Katawa Shoujo Forums

Blasphemy wrote:Well that's partially because of the ludicrously fast pacing you set up in the first chapter already.

The only reason this was fast pace was to get to the parts with Iwanako, it significantly slows down next chapter

Regarding the timeline:
Hisao arrives at Yamaku on a Monday. The festival is the following Sunday.
Many have tried to create one consistent timeline for all of KS but failed. I'd like to think that all the routes are consistent on their own, but getting them to exactly match with each other might be impossible to do, so you have a bit of wiggling room after week one.
If you want Hisao to have spent some time at the school before the letter arrives, you could replace the festival with Tanabata, which takes place somewhen shortly before or after the beginning of the summer holidays (depending on which route you choose for reference. In Shizune's route it is before the holidays start, in Lilly's it is probably later.)
There are pros and cons for that:
For one thing you'd have the holidays looming directly ahead and Hisao would probably return home thus being able to meet Iwanako quite soon. This could be good or bad, depending on what you have planned for the story. (Pro or Con?)
Also, Iwanako would know that she's probably keeping Hisao from some kind of festivity, since she should be aware of the date of Tanabata. (Con)
However since Tanabata is a festival for lovers that could add a special meaning to her choosing this day for a call (Pro or Con?)

If you choose to start your story that late, you should also give some indication as to what happened to Hisao in the meantime. You can keep that part short, but some basics should be covered. Did he join the student council? Die he take up running for his health? Or did he shut himself up in his room with books all the time?
Once you're into the story, if you do want to use time-skips, start the following paragraph with a short bridge to inform the reader how much time has passed and if something noteworthy has happened, even if it's just something like "The rest of this mornings lessons was uneventful."
And I agree that Hisao's motivations and thoughts could use some fleshing out.
Oddball put it in words better than I ever could.

Seems you have enough editors for now, so good luck with the next chapter (and the reworking of the first).

To build on Mirage's comments, you could also skip the letter and just have Iwanako call Hisao on the morning of the first festival.

Mirage_GSM wrote:Regarding the timeline:
Hisao arrives at Yamaku on a Monday. The festival is the following Sunday.
Many have tried to create one consistent timeline for all of KS but failed. I'd like to think that all the routes are consistent on their own, but getting them to exactly match with each other might be impossible to do, so you have a bit of wiggling room after week one.
If you want Hisao to have spent some time at the school before the letter arrives, you could replace the festival with Tanabata, which takes place somewhen shortly before or after the beginning of the summer holidays (depending on which route you choose for reference. In Shizune's route it is before the holidays start, in Lilly's it is probably later.)
There are pros and cons for that:
For one thing you'd have the holidays looming directly ahead and Hisao would probably return home thus being able to meet Iwanako quite soon. This could be good or bad, depending on what you have planned for the story. (Pro or Con?)
Also, Iwanako would know that she's probably keeping Hisao from some kind of festivity, since she should be aware of the date of Tanabata. (Con)
However since Tanabata is a festival for lovers that could add a special meaning to her choosing this day for a call (Pro or Con?)

If you choose to start your story that late, you should also give some indication as to what happened to Hisao in the meantime. You can keep that part short, but some basics should be covered. Did he join the student council? Die he take up running for his health? Or did he shut himself up in his room with books all the time?
Once you're into the story, if you do want to use time-skips, start the following paragraph with a short bridge to inform the reader how much time has passed and if something noteworthy has happened, even if it's just something like "The rest of this mornings lessons was uneventful."
And I agree that Hisao's motivations and thoughts could use some fleshing out.
Oddball put it in words better than I ever could.

Seems you have enough editors for now, so good luck with the next chapter (and the reworking of the first).

Generally agree with what Mirage has said, but timeline discussions are kind of like a Bat Signal for me.

He's got the basics, but a few things that should also be considered:

Tanabata is celebrated in July in most of Japan, but is celebrated in August in the more northern areas. The devs have said (for what it's worth) that Yamaku falls in the Miyagi Prefecture. In Sendai (the capitol of the Miyagi Prefecture), Tanabata is celebrated August 6 - August 8. It would be trivial to place Hisao's hometown somewhere where Tanabata's celebrated in July. That could actually make for all kinds of fun, depending on how you try to swing it.

Thank you a lot for that mirage. I really appreciate it. But my plan is for it to end on tanabata. I read a interview with a author and the advice they gave was to create a end fist and let the story fall into its place so I already know how it's middle and end will go I'm just very very stuck ok the beginning that's why it seems so rushed becuase I'm so stuck and I already know what and how to write the middle (chapter 4 or 5) I just want to get to that point where I'm comfortable with my ideas

griffon8 wrote:To build on Mirage's comments, you could also skip the letter and just have Iwanako call Hisao on the morning of the first festival.

