Also jumping in here to mention that @CAT5 was an invaluable resource when finding bands in the “olden” days (which really felt like a midpoint in the greater scope of things.)
Taking a step back here, the DeG and Gaze situation is no different than the forums of yesteryear featuring the “Big 3” Shonen series (modern ver. is like MHA, SnK, and JK? I’m OOTL) with the other series tucked further back with less engagement. I think the worst thing to tell someone is that their taste isn’t “diverse” enough or pressure them into other bands. Everyone has their own journey and their own priorities, and JRO should serve as a welcoming space to the entire spectrum.
On that note however, I think there needs to be a more even split between vk and non-vk band representation on the forum, even if the bands are more “radio-rock”, anison, fusion, idol-adjacent, etc. Maybe instead of just using the tags where things can get buried, have individual categories dedicated to Visual Kei, J-rock, etc.
i’m the worst at enjoying rock (not against it! just personally bad at it) but i’ve been following alt idols somewhat for a while; i think there’s a lot of potential for crossover interest. Esp when you consider how much vkei visuals & marketing take from idol… not to mention it was a track Ruka from Naitomea wrote for BiSH that got me into those girls in the first place, and then the rest of WACK from there
Yeah, that’s the thing. I’ll go on record saying that I used to loathe idol groups many moons ago. You had, a decade ago, fans dumping hundreds of CDs in the streets just to nab special handshake tickets/voting ballots/etc. , the Minegishi AKB controversy, the hypersexualization of the industry, etc. Small or big, I wanted nothing to do with idols, but now seeing the work they put in thanks to SNS (and the vtuber side of things pulling additional Western engagement), increased number of vk artist composers and performers, and sheer creativity on display have changed my mind a lot on the matter.
Like some others already said. Most of us are probably adults wirh a job so we don’t have all the time in the world to dpend on music.
I personally just like vk the most. It’s weird and diffrent so you probably will have a hard time to advertise something else to me. It’s not that don’t like other japanese stuff in general. I listen to Enka (yes before Tsukasa did it!) and city pop for example, but when it comes to non vk j-rock I have western stuff I just like more. I am here for more vk because I crave it and I looked into like 50 bands since I made the account here
And there is a thing I read about:
A lot of people enjoy watching movies, they liked, again because when you know you liked it before you automatically produce endorphine because you are about to do something that gave you endorphine before.
Same effect is probably true for music. You already like a band, a song so you listen again because it’s easier endorphine than enganging with something new you might not enjoy. Of course people differ and so does this effect. But it explains a bit why it’s always diru and gaze. (Also they just make very good music!!!)
I notice about myself that I know the members of the bands I got into as a teen pretty well but I find it harder to do for newer bands even if I really enjoy their stuff because my close friends are not into them (yet <___<) and it’s not the same to write about stuff you are passionate about or talk about it to your bestie.
I have a hard time getting into newer (2020s) vkei bands legit bc i don’t know where people talk about them - it doesn’t seem to be here!
I’m past my formative memory-making years, but a lot of 90s bands are becoming new favs of mine, despite hearing them for the first time only recently. Can’t call that nostalgia - plus every once in a while if there’s a recognizable hook (like say, Eve as producer) i can find some investment in a completely new recent band like Hitchcock.
I think the getting old thing is a thing, but so is the idea that it’s easier to get invested where your community’s invested - and this board, imho, leans real heavy to the 2000s w/ some 90s nostalgia and 2010s late interest
What now feels like months ago, there was talk about Ashmaze and Virge merging or some shit, and (not saying that’s the only time it’s happened!) but there was a lot of quickly progressing talk on the musicality and styles of the two bands, speculations & shit, and that ended up getting me going thru Ashmaze a lot more receptively than the cursory checks i’d afforded them in the past
I’m about to say a lot of deeply unpopular shit. Perfect for this topic.
While on the surface and conceptually I agree with this take 100%, in practice these two viewpoints are diametrically opposed to each other. Which is why @CAT5 attested to trying to win people over back in the day, I attested to the same thing after, and @Rena can verify that reception is still cold now. Let me explain why with this meme:
I hate the term “forcing people to listen to new bands” because it’s double speak. I posted this obviously inflammatory post a while ago to get discussion going. I even posted ten YouTube links for people to check out further. You know what I didn’t do? Bust into someone’s house, put a gun to their head, and say “listen or else”. I literally cannot force anyone on this forum to click a YouTube link that they have no interest in. So while I got fifteen likes, I feel like a lot of that was preaching to the choir.
“Forcing people to listen to new bands” is double speak for “don’t talk about bands that I don’t enjoy”. Person A and Person B holding a conversation about Band X isn’t forcing Person C to listen to Band X at all, yet that person comes in to make their displeasure known and suddenly no discussion is happening at all. Have enough “Person C”'s running about and conversation is reduced to the lowest common denominator of Dir en grey and the GazettE, because the forum doesn’t feel welcoming enough to discuss anything else.
