The "feels" bazaar.

[6tuf]

yesterday i completed 100% of game. i liked the whole experience. game is really sincere. i have to say thanks for all authors.
concerning my feelings - its quite simple. im somewhat lonely at the moment, and the game hitting on that spot. and hitting hard. people are social, we need communication, we need to feel ourselves related to some group. so katawa shoujo in that regard is just like watching some series, but more intimate. and when its all over - when you complete a route/game it feels like a bit of your soul become empty.
ps: id really like some cool tshirts or whatsoever with KS theme

[OtakuNinja]

Personally, I think feels are great. Both the happy ones and the sad ones. It proves I'm human.
Although, I understand if someone is depressed and want to get rid of the feels. However, I've never felt that way because of KS.

[Helbereth]

I've seen people responding to people with the feels with ways to get rid of them. My question is why? Why does everyone act like they're a bad thing? Isn't it a wonderful emotional experience? My reaction to emotional experiences is to try and prolong them, and I know I can't be the only one who thinks this way. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the matter.

They're not bad, just bothersome. Lingering sadness and a general feeling of emptiness aren't good for you, and they can be detrimental to your health if left untreated. The 'feels' people want to get past are those sinking, depressing emotions. Without getting past them, it can be difficult to analyze the experience with fresh perspective, and assess the reasons why the story made them feel so strongly.

TL:DR
They aren't trying to get rid of the good feels, just work past the bad ones.

[Zezin]

Dude. My reaction to this game made my parents make an emergency call to my therapist.
Sometimes the feels need to GO!

[Nekken]

Coming out on the other side of the feels can be a wonderful experience, but the feels themselves are not. The trick is not so much to get over them or rid of them as it is to get through them.

[yassodude]

This might make me sound like a sissy but this is what's so bad about the feels :
I lost my appetite , I was always wearing a frown , I stopped laughing at anything : 9Gag was like reading a grocery list. And every time I remembered Lilly or KS in general I felt a weird pain in my chest , actual physical pain like a mini-mini-mini-mini heart attack, the same sort of pain you feel when watching something very sad or touching like A puppy being tortured . I couldn't sleep well for days seeing as KS kinda conquered my dreams , I had to remind my self every waking moment of the sentence written on the top of the forum : Don't panic , it's just a game ... it's just a game ... it's just a game , even so I couldn't get over it . Right now I think i'm past the worst part(I dream of different things thank god). Thing is : the effort you put into KS for Hisao to get the girl gets wasted when you're sent back to the main screen , so after you've built up a relationship and a connection to a girl that's not even real , you get thrown out and (virtually) that bastard Hisao gets all the benefits , you're just left there staring at you're computer screen with that irritatingly awesome and nostalgic music playing that just makes you want to literally jump into the screen (to enter the game) . So yeah , to most (if not all except for you) the feels are pretty darn bad.
That said , I think the feels are just an amplified version of the emptiness you feel when finishing a series or a good book , happened to me while watching Friends from the begining and especially after reading "The Name Of The Wind" and "The Wise Man's Fear" , those were awesome .

Sorry for the rant , it's the feels man...... the Feels.

And Nekken , your picture really isn't helping us get past the feels man ... c'mon :'(

[yummines]

i didnt really get the feels hardcore. i just got more like just a deep sigh at the situation in my life.

[Snow_Storm]

I don't take video games seriously, so no feels on my end.

[Beanwell]

I'm not gonna say "OMGTHISGAMESOGOODIWILL<3KS5EVER", because everyone already knows that (although the OST was phenomenal).

WARNING: GENERIC FEELS POST BELOW

I will say that I feel empty after finishing it. Recently I reached 100% completion, but I didn't want to come to the fact that I had already seen everything there was to see, so I played all of the routes again. Now, I've reached the end. Sometimes I almost (note: ALMOST) wish that this game was like TF2, where new content is added periodically so I don't have to have this empty feeling.

"The closer I got to finishing katawa shoujo, the more I wanted to stop playing it. I started looking for other things to play, watch or read, dreading the final credits every time. But every time I played again, I immersed in it (obviously) and now it is finally over.
Guys, what do I do now?"

