Katawa Shoujo Forums

Nobody in Particular wrote:Nominya wanted Rin to do well, possibly for selfish reasons as well but he certainly wanted her to have a good career in art, so I can see why he pushed her to do the exhibition because it was what he though was best for her. He clearly didn't understand why Rin didn't want to go through with it and pushed her despite the knowledge of Sae's husband, but still I don't think he deserves all the hate as he was just ignorant and misunderstood Rin.

Nomiya is despised by Rin fans because he does not, in fact, care for Rin in the least; rather, he recognises her prowess, is reminded of his past self, and subsequently desires to live vicariously through her, due to his own failures, and his age. It's alluded to in Rin's path that Nomiya has taken an inordinate level of interest in Rin's exploits, much more than a teacher should take in a student's achievements. The vehement way he teaches and the profession he's chosen both suggest to me that he became a teacher for the sole purpose of finding someone like Rin, which only fuels my revulsion of him, although I still can't fault him for being selfish, at least. The last straw is when he blows up at an unresponsive Rin after the exhibition and storms out of the classroom. Such behaviour is simply unacceptable for a teacher. I should know; I had a few lunatics like him that would explode back when I was in school. One had to be relocated to teaching music, and being a librarian, due to stress, and the other quit, after having a nervous breakdown.

Deep down, I believe we all want a disciple, as you've never truly mastered until you've passed on, but Nomiya just takes it way too far.

You're right, what he tried to do with Rin is not much different than slavery or, actually, is like a form of slaver, a slave of of the whims of her master.
There're lots of people like Nomiya in real life, and they come in all forms and colours, it's like having your parents pressing you to study a specific career because they think that you are good at it, or even study any of the most typical careers for that matter, and they always used the same basic rhetoric catchpharase of "success in your career or fail in life forever because you can't do anything else".

That a selfish way of thinking to say the least. In reality, they just want to have success by proxy.
In Rin's case, is partially her fault for being so neutral in her attitude, others would simply flip the bird on the old geezer (despite that she can't do that in physical terms, but you get the point).

It's not much different than Hisao's attemps of white-knighting in any of the possible paths.

^ Which is where my irritation (not hate, mind you) for Hisao comes in. In place of Rin's neutrality, Hisao should have sent some thunderous verbal attack Nomiya's way. Though, I suppose that would be hypocrisy, as he's also partially responsible for encouraging Rin to go through with the exhibition as well...

That's one of the more interesting things about Rin's route. You find out that by the end you've sort of been playing the bad guy. That's one of the reasons it gives a lot of "feels" I believe.

Raburesu wrote:^ Which is where my irritation (not hate, mind you) for Hisao comes in. In place of Rin's neutrality, Hisao should have sent some thunderous verbal attack Nomiya's way. Though, I suppose that would be hypocrisy, as he's also partially responsible for encouraging Rin to go through with the exhibition as well...

Yep, he is just as pushy as the old geezer, and we know that Hisao clearly joined the art club because of Rin and to avoid Shizune and Misha and their attemps to draft him into the School Council.
Not to defend Hisao, but at least we can understand him being a jerk because he's young. We all did stupid things when we were teenagers.

GIRakaCHEEZER wrote:That's one of the more interesting things about Rin's route. You find out that by the end you've sort of been playing the bad guy. That's one of the reasons it gives a lot of "feels" I believe.

Her path is sorta the ultimate white-knight killer, no matter the ending you get, not even Hanako's path achieves that entirely.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that Hisao is "as pushy." He encouraged Rin because he genuinely thought it would be good for her, especially after seeing her receive, what he would think were, innocent intentions in the form of support from thier art teacher.

The difference between Nomiya and Hisao is, after the exhibition, Hisao realises he was at fault for pushing her, feeling deep sorrow for Rin and the events that unfolded, while Nomiya is simply disgusted that she was too weak to follow through with vindicating his guidance.

Raburesu wrote:I wouldn't go so far as to say that Hisao is "as pushy." He encouraged Rin because he genuinely thought it would be good for her, especially after seeing her receive, what he would think were, innocent intentions in the form of support from thier art teacher.

The difference between Nomiya and Hisao is, after the exhibition, Hisao realises he was at fault for pushing her, feeling deep sorrow for Rin and the events that unfolded, while Nomiya is simply disgusted that she was too weak to follow through with vindicating his guidance.

