I did some digging into the identity behind the Cure Dolly character after finding the videos quite helpful. There is what I recall being a fairly credible trail of evidence that the proprietor is formerly associated with the Silver Sisterhood, AKA the "Lesbian Spanking Cult", which has popped up on HN a number of times due to their involvement in the early text adventure video game industry.
This is what I could find from a few minutes of searching, although it's not really much evidence either way: https://pastebin.com/eHtG45pf
I have no skin in this game, but I wouldn't be surprised that someone with a brilliant mind would also have, to put it bluntly, "a bunch of weird shit."
The online Japanese learning community is pretty notorious for its drama. I previously worked at a small language learning company and the amount of drama we got from the Japanese learners was totally disproportionate from the drama we got from other learners.
Given her presumed age, and what happened in 2020, I am not surprised that she died in 2021. The connection with Japanese lessons and early text adventure games is rather unusual, however.
i randomly stumbled upon the connection as well while reading about the St. Bride's School. such a random connection between two completely different interests of mine that i joked the universe is a simulation with limited RAM and reuses assets
Cure Dolly has _some_ connection to this group which, to me, just adds even more mystique to an already fascinating story[1]
Having come across the connection from somewhere else entirely, I found it a very curious rabbit hole. I saw recently a website that attempts to summarise the whole thing (not quite complete) [1], with a section on St. Bride's.
Then there's the oral history someone posted on Something Awful some years ago [2] -- from someone who may have accidentally indirectly derailed the entire movement.
So eroge. Makes a ton of sense. Nowadays it'll probably be dojinshi. Why don't anyone else make and ship ton of those? It looks like foreign exports of pornography, especially generative than recorded, is not at all an insignificant source of soft power for Japan.
Overseas there is barely enough demand in cities with high Japanese population to support a subset of new releases of physical Japanese comics, I don't think physical eroge would be viable. Considering how niche it would be for overseas people it makes sense to just have them buy it digitally on dlsite and not have to worry about logistics for it.
