Ask!

[Aura]

There should be no cause for concern. I gave permission to use Hanako in a fictional poster in one of the background illustrations of the game. Hanako the character will not appear.

[Aura]

Yeah I don't care to look for my numbers or do the math again myself, but that post about Act 1 probabilities above looks like it can't be right. If you guys want to work it out (possibly actually worthwhile), take it to a new thread.

[Sohtak]

Back with a question I feel might have been asked already years ago.

As writers...does it make you Happy,Creeped out or Concerned the way people have bonded with the girls? And in some cases the side characters like Mutou,Nurse and Yukko.

All these stories about how one girls route changed a persons life, Or another about how the game itself gave people the drive to do something they didn't have before. Like for example "Emi's route inspired me to run and get healthy and I'm doing better than I've ever done" etc etc.

I understand the girls were written in such a way that the player (Reader?) would inevitably click with that ONE girl they can relate too, Or all of them of course.

Nevermind the obvious Waifu aspects, Or does the waifu aspect creep you out as well? Although it's kind of a given with a game like this

[Aura]

As writers...does it make you Happy,Creeped out or Concerned the way people have bonded with the girls?

None of them. I've been around long enough to become insensitive to how fan cultures of fictional characters work. KS isn't special just because I happened to make it.

I guess if I step back and think about it, it's weird. How many of you would casually discuss with, say, your parents what a wonderful girl Hanako is? It is weird, by social norms of the uninitiated. On the other hand, the intensity and longevity of the fan community means that we did something right... though by a measure we ourselves aren't likely to use for "success". I don't think KS is worthy of the adoration it gets, but I recognize that things like this aren't a matter of getting what something deserves.

Ultimately, I suppose it makes me happy after all. Why else would I still keep in touch with the community (even if it's a pretty limited way)? We made something that's meaningful to a whole lot of people, and that's a great thing. In fact, I suspect KS's popularity has made us a little blind to how lucky and blessed we are to have made something so beloved.

[BMFJack]

I was wondering how much background information was decided/discussed for background characters like Mutou or Nurse.

Specifically, is Mutou married/does he have kids?

How old is Nurse?

[Aura]

Neither of those details were decided, as they have no bearing to the story.

[Kon22]

As the creator of a VN, and just in general, do you think it's necessary for a work, a VN or a book, to be anything more than just something fun, or an excercise on storytelling? Alternatively, do you think a work is 'better' when it has something to say, than when it's just telling a story? This kind of discussion is very common in music and the such, not so much in mediums which involve storytelling, but I'll still ask.

[Aura]

As the creator of a VN, and just in general, do you think it's necessary for a work, a VN or a book, to be anything more than just something fun, or an excercise on storytelling? Alternatively, do you think a work is 'better' when it has something to say, than when it's just telling a story? This kind of discussion is very common in music and the such, not so much in mediums which involve storytelling, but I'll still ask.

It's super important to have something to say. If you have nothing to say, how can you write a story? You will end up with a meaningless collection of words. Meaning is fundamental to storytelling. Even almost all stories you think are "just telling a story", even the simplest ones, carry meaning, themes and values. Stories that are "just telling a story" are stuff like the five piggies nursery rhyme, or something a bored 5 year old comes up with.

Now, what I think you're asking about is whether a story needs to have a "message". This is, in my mind, an important thing (or many), value or point of view the author wants to communicate to the reader. It's not necessary. It doesn't automatically make a story better either. However, all other things being equal, a well-crafted message does elevate a story and make it better. Conversely, a badly crafted message makes the story worse than it would otherwise have been. Communicating meaning, or a message, is a very difficult skill to master. If done badly, the work can come off as preachy, confusing, trite or contradictory. That's why writers should always be very acutely aware of what they're saying.

[TheHivemind]

As writers...does it make you Happy,Creeped out or Concerned the way people have bonded with the girls?

Everyone has that one thing they latch on to now and again, and it becomes SUPER IMPORTANT and LIFE-CHANGING for a while, and there's absolutely no telling where it will come from, and there's always someone to shake their head and wonder whether you might not be better served going outside rather than, you know, obsessing over a drawing. But sometimes stories do that to you, and that's okay as long as you don't forget to move on at some point--you're allowed to still love the thing, but all things in moderation, you know?

Frankly, however, I'd be a huge liar if I didn't say that I feel oddly pleased that Emi has got so many people out and running (or claiming to do so, anyway). That's something tangibly good to come out of the whole thing, and that's neat!

As the creator of a VN, and just in general, do you think it's necessary for a work, a VN or a book, to be anything more than just something fun, or an excercise on storytelling? Alternatively, do you think a work is 'better' when it has something to say, than when it's just telling a story? This kind of discussion is very common in music and the such, not so much in mediums which involve storytelling, but I'll still ask.

