow. What was the baseline before videogames achieved mainstream popularity? This site is serving the same purpose.

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7 hours ago, MaggieROBOT said:

B-b-but this place still have the purpose of finding weeb friends without going outside! :kosame:

Pretty much this ever since Visual novels gained some notoriety in the west (even if they're still a niche market by all accounts) and since the torrents got banished to a different realm the purpose of this site and community shifted from those into simply being a gathering point for English readers & Mixed readers alike to bond or share opinions about said medium as well as random banter about anime or life or whatever else it may be about.

At least that's what it is in my eyes.

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Where would i talk about my existential crisis while playing to the fullest my tsundere persona?

Fuwa is a community, and that's fine by it, i don't think nowadays fuwa has the power to attract new people, and maybe yes, it'll die in 5-10 years, and so what? We're bound forever, whatever happens, we will know each other, this website served its purpose of connecting people between each other. 

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The very act of discussing about visual novels creates a more pervasive public awareness of it. In other words, the very act of discussing VNs and therefore upholding visual novel culture boosts, subtly, the popularization of visual novels in the West.

I've felt my fair share of doom and gloom about this website before, but honestly, I'm now witnessing new members create their own inside jokes, their own classic threads, forming their own relationships with both old and new members. And that means that Fuwanovel, quite simply, is still alive and progressing (prospering). There's still a fairly good turnout of new members, so I feel that we're still fulfilling the same purpose in a more subtle but no less important manner.

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56 minutes ago, Funyarinpa said:

The very act of discussing about visual novels creates a more pervasive public awareness of it. In other words, the very act of discussing VNs and therefore upholding visual novel culture boosts, subtly, the popularization of visual novels in the West.

I've felt my fair share of doom and gloom about this website before, but honestly, I'm now witnessing new members create their own inside jokes, their own classic threads, forming their own relationships with both old and new members. And that means that Fuwanovel, quite simply, is still alive and progressing (prospering). There's still a fairly good turnout of new members, so I feel that we're still fulfilling the same purpose in a more subtle but no less important manner.

im still cooler than those dweebish new members

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Jokes in regard of the crew aside, this is quite an interesting discussion. As for the OP question here, I believe that the OP himself here already answer the question with the most simple statement, and here's the statement:

On 3/14/2018 at 5:41 AM, Happiness+ said:

I came here because I didn't feel welcome after posting on the VN subreddit.

So the answer here more or less describe what's our community like, to be more friendly place to discuss VN compared to Reddit. That aside, I knew what you want to discuss here in regard of obscurity. Because after all this is a small community and surely we have many older members in the past who didn't active anymore. That said, as long as we have many members that was willing to participate here, then it'll be alright even though the activities from the new members might be not have the same flame as the old one. Other than that, I don't know what to say in regard of the purpose.

PS - To Zalor, yeah you may have a point in regard of Fuwanovel still have some glory from back at torrent day. But I think even with torrent Fuwanovel still have some competition with some many sites that I can't say here, so in the end it might be just some niche community for now at least.

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