I really considered a call but I decided it might be a bit odd but reading what you wrote kinda gave me a idea, also since you guys got me a good timeline does anyone know how long after Iwanako stopped visiting did he stay in the hospital?

monkeywitha6pack wrote:does anyone know how long after Iwanako stopped visiting did he stay in the hospital?

That's easy. Hisao had his heart attack sometime in February, Iwanako visited for six weeks, stopping end of March/middle of April, and Hisao gets out of the hospital at the beginning of June: eight to ten weeks longer.

Thanks I knew it was 6 weeks, I just want to be super careful around here.

I read a interview with a author and the advice they gave was to create a end fist and let the story fall into its place so I already know how it's middle and end will go

That's good advice - within reason.
It IS good to have an idea of where the story is going and how it is supposed to end. Just be prepared to improvise and change a dtail or two if things don't go as you expect them to. I posted something about that topic just today on the "tips for authors" thread.

Well of course there will be a need to improvise, I don't even have it writen down I just know what I want the last scene/line to be

One random thought I had after reading the first part of the story and the discussion regarding the timeline:

Hisao recovery proceeded slightly faster here than in the VN. While still not fast enough to avoid the trip to Yamaku, it was enough to keep his spirits from falling to the point of driving off Iwanako permanently (as in the VN). Thus, the stage has been set for her return.

That's actually good, I was going to redo it since no one seemed to like the way I dd it but that explanation might allow me to save a large majority of this instead of haveing to scrap the hole thing thanks on mobile now so I really can't put it in now but. Thin ill work that in later to salvage a lot of this. That is if you don't mind

Hmm, another story with a major Iwanako.

I'll admit, this is the first time I've ever seen an Iwanako route. To be honest, I've never thought of an Iwanako route, though I'll be watching this with interest to see how it develops.

monkeywitha6pack wrote:That's actually good, I was going to redo it since no one seemed to like the way I dd it but that explanation might allow me to save a large majority of this instead of haveing to scrap the hole thing thanks on mobile now so I really can't put it in now but. Thin ill work that in later to salvage a lot of this. That is if you don't mind

If you're referring to my random thought, go for it...

So, previously when you PMed me asking for advice writing a pseudo-route, I told you I didn't think it was a good idea, but I got swallowed up in other business before I got a chance to tell you why. Now that I have some time, I'll tell you why I think you shouldn't write this fic.

I mirror Mean Time to Breakdown on Fanfiction.Net so that philistines can find it, and it usually lies sandwiched somewhere between absolutely horrible stories about American transfer students coming to Yamaku for no reason and romancing Hanako or Miki. The reviews I get on that website are few and far between; quite a few of them deign to tell me what the concept of my own fanfic is, as if I needed to be informed what I was writing about, but one review I got a few months ago strikes me as relevant for how utterly asinine it is:

"Nice idea using Iwanako as a main character, but in my opinion she should stay out of yamaku and fanfics about her should be following what happened at hisaos old school and what happened as people gradually forgot about him. Don't let this review stop you writing this FF"

After reading this, I was immediately stricken with a guttural, instinctual disgust for the idea. Reading this advice was like smelling a freshly defecated turd—it really is that bad. But why, structurally, is this a bad idea? After all, on the surface, it's relevant to the plot of Katawa Shoujo, isn't it? Isn't that all you need, hypothetically, to write a compelling fic?

Well, no. You actually need a lot more.

Story time: Back before Katawa Shoujo was even completed, I'd read Act One and decided I wanted to write a route of my own. This wound up being the first chapter of a canceled Suzu route that was legitimately painful to write; long story short, my contributions to the source material at that time were meager and uninspiring and in the end it was a very, very good thing that I never continued to write that. But before that, the character I really wanted to utilize in a KS fic was Iwanako. That's right; my enthusiasm for the character goes all the way back to the Act One demo. I felt like Hisao and Iwanako had unfinished business and I direly desired to see it taken care of.

My older sibling and I engaged in a discussion about how to use Iwanako in a fic. We talked about a pseudo-route, we talked about alternate universes, we talked about an alternate POV. And this is the conclusion we came to: Iwanako in her default state cannot be used effectively without utterly bastardizing the central themes of Katawa Shoujo. It would be like writing a Daria fanfic where Daria is a popular girl with a lot of friends. It would be like writing a Ren & Stimpy fic that isn't depraved. It'd be like writing an Inception fanfic without any dreams.

