Futaba Channel
Futaba Channel (ふたば☆ちゃんねる), or Futaba for short, is a popular, anonymous imageboard and bulletin board system based in Japan. It is essentially the image board of the heavily popular Japanese mega-BBS 2ch; while it is related, it is not run by 2ch's founder, Hiroyuki Nishimura.
Futaba's image boards usually do not distinguish between pornographic and "clean" content, but there is a strict barrier between two-dimensional (drawn) and three-dimensional (CG and photographic) pictures that is heavily enforced and debated.
Futaba has a culture of its own, including
- Waha, Musu and Choia. The cute character Suzuran was featured in the erotic game Suigetsu; Futabaites changed her appearance somewhat and called her "Waha", after a common exclamation she utters in the game. Her sister, Musu, and her "pet human", Choia, are original creations by Futaba artists.
- Yaranaika? Literally means "Shall we do it?" As it does in English, in Japanese this phrase can have an erotic subtext. It was used in a homosexual erotic comic book "Kuso Miso Technique", that was endlessly parodied by Futabaites.
- Heika, aka 'His Majesty', a strange-looking man with a pointed helmet from the TV show Space Warriors Baldios, has been transformed from a murdered monarch into master pimp by Futaba.
- Taicho, or 'the Captain', in reality Marine Sgt. Parish J. Harvey of Company L, 3/8, whose commanding visage has been mutated into countless parodies. Taicho's appearances are mostly concentrated at 2chan's military related imageboard, even if the pictures he's in aren't.
- Saizensenkun, aka 'Mr. Front Line', a creepy-looking photographer from somewhere in Japan who frequents anime conventions. (It must be getting hard for him because of his rising infamy.) On Futaba's image boards he is spliced into warzones, crises, press conferences, and movies.
- OS-tan A set of fan-made, cute mascots for various Operating Systems.
- A gaijin yonkoma is a 4-panel comic with many variations, usually interspersing 'good' and 'bad' images with two stock reactions. The reaction pictures used show four attendees at E³, apparently a group of editors from IGN responding to news of a Zelda video game. One picture has the four sitting in chairs, with little emotion; the other shows a similar group cheering wildly. The images have also been used as models for anime characters drawn in the same poses, most notably Akane, Mitsuki and Haruka from Kimi Ga Nozomu Eien. An interesting thing to note is that some people have swapped seats and changed their clothing between photographs, whereas the comic form implies they're immediately sequential.
Some of the characters that appear in Futaba also become various goods, such as figure, doll or image printed on pillow, which is mainly produced by Japanese dōjin party.
The default name for anonymous users of Futaba is "Toshiaki". However, it does not mean "anonymous" in Japanese. A user calling himself "toshiaki" repeatedly posted messages requesting others to upload a Doujinshi. Later, everyone on the board started using his name to post stupid things, and eventually this was so common that the site keeper changed the default "anonymous" name to "toshiaki". To distinguish between different "Toshiaki", some of them are called "something-aki". For example, the original designer of ME-tan, one of the OS-tan, is referred to as "ME-aki".
The Futaba bulletin board system is so popular that it has a small American following. Since non-Japanese people are not allowed to post to the image boards, the Americans created "4chan", which is similar to Futaba except that the major board divisions are between pornographic and non-pornographic content as well as two-dimensional and three-dimensional content, and the primary language is English.
Americans sometimes refer to an entity called "2chan". It is unclear whether this means Futaba Channel or 2ch, and sometimes it even refers to both, as if they were a single website. To eliminate confusion, the names "Futaba" and "2ch" are usually preferred.
External links
Categories: 2ch | Internet forums