Hi, I'm Luke and I make games (not real ones yet but I'm going to be making better games next year, probably). I also like Vocaloid which is very weeaboo but I'm not a weeaboo, I just like the fact that anybody can use them. I also like writing extremely long essays on things that nobody cares about regarding analysis that would probably make a lit teacher cry. Oh, and other people's video games. I play those regardless of actual quality. My family practitioner says I've got Asperger's Syndrome and I've got intrusive and suicidal thoughts but I've homeschooled and will never see a therapist as long as I live because my mother thinks they'll force me to take pills that make me braindead/doesn't believe me. Which seems very bitter but it isn't, I like my mother. Also, I'm sorry. I think I did this wrong.
Hi Luke! You didn't do anything wrong; it's pretty hard to do things wrong around here. Welcome, and I hope you like it here!
I heard good things, haha. If people complain about something a lot it's either very good or very bad and I think it's the former situation this time. Edit: And it's good to know nothing's wrong but what are the forum rules? I don't want to unintentionally break them. I haven't been on a forum for three years, haha.
They pretty much boil down to: don't be a dick, and don't RP excessively outside of the rp forum. Any thread- or forum- specific rules will be either in the first post or a stickies thread.
hi and welcome! yay another 'i accidentally an essay' person! i'm definitely the same there, mostly in regards to movies, books, art- ok most sorts of media. what sorta stuff do you like writing about? or, if that's hard to summarise- what's something that really grabbed your interest in that way recently? i've never really gotten into vocaloid, i gotta admit- i'm really not much of a musical-creative person (quite happily more of a listener than a creator). do you make songs with them, or mostly enjoy following other people's creations?
I write for pretty much anything I like, haha. So, I usually do Visual Novels and Games. I used to be really big into anime but then I realized that most releases were just adapted manga and read those instead. Currently, I'm following Murcielago but it's a little... not enough I guess. Maybe to explain better, I like highly symbolic things and tend to write about what that symbolism might mean even if the creator admits it doesn't really mean anything. Murcielago is very straight forward so there's nothing to digest. The last analysis I did was during the Daoko Girl craze. Unless you count my Meta stuff because I'm currently writing a piece (it's twenty five pages already) on Harem series and Dating Sim Archetypes. This also sounds weeaboo but when I used to be big into Anime (before that it was Books but I'm not allowed back at the library) and a lot of the people who watched it with me didn't behave really well (they're part of callout culture now and I think weeabooism and tumblr culture is really similar but that's another big dumb essay haha) and got way too into it. So the future game I'm doing concepts for (mechanically and character wise) is about a guy that gets too excited about Dating Sims and finally gets to live out his fantasy as a hero of a really edgy and dark one (that's the kind of stuff I like so it's kind of self-deprecating) and it doesn't go too well. Mostly because he starts out thinking that he can just treat people how ever he wants because they love him/they're his friends and so and so. Of course, the player can change that over time or not and be a jackass. It's a lot to talk about, haha. I always pick things that are probably more complicated than they need to be. Haha, no. I'm not musical either. I keep getting urged to play the piano because of my typing speed but I can't get the hang of reading music so I just wrote down which keys made the best noises before quitting (the apartment my family lives at is too small to play my keyboard so it just sits and catches just, haha). So, I just listen to producers and sometimes request translations. I'm hoping to begin learning Japanese this year so I can do my own though. Also, sorry I talked so much. I'm said to have verbal diarrhea.
totally not talking too much, cos that all does sound fascinating. seconding wanting to hear about weeabooism and tumblr culture! and don't need to worry about whether you 'sound weeaboo'. honestly, i'm a big anime fan, even if i've fallen out of watching much recent stuff, and i think there's a big difference between a uhhhh- 'harmful weeaboo' and someone who just enjoys anime and a lot of japanese culture? idk lol cultural appreciation doesn't have to be creepy and weebish and oh man i had a burgeoning interest in dating sim games- mostly the otome games. then my computer broke and i lost all my progress, so i kinda ragequit research for a bit, whups. 25 pages, tho, goddamn, i definitely would love to read that if you ever wanted to share! and OH MAN GAMES THAT MESS WITH THEIR OWN GENRE yes good totally tell us moreeee
oh hey! i was homeschooled too. and my mother used to be not into health professionals, too, but then she had post-partum depression with three or four of my siblings and was like, oh wait, this stuff is for real. she's still not convinced that pills are the best way to deal with it, though. welcome to the forum!
