All right. As always with a Brythain piece, I’m at something of a disadvantage—your voice and pacing is just
so different from my oeuvre that it, to some degree, undermines my ability to provide a thoughtful analysis. Add that to the fact that I haven’t finished
After the Dream (it’s an attention deficit thing that ties uniquely into my thought process as a writer; the Brythainverse is so far removed from my own take on the source material that seeing how
Brythain does something makes me want to contemplate how
I would do it, and from there my thought process drifts somewhere else entirely and I forget I’m reading a story), and I don’t know how well my commentary will avoid sounding like abject ignorance.
I feel like one of the most compelling stories here gets waved aside in a single sentence: “
… have lunch with whichever girl has decided to pity me.” This
isn’t that story, so I don’t want to dwell too much on how interesting I find that premise, but let me just say that there’s something
good there—I like the idea of a literary montage where a down-in-the-dumps Hisao has lunch or going on mini-dates with a cavalcade of different girls (your Parvatis and Lavenders, if you get what I’m saying) and the added social exposure just makes him feel all the more
empty.
There’s one other untaken opportunity I feel the need to remark upon, though this one would have required significantly less effort than the previous one;
Hisao, in the
snow, walking deep into the
forest with a
cute girl? With so many asides already characteristic in your work, I think you could have easily fit in some pensive reflection here about the similarity to the circumstances which led to his heart attack. Honestly, that could have enriched/lengthened Hisao’s dialogue with Rin here—given that, as Dewelar mentioned, Rin and Hisao aren’t emotionally intimate in this timeline, maybe he could have tried to bridge that gap a little bit by relaying the anecdote to Rin as they headed towards the Sadness tree. To the best of my knowledge, this doesn’t happen in the actual Rin route, and I think it’s probably rare in
fanfiction too, so it would have been especially compelling to see your take on how Rin would respond to the story.
(Oh, okay, let me just say one more little thing on the matter: “Iwanako never replies” is one of my least favorite inevitabilities in
Katawa Shoujo fanfiction. Okay, done.)
You know, honestly—knowing full well that writing in the “journal entry” format is the air you breathe and the water you drink, I think this is an installment where it might have become a weakness. Though this isn’t in the second-person past tense like much of your work, Hisao’s inner monologue here is so much more involved in
action and
ideas—I feel like you didn’t utilize the setting as much as you could. This is a story about winter doldrums and a walk through the forest; there was room for more tone-setting imagery, I think. It’s done nicely in the middle of the story, but then it tapers off by the end, and the beginning of the story could have done more with, like, the fluorescently-lit, barren classrooms and grey winter sky mirroring Hisao’s extinguished emotions.
Or maybe I’m totally wrong here—I’m thinking specifically about the small Akio part of the fic. To give you an idea of where I’m coming from, this one-shot feels like it narrowly avoids taking a Makoto Shinkai-esque tone, and maybe it should have reached for the brass ring? The first part of the story reminds me very much of the first few pages of one of my favorite books, Patricia Highsmith’s
The Price of Salt, and some of the mood-setting devices she used there feel like they might have been appropriate for this. I concede, however, that this criticism borders on self-indulgence.
Other than that, I don’t have much to contribute that wasn’t expressed more concisely (and less loquaciously) by Dewelar. This feels like it wants to be a richer story than it ultimately became—of course, I’m notoriously wordy, so perhaps I’m just in that mindset where I want everything I read to be more flush than it is. Like some kind of word-glutton.
.