^^ This. Hisao is not a jerk or "the bad guy" just because he did his best to be supportive of Rin; it's not his fault that what she needed and what was (theoretically) good for her career were not the same thing (heck, even she didn't understand that until fairly late in the game). Once he understood what was what he changed his approach in a hurry, just as any decent human being would do. That's the difference between him and Nomiya.

Raburesu wrote:Earlier on, during Underwater and a Maple with a Name:

[snip images]

Then, near the end, during Proof of Existence:

[snip image]

WUT.

Interesting catch. I totally missed that. But it makes perfect sense to me. It's a tad hard to explain, though. I'll try anyway. But it's going to be a long post. A really long post. I just hope it's not boring.

1. Rin, experience, words, and conversation

Basically, Rin is all about experience. Talking is hard, because talk is - in itself - an experience, and the experience you talk about takes the backseat to the experience of speaking itself. The result is a slow aliantion process, as Rin gets into the experience of talking and forgets the experience she's supposed to be talking about. All that remains is a thread of words, and Rin starts to worry about meaning and truth.

Now, Rin would like to be understood. But that is not a matter of understanding the meaning of her words; rather, it is a matter of sharing an experience. Talking is different: Talking about an experience suspends it, and divides people into two parties; one who has a speaking experience, and one who has a listening experience. To Rin this is confusing, because she automatically attempts to share the listening experience, too. ("You probably don't want to hear this, or maybe you do, but even if you don't, it doesn't matter..." - quoting from memory, so it's not verbatim)

So: in addition to having an experience-vs.-words problem, Rin has a speaker-vs.-listener problem. With her paintings, she hopes to by-pass this: in theory, both people could have the same experience when looking at the painting. (In practice, that doesn't work, because Rin has memories that are triggered, and others don't. I suspect that Rin knows deep down that this can't work, but she clings to it, because it's the only chance at "connecting" she sees.)

2. Rin and Hisao

Rin is very slow to open up, and very quick to close down. Hisao gives her the impression that he might one day understand her, but he's never quite gets there. Take the scene near the beginning, where they talk about the clouds, or a bit later when they talk about the sky. Both times, he gives Rin a new perspective on the topic (so in a sense they connect), but then he goes back to being down-to-earth Hisao, with his need to classify experience to make it real (the cloud-explanation is better "because it's true"; Rin is not the sky). In both cases, Rin ends up agreeing tentatively. She's sort of humouring Hisao, when she does this, but not quite. "Truth", for example, falls into the word realm rather than the world realm. (For the record, I think the thought of all the people's water joining in a cloud is a sort of connecting experience for Rin; much like Rain.) And "agreeing" is a speech act (also a word-experience). It's really hard to explain this.

It's this sort of back and forth that makes her nervous. I think she wants to explain herself, but can't do it in words. She knows that Hisao wants to understand her, but it's equally clear that he's much more involved in the realm of words (categories), and this is where she's uncomfortable. There is a bitter irony in the alienation experience Rin has when she tries to talk about herself. Maybe she can get Hisao to understand her explanations; but she herself wouldn't necessarily know what they mean, and whether they really apply to her. Because the words are removed from her experience.

She has opened up significantly to him by the time she tells him about the worry tree.

3. Does Rin talk to trees?

So, when Hisao asks her whether she talks to the worry tree about her problems she reacts as your screenshots indicate. I do believe that she doesn't talk to the trees about her problems. That would be a way to direct approach for her. But I don't consider it impossible that she strikes up some sort of "relationship" with the trees - so that she might imagine they're there for her. A sort of "connection". Trees won't ask her to explain.

When she's talking about talking to trees, she's talking with Hisao, and it's quite clear to her that - even if did on occasion use language towards trees - that would not constitute talking about her problems in the way that talking to Hisao "now" does. That is the experience of talking to trees is substantially different to the experience of talking to people, and in that sense, it makes sense to say that she doesn't talk to trees.

But then she starts to drift off. She starts to worry that she might have accidently insulted Hisao (if he were the type ot talk to trees). And by the end, when she says that people might think you're weird if they spot you talking to trees, she might have slipped from an internal experience of "talking to trees feels different from talking to Hisao" to an observer experience of "talking to trees might look a lot like talking to Hisao (except that trees don't talk back)", and thus she might be talking about herself as well as Hisao - but she's no longer in the moment.

To re-anchor herself in the moment, she needs to lie down. And crucially, Hisao follows suit. While what we get is a swarm of words from a Hisao who thinks too much, what Rin gets is the experience of lying side by side in silence, and that must be calming.