Okay so I'm going to do the first part first, lol and probably separate it out into two posts to make sure it isn't cluttered. I was going to add an emoticon here but obviously, none of these are appropriate. Knife is the friendliest so I will use that. Okay so, there's a lot of things that are associated with weeabooism and I'll make a bullet point for that. However, first, I want to talk about Fictionkin. This seems completely out of the blue but tumblr culture basically involves Fictionkin intimately. Now, you probably know this already, but Fictionkin used to be Otakukin which is already pretty weebish in and of itself but I actually knew a person who knew the person who popularized it (pretty far down on the chain, haha). They were part of the Livejournal Digimon community and kept talking about how they were one of the characters in another life and made like, an Angelfire page for it and everything. As you know, fandoms tend to come in groups. Digimon was pretty small/tight knit and not very tolerant of fandom nonsense and Pokemon was very large (if a fandom is very small, it's absent of fandom and if a fandom is extremely large then it's difficult to find the fandom garbage) so it didn't have any problems. In between Digimon and Pokemon in terms of popularity was Yu-Gi-Oh! and the fandom didn't have any 'veterans' because everybody moved onto Seinen and Jousei series. What we were then left with were the people who refused to move on when the fandom had obviously died and refused to join any other fandoms unless they were in the same age range (Detective Conan, Sailor Moon, etc.). They were also extremely bitter regarding the Abridged Series becoming more popular than the original. Oh, and since they'd been there for way past the series duration, all of those shipping issues just sat and festered. What somebody said on Livejournal still hurt because they changed tumblrs but they didn't change their discussions (this isn't a demonization of all dead fandoms by the way because I've joined one right now and am extremely happy, this fandom already had people who took things too seriously but these issues compacted it). During this period, I watched (and was victim too, haha) a number of changes throughout the fandom. So we take a bunch of angry people who were in the age range of 17 - 23 who were upset with the way their lives were going and already had connections to woo (the series basically attracted people who were already kind of weird about things like only roleplaying small children and getting furious when other characters wouldn't pretend to take care of them regardless of personality). Then this person showed up and starting putting things in the tags and since Yu-Gi-Oh (notice that more than Homestuck and more than Undertale, if you click a random Yu-Gi-Oh blog or one with a Yu-Gi-Oh icon, particularly of ZeXal or Arc, that they have a large amount of kintypes) was so close to Digimon, we had Fictionkin Ground Zero. So because of this and the fact that Yu-Gi-Oh was already a weeaboo entry anime and the group was so tiny that it was a hugbox ("I don't want ---- to stop being my friend so I'll just go along with it."), we ended up with a perfect storm type situation. Oh yeah, also, any new members who tried to shake things up (not just me but anyone I had spoken to that was kind to me) and the few people that still cared enough to get involved were bullied or coerced into leaving and shutting up about it. I retaliated and am going to straight up say that I went nuts about it because I wasn't old enough to deal with this and was planning on ruining everybody's lives and killing myself afterwards but I didn't and someone else was a nuisance instead so I just didn't. Since I dropped off the face of the Earth during this period, I saw the start but not the middle but this is my explanation of that phenomena. Now, I'm going to bullet point the similarities. This is also pretty gibberish, I think but I'm not good at thinking casually. So, weeabooism is present in both the aesthetic, the identity politics and in the fandom culture that's been made. A lot of this stuff therefore is a reskinned version of what we've seen before. I'm going to go in that order too with spaces in between each. Also, please note that this is pretty bitter because I'm just that kind of person and that this is just my opinion of the facts. If you disagree, that's fine. Small fonts with random Japanese and obsession with either pastel colours or black and white. A heavy aspect on Eroguro, Menhera and other Subversive Kawaii things which add Tumblr's need to be edgy with it's need to be cute. Almost excessive art depicting themselves as being much cooler and frightening than they are in real life. Instead of saying it's a Self Insert or an OC, they say it's really them but they have to hide their appearance for whatever reason. Listing off Mental Illness and such things as a way to be more unique than the other. Basically, a recreation of those arguments of "Well, I defeated an entire army of myself." but more 'mature', I suppose. In addition, pretending to be gay, a cross-dresser (not trans at that time but it fulfills the same role here) or Mentally Ill to follow one of your favourite characters. The Yaoi Fangirls