I have a bunch of friends who watch animes (a lot), one of them watched Hakuouki, and I kinda got excited to see what she thought about it:
Me: "Hey hey, what do you think of the anime?"
Friend: "It was great with the plot and all, but I just found out it was from a harem game? Meh..."
Me: "...Oh, okay..."
My friends either have no idea about visual novels/otome, or if someone does know of the existence, they'll think of it as a "dating and harem" game ;A; I mean that's not even close... The special case is I have only one friend who plays Voltage games, and she doesn't even like talking about it.
Other than that, the community here where I live is veerry small - even online there's only so few people who I know that play otome games. It's hard to expand the community somehow ><