I've been asking this same question for a while now. I haven't picked up any new habits/hobbies after playing this game - I don't even know whether my feels are good or bad. I almost envy Rin in the fact that she has something she likes to do and has a natural talent for. Although I'm still young enough that I don't want to post my age here, I see my friends learn and develop interests. However, I have nothing - no subject, hobby, or activity I have a talent/like for, nor do I have motivation to change anything. I'm just not good at anything, and I don't really like to do a whole lot of things. Even for the few things I have interests in (e.g. computers, science, games), I've never really tried/wanted to study them deeply. They're simply subjects that I find slightly more appealing than others. So to sum things up, I have an empty feeling and I have no idea what I'm going to do with my life.

Oh yeah, one last thing - like Kenji, I stay in my room most of the time (although instead of trying to bring down the vast feminist conspiracy, I go on the computer) and I don't like dealing with other people, finding social confrontations rather dull.

tl;dr i haz feels, no idea what to do

[ShadeHaven]

It's a perfectly normal reaction to feel empty after finishing KS. I know I felt the same way. It's been 5 months and I still haven't achieved %100, even though I've played through the girl's routes several times. The feels' will subside soon enough. As many have already said, its best to channel that energy into something productive like a hobby. You say you aren't good at anything, but if that's true, why not try and learn something new? Fanart and fan fictions have been a very popular activity brought about by KS feels'. I fall into that category myself. Honestly though, I'd say enjoy those feels while you can. Many yearn for that same emotional impact after they've finished the vn, and in a way, it's worse than what one experiences during KS.

[Nobody in Particular]

I said the same thing in a thread yesterday, but it works so I'll say it again. Just read a book, play a game, watch a film or do what I did and move onto another VN. Providing it has a good enough story the emptiness will be gone in a day or two.

[Loonie]

Try to hang out with your friends a bit more every day and watch what they're interested in. Don't find excuses for yourself to not do so, just set it up as a regular weekly event to hang out with them. Ask them sometimes as to why they're interested in the things they love doing the most. You just might get an answer that triggers something inside you and makes you realize a bit more about what you could be passionate about.

[CaptainFalcon]

PKSDD (Post-Katawa-Shoujo-Depression-Disorder) is a common affliction among its readers.

Symptoms include reassessing your own life path, looking up old friends, examining past relationships, reconsidering your familial ties, taking up physical activity, reconnecting with old hobbies, reduced time spent masturbating, higher awareness and related emotional empathy, profound contemplation of your possible future, rediscovering your love of lemon-scented lube, improved skill at reading comprehension, sudden interest in artistic endeavors, speculation on the intricacies of life with disabilities, increased interest in literary expression, desire to research prosthetic technology, insomnia, depression, reduced sex-drive and uncontrollable crying.

Take two of these,

and try to smile, there are thousands of people going through the same ordeal.

Wow you really hit the nail on the head there. PKSDD, I love it! Such a perfect way to describe it all. I finished all the routes a couple of months ago but I find myself wanting to play through them again (once I summon up the courage to live through those feels again). Anywho thank you for providing the perfect definition!

[Tiercelet]

I'm sorry about any snide or Offensive comments I've made that may have offended any of you . I still think they were justified but i've never really been the type of guy to do that .
[...GF story...]
So in conclusion sorry and my ex's situation's resemblance to Emi's is the reason why I was severely depressed and kept playing back out relationship in my head several times , wondering if I "MAde the wrong choice" you know , or "Got her bad ending" since KS depends on single lines , I though perhaps I said the wrong sentence once which is why she never opened up to me.

Regarding the first, well, this is the Internet. It's like a high-oxygen environment, the smallest spark will start a fire. It's a good practice for life to breathe a few times and be the fire blanket rather than rising to the bait.