insisting they were actually gay men reminds me of this. Saying that you really are a character that you like is the same as point two of aesthetic. Following that, a lot of Fictionkin 'date' Headmates or other Fictionkin of characters they like which is basically Waifuism. A lot of the time, they'll refer to their partner as only that character and treat them as the same person. Unless it's being 'calledout' again in turn as being incestuous or abusive. Following that, a lot of weeaboos tend to do things like insist their favourite character is really talking to them. This becomes Headmates. And as yet another addition, all of these characters are sanitized or taken extremely far into edginess but are generally OOC. This is yet another manifestation of old fandom behaviour where if something's too gross, the fans would ignore it. In anime fandoms, this was really bad because everyone was drawn so cute. Back in the day, ships that people didn't like or Hate Sink characters were considered abusive. Everyone had their own ship and villain character they liked that was the same/worse of course so it was mostly that they didn't like the way the characters looked/one of the people shipping it and wanted a reason to attack them. Also, everyone hated porn artists and writers unless they wrote fluff content or it was a fandom with a lot of romanticism going on. Now, everyone... still hates artist unless they depict nice content. One time, a cosplayer had things thrown at her until she left the event and stopped drawing/cosplaying. I read her last messages and didn't do anything about it because I thought "Everyone's too nice to do that!" don't do that. Additionally, cliques were formed constantly and would bully another artist because they were jealous/that artist was mean once/they just felt like it. At the time, the excuses were more transparent and petty like "So and so isn't even pretty! Her cosplays suck!" and so on. Also, callout posts were common in the form of "This person was mean!" whether they were or weren't but receipting wasn't popular yet so it was all hearsay at that point. I was the first person in the group to hold screenshots (and I'm still bitter about that because I got hatemail even though the other person had no proof unless I deliberately linked people and said "Yes, I did do/say that."). I wanted to say more but I forgot. But here's the gist of it. Besides that, proclaiming to be an anime character is a transparent way of saying "I'm Japanese guize, really!" which was popular in the weeaboo times.
No, my mother believes it. She just doesn't believe that I need them because I'm so smart that apparently, they'd damage my brain. I feel bad but she's been through stuff so like, okay. Ah, okay. So, the setting comes first because I worked on this forever, haha. Also, this is going to be long and I'm so sorry. I'm incapable of shutting up. First off, this is part of a larger Multiverse where a trio of Wandering Goddesses (Yantra, Marchen and Deus Ex Machina) go to various Universes. Their very presence damages the fabric of it and for a couple decades, the story messes with it's own Genre. The other concept was a Dangan Ronpa style mystery game where the mystery of the murders wasn't meant to be solved (it was deliberately too easy). Anyway, in this one, you collect cards (made by making people quit the game or by killing them and fishing the card out of their corpse) to gain wishes. If you gain enough of the Court Cards, you get to become the next God and take Marchen's place in the trinity and a world-rewriting the wish. The aim of the game is to do the latter without doing the former. The game is set in a universe where there is only one type of magic and that is Fair Magic IE Fairy. Fair Ones follow all of the rules that Fairies typically do (this is important as the series is built off of following the rules to the letter but not the spirit, the meta was done in that very way): They're burnt by iron, religious symbols hurt them (auditory hurts the most), most Fair Ones can not tell an outright lie, Contracts Bind, knowing a human's real name gives them power over that human, they must be invited into people's homes and they're all very prideful. Now, the rule on religious symbols is where most of this came from. I decided to model the Fair Ones off of: Animal Spirits (just shapeshifting animals), Legendary Heroes (Gilgamesh, Achilles, Cu Chulainn, etc), Demons and Ghosts and different levels of Gods. Now it becomes that Fair Folk can only stand religious symbols of their religion which ties it to their pride. And due to a contract during the Victorian Ages (they can not take any whole human), they're limited to people with physical disabilities in being able to grab people (I've got Chronic Sinusitis, haha). Since the Victorians were kind of douchebags and Fair Ones and definitely douchebags, the deal worked well for both of them. Until the production of Steel. At this point, they were left to be forgotten (if all traces of a Fair One's name is lost, that Fair One is lost as well) and fester. The story is set far off in the future as a result because there is no more need for Steel. Also important, personal shields make people immune to explosives and bullets unless they're at an extremely