Oddball wrote:
So, less of a story about Hisao's romances and more of a story about Hisao making a lot of good friends but not getting anywhere (romantically speaking) with any of the girls.
Yeah, pretty much. You could even have the girls interact with each other a lot more than they do in their own specific routes. Maybe when Shizune and Hanako play chess, Hisao's acquaintance with Hanako would make her slightly less nervous and therefore able to not be completely dominated at speed chess, starting a tentative friendship between Hanako and Shizune. Maybe that could eventually lead to some proper reconciliation between Shizune and Lilly. Maybe Emi would encourage Rin to do her exhibition, and perhaps, lacking an obsessively present Hisao to visit her in the atelier, she would not forbid Emi from visiting her, and that would lead to a deeper understanding between them, especially as Emi tried to comprehend and deal with Rin's self-destructive drive. And then Emi, upon cutting her leg on her running prosthetics, might avoid seeing the Nurse for so long that she developed a much worse infection, but since Rin would be too focused on painting to support her, she would have to turn the the track team captain for comfort. But the track team captain would be preoccupied with his crush on Hisao, because he's noticed how Hisao seems to be so friendly with all the girls but not really interested in dating them, so he thinks Hisao is gay! But when Emi convinces the track team captain to go visit Hisao's room to see if he's interested, the two of them run in to Kenji, who, due to his poor eyesight, mistakes the track team captain pushing Emi's wheelchair as killer robot sent by feminist agents to assassinate him, and starts shooting them with the airsoft rifle he keeps in his room. And then Shizune, who noticed Emi going into the male dorms and followed her to scold her for breaking the rules, walks in on the battle occurring outside Hisao's room and joins in (with Misha, predictably, right beside her). Then, as Hisao, Lilly, and Hanako are walking back to the dorms, they hear the fracas occurring from outside, and decide to go together and investigate. All of them have a pitched battle against Kenji in the hallway of the male dorms. Although they have the superior numbers by far, Kenji is better armed and holds a fortified position, so it's no easy task to take him down. Eventually they manage it, and as they're leading him out of the dorms to the administrator's office, they walk by Rin, who came to the dorms to look for Emi (since she finished painting for her exhibition) but then got distracted and started looking at clouds, and Rin starts to question them about what happened, at which point they all start to give differing accounts of who started the fight, who was on which side, etc. In the ensuing argument, Kenji manages to slip away, and then all of the main characters have to organize into search parties to hunt him down...
... this is getting seriously off track. Anyway, all I'm saying is it could be interesting.