Sofa: Yes, my name is Sofa! I am a rabbit girl from Puerto Rico. I have been an internet dweller since I was 6, and in anime communities since I was 8. Posting art online started with Instagram, and I was there for quite some time while I figured myself out growing up. I had been rejecting my love for anime due to bullying, but then it started creeping back up, and thats when my “career” as yogurt200 started around 2017.. Twitter was the biggest thing for me, thats where I met a lot of the community and peers I know now. So I’d say 2018, the year I made that account, is when it really started.

Sofa: Hell yeah! Unicorn Jelly is great! I only discovered it the other year, wish I had seen it sooner. It’s an excellent piece.

To answer the question, I’ll be talking about my experience because I’ve never really talked about this publically before and a lot of people have had similar experiences growing up in this online anime world.. My experience is very much painted by the ‘growing up’ part. Like I mentioned earlier, I was very young when I first started getting into this stuff and found myself having to “catch up” on the culture that had already been progressing. The culture used to be pretty crazy I think, people were roleplaying everywhere, people weren’t as self conscious or self aware..most people would pick a character they identified most with in that moment and use them as an avatar (in the general sense of the word). A downside is that people seemed much less respectful of Japanese culture, or less likely to research things? The less intense grip of copyright was nice, though. Less corporate presence. A much humbler vibe. Also you couldn’t really tell who anyone really was but this could also very much be because I was a child, and there was a haze that surrounded everything, and I was not looking to meet up in real life, or reveal too much! It was this elusive world that kept getting deeper and deeper. I miss that feeling, of learning about Lucky Star and Haruhi and K-On for the first time. Lucky Star for example was a good way for me to learn about all the culture I missed out on for the first time, because it’s so referential and made for otakus. Now its very satisfying to get older and understand more and more of the references.

There were much less people on the internet, too. Things felt more playful as I saw it. A big thing is also that I was engaging with stuff that was not meant for my age group. Things like Dokuro Chan and Yuru Yuri, I was very young when i saw them and grew up to realize a lot of people HATE these shows and will hunt you down for it. I have a soft spot for them because as a child, I saw something different, and kind of filled in the blanks in my head that were formed by what I couldn’t understand. Even though these shows are “problematic”, I personally don’t believe the shows themselves traumatized me. For a short while I hated them too, it’s not lost on me why people gag, but I realized they’re so fake, not real, and much less harmful to children than say, Catholicism or their own families. Just definitely not for kids of course, especially not an 8 year old! haha.
Anyway I think I was drawn to these things for different reasons more related to my reality as a child. From ages 8 to 11 I had a friend group of teenagers, save for one girl my age. People could pick up that I was younger, and I got ‘targetted’ a lot, had an older girlfriend, etc. That probably had more of an effect, more so than the media itself. But despite being exposed to a lot of stuff I didn’t understand, strange stuff, stuff for adult minds (or well, otaku adult minds), I learned that you could be gay from these communities. I was directly exposed to gay people just living their life online. And It was because of the VOCALOID song Magnet that I was awakened, that I realized I liked girls. I think kids get a lot more proper exposure to this stuff nowadays though! Anyway due to the effect of anime on my general sexuality, I was alienated from my peers. I realized I was a pervert pretty quickly, which in itself isn’t bad because I think it was bound to happen anyway, but there was a lot more risk. I could’ve gotten into much deeper shit and I was not careful. I think nowadays kids in these cultures are much more aware of their boundary with adults and aware of grooming, a lot are actually hyper aware. A lot still slips through the cracks most likely.. this isn’t exclusive to anime cultures though. that’s a whole can of worms;;

At 12, I briefly experimented with gender through the lens of yaoi and bishounen characters. There are a lot of people that ended up realizing they were trans because of anime. Really, for me, a lot of discovering anime had to do with identity, and self acceptance. People tend to argue that anime characters don’t act like real people.. and coincidentally I often did not feel like a real person. Characters like Chii from Chobits resonate with a lot of neurodivergent women I know. I think this is kind of what sparked the intense connection. It was a fantasy world that I could really connect to. Of course there’s the added factor that it’s all from Japan, and people could maybe say “oh, its only fantastical feeling because it’s from a foreign country” ..I acknowledge this could be an aspect as well, it has all it’s roots there, there are many many aspects of Japanese culture in anime of course. But anime also has a culture of its own, both Japanese and ‘Western’ otaku are often disconnected from the real world, because at it’s core it’s very much a fantasy.

