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Our previous stance on Vocaloids(quite old): Are questions about VOCALOID allowed?

I ask this as the What is the background story of Hatsune Miku? question was re-opened by a moderator claiming that the community consensus was different now.

Is that correct though? What is our stance on questions about Vocaloid, Touhou, etc?

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Sure - as the moderator who reopened the question, let me elaborate on what I believe the current consensus is. This is not a statement of site policy, but rather my take on how we currently do things.

I think that the current consensus is to accept questions on not just anime and manga, but also things that are part of the larger "otaku" industry/community, which I think uncontroversially includes (e.g.) light novels and visual novels, and perhaps-controversially includes things like Vocaloid; games in the style of KanColle and Girlfriend Beta; whatever Love Live was when it was first created (a "multimedia project", I guess?); and so forth.

I offer as evidence the following:

  • We have lots of questions about visual novels without anime/manga counterparts.
  • We have questions about Touhou, which is, at its core, a series of self-produced video games. Despite there having apparently been a few official manga (I don't really follow Touhou), most of the questions are not specifically about those things.
  • We had a question about Kantai Collection that is more about the game than anything.
  • We had a question about the Shuuen no Shiori song series, and I would be surprised if there were opposition to other questions about Vocaloid song series that lack anime/manga counterparts. (For example, if we had had a question about Kagerou Project back when it was still just a song series, I'm pretty confident we would have been fine with it.)
  • We even had this recent question about Hatsune Miku herself.
  • We have a fair number of questions about AMVs, which seem to me to be even one step further divorced from the core of the "otaku" community than things like Vocaloid.

The particular Miku question under discussion is, admittedly, going to turn out to have a silly answer ("no, Miku lacks any explicit characterization outside the domain of fanworks"), but I think it's still a legitimate question insofar as Hatsune Miku is clearly part of the anime-o-sphere.

Or, I guess what I'm trying to say is that the boundary between what is core enough to the anime industry as to be on-topic and what isn't lies somewhere beyond Vocaloid. (I can't really think of any topics that would be borderline, unfortunately, so I'm not sure how to articulate where the cutoff ought to be.)

(In closing, I would like to point out that we apparently don't object to questions about AtLA and RWBY, which aren't even peripherally anime-related.)

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  • Rwby is about to be Japanese dubbed and is drawn anime style. Is it peripherally anime-related now?
    – BCLC
    Aug 18, 2015 at 8:48
  • @BCLC My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is also Japanese-dubbed.
    – senshin
    Aug 18, 2015 at 17:16
  • senshin-san, is MLP drawn anime-style?
    – BCLC
    Aug 18, 2015 at 17:23
  • @BCLC I dunno, it looks an awful like Panty&Stocking to me. (My point is: what does it being Japanese-dubbed or being drawn anime-style have to do with it?)
    – senshin
    Aug 18, 2015 at 17:25
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I think Toshinou Kyouko is correct to be concerned that "Technical questions about the vocaloid software or gameplay mechanics should not be allowed," as such questions would fall under the Arqade SE, the Game Design SE, or perhaps even the Programmers SE. Since these SEs might not be interested in answering questions about vocaloid characters and other in-universe or fandom details, those could be incorporated here without infringing too much on their on-topic territory. If a vocaloid or other non-anime/manga title gets an anime or manga adaption, questions that apply to the adaption(s) would be clearly on-topic. But just as we should prefer that anime questions get posted here rather than in the Science Fiction & Fantasy SE (some do get posted and answered there), I think we should defer to other SEs for questions regarding vocaloid software.

In the same vein, gameplay for customizable card games and other physical games is on-topic for the Board & Card Games SE and therefore should not be considered on-topic here. However, fictional games that are only mentioned within manga/anime, or which originated in manga/anime and later became playable in real life, would be on-topic here, such as this: How does one play Gungi?. Kantai Collection does have anime and manga, so questions about its characters could be on-topic here, but a question about gameplay seems to fall within the primary topic of the Board & Card Games SE.

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