close range making them close range weapons in this but that's just because I think that a story about Fairies without swords is unfair. Now, another thing about this Universe is that it is possible to be released from the Fair Lands or even escape. But if you do, there are certain things that you must do to prevent being taken back. Now, if you were released or you were rescued, you're going to be okay but if you escaped you become Tainted in the eyes of the Universe's rulers and your end up developing a 'split' in yourself to match. So, you end up with a world that's full of Serial Killers, Spree Killers and just generally murderous people like the protagonist likes but they're all quite angry and upset at the same time. Most of them have a great right to be, actually. Considering that rescuing someone from the Fair Lands is as simple as going up and saying "Give them back!". Following from this, all of these miserable people also develop abilities because what kind of Seinen is it without that. These come from the Fair Lands themselves which are basically Magical Programs (literally, you could say they were fairlands.exe) that are designed to heal Fair Folk after they get injured in the Human Realm That Lies Beyond the Veil. The longer it takes a Fair One to heal, the longer it is before they can come back to the Human Realm. And since the stronger a Fair One is, the stranger it's real form is/the more grand it looks, guys like Gilgamesh can come back in just under six hours while it would take The Queen of the Night ten years to return. The way this program works however is that it basically goes through each body part, cuts it off if it's damaged and replaces it with what's common for the Fair One/type of Fair One that lives there. So, since only the physically disabled can go back and this program works on humans and Changelings (human/Fair One hybrids usually more like Galatea than through sex and I'll explain that below). It basically goes "Is arm damaged? Remove arm. Replace arm." so these abilities come from getting your parts sliced off and replaced which makes them even more 'Tainted". The strength of the ability also directly correlates to the strength of the Lands and how long you were there with the highest level being Physiology (someone taken by the Wild Hunt gets to be a Werewolf basically and another guy with a blood disease becomes a vampire). The main character is a Futakuchi-Onna due to have rather mild digestive issues (Acid Reflux and allergies to Soy, Milk, Meat and Eggs). Also, the ability can never make up for the disability but only make it worse due to how different Fair biology is. For example, someone who is Hard of Hearing doesn't get super hearing, she gets the ability to understand all languages instead which is connected to hearing but doesn't make up for it. Basically, it's OC fodder, I think. Finally, regarding Changelings. A Changeling is anything that a human made that a Fair One helped make. This includes biological children of course but also includes clones made from a Fair Ones DNA, art and ideas brought to life, robots, plants and so on. Unlike Humans that can only have one ability (even if that ability is Vampirism which brings a bunch of other ones, it's still technically one), these guys getting three themed abilities (but only 'artificial' variants if they were technology based). One of them was an Artificial Human designed to resemble the Setting Sun and gets enhanced strength/healing (moreso than most Changelings since they can all do dramatic healing; as can most Fetchlings IE humans taken into Fair Lands, it's par for the course basically), the ability to harness nuclear power and extreme skill in all visual artistic mediums. The first is based off the Sun being 'masculine', the second is straight up Solar Power but artificial variant and the last is in regards to Apollo. Now, Changeling also suffer a 'deformity' to both humans and Fair Ones. The Fair One above has organic brain damage and suffers from impulse control (also very solar). They also have strange eyes (usually reflecting their 'theme'). Oh and I forgot, all Fetchlings and Changelings have a change to their teeth to make it better for eating Fair Food. And they also have to consume a special food because Fair Land will damage your ability to eat. This ranges from having to eat nuts all the time to having to eat human hearts. This seems more offensive then it was in my head, honest. The disability thing came both from "My fucking head hurts. Man, I wish I got something out of this." and "Katawa Shoujo was good but it just made a bunch of people want to date disabled girls." and I didn't mean for it to be so bad on paper, haha. Oh yeah, all Fair Folk are also highly Lovecraftian which is why they're separated by the 'veil'. Anyway, for the actual plot itself (I'm sorry that took so long but a lot of stuff is kind of confusing unless the universe is explained), the main character (Kailen) basically worships a fictional character called Blueberry Drop. He decorates his shitty one bedroom apartment with all of her posters, has all three of her mobile games and all of her albums (she's basically a Vocaloid except her actual provider also dresses up like her and does concerts because Holograms