Nowadays, a lot more people like anime, it’s much more normalized, and you are less likely to get bullied. Still there’s very little respect for the freaky origins of it all, and I notice to many there’s a “wrong type” of anime fan. I think people are quick to discredit the strange parts, act like they are above it. But for example, so much anime comes from visual novels, and a majority of visual novels are eroge. (Don’t get me wrong, this is something I appreciate about VN :) I like the freaky origins and doujin culture is really amazing to me. I have my criticisms, but it’s overall a very theraputic thing. Despite everything, people should be allowed to indulge in such things even if its just to get off, in my opinion. It does not make it a lesser medium. In fact, it makes it a much more freeing medium to work in, and it’s awesome that theres now this whole LGBT english scene growing from that but I digress!)
I was not mature enough to discern whether people really had less issue with it back then or if it just flew over my head. I was very naive but as I saw it, if someone was an anime fan, you could more or less trust they won’t bully you. It’s different now. It’s already such a broad thing, but nowadays in the west there’s much more variety of fans and interests.. People have a harder time separating media from real life, there’s an inversion and I haven’t been the only one to notice, that people more and more “see real people as fictional characters and fictional characters as real people”

I kind of stopped watching anime as much as I got older because I became very embarrassed of myself and self conscious. At around 13 years old, I started watching stuff like Lain, Evangelion, Utena, Kaiba.. all the more artsy stuff that for some reason I saw as more acceptable to indulge in. Then I grew older and at 17 I realized all the stuff I thought was too embarrassing was actually still the shit. Moe! It just hits right. Its magical.
Anyway, the culture nowadays feels very accelerated, kind of like.. everything everywhere. It’s all saturated. Miku used to be so indie feeling, more niche, but now you see her everywhere, you could see her at Target. Seeing Miku in the wild would make me so happy as a kid, but its still really insane to me. I’m proud of her, but I can’t say I’m not bothered by how commercialized she has become. Still I think its a testament to her power! Simply her image invokes such a strong feeling. She’s a modern deity. But yeah, commercialization.. I’ve become really jaded by it all. I felt weird even making my own plastic merch, I dunno. Capitalism whatever.

It’s hard for me to think of newer anime I like and it’s not like I don’t give it a shot. Magical things that spark a culture that appeals to me still happen, like Kemono Friends for example. But that was already almost 10 years ago. The new BanG Dream (MyGO and Ave Mujica) is the most recent thing I can say I loved. It had some of that magic for me. It all feels so sparse though, and I don’t think it’s a nostalgia thing. I think it’s just my personal taste. I still find “new” things to like that I hadn’t seen before, but they’re usually all older things. That’s okay.

Okay, sorry this answer has gotten so long but I’ll talk about one more thing regarding this topic.

So there’s this resurgence in “old anime” culture appreciation aesthetics, something I’m connected to though I’m being honest in that it was not as much of a thing when I started exploring it again. It’s kind of the typical, expected, thing of old things looping back into new culture through a general lens of “nostalgia”. I don’t think my themes and aesthetic are a nostalgia thing, I simply see them as my taste, a taste that happens to have been more widespread in the past. Tying things too much to time is reductive, and I think it’d be better to stop doing that as much, stop compartmentalizing aesthetics and focus more on how everything accumulates and mixes together, the big picture. Older is not necessarily better but its okay to like older things and mix them with newer things or whatever you want. I think this problem, this obsession with and flattening of time, also leads to people getting snarky and saying “well, most of the kids engaging with that ‘Old Internet Anime Aesthetic’ weren’t even there!” or “stop glamorizing this!” or “all these people are blinded by nostalgia” etc. .. People seem sour that the things that they got bullied for, things that they saw as their identity and by extension subconsciously perceived as owning them, are suddenly cool again and being adopted by people who don’t ‘own’ it like they feel they do. Or, they never respected this stuff to begin with and think people engaging with it now could only be doing so in a shallow way. Whatever. There’s a lot of reducing things to nostalgia from both the appreciators and the skeptics. And I get the negative reaction, its fatiguing, it can feel overplayed.