"Aren't you exaggerating, Leaty?" No, shut up and let me talk. The whole point—the entire point—of Katawa Shoujo is finding second love after your first heartbreak. This point is predicated on finding love with a fellow disabled person. You can play with these ideas, contradict them, twist them, whatever, but you have to explore them somehow. In terms of fanfiction, then, Iwanako is basically a boondoggle in the making; it is exceedingly hard to incorporate her into a leading role without severely undermining the factors which make KS compelling.

For example, let's look at the terrible idea that that FF.net reviewer left me, to write a story about Iwanako going to her old school and her classmates slowly forgetting about Hisao. Okay, right off the bat, we're writing a story with exactly zero of the characters in Katawa Shoujo. We have Iwanako, I guess, but we know next to nothing about her. So we have one poorly-characterized character and, I guess, an entire ensemble cast of OCs that have next to nothing to do with Yamaku Academy. You like reading about Yamaku? Tough break, read another fic. You like reading about Emi, Shizune, et al.? They're not in this fic, read another fic. You like Hisao? He's not in this fic, read another fic.

So there goes your audience, because nobody who sets out to read Katawa Shoujo is interested in something that's not anything like it. We're talking about a fic that has literally nothing in common with the game other than one character, a persistent universe, and the theme of heartbreak. No disabilities, no bad heart, nothing. If this is a story you really want to tell—that of a girl dealing with the fallout of her confession—why would you even write this as a Katawa Shoujo fic and not an original story? You're already forced by the vagaries of your concept to make an entire world from whole cloth, and the Katawa Shoujo audience isn't going to find your idea particularly compelling unless it's a one-shot. You have no audience and no concept. You're not telling an interesting story.

So why doesn't an Iwanako route work? Well, for the reasons stated above: there's no disability, no common characters and no finding second love after heartbreak. You're going back to your first love, which is a whole other kind of story arc entirely. Not only that, but Iwanako doesn't have any connection to any canon character but Hisao. Look at the Rika pseudo-route; Miki, Emi, Takashi, etc all feature prominently in it. Look at the Kagami route; Rin, Misha and Emi all feature heavily in it. In Tomorrow's Doom, Shizune and Misha both feature prominently, and other characters pop up now and again. So in basically every pseudo-route, you've got canon characters front and center, because the sad truth is that no matter how compelling you make your OC (or pseudo-OC), the canon characters are your headliners. They're the people who will draw your readers in and keep their interest.

So you've got this technically canon, barely characterized girl from beyond the context of the series, waltzing in and pushing the compelling aspects of the source material between the proverbial sofa cushions. Maybe you can cook a compelling meal up with such poor ingredients, but it ain't gonna be Beef Wellington. The fact of the matter is that Hisao going back to Iwanako isn't an interesting story, and the amount of groundwork you'd have to put in to make Iwanako a compelling love interest would basically make her an OC anyway. Again, the question that needs to be asked is what is your point? What statement are you trying to make by setting this plot in motion? How does this plot even make sense? Why wouldn't you just write an original story? The very premise pushes out everything unique about Katawa Shoujo anyway.

I started writing MTB because I wanted to make Iwanako interesting in the context of the setting. The only way to do this was to give Iwanako a context in the setting, i.e., creating a scenario where she goes through what Hisao went through. This, to my knowledge, is the only possible storyline in which an Iwanako-centric story can be appealing and compelling. There probably are more, but we are seriously scraping the bottom of the barrel here.

Now, that's not to say that Iwanako can't be used at all. As much as I dislike That Guy's Hanako epilogue, his use of Iwanako was clever. Similarly, I hear Weekend at Hisao's uses Iwanako in a creative way. But in both of these cases, she functions as an ancillary character whose presence serves to illustrate the magnitude of the changes to Hisao's perspective. She's a plot device, not a plot. The same goes for the fic where Kenji gets into a relationship with her; she functions as a foil to emphasize the inherent silliness of his character. That's really the takeaway here: without a lot of elbow grease, Iwanako is only good as a MacGuffin.

Furthermore, I have to be brutally honest here and say that your writing isn't ready for primetime. Your use of language here is more amateurish than amateurish, your utilities are abysmal, and your pacing is clumsy. Moreover, I can't help but think that the only reason you want to write this fic in the first place is because you want the legitimacy of having written a route for a canon character without the baggage of writing a route for a character like Suzu or Rika that's already been nicely-defined by various fanfiction authors in a lot of readers' eyes. I can't see anybody with distinguished tastes actually enjoying your writing in its current state. If you're just trying to get better at writing, fine, but don't expect to have much of an audience for your literary noodling.

TL;DR, do not write this fic and Leaty is a huge jerk.