Yamaku Book Club (20220124 Dish Washing)

[dewelar]

What short Hanako fiction do you like most, or has made the greatest impact (good or bad) on you—and why?

Short fiction...hmmm...how short is short? I mean, Reconciliation above is pretty good, but that's ten chapters, so it may not qualify. Second Beats is kind of a guilty pleasure of mine, and the fact that I remember it two years after reading it must mean something. However, beyond that, I can't say much, because in the end I don't actually remember more than a handful of others. I think the reason for this is that writing a good Hanako fic (or, more precisely, a fic with a good Hanako) requires some time to allow her personality to make its presence felt fully, which is difficult to do in a short fic unless it's from her own PoV, and very few stories do that well.

The exceptions, as Leaty noted, are stories that, like Reconciliation and Blank's stories (looking forward to that New Year's one ), are set some years after the VN, where she's had time to grow and be able to express herself more openly. Then the difficulty becomes connecting the new Hanako to VN!Hanako. Again, the number that can do these things well is quite small, and perhaps the haystack of Hanako glurge became a bit too imposing for me to put in the effort necessary to find the Needle of Quality.

[brythain]

What short Hanako fiction do you like most, or has made the greatest impact (good or bad) on you—and why?

Short fiction...hmmm...how short is short?

I think Asimov or somebody said under 3000 words was short-short and under 10000 was short. These days, 'short story' weighs in at up to 20000 words. My rule of thumb is that you can read it through at one sitting without (much) strain. Clearly, things like Sisterhood, Developments and AtD don't make the cut...

Edit: Heh, it seems to be a matter of record that you liked 'Change in Management'.

[Blank Mage]

Clearly, things like Sisterhood, Developments and AtD don't make the cut...

Edit: Heh, it seems to be a matter of record that you liked 'Change in Management'.

Ah, you'd think I'd learn to read the question completely before answering, eh? You'd be wrong.

Okay, now that's I'm done being an idiot, I'll change my answer to Ozymil's Loose Leaf. Although it actually deals very little with Hanako herself, and has no real drama or plot to speak of, the tone of the story is very fitting with her personality, or at least, one version of it.

[Skeeve]

There was something that rubbed me the wrong way about Loose Leaf on first reading. It's very competently written, and it gave me a little bit of the warm fuzzies, but the whole piece seemed to hint at this whole journey of self-discovery for Hanako, and I think I wanted to read excerpts from that story more than I wanted to read the one we got.

[brythain]

This being 1 September over in my neck of the woods, I'd like to declare Hanako month officially open. While the enormous 'Sisterhood (True Edition)' is the largest work being discussed, other big readings can be found here.

We're also looking at shorter works, and overlapping works such as Developments by dewelar. However, note that I think that last work deserves its own place for discussion later this year when I can persuade dewelar himself to co-chair a session on multi-threaded big KS fics.

Nearer the end of September, I'll post a list in keeping with our current side character/main character alternation — and that list will be about Shiina 'Misha' Mikado. No prizes for guessing which big fic(s) will lead that list. Or no-prizes, if you like.

Now I'll just shut up for a while and let normal business resume.

[Mahorfeus]

Robnonymous' other Hanako fic, Bad Dreams. Short with possibly diabeetus-level sweetness. I suppose one can raise questions about Hanako's portrayal in the story, though I think that is one of many things that just falls under personal interpretation.

[Blank Mage]

Now that I'm thinking about it, Hanako might have the most flexible personality of the main cast, ranging from 'A Shy Lilly' to 'Spiteful Hikikomori'. I suppose it's because she has the largest disconnect between her ideal and her reality? Hanako's clearly no stranger to low self-esteem, and her bad end shows that she can easily project that mentality on to others. We also know from her general demeanor that she's typically quite gentle. Comparitively, the other characters all seem rather locked into their usual personality, even in time skips. I can't imagine what it would take for Lilly to drop her well-to-do aloof persona and act like Akira, for example. I couldn't see Emi being the subject of a 'My Fair Lady' type plot, either. Shizune fights change tooth and nail and Rin... well, Rin is Rin.

So yeah. I think Hanako is the most versatile of the main leads. Obviously, semi-canon has a bit of an advantage on that field, though, so the Mikis, Rikas, and Sakis of the world still easily best her in that regard.

[brythain]

I think of Hanako as being defined by a tension between fierceness (intense engaged focus on something she wants to fight for/about), gentleness (born from empathy, since she was bullied when young) and responsibility (need to respond in an appropriate way, based on loyalty, love etc). While she might be a flexible character in the sense of developmental range over time, these are traits you wouldn't want to lose in this particular reading of such traits.

Where she is most interesting is when she isn't sure her natural tendencies to fierceness or gentleness are nudging her towards the right thing, or where the tension between them is severe. In some readings of the case of Lilly/Hanako x Hisao, she's clearly conflicted between loyalty to Lilly, empathy for Lilly, and the urge to fight for Hisao. It's also interesting if you make one of the three dominant and the other two subordinate, but in such a way that if the other two are strongly opposed to the first, there is genuine tension.