We’ve been making space for non-visual artists on this forum since Day One, and on MH we were trying to do that for years before the closure. And what I can tell you is that a sizable subset of visual kei fans act absolutely feral if you try to make space for other acts. It doesn’t even have to be non-visual. Talk about a sufficiently old band to the wrong person and you get the same reaction. So it’s not enough to say “make space for other kinds of discussion” when doing so elicits an even more hostile reaction.
Why is it like this? Probably more than one reason why, but the biggest thing I can point my finger at now is The Internet of Algorithms. When I started out in the scene, you had to do all your own research. People pushing new bands to your attention was them saving you time and effort. Visual kei was always at it’s most rewarding when we put on our boots and waded into the trenches to find new stuff.
Somewhere along the way that switched up, and instead of doing homework fans are more comfortable letting algorithms bring new things to them. But this only works to a point. There’s another Catch-22 with algorithms where bands need algorithms to promote them to people so that they’ll listen, but algorithms need the songs to have a certain amount of listeners before they promote them, so we end up in a situation where 38 million songs have zero plays. All our favorite bands are subject to this issue; the more indie they are the more they deal with it.
Algorithms will only give you what it thinks you will like based on what other people like. And we know this because if we go to Spotify, put metal on shuffle and wait, it will never ever ever put on visual kei. You have to direct the algorithm to do that (and then it over corrects and that’s all you get) which means that even in 2024, you have to go out of your way to find visual kei. It’s not likely to find you on it’s own via an algorithmic shuffle.
So I don’t understand at what point a fan goes from “gimme all this good shit” to “nah I’m good don’t show me anything new”, but from a perspective of an administrator this has left me in a weird position where I can’t please everyone, so we just walk a tightrope and let the community dictate what it wants to talk about.
And literally, that’s just Dir en grey. The proof is in the pudding.
That’s the same for me.
When I got into VK it’s been because of this.
I can’t name what exactly it is but there’s something about the songs I listen to that I never found in plain rock (in like J-rock, western rock). And I’m just talking about the music. The visual aspect comes on top of this.
I guess that’s an important point.
For me it’s that feeling of looking forward to certain parts of a song, just waiting for it, getting more tense the closer I get and then let go and fully enjoy it (not always but sometimes, I wouldn’t manage getting anything done, if I always listened to music this way).
The other part for me is predictability. As an autistic person I rely a lot on predictability. Aside from it feeling just know, sometimes like coming home.
And that’s another point that limits new bands for me, that I already mention somehow before, time. What I love I like to enjoy, again and again. I often don’t know where to fit in new music while I can’t let go of the known one. It’s less about not wanting but still feeling the urge to keep on listening to what I’ve been listening for the past weeks, months.
What I find interesting is, that I thought the same of myself but mainly because I just don’t care about knowing much about the members themselves, not spending time on this as well. This was totally fine when I got into 蟻 (Ari), I still don’t know all member’s names out of my mind. While I really love them and do listen to them a lot still (that’s one band I really can’t part with, for I think almost two years by now straight). Then I got into exist†trace last year. Totally out of the blue. And things changed. I’m not as obsessed as I’ve been in my youth with bands I do know the members names, part of the birthdays (and I’m sure the rest will also settle, just because it’s dates), I follow all of them who have accounts on SNS, I’ve been reading translated interviews from years ago, I’ve been watching part of their recent kinda YouTube series for their 20th anniversary live song polls and so on. It’s not like I’m talking to anyone about it but I’ve not been doing about other bands for years, so that’s not the reason for me.
I don’t know what changed. But I also don’t care, I just recognized I’m not over that, it still can happen.
I find that part fascinating, just for the “similar highs, similar voice” when it comes to masc/femme aspect.
I guess one reason why I never cared about exist†trace (or other bands with female vocals even though there are very few exceptions and these happened by chance) is that female voices when singing high notes to me are harder to listen to than male voices, even considering Yuugiri from DaizyStripper for example. High notes can become pretty painful for me, I prefer lower ones. However with male voices it’s still different and that difference doesn’t make it as painful. I can’t explain why, but high alone is not the only aspect for me. In the end it’s actually the voice itself but it’s more likely that females voices are painful and male ones aren’t. exist†trace proofs to me that there are exceptions.
that’s a shame bc i’d totally have gone thru this list - maybe not exhaustively but at least checked a few based on how they were described - and probably will later on today
it’s the kind of long-form blog-ass post i like reading & what i imagined i few posts up
I mean i’ve gone thru plenty of long list posts like that on here! It’s how i learned about basically every kote band that’s not Luna Sea, from some way long well-sourced passion project of a post
BUT SOMEHOW i’ve just not seen that one you linked yet
I know “complaining” about the transition from mch->jro isn’t a fruitful pursuit - i imagined this forum host must have been cheaper or something, bc i’ve always found it just somehow less intuitive to navigate, or guess what’s the content of topics or which ones would interest me.
