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Feb 20, 2012
On Asperger’s
Around the time of my last post I came pretty close to responding to something on the KS forum, then remembered that I’d seriously just turn into a troll in five seconds flat if I started responding to self-diagnosed Aspies on an anonymous internet forum.
…I burn a lot of bridges sometimes.
The topic is still going strong at the forum, and I still don’t have any intent to touch it. The battle would quickly become “I’m a doctor, and you’re wrong” versus “I’m an Aspie, and you’re not”. Because I’d be fighting with self-diagnosed Aspies, the thread would extend for miles and miles, pages and pages. At some point the war might be won, but mankind would have lost.
So, Asperger’s. I sorta knew I’d have to touch on the subject sooner or later, if I was going to write anything medically related to Katawa Shoujo. Better to get it out of the way now.
Today’s post is only tangentially related to KS, and a little bit more serious than the rest of my liveblogging efforts or the Disability FAQ, so skip if you don’t care about the subject matter. I’ll try not to be an asshole, promise.
Feb 7, 2012
Act 1, part 4.
(A medically-trained douchebag liveblogs Katawa Shoujo. See also: Site introduction / KS Disability FAQ)
I didn’t lose my save after all—it got buried in a bunch of Emi saves and had a screenshot of the track. Unfortunately, the save was stuck at the end of Act 1 heading for the Emi/Rin paths, and I’d decided to blog Lilly’s route, so it’s time to start over.
Since the path you take significantly alters Hisao’s personality, it seems reasonable for a visual novel to give Hisao additional heart troubles if he chooses not to follow Emi’s diet and exercise regimen. But given how well he recovered in the prologue and most of Act 1, the dramatic difference between Emi’s and Lilly’s routes are still a little surprising, even if it makes for a better story. But back to Lilly’s route — though we’re actually still in Act 1:
Feb 3, 2012
Rin. It’s Rin. This isn’t even a valid question. Somebody give the man some antidepressants.
This is what happens when a guy needs a hug but his girl doesn’t have any arms.
Feb 2, 2012
welcometotheownzone asked: i'm not looking forward to the day where you get bored of ks and stop posting, because i love reading your posts. your style is accessible and informative without being boring hoofshit. i'd love to read your main blog but i get that anonymity is a concern, so i hope you keep writing stuff on this one for at least a little while longer
Thank you for the kind words. Actually, I haven’t had much inspiration to write medical stuff anywhere else in the last two or three years—KS just happened to push all the right buttons at the same time. I rarely pop stuff over at my main tumblr, but it’s been months since I wrote anything remotely substantive over there.
Also I saved this thing as a draft where’d the fucking reply privately button go
Feb 2, 2012
Pretty sure Lilly route is what I’ll be blogging next. Currently working my way through the epilogue as I write this post. Enjoyed the story, but raged countless times toward the end. Trying real hard not to diagnose Lilly’s writer with multiple psychiatric comorbidities as I read this.
Also Lilly just went whooosh which I’m pretty sure is inappropriate for the inside of a hospital room whether you’re in Japan or America or Scotland
Ok maybe not Scotland
Anyway Hisao’s ok when he’s talking to Lilly and other people, i mean it’s even ok when he can’t stop being emo, but once he opens his goddamn trap to talk about medical stuff I can’t help but start to wonder what other brilliant insights he will have to offer when he develops post-MI pericarditis or something, maybe he will wax feverishly about the inadequacies of american japanese healthcare as a doctor pumps him full of baby aspirins saving his life yet again with one of the many miracles of modern science
OH MY GOD DON’T STOP TO TALK ABOUT YOUR IV HISAO THINGS WERE BETTER WHEN YOU WERE WAXING PHILOSOPHICAL ABOUT LOVE TRUST AND DEDICATION TO YOUR BLIND CRIPPLED SOULMATE
Thankfully the brief interjection ends and we’re back to lovey dovey. Aww isn’t that cute. ♥
emi route was undeniably superior
Jan 31, 2012
On the Art of Diagnosis
Just happened across this while browsing the internets tonight.
