Greetings!

[Tulip]

Hi! I'm Tulip. After a few years of being scared off by all the casual spoilers flying around, I've finally decided to take the plunge into joining this forum; I'm still likely to be cautious in my browsings, given worry about those, but I figure given some cautious browsing it should at least be possible to have worthwhile interactions here while avoiding spoilers, and given its being possible I figure I should give it a shot!

I have, perhaps, a somewhat weird history with visual novels, in that... I get the impression that a lot of people have clear memories of how they got into the medium? But I really don't. I know I started getting into visual novels no later than 2017—I specifically remember that, around the end of that year, I got the first five Higurashi chapters in a Humble Bundle, and by that time had enough prior experience with relatively-short OELVNs that I remember having found Higurashi Chapter 1 strikingly not-what-I-was-used-to in its visuals and pacing—but I don't remember much in the way of specifics of which VNs I'd [played/read]* prior to that point in order to form those initial impressions.

Regardless, I've been getting increasingly into the medium as time has gone on. Early highlights among VNs, for me, included We Know the Devil (late 2018), Heart of the Woods (early 2019), and Umineko (early-to-mid 2019). Around the end of 2020, I started Fate/stay night, which turned out to be a very good idea, because that's now pretty solidly one of my all-time favorite works of fiction, with only one other story particularly in competition with it for the top spot; that, in turn, got me into the rest of the Type-Moon VNs (of which I've now read all except Mahoyo, and will be reading Mahoyo as soon as my copy of it arrives at the end of the month). And then, in mid-2022, I started hanging out in VN-fan corners of tumblr—or, well, mostly I just started following toskarin, but she sure does do a lot of VN-fan-blogging—and that's gotten me even deeper into the medium; probably the majority of my fiction-consumption in the second half of 2022 was made up of visual novels, and I expect that pattern to continue into 2023.

Meanwhile, off on the creative side of things, I've been forming various half-baked plans for potential future VNs—held back, thus far, mostly by my chronic inability to convert writing ideas into prose, but that problem is a work-in-progress which I'm expecting to solve sooner or later—and also accumulating ideas for visual novel engine-design which I hope to eventually publish in one form or another. Both of these are slow going, not necessarily going to bear fruit soon, but I'll get there sooner or later.

And, off on the community-contribution side of things, I maintain a small Discord channel for visual novel discussions, as well as being the emergency backup admin for the visualnovels Dreamwidth community, and I have ambitions of continuing to scale up from here! Because visual novels really are very good, as a medium, and there's a lot of valuable work to be done both in drawing in more VN-fans (thus helping make VNs be a lucrative business to work in, thus helping more of them be created and translated) and in improving the state of community resources and patches for those VNs which already exist. And this forum seems like a place with its share of likeminded people, in these fields! So I look forward to spending time here and hopefully being able to help some such projects along.

* We really need some better verb for consumption-of-visual-novels than either 'play' or 'read'. At some point when I'm feeling particularly linguistically inclined, I plan to go invent some etymologically-plausible term which more properly captures what it is we're doing, then do my best to popularize it in as much of the English-speaking VN-sphere as I can reach.

[littleshogun]

Welcome to Fuwanovel, and that's quite anintroduction there. Regardless, I think it's fine if you didn't have clear memories on how you come into knowing VN, because in the end all that matter is that you're enjoying it. As for verb for VN consumption, well plread is the one that commonly used as far as I can understand, although perhaps you have a point that we should find the better verb for it. Lastly, feel free to ask for more recommendation if you need it, and I hope that you'll have fun in here.