There’s talk of ‘animecore tax’ or ‘tumblr tax’ because cheap merch of certain shows/franchises of the older moe era have inflated to absurd prices. A couple of dolls I own that were pretty cheap have inflated in price as well due to ‘aesthetic blogging’. And I do think stuff gets flattened a lot, culture gets reduced, misinterpreted or ‘disrespected’, but that’s not really most kids fault nor is it a problem that’s specific to this culture, its a widespread thing infecting everything. And if you did enjoy this stuff while it was fresh, can you really blame people for wanting to engage with it again, to bring more attention to it, to identify strongly with it?
Really though, if kids are deciding to identify with windows XP, OS-tans, Old Moe, whatever, even though they didn’t engage with when it was a present thing, who cares? The internet allowing us to engage with things from all time periods is a wonderful thing. If you feel as though they aren’t properly educated on it, educate them. Show compassion to the younger generations that were once like yourself. Bottom line we’re all appreciating the same thing and overall, the resurgence is a net positive because it helps this stuff be more respected as art, keeps it in circulation, etc. even if it can be a little grating sometimes!

LOL that’s a bit of a messy tangent, I don’t like being lumped/reduced to some ‘nostalgia’ or ‘core’ but it’s a complicated thing! anyway yeah that’s all..!

Sofa: My first proper drawing was a Littlest Pet Shop cat on a napkin at around 5 or 6 also. I remember showing it to my mom and her giving me a big stack of paper to draw on. Since then I’ve been in love with drawing. Littlest Pet Shop was my first major influence for art.. and that evolved into anime, and discovering anime was the most life changing thing. There’s this magical girl show called Shugo Chara, and that was my first anime and manga. I consumed it voraciously! The influences from it still show in my art today, with the whole red blue green stuff. Shortly after that I discovered VOCALOID/UTAULOID and all that culture, and that was huge HUGE huge. I still consume stuff related to this everyday, and its become a pantheon of spirits that I am always inspired by. I felt a strong spiritual connection to anime characters, and I saw in them something that made life worth living. They also don’t quite look human at all, and that started my interest in perceiving them as something beyond human, like angels.

Sofa: RGB Paw started with 8eyes, connected to that thought I mentioned, the question of “What if anime girls were aliens/astral beings?”..I had interest in creating a fictional universe for a while already, having had some attempts to write different things growing up. I was dipping my toes in creating a world with 8eyes, and I realized it belongs to a whole universe with all these rules. It started truly materializing while writing HEARTLOVEPOWERTEMPLE. Since then it’s been revealing itself more and more to me.

Sofa: Yes, they’re still up on 8-eyes.tumblr.com. I’m extremely embarrassed of them. I originally started creating the comics late 2017 and then created the blog for them in 2018, and kind of kept it secret for a while. Somehow, someone on r9k ended up finding it, and posting a picture from it on their thread. That caused someone else to repost it onto tumblr, and that got a ton of notes. I asked them to give me credit, and the thing wasn’t secret anymore and put more eyes on me than I was ever used to. My initial idea was, four anime girls with red eyes, and they’re astral beings, and they’re communicating with humans indirectly through the internet. It was very much a joke at first, I was denying myself a serious relationship with anime. I’m not proud of that, or I don’t really enjoy making art purely as a joke anymore. I ran into trouble on tumblr, and felt so horrible I decided to quit. When I decided to revisit 8eyes, I was transformed as an artist, I was making anime girl paintings for a while and I wanted 8eyes to represent something a little more serious, though it remained pretty silly. With the new incarnation I acknowledged the ‘universe’ more. The original comic was very much an experiment, and it continued to be experimental into the new website. I was still figuring out what I wanted to do, what I liked, etc.

Sofa: Thank you so much! I’m a painter more than anything.. it’s very hard for me to go in with an idea. I usually just do whatever comes out. I ‘carve’ out a shape and then refine it for hours. Nowadays its a little easier to say, OKAY, I’m going to draw this character! but everything else I just leave it to intuition. I’m very intuition based, it’s just what works best for me. Unfortunately, I am not really an illustrator, which is a difficult thing to come to terms with when anime is my favorite style, given that a lot of the artists I look up to are this type. Figurative work is obviously my favorite. I usually start with either the head or ribcage. Hair probably takes the longest.