One important aspect of this was to have a realistic portrayal of the various disabilities, which Aura attributes to the extensive research undertaken by the development team. “We have a medical professional in-team to take care of fact-checking, and we studied about the disabilities and the conditions and the real-world solutions to them,” Aura explains. “There are creative liberties here and there, but we did feel it was important to give a sense of realism to the disabilities.”
I missed this quote from a week or two ago (it would require that I read Kotaku, for starters), but this certainly adds an extra element to the game—one in which I’m not just an anonymous consultant passing along some information on tumblr, but rather a participant trying to decipher whatever clues were left behind by the authors…
Jan 30, 2012
Holy shit there’s Katawa Shoujo AA.
On a tangent I can’t connect to the doujin board on 2ch at its new location for some reason - hope the KS fanbase wasn’t responsible for this…
Edit - it’s back. Hanlon’s razor - “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
Jan 30, 2012
Focus
We’ve all got a friend who is more musically inclined than we are.
To this friend, your taste in music is shit, and you can’t sing worth half a damn. Music that doesn’t break new ground and redefine genres is trash, its composers revolting in appearance, its listeners crude and unrefined. Your friend can bloviate for hours on the subtle yet vast differences between bipolar disorder type I and cyclothymia Luciano Pavarotti and Andrea Bocelli. You’d ask him if you needed advice on picking out an album to give as a gift; at the same time, the chances of you showing him your secret collection of Justin Bieber are close to nil.
So it’s always good to hear that a writer thinks the writing in KS is shit:
“Too much reading” or “too much detail” is often a criticism that people who don’t like visual novels, which are about reading and details, levy at the genre. But this just isn’t good reading. They aren’t useful details. The prose is concrete-legged; it defies engrossment.
There’s a limit to this, though. It strikes me that Ms. Alexander herself has fairly good insight into what makes KS itself somewhat magical:
Yet that’s no small thing, its existence, that it was born entirely from a strange internet culture nebula and the dogged effort of those devoted to bringing it to life. I can’t look at the hundreds of thousands of posts on the forum, fan works and art on message boards, I can’t look at how loved Katawa Shoujo and its characters are by those who made it possible and those who deeply wanted it to be born and say I’m not glad of its existence.
That it exists says so much about games as a medium of cultural expression that it doesn’t even really matter to me if the game is “good”. The internet made, lovingly, a game about romance with disabled girls. That’s so weird; that’s so wonderful.
On the other side of the spectrum, there’s a college professor trying to analyze KS, in part by means of internet survey (sounds like a recipe for success). And dear lord, it sounds like the man is in love.
Reality is probably somewhere in between. It’s not the best writing ever, but it’s not too shabby either; it’s a work of love and it shows.
As for me I don’t know shit about literature and fine writing, so I don’t have any problems enjoying the game—after that pseudo-medical prologue, at least. …Speaking of which, now that I’m done writing that disability FAQ, I’m going to actually sit down and play the fucking game. ☆
[ Katawa Shoujo Disability FAQ | Site introduction ]
Jan 28, 2012
The premise of Katawa Shoujo requires this to be true. A visual novel about mentally disabled students, with a more realistically brain-damaged Hisao, would simply border on pure mockery of the disabled. Plus, it probably wouldn’t be very engaging.
You rock back and forth on your wheelchair, groaning like a zombie. Drool runs down the corner of your paralyzed mouth. Your overweight caretaker glances briefly at you to determine that your movements are volitional and non-epileptic before returning her full focus to the daytime soap blaring away on the decrepit television mounted in the corner of the room…
Jan 27, 2012
WHOOOSH
Every single important moment in Katawa Shoujo.
Confession of love? Whooosh. Tender moment shared between two kindred souls blindly in love? Whoooosh. Young couple experimenting in a shed early in the morning? Whooosh. Naked bathtime together? Whoosh. Crippled armless girl masturbating alone? Whooooooosh.
Goddamnit guys.
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A physician plays through the amateur visual novel, Katawa Shoujo. These are his thoughts.
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