For example, Hanako can be fiercely gentle — with a child she might be a tiger mother with a warm and nurturing streak (Shizune might be the former without the latter, Misha the other way round). But her sense of responsibility might require her to stand off and be a little cold towards a renegade child, for example if her kid had decided to go off and bully some other kid. She'd have to do a bit of juggling there. She might need lessons from Emi.

[dewelar]

Now that I'm thinking about it, Hanako might have the most flexible personality of the main cast, ranging from 'A Shy Lilly' to 'Spiteful Hikikomori'. I suppose it's because she has the largest disconnect between her ideal and her reality?

I tend to believe it's because the nature of her route, both the briefness of it and the fact that for a majority of it she says and does very little to the point that Hisao almost(?) ends up talking to Lilly more than he does to her, means that less of her personality is actually revealed within the VN proper than for any of the other heroines. On the other hand, we get many, many hints of who she is that can be interpreted in different ways. I think that's a big part what made her the breakout character of the VN in the first place -- not just that she embodies a crap-ton of fetish tropes, but also because she's the easiest of the heroines on which to overlay the personality template that conforms to the ideal of the gamer / fanfic author.

[Mirage_GSM]

Short fiction...hmmm...how short is short?

I think Asimov or somebody said under 3000 words was short-short and under 10000 was short. These days, 'short story' weighs in at up to 20000 words. My rule of thumb is that you can read it through at one sitting without (much) strain. Clearly, things like Sisterhood, Developments and AtD don't make the cut...

20K is short for you?
For me, a short should not be more than two or at most three A4 pages.

[bhtooefr]

It's worth noting that Hanako's also quite prone to falling into the very same trap as Hisao does in her bad ending, IMO, by trying too hard to prove herself useful, even against the wishes of whoever she's "helping". I can't think of many fics that explore those tendencies of Hanako's right now, other than Developments, though.

Another thing that my reading of Hanako includes is that she has a very analytical mind... but it can get stuck on things and enter a feedback loop, causing her anxiety to build and build and build until suddenly she can't take it any more. (I know nothing about this. Nothing at all.) Hanako's a good lens onto an environment, though, as a result... because she actively tries to pick up the small details (if nothing else, because she feels she needs to perform a threat analysis on everything). But, given where she is in life, the lens may well be crap-colored (but she wants, deep down, to resist that kind of thought), and you might lose the details when her anxiety takes over, because then she gets metaphorical tunnel vision.

[brythain]

Short fiction...hmmm...how short is short?

I think Asimov or somebody said under 3000 words was short-short and under 10000 was short. These days, 'short story' weighs in at up to 20000 words. My rule of thumb is that you can read it through at one sitting without (much) strain. Clearly, things like Sisterhood, Developments and AtD don't make the cut...

20K is short for you?
For me, a short should not be more than two or at most three A4 pages.

Visually I suppose you're right, but if double-spaced that's only about 1000 words or so.
I think the shortest one-shot I ever wrote in these forums is 450 words long; the longest I think is 72 Hours, at around 8500 words. Pavane is under 6750 although some people say it feels longer. Looking around the Library, most shortish stories are about 3000 and under, so Asimov might've been right.

[Mirage_GSM]

Even if there were 200 self-claimed short stories with >20K words on the forums, I'd still take take Asimov's word over theirs
A more or less accepted upper limit seems to be 7.500 words.

[brythain]

Even if there were 200 self-claimed short stories with >20K words on the forums, I'd still take take Asimov's word over theirs
A more or less accepted upper limit seems to be 7.500 words.

Oh, certainly! When I implied there were 'short stories' with 20,000 words, I meant that sarcastically. Those are novellas, the kind they stash at the back of an anthology of short stories hoping you won't notice that the later stories seem curiously long drawn-out.

[brythain]

It's worth noting that Hanako's also quite prone to falling into the very same trap as Hisao does in her bad ending, IMO, by trying too hard to prove herself useful, even against the wishes of whoever she's "helping". I can't think of many fics that explore those tendencies of Hanako's right now, other than Developments, though.

Another thing that my reading of Hanako includes is that she has a very analytical mind... but it can get stuck on things and enter a feedback loop, causing her anxiety to build and build and build until suddenly she can't take it any more. (I know nothing about this. Nothing at all.) Hanako's a good lens onto an environment, though, as a result... because she actively tries to pick up the small details (if nothing else, because she feels she needs to perform a threat analysis on everything). But, given where she is in life, the lens may well be crap-colored (but she wants, deep down, to resist that kind of thought), and you might lose the details when her anxiety takes over, because then she gets metaphorical tunnel vision.

That's a very interesting take on the Hanako psyche. I think that it fits the available data to a fairly large extent. What I'm also interested in is what she does with her inputs: she reads a lot, she is a pretty good language processor — newspaper club and all. What are her romantic influences, her fictional role models, that kind of thing?