Sofa: I like to create naming conventions for each planet. So on Earth, its all girls who end in -GIRL with a word that describes them. I like to believe they are born and choose this name quickly. For Venus, where HLPT takes place, the species of Venus rabbits all have names ending in -Ja and that is exclusive to that planet. These are random names that they themselves choose. In SPECIAL GIRLS, and I won’t reveal anything about planets there because its kinda plot spoilers, they’re named FLAWER, SHARKY, PERFUME, ARANA, CORAL, and MEMORIA. Theres less of a trend there, but to me the names are all in the same ball park in an abstract way. I just kind of see most of my species as almost clones of eachother in a sense, so its satisfying to have such conventions. Not all my planets will have rules for naming but they make up for it in trends that appear elsewhere. When I name the characters I try not to think about it too much. I don’t really mind stuff that isn’t traditionally considered a name.

Sofa: Yes I am familiar with touhou! I love it. I’ve actually made fan comics and stuff before, and drew a lot of touhou characters before I had my own OCs. It’s one of my major inspirations. I’d probably continue doing touhou stuff if it wasn’t for my own world. Touhou, Vocaloid, Kemono Friends, and My Little Pony are like the three biggest influences for the way my fiction is structured. Look into ‘database consumption’, its very interesting. I like exploring that.

Sofa: I think my first biggest inspiration with writing was the Metamorphoses by Ovid. Poetry in general is a cool thing. Myth also, and sacred texts. I grew up with catholic influence, so that might have a hand. I don’t really know where my writing style comes from though, this is more spiritual. It really does just “come to me” and I take whatever comes and try not to mess with it or question it much. I feel like the story already exists and is just being relayed to me. I love playing with language. I treat writing similar to painting with my in-development visual novel, taking a layered approach but not changing the core skeleton. I’m reading more nowadays, the writing I haven’t shown has more influences than HLPT which was much more naive.
If I can think of anything to recommend or mention, In the Pines by Alice Notley is really amazing. I’m trying to expand my horizons more, and I think my next visual novel will show that. You read/watch things and see things you already know or were working with, and its this special connection that’s really enriching and makes you more confident in your own ideas while also expanding them.

Sofa: I used to write it off completely, but lately I’m toying with the idea of doing it again. So I might. It will be pretty different though. I don’t know. I feel visual novels are my favorite medium, but the web medium is very nice too, and its less pressure which I need. Developing my latest work has been far too much pressure. I’ve burnt out. So I’ve thought of web project as a way to remedy that. We’ll see.

Sofa: What made me want to make a visual novel was Higurashi. It changed my life. Other than that there is ARCHANGEL:NEMESIS, which was made by my ex girlfriend. She really pushed me in the direction of making VNs further and her work is very inspiring. I really like AIR, One: Kagayaku Kisetsu E , SNOW, Sayonara Wo Oshiete and some parts of SubaHibi. I also love this brewing EVN scene in general. it keeps inspiring me, and there is SO MUCH. Check out the Toxic Yuri VN Jam! that shit’s so cool. they’re doing their second jam now and I know thats gonna a bring a whole new batch of amazing things. Nadia Nova makes amazing VNs and other ones that stand out within the scene are Hello Girl & Coquette Dragoon.

Sofa: I think I mentioned it in my website, but HLPT was originally gonna just be a couple of pages on the 8eyes website that were CONEJO-ESS’ backstory. And the VN i’m making now was actually what I had planned as my first VN.. then I realized, that my idea was too ambitious and it would be easier and more easy to tackle if I just adapted the Venus story into a visual novel and gave all the characters proper justice instead of a hazy kinda vague flashback. Everything fell into place from there and I found the development of the writing to be very smooth. I was honestly really desperate to make some money, and this motivated me greatly to work fast but it also caused the VN to be rough around the edges because I didn’t want to question anything, I thought it existing was the most important thing. I used to beat myself up about this but now that I’m stuck in limbo developing this really big and complex one where I’ve had to re-do various things (mainly visual) I think of it as a strength.
It was my first time writing anything properly. It was through this I realized I wanted to write stories for life. Besides the general big story beats I improvised everything and left it up to intuition, this is still how I work in a broad sense. But overall it was a much easier time than my current development. Everything was new to me and I was learning things along the way at every second.. Before that, I had never made so much art in such a short period of time, I shocked myself with what I could produce under the guise of developing a VN and i fell in love with that. I improved immensely from it. But I also tried to build the VN around abilities I already had and not the other way around. Since my scope was so small at first I ended up surpassing my ambition by a lot and that was very satisfying.