Fiction is, according to some dead guy whose book I read, "about what it is to be a fucking human being," and so as a result all fiction is about something, either intentionally or not. Setting out to deliver a hard message of truth to the people is a lousy way to write a book, although sometimes it works out okay (see: Invisible Man, one of my favorite books hands down, and, unfortunately, still relevant). You always want your story to be about something, and that something is usually about something very human that you either think you've got figured out, or you're trying to figure out, or maybe it's just an idea that interests you and you want to explore it. Sometimes writing a short story is about flexing a creative muscle ("can I write science fiction" or "can I talk about this thing that bothers me without being explicit about it," or just "can I write porn and have it not be hilariously bad?" (the answer to that last question is a resounding "nope!")), but the good stuff? The stuff that sticks with people? That's going to be the stuff you write where you tried to figure out what it is to be a fucking human being, in some fashion or another.

As a younger man I liked to point to Tolkein's denial that LOTR was anything more than a story for fun as a way of shitting on literary criticism, but Tolkein's stated intent with his whole Middle Earth deal was to give a mythology to Britain, which had sort of never had one, because it abandoned it in favor of obsessing over Rome's mythology--and what is mythology but a series of stories trying to explain what the fuck is going on in the world? Plus I mean dude had some heavy shit to work through after watching literally all his friends die in the first world war, so there's going to be a lot of people carrying on in the face of daunting, impossible, depressing-ass odds (I mean the elves literally refer to their whole time in Middle Earth as the Long Defeat, holy SHIT my boy Tolkein is a depressing dude). Even Oscar Wilde, with all his aestheticism and "art for art's sake" wound up writing Dorian Grey, which is basically a big ol' book about how sooner or later a rotten fuck is going to be exposed as a rotten fuck (in simplistic terms), so I mean, dude was talking out of his ass a little.

Like Aura said, though, there's a difference between being about something and wanting to deliver a message--although I tend to think that the best message books and the best books without messages kind of share the same ranking, if only because even the books without a message are still saying something about being alive, and that's worth looking at and discussing and hey, it can even change your whole goddamn outlook on life.

When we sat down to do KS, we settled on the idea that our various heroines would all be fully fleshed people, and their disabilities would not be the center of whatever conflict they had to overcome in order to send the message that these were just people like the rest of us. I'm not sure how successful I was on that score--Emi's conflict is sort of centered around the events that caused her disability, after all--but even we started out with a message of sorts.

Everything means something, even "storytelling exercises." The measure of whether or not they are any good is partially reliant on whether or not the person writing realizes that and pays attention to what they're doing. Otherwise it's poorly written crap.

[Ryusashi]

I enjoyed each of the chars, but one has so many memorable quotes that its almost impossible not to laugh when you say them: kenji. My god he is hilarious, and it lead me to wonder, where did he come from? Is he a representation of someone you know/a group? The feminist conspiracy is strong today because he is my hero! Kinda same question, but when you created each of the girls, did you look to someone you knew that had that personality? Fleshing out the characters was a great way to start, and it shows with each character.

[Aura]

Kenji is somewhat similar to the online persona of his creator, A22. Not really based on, but the similarities are there even if Kenji is very exaggerated and cartoonish.

To my knowledge none of the characters are based on any actual or fictional people we know. All of them are influenced by hundreds of sources, of course.

[ParagonTerminus]

What would KS have been named if not Katawa Shoujo?

And no, "Cripplefuck Simulator" doesn't count.

[Aura]

We actually briefly considered changing the name when KS first made rounds in the Japanese parts of the internet. All the alternatives we came up with were godawful though (not that anyone spent much time on thinking about it). That, plus that the name was bestowed on the project by RAITA's picture, plus that it'd just be known as "the visual novel formerly known as Katawa Shoujo", plus that we would've had to rebuild our presence under the new name made us give up on changing the name. Even though the name is pretty problematic, I don't mind it too much.

Most suggestions for the new name revolved around heart-related words or (im)perfection. As for actual suggestions, I only remember that someone offered "Coeur", the French word for heart. The logic of wanting to swap a Japanese name to a French one in an English work remains a mystery.

[cpl_crud]

I was wondering how much background information was decided/discussed for background characters like Mutou or Nurse.

Specifically, is Mutou married/does he have kids?

How old is Nurse?

To add to The Hivemind and Aura's comments on this topic already, I would like to add the following thought to the "Did you ever consider background information..." type questions.

Aura has repeatedly mentioned that if something didn't show up in the game (either the final version or our production) then we usually didn't even discuss it.
It is kind of like a reverse Checkov's Gun. Anything that we needed in the story, for whatever reason, was included, discussed and (in rare cases) decided upon. Anything that wasn't directly needed by the story simply wasn't thought of - simply because there was more than enough information that we did include, which left little to no attention span to the finer details.

If we needed it for the story, it was thought of, and almost universally included in the text. Details like number of children or drinking habits of secondary characters simply didn't matter enough...

[cpl_crud]

someone offered "Coeur", the French word for heart. The logic of wanting to swap a Japanese name to a French one in an English work remains a mystery.

You'd be playing right into Japanese sensibilities. They seem to love multilingual bonus points.

Love, yes.

Understand... maybe not so much.

We could have called it "Merde" and they wouldn't have cared.

Also, "Katawa" is pretty much an archaic word, to the point where most Japanese people I have talked to have to stop and think about the actual meaning of the word. I wish I knew this when we were getting precious about the Japanese name...