2chan
Futaba Channel (ふたば☆ちゃんねる), or Futaba for short, is a popular, anonymous 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 is best known for its image boards, where anyone in Japan can anonymously post a picture for the world to see. These 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", and invented her sister, Musu, and her "pet human", Choia.
- 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 that was endlessly parodied by Futabaites.
- Heika, aka 'His Majesty', a strange-looking man with a pointed helmet from the TV show 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.
Some of the characters appear in Futaba also become various goods, such as figure, doll or image printed on pillow, which is mainly produced by Japanese doujin party.
The Futaba bulletin board system is so popular that it has a small American following. Since non-Japanese people cannot 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.