Basically, this scene has a nervous and upset Rin talking about experience rather than experiencing.

The scene near the end has Rin already in it's-okay-to-be-me mode (her words tend to lag behind her mood). Thus it's okay to greet trees, and it's okay if Hisao sees her. No more pointless talk and complicated differences and similarities. Just the here and now, and a couple of calming habits and non-angry, accepting company.

So, basically, I think Rin did change: especially her experience of their relationship. Understanding is no longer a prerequisite for connection at that point. Thus to what extent one could say that she talks to trees and whether that would then be weird or not is no longer important. She can now connect to Hisao and trees at the same time (and in different ways), even if Hisao might not share the tree connection. That would have been impossible, earlier.

At their most basic, it seems Rin isn't a person of logical and words. She's a person of feelings and emotions. The reason she does what she does and acts the way she does is because that's what feels right to her. When she's asked about things, this is where she trips up. She doesn't have any other answer to give except that this is how something makes her feel, but she knows people won't settle for that, so she tries to explain why she feels a certain way and simply can't do it bcause explaining and feeling are two different things entirely.

Oddball wrote:At their most basic, it seems Rin isn't a person of logical and words. She's a person of feelings and emotions. The reason she does what she does and acts the way she does is because that's what feels right to her. When she's asked about things, this is where she trips up. She doesn't have any other answer to give except that this is how something makes her feel, but she knows people won't settle for that, so she tries to explain why she feels a certain way and simply can't do it bcause explaining and feeling are two different things entirely.

I wouldn't say that she's a feely person, I'd say she's actually pretty logical. She takes a lot of time to think things through, and that's what makes her trip up. She thinks and thinks but can't find the words that would fully describe what she wants. It only doesn't appear logical sometimes since Rin's logic is a bit different.

When it comes to Nomiya, I think people need to consider the fact that he has not seen the things that we, the players has seen. To him, it most likely felt as a sudden whim from Rin's side to run away from the exhibition without never finding out why. He put much effort and time into it so it's only natural to feel some degree of negative emotions when the person that you invested so much time and effort into suddenly have a change of heart for (From his perspective) no reason at all. That he did this for selfish reasons might be a part of the truth, but I highly doubt that it was entirely out of selfishness, I just find it more realistic that it's partly because of the joy and satisfaction of making your favorite student to succeed and partly because he wanted her to be successful and happy in the long run.

So no, I don't hate or even dislike Nomiya as I just thought it was probably something the most of us would feel if we did the same thing. We just have more knowledge than he does, but other than that... I wouldn't say he's that much different from anyone of us, us humans are more similar than we think most of the time.

Efrath wrote:When it comes to Nomiya, I think people need to consider the fact that he has not seen the things that we, the players has seen. To him, it most likely felt as a sudden whim from Rin's side to run away from the exhibition without never finding out why. He put much effort and time into it so it's only natural to feel some degree of negative emotions when the person that you invested so much time and effort into suddenly have a change of heart for (From his perspective) no reason at all. That he did this for selfish reasons might be a part of the truth, but I highly doubt that it was entirely out of selfishness, I just find it more realistic that it's partly because of the joy and satisfaction of making your favorite student to succeed and partly because he wanted her to be successful and happy in the long run.

So no, I don't hate or even dislike Nomiya as I just thought it was probably something the most of us would feel if we did the same thing. We just have more knowledge than he does, but other than that... I wouldn't say he's that much different from anyone of us, us humans are more similar than we think most of the time.

I think that's entirely fair, actually. But even still, he was pushing her for some very selfish reasons, even if he probably didn't realize it himself, and his conduct toward her at the end was harsh and unprofessional. He has a right to be disappointed and upset, but he doesn't have a right to chew her out like that without first learning why she did what she did. Had he put forth that effort he might have realized she wasn't ready for this and didn't really want it.

Nomiya isn't evil. But he does expect others to share his values and goals, and sees nothing wrong with coercing them into adhering to such "for their own good." That can be incredibly damaging, particularly when the person in question has Rin's social issues.

Question here.

When Hisao confessed to Rin in the studio and she asked him not to speak of this, what exactly was the reason? Later she said she's scared of his kindness but surely that couldn't be it?

Was being scared of his kindness, was that something like the "change"? That it made Rin like Hisao more than just a friend?

And why the kiss attempt inside his room? 2DEEP4ME

Titus wrote:Question here.

