Moral.
So, oft in theologic wars
____The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
____Of what each other mean,
And prate about an Elephant
____Not one of them has seen!
Katawa Shoujo is a game and a work of fiction, and like all works of fiction, there is a sense in which it's a collection of lies. These are all lies we tell ourselves, but it's not always clear where the lies end and the truth begins.
We can all be delightfully surprised when a shy, quiet little Japanese girl accidentally lets slip an observation of the human condition that is as profound as an elephant is large, and at the same time is perhaps as many-faceted as such a strange creature. Then we can remember that it's all just a character written into a game by a whole team of writers, and wonder what it all really meant underneath the facade of an entertaining little story. What is it that we are really supposed to take with us as we leave the library, beyond a handful of interesting stories?
Physical handicaps aside, all of us at times think we can save ourselves from being hurt by running away from the people we care about. We can blindly follow the wishes of our families out of a misplaced sense of responsibility. We can find ourselves unable to reach out and touch others no matter how creative we are. We can fail to hear what the people around us are trying to say out of selfish ambition and pride. We can even shut ourselves away from the world and wish that the mistakes of our past would just let us disappear.
I don't think anyone ever really believed for a moment that the person writing these words was a twenty-year-old Japanese girl, but who I am doesn't matter when it comes to telling the story that I wanted to tell with these words. I had to tell it for me, and there was a part of me that, even though it may sound cheesy or overly sentimental, had to tell it for anyone and everyone who cared to read. I think somewhere in all of us is a scared and confused teenage boy with a broken heart who needs to be told an easy lie in order to see a deeper truth.
Like Hanako, I've got scars. There are scars that you can see, and scars that you can't, and most of us have some amount of both. In the midst of writing this, I began to see a cognitive therapist in real life to deal with my invisible scars. I'm sure I'm over simplifying the concept, but cognitive therapy consists of telling yourself constant lies about how much better your life is than you think it is until you start to believe it. Maybe life isn't stranger than fiction, but rather is just another form of fiction in its own strange and maybe wonderful way.
I was delightfully surprised to find that a game like this could have messages about the human condition as deep as it does. When it first came out, I had largely ignored it, but then I saw the way it had affected the Internet community and I had to give it a look for myself. It was clearly not just a story about a collection of beautiful girls, but girls with a collection of beautiful stories. Like all good fiction, it had something to say not just about the characters in the story, but about the readers, whoever they happened to be, because we all deal with these very same issues in our lives.
I think that's another interesting phenomenon that happened as a result of this, even though I haven't participated much personally; to a great extent, this game has created a sense of community for a lot of people. As Hisao came to see Yamaku as a new home, so fans of this game came to find fan sites as a new Internet home, and from what I've seen, a lot of those communities are above par in the quality of interactions. Perhaps these people are "connected more closely than ever in our shared grief, and our shared happiness." I'd like to think so, anyway.
Well, thanks for reading. The library is closed.