don't exist in this universe for some reason I can't explain) and when his mother calls to ask if he has a girlfriend, he says they're dating. He's also an MMO player and spends all of the cash he gets at his shitty welding job (the money that doesn't go to Blueberry) on this game. So, through this, he's become one of the world's best players. In the game, since he escaped Fair Land before he was supposed to (for the Grand Game, see the first paragraph), he gets a message from the artistic representation of Gilgamesh (who's stuck as a pretty boy because Fair Folk's human forms take on the qualities of A. their nationality/ethnicity and B. the last depiction they had in human media and well...) that says "Great job! You get one free wish!". This is because the universe says they need a hero and who better than the NEET, right? So, he accepts of course and types in that he wants to be the protagonist. After filling out a questionnaire (including questions like "Yandere are okay, right?") with them all set to yes because he doesn't get what Gil means, he goes to bed. The day after that, he has an unexpected expense and has to move in with his Glamour (what Fair Folk leave everywhere they go and Fetchling bleed) addicted roommate whose equally small apartment smells like dead people and there are rats everywhere. But he's broke and this guy (Kamiyama) is the only one who will let him keep his Blueberry merch. He also has to take a job delivering food to a blind fifty year old man who lives in a basement covered in old marionettes. Also, he's a college student and is being tutored in History. Now, things start to go Kailen's way. He gets a mini harem of three women chasing after him (each fulfilling the three core archetypes). He realizes that he can use his gay boss's feelings for him as a way to get better pay and promotions and starts doing that. Eventually, he thinks things might go okay. Then the women start turning up dead one by one and the Kuudere type character (has the ability, this one coming from the Grand Game itself, to see her own future in five different ways at a time) sends him messages explaining the game and how to get her Tarot Card. Then she dies. Suddenly, Kailen finds himself in the very world he asked for but dealing with things that make him upset and uncomfortable. First, the prospect that these people have their own thoughts and feelings, that therapy is actually important and that if so many people depend on you, you can't just do whatever you want. Oh and Kailen has split personalities each representing a different character archetype. We have A who is very nice but feels like he deserves an award for it, B who is basically a horny jackass that realizes that the other two are way over their heads but finds himself powerless to stop his own issues and C who likes to pretend to be a sociopathic killer and jumped at the chance to actually be one but turns out it's not as fun as he thought. A lot of the issues I tackle are being "Tained", getting too old to be your archetype anymore, a variety of mental issues (some are mine, some aren't) and the main character's fascination yet hatred of sex and violence. Oh yeah and you also get to play Doctor Graham who is the lady psychologist during some segments. The main mechanic thus far is that you use her and Kailen's interactions to keep everyone's Sanity high so they don't kill you/each other/themselves (he did ask for Yandere after all). Interacting with them makes Kailen stressed so you have to interact with Blueberry in a safe world to calm down.
Really? Ah, thanks. I figured that since Demons were so common that maybe it'd be strange to use Fairies instead. Also, it's kind of funny how if something is Deconstructive then it becomes the new normal for a game. Denpa and Yandere and all those things could have been Deconstructions when they came out but now they've been absorbed and become stereotyped and cute too, haha. So, it's like the Literary cycle of life. Now I guess I'm messing with the Denpa genre of VN (games like Higurashi) by giving a reason why everyone's acting so strangely. And then so on. Although my main problem is whether getting somebody else killed is a Bad End immediately or just takes them out of the game. I mean, the latter would be more interactive but having to code different reactions will probably be annoying. That would be thirteen different major branching points (thirteen dateable characters excluding Blueberry Drop) and therefore, twelve different reactions. But I'm really just in the conceptual stage right now. I always spend a couple years working on something because this game's coding has been a disaster since I took someone's advice to just do it. Since it's just a fangame and I'm hiding the development blog, it's not that big of a deal but I wouldn't want there to be problems with this game. I'm already rather proud of my overgrown brain spawn! Also, @Inksalt it mostly takes the form of colour coded bullet points for posterity so it's less of a direct analysis (I wanted to keep it precise) but you can see it when I'm done. It's part of a three piece thing with number one talking about the rules of a Harem genre and a story about Fairies and the last one talking about the cycling of Deconstruction.
