I can think of many reasons you’d summarise a work to give someone the best of it. First, there are many works that are valueless save for one or two scenes deep inside them. Having those moments contextualised and explained is a far better experience than having to, say, first sit through 80 hours of a video game that is otherwise bad.
More importantly, a summary can still be extremely powerful, and may sometimes be the most powerful way to tell the story. I referenced the Parable of the Good Samaritan - which is, itself, a summary. I don’t think that parable is improved by expanding its characters’ backstories or giving them extra description. Neither is it improved by adding music and animation (you can check this for yourself on Youtube). I submit that the summary of that story, as seen in the Bible, is close to its most powerful variant. Likewise, I posit that a large number of stories lose nothing, or even gain something, when they are stripped down to parable form.
As for grafting on opinions/anecdotes: it is patently incorrect to claim that no two experiences can evoke similar feelings. Connecting a moment in a story to a personal experience can also re-evoke the initial emotion in a listener, provide greater context for the moment, and let the listener go away seeing the moment in a new and more fulfilling way. All of these things have value.
I take your Christopher Reeve anecdote to be a demonstration of why summarising a story is a hopelessly underwhelming thing to do. As a counter, I’ll first point out that EVERY write-up of ANY person’s life is ALWAYS a summary, because you can never live someone else’s life for real. Of course, any summary you write can be crude and underwhelming, as I imagine yours deliberately was. Of course, here’s a more powerful, higher-resolution summary of that same story:
https://www.biography.com/news/christop ... g-accident and we can easily imagine, say, a 60,000 word summary of Reeve’s story that is even more moving than that.
(Now that I’m proofreading this for the last time, it also occurs to me that Katawa Shoujo is itself a summary of Hisao’s time at Yamaku, that all stories are summaries, and thus that your entire contention is moot).
You say “All that big talk, including THREE conclusions, to have it all boil down to a message of "it gives me feels."” My poorly constructed conclusion aside, your claim is once again reductive and inaccurate. I could similarly claim that Paradise Lost boils down to “Mankind falls,” that Hamlet boils down to “He dithers then gets revenge,” and that Ulysses boils down to “Some largely inconsequential things happen.” Anything can be reduced to a trite summary. Beyond that, yours isn’t even an
accurate trite summary; a better one would be “Here’s how Katawa Shoujo gives people feelings that encourage them to go out and be better men.”
As for my assumptions: I’m sorry to hear that I was wrong, and sorrier still to know that I might have spawned an unfair and inaccurate rumour. You’re right; I have no inkling of how much you respect Moekki. I wish I did. I wish I hadn’t had to make any assumptions in what I wrote, because I’d known exactly why each decision was made. Of course, I didn’t know that, and assumed that you’d ignore me if I asked. Thus, there could be no other result.