Despite the overwhelming changes over the last years, Visual Novels are still a niche genre, even in the western Anime, Manga and Otaku community. That’s the reason why Fuwanovel considers translations of Visual Novels as the foundation for the genre’s success in the western world – and that’s also the reason why Fuwanovel always considered the support of any kind of translation effort (be it commercially or fan translation) as a key element of its concept of make visual novels popular in the west.
However, in 10 years of Fuwanovel’s existence not just the Visual Novel market has changed enormously: Fuwanovel itself changed too, adapted itself, its methods and its core concept to new conditions. On this page, we want to give you a overview over our long, diverse and sometimes also controversial history.
The genesis: Fuwanovel.org
Fuwanovel’s core concept of make visual novels popular in the west was coined together with the name Fuwanovel itself by an Australian girl called Aaeru who once established a small Visual Novel translation, download and discussion community under Fuwanovel.com (later changed to .org) in 2012.
She envisioned the concept of a website that should offer ready-to-use game downloads of Visual Novels with pre-patched fan translations. This approach made Fuwanovel.org a popular place for people from many western countries who “just wanted to play Visual Novels”. For many newcomers in particular, Fuwanovel.org was also often something like an “entry point” into the world of Visual Novels as well as their first Visual Novel online community and at the same time, Fuwanovel.org was also the foundation for a couple of fan translation groups, some of them later becoming even well-established western publishers for Visual Novels.
Although many people liked Fuwanovel.org’s concept of a “Repository for pre-patched Visual Novels downloads”, especially under the difficult circumstances the community faced 10 years ago (compared to today, there were significantly fewer officially translated games back then), it had also at least one obvious drawback from the beginning: Free downloads of commercial games were clearly illegal, and this brought Aaeru and Fuwanovel.org a lot of criticism – both from other fan communities (where Fuwanovel.org was often on block lists), many hard-working fan translation groups (which mostly encouraged their users to buy the game legally from Japanese online stores), and western publishers (which, of course, wanted to build a legal market).
At the beginning of 2014, the legal situation for Fuwanovel.org became more and more difficult while its founder figure, Aaeru, disappeared. Given these circumstances, it was clear that the time of Fuwanovel.org should come to an end.
Aaeru ふわっと; ふわーっと; フワーっと; フワーと (adv,vs) (1) (on-mim) floating; drifting; weightlessness; (2) (on-mim) softly; gently; lightly
Aaeru but apparently westerners interpret it as fuwafuwa which is fluffy
Aaeru which is fine too
Aaeru but originally i thought
Aaeru they were novels that make u go fuwaaaa—
Aaeru make your heart go alight
kaguya …
Aaeru bcuz of the romance
https://www.vice.com/en/article/are-visual-novels-just-porny-boring-video-games/
The rebirth: Fuwanovel.net
With its fall, Fuwanovel.org left behind a huge fan community, an established name in the western Visual Novel community and this great dream of make visual novels popular in the west. But it left also a lot of uncertainty: Aaeru, the founder figure of Fuwanovel.org was disappeared and there was no access to the servers and the old website content anymore. So the question arose whether the website could (and should) be continued at all. And if so, how?
After a hard and emotional community discussion, the decision was made against giving up and in favor of a continuation – But under one important condition: A line should be drawn under the past and a new and legal Fuwanovel should be founded, with a new leadership and under a new operator. Now, under the leadership of Tay and with the technical support of Nayleen, this plan came into reality: After a public announcement from Tay, Fuwanovel.net was established which became the new home for the Fuwanovel community.
The re-establishment as Fuwanovel.net led to a new interpretation of the old slogan make visual novels popular in the west: Instead of offering questionable free game downloads, it was decided to achieve this goal now by building a large fan community and an extensive Visual Novel news, reviews and think pieces blog, while working closely with western and Japanese publishers as well as small indie devs. This process was accompanied by major changes on the site itself: Step-by-step, a completely new website with a new theme and logo was created, filled with useful tools and services that should help fans to find interesting Visual Novels in English. And in the end, although it took the community a lot of effort, it was even possible to rescue most of the community content from the old servers.
As always with such changes, not every person out there agreed with the transformation and yes, there was a lot of dissatisfaction that “Fuwanovel doesn’t offer games anymore”, but it allowed the idea behind Fuwanovel to continue to exist. And much more important: It allowed Fuwanovel to provide a useful service to the western Visual Novel community as one of the largest Visual Novel dedicated websites on the net.
Fuwa today: Fuwanovel.moe
Over the years Fuwanovel.net slowly drifted into a crises: On the one hand, there was the growing popularity of centralized social media services like Reddit, Discord and Twitter who tackled Fuwanovel’s dominance within the Visual Novel community. On the other site, more and more of those people who once invested huge amounts of their free time to operate Fuwanovel, weren’t able to do this anymore, resulting in a lack of activity, especially on the Fuwanovel Blog.
Because of all these reasons, Fuwanovel joined forces with the German Visual Novel site Visual Novel.Info, resulting again in a leadership change: Tay and Nayleen, who managed most parts of the site for many many years, went into retirement and Hata and Sinned from VN.Info joined together with Zaka and Emi from the old Fuwa team in order to build a new leadership council: The Fuwakai. Over the course of a few months, the Fuwakai successfully rebuilt the blog and forums teams from scratch, resulting in a new activity especially on the Fuwanovel Blog.
In 2023, the Fuwanovel quiz and recommendations site, once known as Fuwanovel.se, was fully merged into Fuwanovel.net. Later that year, Fuwanovel.net moved from its old overpriced and often slow server setup to a new one, resulting in better user experience. At the same time, a new theme for the Fuwanovel’s main page/blog was released to get rid of the old and buggy 2015 theme. Finally, Fuwanovel.net changed its domain name to Fuwanovel.moe.
