Atario wrote:someguy1294 wrote:Rather than an internal monlogue, he could have just called her and found that her phone was turned off/dead/out of service... action is usually more interesting than internal monologue, anyways.
That presumes he didn't already know her service was discontinued. If, as might be expected, (1) she'd had it shut off, and (2) he
knew she'd had it shut off, there'd be no reason to try calling nor to think to himself that there would be no reason to call. There would be nothing to do but go to her, as he did.
That's not a bad theory on the cell-phone thing, but I still feel too much was left to the reader's guess-work.
I'd like to talk about a point you brought up a few pages ago, that the central problem in Lily's route is not her attachment to her family, but her inability to express and act on her own desires. The most moving scenes in the route (the wheat field, the hospital) come when Lily drops the pretense of what is 'proper' and dignified and expresses her desires without censoring herself, so you may very well be on to something here. I may have latched onto the family connection thing, because to me, that is a more compelling obstacle to overcome. That, and I loved the scene in which Akira tells Hisao about how she took care of Lily when she was a child. One of the better pearls I picked out of what I mostly considered to be a muddy ocean bottom.
One of the reasons Lily's aversion to asserting her desires didn't come across as dramatic to me, I think, is that it isn't something Hisao had to fight against on Lily's end. He had to deal with the same problem on his own end (as you noted), but rather than actively struggle to get through Lily's barriers, he draws Lily out of her shell by accident; he has a heart-flutter, Lily becomes aware of how easily he can die, this forces her to express her feelings.
Now, this sets Lily's route apart from the Rin's, Emi's and Hanako's
haven't read Shizune's yet, so I can't speak on that because in all of the other routes, Hisao had to struggle to overcome the girl's personal boundaries to connect to her.
He suffers endlessly in his efforts to follow and understand Rin, he confronts Emi on her tendency to dodge serious issues and hide her problems, leading to a nasty argument (in one branch, anyways), and he goes through tremendous efforts to ease Hanako out of her timidity. My point here is that in these routes, the chief obstacles Hisao had to struggle against were at both psychological and external; they came from the personal demons and baggage each love interest was carrying around.
With Lily's route... he didn't struggle to get through her wall. He lured her out by accident. The only psychological obstacle he really struggles against is his own inability to fight for what he wants. He creates the obstacle entirely on his own. To me, that just isn't as compelling.
One could argue that Lily's aversion to expression of desire rubbed off on him as they spent time together (picking up traits from the girls seems to be a recurring theme in each route, so this is not unreasonable), but this raises some questions about the definition of Hisao's character, or, perhaps, the lack thereof. Hisao is clearly the least defined character in the story (as he must be, since who he is changes depending on the reader's choices), but if Hisao's central flaw is merely a mannerism he picked up from the love-interest, it makes him feel a little hollow, a sort of place-holder character. Being a dynamic character is one thing, but Hisao appears to be so malleable that he has no real substance in and of himself.
Now, Hisao being a bland character isn't as large a problem in the other routes, because in the other routes, his problem comes primarily from his expectation and desires bouncing off the love interest's personal barriers. Thus, Hisao defines himself by struggling against those barriers. The subdued nature of his character works as a foil against the more vibrant and defined characters he interacts with.
This isn't to say that one can't write a compelling story in which the chief conflict is the protagonist's own mental conflict. It's merely to say that if the chief conflict comes from the protagonist himself, then the protagonist must have interesting internal problems to struggle against. If Hisao's chief problem is that he has an aversion to expressing his desires for fear of violating social grace, than that needs to be a defined part of his character.
