Looking at Minorigate and the Tokyo Loli Ban through Anime Expo 2010
I went down to Anime Expo this past weekend, surviving almost a week of no sleep and irritable fans. Amongst the many stories worth blogging about, perhaps what seemed most surprising to me about Anime Expo 2010 was the powerful presence of visual novels. While other blogs, such as AnimeDiet, have covered extensively some of [...]
Visual novel review: Saya no Uta
Title: Saya no Uta Genre: Drama Company: Nitroplus Platform: PC Release Date: Dec 26 2003 Synopsis: After surviving a serious car accident, medical student Sakisaka Fuminori undergoes brain surgery and comes to perceive the world in a whole new way. To him, what was once everyday objects have become twisted and malformed. Normal people look [...]
You Can Keep the Furniture
Anyone who’s seen Saturday morning cartoons would be familiar with amnesia as a plot device. There’s a certain popular formula: a character suffers a bump on the head and forgets who he is, where he lives and who his friends are. Of course, this is quickly resolved before the end of an episode, and the [...]
Minorigate, or, How to Piss Off Otaku Without Really Trying
There’s been quite a hubbub in the eroge-playing community this week, sparked by minori (ef, Wind, eden*) inducing an edit war on TLWiki’s eden* page. Now, for those of you who remember, minori was one of the first eroge companies to block website access from foreign IPs last year after the Rapelay controversy exploded, citing [...]
A Different Approach to the Translation of Ero-Scenes
Recently, I’ve been thinking about how I translate sex scenes (エロシーン, ero-scene) in visual novels. It is one of the least pleasurable aspects of my hobby, and I’m rather glad that I never had to deal with ero-scenes during my time as a fansubber. Ero-scenes are notoriously difficult to translate well; several inherent linguistic barriers [...]