When Hisao confessed to Rin in the studio and she asked him not to speak of this, what exactly was the reason? Later she said she's scared of his kindness but surely that couldn't be it?

Was being scared of his kindness, was that something like the "change"? That it made Rin like Hisao more than just a friend?

And why the kiss attempt inside his room? 2DEEP4ME

First, I think that she was in the middle of trying to destroy herself. As in destroy to rebuild in a particular way. I think that she's scared of his kindness because she knows she's hard to understand. The possibility of her and Hisao working out was slim, to her, because she's not met anyone willing to continually try and understand her. The fear of accepting that kindness to later be rejected is a major reason for alot of her anst.

I'd say in a way accepting his kindness and love would definitely be a change versus just being aloof about everyone. People in general are afraid of change, especially when it's all unknowns. It's just that Rin knows it instead of denies it like the average person.

A lot of Rin's actions are exploratory attempts to understand herself, and get people to understand her. When I say understand herself, I mean, emotionally, and mentally specifically.

There's a method in her madness, that I can relate to.

Titus wrote:Question here.

When Hisao confessed to Rin in the studio and she asked him not to speak of this, what exactly was the reason? Later she said she's scared of his kindness but surely that couldn't be it?

Was being scared of his kindness, was that something like the "change"? That it made Rin like Hisao more than just a friend?

And why the kiss attempt inside his room? 2DEEP4ME

Note that Rin twice declares to Hisao, as they part on the stairs, that she has decided to change. Once before she starts working on her exhibition, and again the night of their reconciliation after the exhibition (when Hisao comforts Rin after Nomiya yells at her). I think this is related to Rin's statement that she can only think of 4 things at once, which, taken in a less literal sense, means she has a very one-track mind in terms of her life goals. Once she decides to focus on a goal, that's the only goal she can focus on, and all of her decisions have to be made towards the achieving of that goal. This is not only necessitated by her inability to focus on several things at once, but also by her desire to experience life as fully as possible (for example, she likes to watch Emi run because it shows Emi at her "Emi-est"). Trying to reach some goal, but only being, say, 90% effective at it, would be worthless to her, because she would always wonder if the experience of being 100% effective was different.

So, the first time she declares she's going to change, she decides she is going to be an artist. She's going to put 100% of her thought and effort into creating art for her exhibition. After that decision, she is no longer able to allow herself any distractions; she effectively drops out of school, tells Emi to stop visiting her, tells Hisao to be quiet while she is working, and eventually tells Hisao to stop visiting her as well (although this might be more because she didn't want him to participate in her self-destruction process because she either thought it would be painful for him or that he would try to stop her). It's pretty clear that in this mindset, there is absolutely no possibility for Rin to start a relationship with Hisao. It would be a completely unacceptable distraction from her artwork.

Now, that is not to say that she doesn't have feelings for Hisao at that point. Unfortunately, one of the things Rin misunderstands most profoundly is love and relationships. She even admits this herself near the end of the route ("I don't think I really understand love" or something like that). I'm pretty sure she has some strange misconceptions about the proper way to start a relationship, the societal obligations of being in a relationship, the correct way to express romantic feelings, etc. I also think she profoundly misunderstands what Hisao wants in terms of a relationship when he confesses in the atelier. The combination of those misconceptions lead her to believe two things:

• That Hisao's motives for confessing to her in the atelier are mostly based on wanting to have sex with her (I believe Emi says at one point that Rin doesn't really understand the difference between the friend/friend relationship and the girlfriend/boyfriend relationship beyond the physical component)
• That if she gives Hisao at least some physical interaction, it will satisfy his desire and help him wait until she's done with her exhibition and is free to focus on other things.

This is why Rin offers to let Hisao touch her after she tells him to stay away from the atelier for a while: she honestly thinks it's a helpful gesture that will somewhat assuage Hisao's lust while she makes him wait. It's a calculated (although probably not particularly effective) decision intended to prevent Hisao from drifting too far away.

Now as for the codeine kiss; I think that's pretty easy to explain. Although Rin is usually an incomprehensible collection of odd mannerisms and motivations, almost all of these behaviors are born of conscious decisions and purposeful thought. Underneath all of that, Rin is just like any other human being; she has a desire for affection and physical contact. In normal circumstances, her conscious mind would prevent her from acting on such desires, but when high on codeine, her conscious mind is not nearly as strong an influence, and she acts on baser impulses. In summary, it's just a basic case of lowered inhibitions due to intoxication.