As some of you may know, I often write about Japanese subculture media, including Japanese-language visual novels, on my blogs. It’s been one of my dreams to write books about this subculture, but I also realize that it’s a daunting task to write about everything I like about it. I’m also not sure what kind of topics people would be interested in if they wanted to read about Japanese visual novels.
Rather than speculating on what other people might think, I want to open channels of communication and get questions that I can try to answer in this hopefully short book.
There are a few things I’ve settled on what the book should have:
The book will be written for an audience familiar with games but not necessarily interactive fiction, adventure games, visual novels, and academic discourses. It will be about what I think is the fundamentals and a bit more. A better way of putting it is like constructing a quasi-theoretical way for the general public to intuitively grasp the structure and form of visual novels outside of just plot. The aim of the book is to ground readers, give them new avenues to explore the field, and encourage more people to write about it.
I’ve deliberately chosen to focus on writing about Japanese visual novels because if I include English-language visual novels, the book might be a 1,000 paged introduction. I’m more familiar with the Japanese writing scene, and I also want to keep it to 200-300, much like the Very Short Introduction series published by Oxford University Press. Whether that’s realistic is another issue, but I want to keep it focused at least.
I want to have a chapter that’s basically an oral history of how the translated visual novel industry came to be. I know some translators and editors. It would be cool to get their thoughts in because translated visual novels don’t come from nowhere!
The introductory chapters will include definitions of visual novels and different (sub)genres in them. Some general history too.
I also know there will be a few “case studies”. I’ll be revisiting some of my favorite visual novels (untranslated and translated) and supplying essays on them. I also want to include a chapter on otome-ge and visual novels aimed at women because they are often missing from discussions about this subculture.
I’m interested if this is something people might be into. I’m open to suggestions and feedback on this front.
I also will like to know what kind of questions readers will want from a book like this. I can think of several, but I am way too familiar with Japanese visual novels to really know if they are the right ones. I am intentionally writing a thread here because I think a design savvy community like the interactive fiction space might be a good place to get pertinent questions about, say, how a visual novel works.
As for publishing this book, I’m thinking of applying for a (micro)grant from the IFTF. This will likely be self-published on Itchio with a pay-what-you-want method, so grant money might be a nice motivator to complete this project. I might even commission a nice cover art for it.
Thanks for reading the thread. I hope I can make this dream (and many others) come true.
I’d be interested in:
-big trends over time, like if one genre became really popular for a decade or if there was a big split in the community at some point
-game that were really influential and copied a lot
-what some common characteristics of popular visual novels are (for example, in Choice of Games, length is super important, while in IFComp, shorter games with lots of interactivity are popular)
I don’t think it’d have to have all three of those or even any of them, but I would enjoy reading something that featured some of those elements. The things you’ve already mentioned (like case studies and the oral history) already sound good!
I’m personally interested in narrative features. For instance, VNs seem to handle multiple endings well, even though this seems to be challenging in other types of stories/formats. How and why is that?
Not sure if this is within the scope you’re thinking of, but I would be interested in information/commentary on otome games specifically vis-à-vis the recent profusion of villainess-themed anime.
I don’t know very much about Japanese otome games, so when I’ve watched anime like Surgeon Elise, Tsundere Villainess Lieselotte, Villainess Level 99, I’m in Love with the Villainess, etc., I’ve wondered about how accurately they portray/parody the genre. How well (if at all) are the salient aspects of otome games reflected by this class of anime? Are there specific otome games that seem to serve as inspiration for any anime of this type? Did anything happen in the otome game space to trigger the explosion of such anime, or are they mostly just inspired by Hamefura?
Separately, I’m also curious about how well the sales of translated VNs in the west reflect their performance in the Japanese market. If a VN was successful or unsuccessful in Japan, does it generally get the same reception elsewhere? Are there any examples of VNs that weren’t very popular in Japan but had a wildly successful English localization, or examples of the opposite?
Thanks for all the responses so far, but especially to Joey:
I didn’t think of that because it would in fact be relevant. Would be a good idea to bring it up because I think there is a real dearth of writing on otome games!
I like Joey’s response, and add I’d like to read about where VNs fit into the larger picture of Japanese works being adapted from one medium to another and influences across media. I feel like Manga to Anime, video game to anime, and anime to video game(especially shounen fight anime to fighting game) adaptations are well trodden subjects and even Light Novel to Anime and vice versa adaptations get a decent amount of attention, but about all I know about VNs and their relationship to Japanese pop culture in general is that my favorite anime of all time has one official PC game that is a VN if I’m not mistaken.
I’d love to know about how the art style has evolved and if distinct categories of style exist for Japanese VNs.
I don’t know anything about Japanese VNs, other than the girls have a proclivity for wearing maid outfits. What’s up with that? Is every location always dirty?
This sounds a fantastic idea. I’d be really interested to read the book. Analysis of popular game mechanics would be interesting as would non-western story structures. Ie things radically different from Hollywood or Disney.
I have close to zero knowledge on Japanese visual novels, and my main exposure to VN as a things is through genre “parodies” (not sure if this is the right word) like Doki Doki Literature Club. I don’t think this is unusual, Doki Doki is hugely popular, so while I understand the need to restrict this to Japanese only, I do think it would be interesting to link things that have been done in Japanese works to these very well-known meta works that have been partly responsible for “explaining” (probably incompletely) the genre to Western audiences.
I think what I’m trying to say is that many people might have the idea that VNs are all an indistiguished mass of the same tropes, and then there’s a few works that “comment on” or “subvert” this big mass. A more nuanced history that addresses this would be extremely interesting to someone like me - I don’t know if this has been done actually, if yes I’d love some recommendations
