9-nine- 9️⃣ (Visual Novel Book Club + offshoots)

Oh trust me I’m excusing myself from the BU$TAFELLOWS one too haha. Best of luck over there, it’ll be great. We’ll see which of us lasts longer in the other’s club :sweat_smile:


To the actual point, I don’t particularly like the idea of splitting by character count alone, but I could see how there might feasibly be nothing at all better for a group going in blind, if they give us nothing to work with. We may need a rough amount per week and then when someone finishes early they pick out a scene break or otherwise logical stopping point and post it for us? I mean it’s not an elegant solution but we do need to convey to people a specific stopping point (for those without texthooking and in case of any count discrepancies) and it allows us to not have to stop mid-conversation.

Basically, the VN club is such a monster it may start putting more management demands on the members themselves :melting_face:

7 Likes

At least we (bustafellows) seem to have some kind of chapters. Hurray! Although no idea of their lengths. xD

6 Likes

I don’t really mind getting spoilerized. After I get the game (Autum sale, preferably) I can click through and get character counts for the scenes + screenshots. I did that for one of the earlier chapters in loopers and it wasn’t too bad, just a bit tedious.

6 Likes

Yeah its definitely not ideal but hard to come up with a schedule when there is no in-game system for us to plan around. There is a VN club in a discord server I’m on and they run their stuff by giving people 1-2 months to read the selected title and they just discuss as they read without a definitive schedule but I think that leads to less discussion. Harder to keep track of participation that way too.

That could work if we have someone consistently reading it at the start of each new week? Not sure if we want to start a poll to decide how long the club will run for this time and then after that we can find a rough estimate of how many characters will be read per week.

6 Likes

Yeah I wasn’t sure about assigning a particular person for general flexibility sake – like often I’m going to read at the beginning of the week but I know things come up for me so I doubt I’d hit every single one on time. Some openness for whoever gets there and can get it close might be best? But as a general concept I can’t think of anything that works too much better, and I don’t want to put too much work (and spoilers) on @ccookf

I can try to whip something up for character count, one sec…

6 Likes
Preferred reading speed in characters per week
  • 7,500 per week (19 weeks)
  • 10,000 per week (14 weeks)
  • 12,500 per week (11 weeks)
  • 15,000 per week (9-nine- weeks)
  • Other (please leave a comment)

0 voters

Had to use some heavy rounding treating the 142,217 characters on JPDB as 140,000 (I think we established they tend to list slightly high anyway?) and then round a little further when dividing by these numbers, but hopefully I didn’t make any silly mistakes. Loopers was all over the place, but I think 7,500 is sort of how it averaged out? Our longest weeks went 10, 11, and 13 thousand, for reference.

6 Likes

It’s funny we’ve picked the same options so far :joy: . I think it’s fine to say that a fair amount of us found weeks below 10k lacking and wanted to read more. I’m fine with anything above, personally. Somehow reading 15k characters feels much easier to me than reading 10 pages of a book. Going by the average characters in a novel page Redglare gave me in the read every day challenge, though a tiny scope, we’re talking about 366 characters per page. So I guess we were all reading a lot and didn’t even think anything of it ^^ . I feel like voice over definitely helps, and there’s a lot of language repetition going on too.

It’s not a bad idea to keep in mind the Bustafellows thread to see how more or less they’re going to lay everything out and see if we both can finish around the same date, roughly, so we can go back to reading a single title the next voting. I would have a blast going for 9 weeks, but perhaps it’s not the most realistic, considering we have people reading both and Bustafellows will take significantly more I suppose. I really don’t want to sit for three more months doing nothing ;-; .

Loopers felt a tiny bit long to my liking with 17 weeks, but 11 or even 14 doesn’t sound bad at all to me. It also depends on how hard Bustafellows and this turn out to be, I guess. Too many questions :joy: . Bit by bit, team.

6 Likes

I referenced this a little earlier, but given the length of their VN, if they don’t bail early after some routes, I don’t think there’s any way we manage that without being absolutely glacial. The plan is probably to play to the advantage we have with some flexibility in 9-nine and after we finish the first game at our pace we can look at how they’re doing over there, then probably read another one or two without even needing it to be as much of a spin off.

6 Likes

Considering Bustafellows is around 4.5 times as long (going by hour length on VNDB), I don’t think there is a chance we’ll be keeping Bustafellows near quick enough to read these two at the same pace. If you were reading all routes of 9-nine-, it would be another discussion since then 9-nine- is supposedly longer by quite a lot if I remember correctly.

Edit: As leader of bustafellows, my plan is we’ll go for one route, see how many are still in, do another route, see again the number still with us and how much quicker a second route is vs the first, and so on. Basically continually checking.

6 Likes

@Daisoujou @MissDagger Hmm yeah you’re both right, it’s not a good idea to mix both with the length of 9-nine-.

I think both of your opinions are extra important here, as (edit: potentially) the two of you will be reading both of them. Ultimately I’m fine with anything really :slight_smile: .

7 Likes

I’m fine looking at some other way of doing it too! Just seems to me the most natural way to try to meet up in the end at roughly the same time, which I do agree is a good goal. Just ultimately neither of us quite know how far our club is officially going while we eyeball what the other is doing further out, and what the people in the club end up even thinking of what they’re reading, so that’s the tentative idea I had that’ll inevitably have to be evaluated as we go.

