Telling friends and/or family?

[ravenlord]

Part of the difficulty is that the "mainstream" view of anime and PC games in general have a bit a stgma IRL. Most people don't even understand simple stuff like vocaloid. I am barely able to get away with listening to jPop, and only because I am able to use the excuse that I am learning Japanese. So as a consequence I just don't discuss anything like that to anyone offline, let alone something as delicate a subject as KS. It feels kind of hipsterish, but I don't mind keeping things like that underground.

[Heartless Wanderer]

Huh. Who needs an excuse? All I need's a good pair of headphones and my middle finger, the first of which to listen with and the latter of which to brandish shamelessly at anyone shameless enough to get on my case about it. (On that note, I actually AM about to start learning Japanese. Pimsleur Approach. Hopefully it's all it's cracked up to be but I suppose I'll only be $10 or so out if it doesn't, the expensive stuff has a nice, long trial period attached to it.)

Never made sense to me while people get on other people's cases for liking different things. It's not as if I'm beaming the music I listen to directly into their brains or something. Or blasting it at 50,000 times the necessary volume as I drive down the road like some other people I know.

The only answer I can come up with is "people suck." And that depresses me. But it also makes it easy not to give a damn what people think of me.

I'd say I don't discuss these things with people offline, too, but that's more because I don't usually strike up much conversation with offline people in the first place, aside from the occasional odd dude I meet who happens to share my interests. Since I'm perfectly happy just skimming the Internet on my laptop instead of striking out into the "real world" to talk to people, it's more a consequence of being introverted than it is intentional avoidance of the topic.

Case in point: there is a Katawa Shoujo shortcut icon in full view on my desktop and if anyone asked me about it on the public bus I would most likely explain what the game is in great detail, consequences be damned.

[rosemarie-chan]

To be honest, I kind of wanted to create such a thread, but forgot about it in the end...

Well, in my country the whole "anime" thing (and, of course, manga and visual novels) is completely unknown to the majority of the people. It sucks to not be able to talk about, well, a part of my life. Luckily,I have my brother, who introduced me to this world and I will be grateful to him forever. These days I realised that some of the boys with whom I hang out in the university have seen the most popular shounen anime (Naruto, Bleach, One Piece,Fairytale) and in some extreme cases Death Note. And, well, there is a girl (the only one I have ever met) who watches anime on youtube but we don't hang out. And there is not one person except my brother that knows what a visual novel is. And, well, KS does not really sound normal when the story is about trying to hook up with a disabled girl. Especially since I am a girl.

So for me the answer is a general no about all of the visual novels. I have tried telling people about them, but they never tried them out. I am not going to give up and I will try to spread the word about animes, mangas and visual novels. But nowadays people critisize things without trying to know them better so I sometimes find no point in telling them. But, as we say in my country, hope is the last one to die.

[OtakuNinja]

I'm curious, what country are you from?

[rosemarie-chan]

Hint: it's constantly in the news for its economical problems. No, correct that; ALL the time.

[Oddball]

I told my brother about it, but he's thirty and big into anime and manga himself. He enjoyed it, but was huge into it like some of us here are.

I don't even think he finished all the routes.

[OtakuNinja]

Hint: it's constantly in the news for its economical problems. No, correct that; ALL the time.

Greece? Spain?? Ireland???

[Heartless Wanderer]

...America? *bad-dum-tsh*

Serious guess: Italy?

[OtakuNinja]

Oh yeah, I forgot about Italy.

[Cognostic]

"Hope is the last one to die"?

Yes, Italy. Or so my google powers lead me to believe.

[rosemarie-chan]

Greece! Η ελπίδα πεθαίνει πάντα τελευταία...
I didn't expect so much interest to be honest....

[Heartless Wanderer]

Huh. Well, it looks like the first guess was right after all.

[FoxtrotZero]

Huh. Who needs an excuse? All I need's a good pair of headphones and my middle finger, the first of which to listen with and the latter of which to brandish shamelessly at anyone shameless enough to get on my case about it. (On that note, I actually AM about to start learning Japanese. Pimsleur Approach. Hopefully it's all it's cracked up to be but I suppose I'll only be $10 or so out if it doesn't, the expensive stuff has a nice, long trial period attached to it.)

