Soliciting community input on two things that should happen, but if I don’t receive input in several weeks I’m willing to proceed myself—in other words, I’m not just kicking the ball to the community to make a decision for me and refusing to make any decisions myself.

Backup Instance

This community exists on ani.social because…

someone else made !otomegames@kbin.social and I participated. kbin.social died.
So I made an otome community to replace it: !otomegames@kbin.run. kbin.run died.

I really thought kbin.run would have longevity, especially because its admin was an Mbin maintainer (Mbin is the software kbin.run ran on) and kbin.run had been up for over a year. I was suggested to make a backup community just in case ani.social also goes down, and I’m finally taking care of that.

I was wondering if ya’ll have any communities you’d prefer to have the backup !otomegames to be on, or to avoid it being on. I’ve heard of lemmy.ml being very controversial and also overrun with politics, and otomegames is supposed to be a fun gaming space so I can definitely tell you it’s not going there. I also won’t put it on lemmy.world, because that’s the huge flagship instance and one of the points of the Fediverse is decentralization. I would prefer to go to a gaming-centric, anime-centric, and/or fandom-centric instance. I was going to put the backup community on some Lemmy or Mbin instance, but I could be convinced to try out PieFed.

Icon Picking

Communities without an icon tend not to get clicked on as much. I made the current one. The current one also doesn’t really fit in on ani.social (which has anime images for its communities, not my crappily-made pixel art). The current one frankly would also fit romance games that aren’t otome.

I was wondering what image we’d want to put up there that more clearly screams “otome”. I was thinking an image of Katarina from My Next Life as a Villainess with a guy looking at her with desire, because it’s a guy wanting a girl, because that anime has a corresponding otome game, and that anime is not very male gazey. I know Hakuoki has an anime too, so I could try looking there. If I can find a picture of an anime girl playing an otome game that might be even better. Maybe a pixel art again except it’s clicking on anime boys with hearts in their eyes? EDIT: Icon picked!

Rules

Please stay on-topic: post about otome games. Otome games are romance games aimed at women who want to romance men. For the purposes of this community, games with female love interests (LIs) count as long as it isn’t mostly female LIs: men should be at least half of the LI options. Note that you do not have to be a straight woman to post: people outside the target demographic play too, and you are welcome here. Amare games will be allowed given how small the community on the Fediverse is for it, and how they overlap with otome, but if the community starts to overwhelmingly have non-otome amare posts I reserve the right to change this rule and redirect those posts to a new amare community.

In an effort to keep this community more discussion-based, please only post fanart and the like if you made the art yourself. Your own fanart, cosplays, etc. are very welcome.

Don’t be a jerk.

3a. No bigotry or discrimination. This includes but is not limited to homophobia, racism, sexism, etc.

3b. Be respectful of other peoples’ tastes. You may absolutely despise an LI and want to discuss it, and that’s fine. Casting negative aspersions on or directly insulting people who love that LI is not fine. What we find interesting in fiction does not always directly translate to real-life desires.

Please don’t directly link to pirated content.

Tag any NSFW content as such. If you are not sure whether to tag it that way, err on the side of caution and tag.

Please indicate spoilers. The following format works on both Lemmy and Kbin, but if you are using an app it may not. See this comment for which apps handle spoilers. Note that spoilers in post bodies will just show the text in the preview if you link the post in, say, Discord, instead of spoiling it.

::: spoiler Spoilers for OtomeGame: The Game Something that happened at the end of the game! Something else that happened at the end of the game! :::

That will appear as:

Spoilers for OtomeGame: The Game

Something that happened at the end of the game!

Something else that happened at the end of the game!

When promoting an otome you have worked on, please use common sense for what is spammy. If there’s about four new posts here weekly, don’t post a progress update weekly—we don’t want self-promotion overwhelming the community. But we do want to inform people of new otome and dev updates are cool, so do post them here every once in awhile! I reserve the right to change this rule to be more specific about what exactly counts as spammy and what does not, but I feel I’ll know it when I see it and trust most posters to operate in good faith.

Two community matters: backup instance, and icon picking

Two community matters: backup instance, and icon picking

Backup Instance

Icon Picking