Years of Research - r/visualnovel version

This is what I’ve put together from all my time in the VN community. This has happened over and over again from G-collection Era -> EOP golden age -> JOP takeover.

How it all started:

This was during the era where Western Eroge readers were on fair terms. Level of toxicity was extremely low. At this time it made the most sense for the entire community to only read the same pool of translated titles instead of having splitting the community. As time went on, the VN community as a divided into EOPs and JOPs. As the number of JOPs grew, there sprang a noticeable amount of toxicity from within the JOP community and they began to trash talk the EOP community.

Forum Comments:

The number of “random toxic JOP elitists” began to rise and this hate spread through to forum comments. Usually comments were “Translation suck. Learn Japanese” The amount of these comments were still infrequent at the time. I didn’t pay much attention to this until later.

“Kamige”:

Translating kamige would have been the logical step to bring both EOP and JOP communities together under one banner. However, JOPs gained a lot of power and did not like translation. So translations for kamige gained a big increase of hate for not being in Japanese.

Shaming EOPs online:

Every time an EOP appeared in forums and discussion (especially), there would always be a JOP lurking around, ready to shame these EOPs and guilt them into learning Japanese or make them quit eroge together. This kind of behavior remains persistence to today.

Fast forward to today:

More TL companies have appeared, providing EOPs with quality service. JOPs decide to “give the translation a chance” by proceeding to say “it’s not Japanese” and move on back to their Muramasas, Sakura no Utas, Baldr Skys etc. For some EOPs trying to ask the feasibility of these translations o companies expressed interest in these titles, the JOP crowd would boo their questions and statement as mentioned previously. This toxicity would transfer over to various discussion forums and chats as well so they could flank us on both fronts.

The final straw

It took me a long time to piece together a proper understanding of why this keeps happening throughout each translation. JOPs have continued being toxic towards anything not in Japanese. There were JOPs I heard about with “BIG NAMES” that had their own mini fan bases. What I learned by reading those comments is that “BIG NAMES” controlled the masses— Fuwanovel, r/visualnovels, VNDB, you name it. They have the power over that. They created that JOP community. It was all the years of petty words and using the EOP community as a whole to become as big as they are now. It has gotten to the point where it doesn’t matter what they do anymore. It’s whatever they say goes, and no one will stand up to them, right or wrong, because they’re scared.

Texthooks or Tae Kim? Make up your minds

Melee tends to support Tae Kim. They even managed to SOMEHOW oppress VN readers when they tried to use texthooks. This is a confusing gray area because they also use texthooks too? Some JOPs have even publicly said they don’t need Texthooks and these JOPs can support itself like it has been doing for years. All of this makes no sense and it’s hard to say whether they actually are reading in Japanese.

But one thing is for certain— there are key people who clearly show they don’t care about anything but reading in Japanese. Like Moogy and Sacredgeo for example.

Moogy is someone who always stirs up drama and needlessly fights instead of staying in his own lane. He’s even been BANNED for this in the past. He’s always someone who immediately trashes translations all the time, giving JOPs a bad name. Though people ridicule him for these types of things here and there he always gets back to it because nobody actually cares what he does since he’s JOP. If he wants to trash on the entire universe people just move on while he tries to make excuses for himself for all the dumb things he’s done to the whole community. This gets wilder when you remember that he has a fanbase that grows with his nonsense when he really should be the one getting the back burner.

Sacredgeo is someone who constantly reads and does whatever he wants and doesn’t care about anything. People like him are extremely dangerous. During the release of the Venus Blood Kickstarter some EOPs were scared of what he would do after the fact— more so even when he made a tweet saying he didn't like how things were going. He took pleasure in giving the idea that he did something wild that could have destroyed everything. Why should anyone allow this history of recklessness? But it gets a pass because the JOPs said so.

Corrections:

When I say the JOP community and the VN community are separate? I mean that the entire VN community is clearly divided into two separate groups. We have been separated ever since the Evo donation. I do not mean the entire JOP community is toxic, but it does have a history of bashing EOPs constantly and that needs to be acknowledged properly.

Obviously there are different types of JOPs who just read VNs in Japanese but do not bother or trash EOPs and translations. They coexist with the EOP community in general and some even help out these EOPs. There’s some JOPs that give these translations a chance for what they are. This is what I mean by being part of the VN community. I do not have any problems with JOPs like this. If anything I’m sorry for not correcting my statements earlier.

The “JOP community” would not care about these things. They would trash everything and everyone and just yell “WHITE ALBUM 2 CAN NOT BE TRANSLATED”. Those types of people are the real problem.

I have no problem with JOPs reading translations and interacting with JOPs. However, I do care about the POSSIBILITY of them using "bad translations" to just grow their own community and THEN trash the other in one go WHILE I watch this repeating pattern. I have a problem with people not controlling their fanbase because they just don’t care or know what they’re doing. Yes there is a chance they are here to actually read the translation and treat it as a fair equivalent but history shows us this is not the case over and over again.

Closing Statement:

I did not mean for this to further divide the VN community. I apologize for snapping at so many JOPs when I only have issues with a few. I only noticed that history was starting to repeat itself again, after another translation has released. Aokana seems to be the VN to finally get us all together behind one title and I would hate to have a few bad eggs return the VN community back to “us vs them” yet again. If anyone has a problem with that, 仕方がない.