On the first sight Fuwanovel might just look like a website about Visual Novels, but its far more than that: It is a open community of people who love to write articles about Visual Novels. A community, who loves to create them and who loves read them. And, of course, a community who loves to discuss them in the uttermost detail.
But Fuwanovel also describes an idea which was developed and improved by many people over many years:
First established as download website for Visual Novel fans by an Australian girl called Aaeru in 2012 with the aim to make fan translations for easy available for western fans (Fuwanovel.org, Fuwanovel.com), it turned into an Visual Novel online community from 2015 on wards (Fuwanovel.net), developed various side-branches like the quiz and recommendations site Fuwanovel.se, up to what we can see today: Fuwanovel.moe
Make visual novels popular in the west
Fuwanovel history timeline
| 2011 | Aaeru, a member of the Australian Pirate Party and infamous Visual Novel fan translator presents the concept of Fuwanovel on her personal Blog Visual Novel Aer: A download repository for Japanese Visual Novels with already applied fan-patches. |
| 2012 | Fuwanovel (Fuwanovel.com, Fuwanovel.org) is founded by Aaeru and some of her supporters. The site gets a lot of attention pretty fast, but also criticism, given its semi-legal concept of sharing commercial games |
| 2013/2014 | Aaeru, the founder girl of Fuwanovel, suddenly disappears at the end of 2013. At the same time, a lot of issues hit Fuwanovel. The future of the website is uncertain. |
| 2014/2015 | A successor community under the leadership of Tay and Nayleen is established ( Fuwanovel.net), partly building on the old Fuwanovel.org/.com site and community. The announcement of the new leadership that the new Fuwanovel will not offer game downloads anymore results in a small controversy |
| 2017 | A bunch of (primary Swedish) Fuwanovel community members[1] launch a spin-off page called Fuwanovel.se which evolves into the visual novel recommendations tool project which you can find today under Quiz. [1] Emi, BunnyAdvocate |
| 2017 | A Discord server for Fuwanovel is launched by Kaguya, later turning into the official Fuwanovel Discord community |
| 2022 | Fuwanovel starts a joint venture with the German Visual Novel site Visual Novel.Info, resulting into a new leadership council: The Fuwakai, primary consisting of some old Fuwanovel members (Emi, Zaka), some new Visual Novel.Info members (Sinned, Hata) and some motivated community members (Fujoneko, Sirus, Kosakyun) |
| 2023 | Fuwanovel launches its new front page layout. Later that year, the site moves to a new and faster web host, given the many outages and issues with the old one |
| 2024 | Fuwanovel.net changes its domain to Fuwanovel.moe in order to empathize the break in design and concept since the take over of the Fuwakai |
Fuwanovel over the years
