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[Aura]

Well it should be pretty obvious. KS is a romance story with a theme harem set in a Japanese highschool stuffed with a bunch of (sometimes) weakly justified tropes that come with that territory. I don't think KS sucks (or even that VNs in a more general sense do), it just belongs to a genre that doesn't interest me much as a reader and doesn't really break stuff hard enough to be interesting because of that. People sometimes ask me if I don't feel conflicted about my attitude towards (some) VNs despite having made KS, or even straight out accuse me of hypocrisy, but I've sorted my feelings perfectly well. Making a visual novel is a completely different experience from reading one and involves a ton more stuff than whether you enjoy the genre or not.

[Atario]

Mmmm, I can kinda see what you're saying. However, don't be too hard on it; it does several things that aren't often seen in the medium (that I know of):

• It pretty thoroughly deconstructs each heroine's assigned trope, and subverts a few others
• It addresses a topic that is woefully unaddressed even in Western media, much less Japanese media (disabilities)
• It does a good job of making the reader feel intense and often very personal identification with the characters and situations involved

I wouldn't fault it just because it doesn't upend everything in the world all at once. Rome wasn't built in a day.

This has been today's episode of Defending An Author's Work To Himself. WTF.

Oh, and just in case it's not kosher to not ask a dev question in this thread:

Was the dev group fairly egalitarian? Or was there one person or small group who was felt to be "in charge"?

[Aura]

Yes and no. There was no real formal hierarchy, though technically some people acted as a sort of a "final word" when needed: the producers for matters of organization and me for the script. In fact the job of a "producer" in 4LS meant that you were ultimately responsible for the stuff that didn't directly involve making some element of KS.

In practice those who worked the hardest to sort stuff out and argued the most vigorously for their viewpoints and commanded natural authority the best were in charge in some vague way. However, nobody could force anyone else to do anything, so anyone was in charge only as far as the others were willing to listen to what they said.

[Passerby]

I've only completed the routes of Emi, Hanako and Lilly. But from what I've seen so far, these stories are completely devoid of the one thing that is so ubiquitous in teenagers' lives in a modern society today - social media. No one tweets, no one updates their Facebook status, no taking of pictures and sharing of them, and no sending of text messages even. The phone that Hanako uses in her story is clearly not a smart phone. Since it is said that it is expensive and a gift from Lilly, it must be a late model and not something cheap that Lilly picked up from the discount section. I feel as if the stories are set in the early to mid 2000s because of these.

So, my question is this: Is it a deliberate artistic direction? If so, why?
Does the inception of this project being in the mid-2000s have anything to do with this?
Or is this a VN trope? (I haven't played many VNs)

I haven't read the whole thread so my apologies if these questions have been asked and answered.

[Aura]

Yes, the story is not set in the year you're reading it in. This would've been difficult for us to pull off. Approximately as hard would've been setting it in the release year, because there was no way for us to know what year we were going to release. So the story is set in a year we were actually familiar with at the time we had to decide this.

Social media, as ubiquitous as it is now, was not a core part of people's lives 5-10 years ago (which is the setting of KS, roughly in 2007). Same for smart phones. Facebook, Twitter, iPhone - all of these have come to wider public consciousness after the events of KS. We also just didn't feel like making a point of something like Emi talking to people on mixi or other stuff that would've been chronologically realistic. She probably does, it just is irrelevant to the story.

[bhtooefr]

Is Hisao's guess at Hideaki's age (15-16) right, or given that he also got Hideaki's gender wrong, did he get his age wrong (presumably too high of a guess)? If so, how old is Hideaki?

[ksfan1989]

Here's one that I just can't wrap my head around:

How are Shizune and Lilly related? I mean, I know they're cousins, but what's the connection? More specifically, where does the Satou family name fit into the picture?

If Lilly's father is Jigoro's brother, then they should share a family name. But if Lilly's mother is Jigoro's sister, Lilly's father would be Scottish and Lilly's family name should be Scottish. The only way I can figure out that this would work is if Jigoro took his wife's name, but given what we know about him that doesn't seem like something he'd be willing to do.

What am I missing here? Or is this just a plot hole?

Oh, and another question (hope I'm not asking too many!).

Who recorded the background voices for the "crowd" scenes? Like, in the cafeteria, there's a bunch of background chatter that's really hard to make out. Is that the devs? Any chance we can find out what's actually being said? It mostly sounds like nonsense but it's hard to make out clearly.

[Erenussocrates]

^ Adding to the last question, also where did those crowds voices got recorded?

And... Do you know about Cards Against Humanity board/card game? I've seen an online browser adaptation of that game on Google, and upon checking up, seen that it also features cards with Katawa Shoujo theme too.
Here is the exact site: http://pyz.socialgamer.net/index.php
Did you know about this?

[Aura]

Is Hisao's guess at Hideaki's age (15-16) right, or given that he also got Hideaki's gender wrong, did he get his age wrong (presumably too high of a guess)? If so, how old is Hideaki?

He got it about right.

[Aura]

Who recorded the background voices for the "crowd" scenes? Like, in the cafeteria, there's a bunch of background chatter that's really hard to make out. Is that the devs? Any chance we can find out what's actually being said? It mostly sounds like nonsense but it's hard to make out clearly.

This again.

The crowd noise is from some sound bank delta had, you can dig through the thread to find the exact one from the previous times this question has been asked. We don't know what's said.

[Aura]

No I didn't know about the CAH cards, but that's an unofficial online clone of the game right? It's not surprising that a semi-popular game gets cards made out of it.

[LemonPirate]

As a writer myself I often find that I will subconsciously (or consciously) draw Ideas or Inspiration from other novels or even historical events. As a writer yourself, how often and what did you draw inspiration off during the writing of KS, if at all and if your peers (the other writers in the dev team) did also draw ideas from other novels or events (non-personal)? If you could be specific that would be great
Thanks Aura

-LemonPirate

[Aura]

I can't think at least off the top of my head of anything in KS that I've written where I could say something like "yeah this bit here, this was inspired by so-and-so", except I guess the part where I do a metaphor of the nature of art with a stanza from Blake's Auguries of Innocence. Inspiration and influence for me are more vague things, all the stuff that I experience melts together into some sort of concept soup from which I "get my ideas from". It's often not easy to pin down. That said, of course literature is and should be a massive continuous process, with writers of every generation being inspired by the ones before them and so on.

[icannotfindausername]

Why is my login not being recognized in the "Shimmie" section.
And for that matter; what the hell is the Shimmie section ?

[TheHivemind]

As a writer myself I often find that I will subconsciously (or consciously) draw Ideas or Inspiration from other novels or even historical events. As a writer yourself, how often and what did you draw inspiration off during the writing of KS, if at all and if your peers (the other writers in the dev team) did also draw ideas from other novels or events (non-personal)? If you could be specific that would be great
Thanks Aura

-LemonPirate

I would be hard pressed to point at any one particular source that I drew on. The "I've got stuff to do" exchange was inspired by a similar scene from somewhere, but I can't remember where, or even if it was a cartoon, comic, book, or television show. Not the actual dialog, mind, but the shape of it drew on...something. Even at the time I couldn't remember the exact source, and the years have not helped.

So "at least once" is the best answer I can give, beyond "everything I've read, listened to, watched, and otherwise experienced, all the time" which is probably the more accurate thing to say.