The protagonists we choose to play are important. They’re our eyes and ears in a VN. They’re the ones we most understand, we see their most private inner-thoughts and dreams, we cheer on their successes and decry those who get in their way. With the first-person format of most VNs, we’re encouraged to see ourselves as them. So if you want to understand VNs, you need to understand protagonists. This post is a continuation of my analysis on VN trends and focuses on the types of protagonists we like to embody.

Tag, you’re it



How can we analyse something as subjective as character traits? Geekdom has the answer: categories, lots and lots of categories. VNDB allows users to indulge their categorisation fetish by assigning “tags” which denote the type of content a VN has. There are currently over 2200 different tags on VNDB covering such elements as the genre, character traits, technical attributes, and the type of sexual content a VN has. The accuracy of the data is ensured by the crowd-sourced nature of the data, with everyone able to vote to confirm or deny the inclusion of a tag on a VN. Those tags with more votes against than for are removed from that VN.

The tag summary for Umineko no Naku Koro ni.



Using this vast source of data we can see which tags are most common in the medium and look for connections between them: are some tags more likely to appear together, or do some tags tend to only appear in higher rated VNs? We analysed the tag data for every VN on VNDB that has at least 5 user ratings which totalled 7690 VNs. 6340 were of Japanese origin (JVNs) and 1072 were developed in the West (EVNs).

This data will have gaps. While popular VNs are well tagged (Fate/Stay night has over 100 tags), less well known VNs aren’t fully categorised (such as the wonderful Where the Sun Always Shines which has only 11 tags), so we’ll underestimate the popularity of many traits. However this is a bias that’ll apply fairly equally to all tags, so while we should be cautious about saying X% of VNs have some trait, we can confidently say that some traits are more popular than others.

Most common protagonists

To get an overview of the kinds of protagonists most commonly found in VNs, we ranked the 280 tags that had the word “protagonist” in them. We split the results between Japanese VNs and EVNs to show the differences in the two markets.



The (X%) is how many VNs have that tag. A longer list is available here. A definition of what each tag means can be found on VNDB here.



It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the most popular JVNs that the list is dominated by male protagonists of school age, fighting and saving the world through sheer willpower. Nor is the presence of sexual traits being so high up on the list unexpected as only 22% of JVNs are tagged as having no sexual content; but more surprising is the presence of such violent sexual content. While we shouldn’t take this out of proportion, only 3.8% of JVNs were tagged with rapist protagonists, but it was still the 11th most common protagonist trait.



As for EVNs, we see more diversity in the characters they choose to portray. No single personality type dominates as it does for JVNs. Even “strong female protagonists” (as in character, not physical strength) were ranked higher (at 23rd) than the most common personality type tag (”fighting protagonist” is 24th). Female protagonists are almost as common as male ones, and dark-skinned protagonists also appear fairly frequently (dark-skinned protagonists were ranked 171st with 0.14% for JVNs). Diversity isn’t good just for its own sake, diverse characters mean diverse settings, and diverse settings mean diverse stories, and diverse stories are good for those of us who enjoy a range of different experiences.



Western fan preferences



Just looking at the VNs being released doesn’t necessarily give you a good picture of the VN scene as a whole. A dozen porn-focused VNs with a handful of fans each don’t better portray the medium than a story-focused VN with thousands of fans just because there are more of them. We tried to create a more accurate picture of what traits Western fans prefer to read by looking at the number of user ratings each VN got on VNDB. So a tag that appears in a VN with 50 ratings counts for 10 times more than a tag in a VN with just 5.



To further highlight what fans preferred over what was common, we ranked the results by the difference in how many user ratings a tag was getting vs how common it was in VNs overall.

The percentage is the difference between how common a tag is in user ratings vs how common that tag is in all VNs.



For both JVNs and EVNs, protagonists with a clear identity (and face) were far preferred over bland self-inserts, perhaps because more engaging stories tend to require a protagonist with eyes /s. Voice acting for protagonists also seems popular, although that may be a side-effect of a VN having a higher budget (with higher budget VNs tending to be more widely read).



It also seems there’s a stark divide between those reading translated VNs and EVNs, with Western JVN fans flocking towards the already over-represented male protagonists. An overwhelming 82% of JVN user ratings go to VNs with male protagonists. While otome VNs do moderately well in Japan, very few get translated. Given how popular female protagonists do in the EVN scene, this would seem to be a missed opportunity.



At the other end of the scale, nameable protagonists may be common, but they aren’t popular with fans. On the Japanese side, this may reflect the additional technical difficulty in translating a VN with such a feature. If a VN doesn’t get translated, it doesn’t tend to be widely read in the West. However this feature also also appears near the bottom of the EVN list too, suggesting the feature itself is unpopular.

Highest rated protagonists



As well as determining what’s popular, we can also gauge what fans think makes for a better protagonist from the ratings they give the VNs with those protagonists. Using a little bit of maths (details here), we got the average rating for those protagonist tags that appeared in at least 50 VNs.



The full list of protagonist ratings is available here.



These ratings are somewhat skewed by a few popular highly-rated VNs, the homemaker protag’s inclusion on this list is due to Fate/Stay night, but there still seems a clear preference towards smart protagonists who get shit done. On the reverse side, many of the most low-rated traits are those most common in porn-focused VNs.

Battle of the sexes

We’ll drill down into more detailed tag specifics in my next post, but as a teaser of what’s to come, we looked at the differences between VNs with male and female protagonists. We split VNs into those who had male or female protagonists and measured which tags became more common than before. Therefore we could see which tags were most closely linked to that gender. For example, the Student Heroine tag jumped from 23.7% of VNs to 32% when we restricted it to male protagonists only. As many VNs focus on heterosexual romances, its not a surprise that VNs with a male lead are much more likely to have female love interests.

The percentage in grey is how many male/female protagonist VNs have that tag, and the green is how much higher it is than the average for all VNs.

The male list is overflowing with sexual traits, unsurprising given that sexual content is far more common in VNs with male protagonists. Those sexual acts that are primarily gratifying to the male partner are especially popular. Boob-jobs, blow-jobs, and virgin sex are all acts that generally appeal more to the male partner and so it’s logical that it tends to pop up more in VNs where the reader takes the male’s perspective.



As for female protagonists, any otome fan can tell you how there’s a dearth of otomes with sexual content. Combine that factor with female protagonists being much more common in EVNs (who also shy away from sexual content), and you have the chaste list on the female protagonist side.



The increase in the proportion of female protagonists with faces and voice acting is harder to explain. This may be a reflection of how rare such content is in porn-oriented VNs, which mostly have male protagonists and eschew showing the male form (perhaps due to their otaku fans fear of turning gay /s). With such porn VNs holding down the average, restricting the results to the chaste female protagonists results in a big increase in its frequency.



Despite VNs being portrayed as escapist literature with generic self-insert protagonists, our analysis seems to suggest the reverse. Fans far prefer protagonists with strong identities, and EVNs are leading the way in exploring stories with more diverse characters. The videogame industry could learn something from our little medium.



Next week we’ll analyse the individual protagonist tags in more detail. What do women and death have in common? Find out next time.



I hope you enjoyed our little analysis. I had a lot of fun collecting the data, but refining it down into a reasonable length post was tricky. I love talking about this, so if you have any comments or queries then please get in contact via the Ask me Anything, my twitter, or reddit.



A big thank you goes out to /u/8cccc9 for his help on the analysis, and Part-Time Storier for her help on proofreading.