I wonder if anyone else feels similarly, or if i’m uncommon in this
To be really clear i hope this doesn’t come off as i’m complaining about mods! I think everyone does a fantastic job at making this site a place i everyday want to check and read!
I just think there’s some faults or difficulties that maybe are caused by the venue of discussions rather than the capability to discuss? And if true, that there might be a third route other than doom thoughts or mismanagement
Like maybe this board just has a 2000s slant, and that’s cool bc idk anywhere else where Diru gets talked about as thoroughly, tho i know if i want Kaneto content there’s a whole tiktok sphere
Ah my bad for not typing too clearly but i was thinking highs and vices like… goods and bads lol, successes and struggles
like i love the overdrive guitars and d-beats over royal road progressions; i also think vkei & idols are weighed down by having to maintain “sexy sexlessness” similarly
Ah no, that’s actually been my mistake, I just thought vices were a typo and shouldn’t have assumed this.
I’m not sure, if I can follow you through the rest but if not it’s not because you didn’t make your point clear but rather so far I didn’t care about idols because everything I tried wasn’t to my liking.
As someone who is currently part of several other Discourse communities, I feel like the site structure has made things especially worse for this very problem. When there’s such an emphasis on “Latest” and most of the engagement is on visual kei-specific news topics, posts outside of that, especially in batches, can come off as annoying, flooding out users from seeing the topics they want. I’m not saying that’s me in particular, but I can see how some might take issue with it especially if they’re used to the content “coming to them”.
EVERY single Discourse forum I’m a part of is weighted towards a handful of categories, and to a drastic degree. It makes users more reluctant to engage in other non-current topics, as once the thread gets too far down the homepage, you typically won’t see additional engagement until a user manually searches for it themselves.
Conversely with Monochrome Heaven, while you had the “Topics” container (with the same function as “Latest”), it was diminutive so you still had to navigate through subforums & categories to get where you wanted to go. You put the responsibility on the users to navigate themselves and carve out their own spots on the forum. A testament to that was how well the Global Music sub-forum did concurrently with all the ongoing Visual Kei discussion.
All that said, the big glaring issue is that Invision, MyBB, and others like it are dogshit for anything but desktop-use and Discourse is excellent for mobile viewing, in a mobile-first society. My gripes could very well just be my rose-tinted glasses for dated UI at work, and it isn’t as bad as it seems. Also, this forum system performs FAR better (faster) than any alternatives.
Personally, Discord’s forum channels feature is the best bridge we have for both use-cases, but everything being its own chatroom turns me off from that. What I want to know is how the 18~25 y.o. users feel about it, since I have my biases as someone pushing 30 and my opinion could be moot.
It’s interesting you bring this up. I absolutely detest the Latest feed, to the point where I set my feed to be Categories instead and I left it like that for a long time. So my home page actually looks like this:
Mine looks like that, too, but I’d still say the same thing since it’s taking up a third (probably closer to a fourth) of the viewport. The more I sit on this, the more I think some setting changes and tinkering with Stylus would make me way more comfy with the site.
Reason I say that is I just zoomed out to 80% and it already feels slightly better for me .
Not your fault for me not knowing lol but that does seem significantly closer to what i’d like!
I’m no good at forums & idk how to quote multiple people but the person above me hit the nail on the head for why i remember mch feeling easier to navigate thru. Trying out a default view of a category tree seems like it could get me closer to that!
I hate to ask nitpicky things of you but i wonder if discourse & viewership might improve over time if more people knew about this!
Maybe it might be worth utilizing today’s spike to get out something like a sticky or bulletin “hey, did you know you can do this? It could help you better find and support bands” or some shit
I do.
Right in the beginning of this forum there were lots of talks about this and I set it to this and never changed it. Mine looks like yours without that sidebar on the left (which I find endlessly disturbing and annoyed quite the hell out of Nick when it was new (to me) quite a while ago).
I think it’s the look that gets closest to common forums. I’m not really liking the software but Nick explained the pros of it in the very beginning so I can understand why it’s this one and no other.
I’m just not too fond with longer thread titles because it’s not many threads when using one of the mobile devices but that’s no major problem that’s why I just mention it now but don’t really complain about it.
I mark the text I want to quote, click on quote in the little menu that appears, in the lower part of the screen the reply section opens with the quote. You don’t have to reply right away, you can repeat that over and over again the other quotes get added by the software and you can place your replies between them (below the respective quote) then.
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