I was frustrated a lot because I couldn’t make myself make CGs the way I thought they should be, and had to kinda compromise in that department. I wasn’t totally happy with the sprites either, but they’ve grown on me. I kept the VN under wraps during the development and mostly disappeared while making it. Alone in that world, I had to have a lot of confidence in myself, and I had to really believe in it, so I conjured that up even though it was pretty difficult and I had some low moments of questioning everything despite my efforts. It was most difficult when I finished it, because then I didn’t want to release it. Suddenly embarrassment flooded me. And I also didn’t want to let go. I had become so engrossed in the world, I was really deep in it and I loved that feeling, of being by myself with my characters. But the release is an important thing and I’m glad I did it obviously. And I have more things planned for those characters anyway! It really wasn’t that long time I spent actively developing it, about seven months.. which now to me isn’t a long time at all.

Sofa: Thank you, I did make them! They’re made out of primitives from Second Life, which is a virtual world I live in. Basically you can build stuff out of a set of primitives, you can texture them, stretch them, etc. The only thing I didn’t make were Faroja’s plants, those were some free use full permission plants I had in my inventory. And Teja’s stuffed rabbits were made in Paint3D, that microsoft 3d program that kinda sucks. I didn’t know how to work blender at the time and was still scared of it, and I can’t really draw backgrounds, so i went with what I knew and built them in the game then filtered them. Mostly stretching cubes. Now, for my new VN, I make my backgrounds in Blender. That Second Life look.. I’m kind of ashamed of it! But I’m glad some people like it. My new Blender stuff is still fairly primitive I’d say, but there’s much more control and shape variety.

Sofa: Nope. I didn’t say anything, I just recieved whatever Cpu and Heoliene had that they could offer.. A chunk of it, mainly the themes, were things that Cpu made in some sessions and sent me, so she did have me in mind. My next VN is even less planned in terms of music, the soundtrack is much bigger but it’s all just stuff that Cpu had laying around in her files. It worked out though, because we have compatible visions. She is a wonderful Musician. I’m eternally thankful for those contributions.

Sofa: Honestly, it was much harder to write for the webpage. I think I could do it now because I’ve evolved as a writer and can adapt but, the webpage format felt much more suited for a ‘window into a world’ than a full story or plot. I struggled to flow with 8eyes. I think I needed to dive into VN and improve.
For HLPT, I wrote it scene by scene.. I would make a set of assets first, and then write a scene using them, then polish it as much as i could and move onto the next. Back and forth. I’d then finish a chapter and run it through from the beginning and add a couple things. I worked chapter by chapter, each chapter feeling like its own pocket of development. At times I’d draft things on my phone but it was very sparse. I kinda would just have some vague idea of what assets I needed and then I’d fit them into my writing.
For my next VN, I wrote things first in larger chunks. Its a much more complex story so I had to, I found that the method of making assets then writing after wasn’t working in this story because I had a clear idea of what I wanted to write and I felt I had to work that out first otherwise it would be too overwhelming. Plus, for the length of the story, it helps me work faster if i just write things out more first rather than putting assets and words together on the fly. So for SPECIAL GIRLS i’d write them on a word processor device called Alphasmart and then transfer them into the Renpy scripts, adding all the sounds and sprites etc. Way less writing directly into Renpy, I spent more time in .rpy files doing editing and corrections than actual substantial writing. I’d just go over everything over and over and add and fix and tweak things, but never any major rewriting or rearranging of plot or scene. It feels a lot like painting, this process.. layers of editing. I’ll say I really love working with Renpy, its very fun and seamless. Maybe the most tedious part is putting in the sprites! For SPECIAL GIRLS I also began dividing the chapters in arbitrary “act” files, and to know what i’d have to write i would take a piece of paper and write a list of scenes i wanna do for the acts, with one sentence or phrase each, then i’d work from there writing in sessions. The Alphasmart helped me really absorb myself into it, because it doesn’t have a screen, so it’s almost like handwriting except you can transcribe it into a textfile directly.
I love the memories of writing it a lot.. going on long walks and having the ideas come to me. I feel like a lot of time has been spent on the script and skeleton and sprites for that vn and I haven’t truly dived into the visual part like I wanted to because I felt like they had to be separate for more effective development.

Sofa: I’m interested in film, and i’d like to experiment with that someday :3 i’ve been singing for fun.. i kind of want to try this more and see where i can go with it too. thats it though. Oh.. maybe rpg maker? but thats toughie for me, pixel art.. more of a pipe dream!

Sofa: i want to play To Heart but its not translated.. but ive played a bit of To Heart 2! Shizuku looks interesting..