5 Likes

As for my vote I feel like it would be good to explain things a bit. On jpdb’s visual novel list there are 490 titles. The median value sorting by character count is Steins;Gate0 at ~535k characters which is listed as ~35h on vndb. (Okay, it’s not quite the median, but I figured the more recognizable name was worth something. It’s actually entry #246)

When I saw this I had something of a thought that going too long would be a different, but also kind of frustrating problem. If we did a novel of this length at the pace of Loopers it would take over a year which probably isn’t fun, or at least a good reason to consider jumping these kinds of VNs into an intermediate/advanced book club. So I picked an arbitrary target of 6 months which still felt long, but more fair given that we’re talking about games 4x longer than Loopers. At that pace we’d have to average about 22k characters per week.

I’m actually ok with the idea of higher character counts (my personal comfort level is about 3k/day. It’s just a magic number for me). But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t scared to jump into that pace right away. 12.5k would be my first pick which ends up being about the length of the longest Loopers chapters iirc. And obviously I don’t mind with a slower pace if a lot of newer readers join us. 9-nine- episode 1 is relatively short so it won’t matter too much, but I’d definitely push a higher pace if we tackle episodes 2+.

Another think I’m open is picking an aggressive pace and having a vote to see if we want to slow down after the first week’s reading.

About 760k I think. It’s quite long in total.

Considering the relative difference between the two groups in voting I’d argue trying to merry them up is a lost cause. They’re basically separate clubs that happen to share technology.

6 Likes

I don’t entirely disagree given the large gap there, but I’m not sure how hard I want to commit to turning this definitively into two smaller VN clubs based on a single vote. Feels like we should at least try once more to see if a pattern like this keeps emerging? I’m not sure we can definitively call them otome club yet, may just be people who wanted to read Bustafellows / didn’t want to read 9-nine-. There were genuinely some people who just showed up for Nighshade and that, but others who voted for Atri, Marco, etc. I dunno, I think it’s premature. At the least before thinking about that I’d want to go ask them if there’s a sizeable enough group that would like to split off into a permanent 2nd club on the specific basis of being otome or some other classification they might suggest.

@MissDagger I know you were not going to be super active here but this bit’s pretty relevant to you all

7 Likes

Good point. I wasn’t looking that closely at the votes, but it’s a nice catch. That also means there’s a very good chance that some might either leave or double dip between clubs if we hit a new vn after they finish a route.

6 Likes

Maybe after we finish ep one of 9-nine we can re-evaluate and see where they’re at in Bustafellows? We could talk then and see if we’d want to continue on with ep 2 while they are still reading Bustafellows and follow up to see if people from that group would be interested in reading non-otome VNs. Like you said, there could have just been a large group of people interested in specifically that VN rather than the fact that it is an otome.

6 Likes

It is actually better to do the opposite, because reading something new means a new style, new vocabulary and such. So it is better to start a bit slower, and then after a couple of weeks speed up. Especially if there are no natural dividers, it should be much easier to manage.

I totally think we have some people that just came for the fact that bustafellows is an otome. Not all though, because Bustafellows is a fairly well known VN, even outside the otome crowd. But I can totally see how it would make sense to have a poll on that about the time Bustafellows decides to officially end (whether that is at 100% completion or not) (or when @AzusaChan suggested). Then we’ll have the crowd that found reading a VN with a group (since bustafellows pulled in a lot of new people) to be nice, and we can see if it is just VN in general or otome specifically that people would be interested in going forward.

6 Likes

This is exactly what I was thinking about and hoping for when I mentioned that going for both wouldn’t be a bad idea. It would be awesome if everyone had a lot of fun in their respective groups and then we came back to a single one with a stronger base and participation. I’m sure someone will bite :eyes: and then their soul will remain forever with us.

I agree though, I think it’s early to talk about branching off.

6 Likes

I pretty much agree with all of this as at least the way I’m orienting towards moving things if I don’t face more objection.

Anyway it was definitely good to at least get the idea out there about there being 2 groups longer term, because I do think it’s worth being aware of as a possibility and exploring when the time comes. Just for now I definitely personally prefer trying to work towards the goal of re-merging so we are in a good position to do so if people want to then.

6 Likes

I certainly aim for Bustafellows not to take a year to read the whole thing if we decide to read it all. 6 months is kinda a good time frame to aim for as a kinda upper limit; although I do believe more in a model of speeding up later on to hit such a target, because I want to make sure to have space early to let people get used to the medium + writing style + something else that I forget what it was (lol!); also not sure how feasible that is for a VN as long as Bustafellows. But it is hard to figure out lengths with no character counts. ^^ I promise we over in the other lane will be doing our best to not take forever.

Also, while I said I won’t dig much into the discussion over here, I meant more with the particulars of 9-nine- than the VN club in general. Also, I’m bad at not sticking my nose in. xD

6 Likes

Oh yeah I feel you; I just thought you might miss buried responses (I’ve certainly not read everything in your thread…) so I wanted to draw your attention when important :slightly_smiling_face:

4 Likes