This week, we received the devastating news from his family that our friend and co-worker Yoran Heling, known to most as Yorhel, had passed away without warning on March 17, 2026.

He’s most widely known as the founder of VNDB, a great visual novel database that has supported the fandom and localization scene from its humble beginnings. However, he has also been the webmaster of Fruitbat Factory since our founding 12 years ago, and we knew him even before that from our time in the visual novel fan translation scene, where he was helping groups with hosting and other technical solutions. Yoran was a steadfast rock of the emerging localization scene, always around, uninterested in and even avoiding the spotlight, but he’s done more to make the current Japanese to English localization ecosystem exist than most people can appreciate, and he was an important member of our staff.

Yoran has done a lot for us, from hosting (and making) our front-facing homepage, to hosting our internal tools and services. We never needed to learn much about web development, because whatever our need was, we just had to ask him and he’d always find the best solution like magic.

Just this month, Yoran was visiting Japan for the first time, the country whose culture he’s been so entwined in for the longest time. I was very excited to learn about it, and gave him many tips for the trip. Ozhan had a chance to show him around Tokyo at the end of his trip – to my own everlasting regret, I missed him by a day on my own latest arrival to Tokyo, so I never got the chance to meet him in person, having to settle for Ozhan’s accounting of the places they went and things they did. By all accounts, he had a great time.

No one can be replaced, but it feels like Yoran is leaving behind an outsized hole. The world is a little less hospitable, a little harder to navigate, a little less bright without his steady presence.

My thoughts go to all of his friends and family in this dark time.

Jakke Elonen
Fruitbat Factory