I like this. I have a habit of refusing to tell people what I'm listening to, just as a boilerplate policy. I've also taken to using the British highway salute over the American one, for no legitimate reason, and if that slaps Anglophilia next to Japanophilia on my list of interests, so be it. I also considered the Pimsleur approach to learning Japanese, but the main stumbling block is not having anyone to practice with.

Never made sense to me while people get on other people's cases for liking different things. It's not as if I'm beaming the music I listen to directly into their brains or something. Or blasting it at 50,000 times the necessary volume as I drive down the road like some other people I know.

The only answer I can come up with is "people suck." And that depresses me. But it also makes it easy not to give a damn what people think of me.

Never made sense to me either, and I try really hard to be that guy. And people do suck, and that's the number-one cause of my self-depressing downward spirals. Being prone to depression and people constantly demonstrating their suckishness is a poor combination.

I'd say I don't discuss these things with people offline, too, but that's more because I don't usually strike up much conversation with offline people in the first place, aside from the occasional odd dude I meet who happens to share my interests. Since I'm perfectly happy just skimming the Internet on my laptop instead of striking out into the "real world" to talk to people, it's more a consequence of being introverted than it is intentional avoidance of the topic.

Case in point: there is a Katawa Shoujo shortcut icon in full view on my desktop and if anyone asked me about it on the public bus I would most likely explain what the game is in great detail, consequences be damned.

And yeah, I try not to care what people think. On the whole I do a pretty good job, I guess. I also mostly don't talk to offline people about such things, but that's again more for lack of anyone with an interest in the subject. And while I understand your introversion point of view, in my mind, nothing excuses the presence of actual icons on your desktop.

But this is an excellent springboard into a point I want to make. So far the only people I've known who would know about KS are people online, and some of the friends I used to have but no longer speak to in person much because of physical distances. Playing KS put me into a pretty depressed, self-analytical mood, and I tried to make some changes in my life. Part of that was the concern that I was settling for someone it was convenient to be, rather than being the person I wanted to be, and so I struck out to try to make some new friends. A few weeks later, that endeavour paid off, and I've been brought pretty cleanly into a circle of friends that I can only describe as being conciderably more otaku. (It's amazing it didn't happen earlier, as I was already familiar with a third of them).

A guy I met last week from this group of friends is an alright dude. Today I was talking with him and another friend and I bring up a Katawa Shoujo reference. Because I'm in a crowd that wouldn't question it's origin, I drop the name (instead of my usual shuffle of "a game I was playing" where I'm extraordinarily vague about the origins or circumstance of a scene because it's not interesting to the person I'm talking to) and the dude is just like "YOU KNOW ABOUT THAT!?" and, for some reason, our immediate reaction is to embrace one-another in a brohug. We spent the rest of the period and lunch talking mostly about KS, and partially about some related interests that we share.

The ability to be this open with someone about something I really like is truly liberating, and I think everyone should try to find that sort of a relation. But in order for me to manage that, I had to make a conscious effort towards associating with a different type of people, people who would be interested and more prone to knowing about the subject matter. It's incredibly full circle that the subject material is what led me to having someone to talk to about it, but that doesn't detract from the life lesson here.

[Espionage724]

I don't know about you guys, but I haven't told anybody I know about the fact that I play KS at all.

I told people I played KS by simply having a game tracking program (Evolve) :p People on my friends list who were curious enough could then go to the game's profile page, read some information, maybe ask me about it, and go try it out

I had one friend ask me about the game in person, I can't recall exactly how I explained it. Pretty sure I said something along the lines of "Your this guy who has a rare heart condition who ended up going to a special school with people with other disabilities, and you try to get with a few of the girls". Not sure if that was the best explanation of it though; but in any case, my friend ended up giving it a try anyway probably because of how long he's seen me playing it on Evolve :p

[Shadowyeclipse]

I don't know about you guys, but I haven't told anybody I know about the fact that I play KS at all.

I told people I played KS by simply having a game tracking program (Evolve) :p People on my friends list who were curious enough could then go to the game's profile page, read some information, maybe ask me about it, and go try it out

I had one friend ask me about the game in person, I can't recall exactly how I explained it. Pretty sure I said something along the lines of "Your this guy who has a rare heart condition who ended up going to a special school with people with other disabilities, and you try to get with a few of the girls". Not sure if that was the best explanation of it though; but in any case, my friend ended up giving it a try anyway probably because of how long he's seen me playing it on Evolve :p

How did he like it?