As for your experience with your gf, I'm sorry about what happened. It sounds like this may be one of those cases where there is no happy ending -- there's nothing you can do to bring her mother back, nothing anyone could do to replace her, and the grieving process simply is what it is. It's different for everyone. We can't judge whether you "made the wrong choice" -- maybe you did a lot of stupid things (asking "is anything wrong" when you know something is might be an example, but it might not, we weren't there) or maybe you were perfect and it's just something she's going to have to work through.

One of the things that KS does address but not always obviously is that agency isn't always with the player. In real life too. Sometimes things happen that are her decision; sometimes things work out based on your decisions but for reasons you have no conscious control over. And sometimes things just don't work out. One thing that KS doesn't address -- and wouldn't, since it wouldn't really fit with the genre of a ren'ai VN -- is self-care. You talked about how you couldn't take being with this girl any more, because she was so distant and so robotic to you. At a certain point, while the situation sucks, the choice not to be with her is okay. Maybe even necessary. It's okay to be selfish when you have to be to protect yourself or give yourself the chance to be happy (so long as you aren't taking advantage of or harming others). You aren't a therapist and you can't be expected to be one. And it's okay to break up with someone for those reasons. (That's a little-discussed side issue with white-knighting, incidentally--say you succeed and make someone's life "better" by making them dependent on you. Guess what? They'll still have issues, you've just recruited yourself as an unpaid, unlicensed therapist. Congratulations...?) Anyway that said I hope you'll still be a friend to your friend when she needs you; but if she isn't The One For The Rest Of Your Life, maybe that's okay.

But you are SO young. You of course want a deep emotional connection with someone (healthy adolescent sex drive or no), but there will be SO MUCH time for that. Instead of thinking about how you don't have that, think of now as this essential time to discover more about who you are and who you want to be (the person you'll share with the person who share your life). Think of it as the time to establish meaningful connections with lots of different people, whether friendships or relationships (many of which won't work out) because you know what? The Hisao that dates Lilly will never get to date Emi or Rin or Hanako. He'll never get to learn from all those other mistakes, he'll never experience all the other joys that you would experience even in any of their bad routes. Think how much richer his life would be if he had the chance to date several of them before settling down... think how much richer your life will be if you let yourself grow and change and meet lots of good friends who shape you and give you direction. You don't want to be forever the person you were when you were seven, right? So maybe it's okay that you not be forever with the people you were with when you were seven, too.

That's not to say it doesn't hurt. The first lesson of life is it always hurts. But life's always about decisions, which experiences you get to have and which you don't. Perhaps you'll get lots of new experiences from this which you never could have had otherwise.

You don't want to be my (now-divorced) parents, fifty years old and realizing your deep connection with one person meant you never got to meet anyone else, or even really have a deep connection with yourself. There will be so much time for all that. Just don't spend that time in moping or worrying or complaining. You have so much time, but never enough that you can waste it.

Okay, okay, grandpa's done. Good luck out there.

[The_Thing]

After playing this wonderful and heart-warming visual novel, there are some sections of each arc that always make me have butterflies in my stomach. Sometimes I felt like I wanted to choke up and break down into depression, but I pulled myself together and found an alternate solution to channel it.

It is nice to be able to experience this adventure and look back to the parts that made me feel most emotional. After all, I have spent hours and hours on this and enjoyed it for the most part. Of course, the first and second times are usually the best for me.

I don't have a severe case of depression and I don't mind being single for a while, but as fictional as these characters really are, they seemed quite real and their stories quite interesting and concerning. If they were real, and I know they are not, and if I had a physical condition and if the settings were real, I wouldn't mind going to Yamaku High School and meeting these characters.

I have had dreams of possible people to live and care with, but those were just dreams. Sometimes I find myself waking up feeling concerned why that had to happen.

Enough of my indelible fantasy. I'll just leave it installed on my computer for now. I may go back to it to try and re-experience it, but in most cases, in my experience, you cannot live and experience the same thing more than once.

Despite me not having a severe case of depression, I was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome at age ten. I did find this visual novel to be quite pleasing to the eyes and ears. It is as if I was reading a Goosebumps book where you had to make a decision then turn to the page that decision follows, except this was much more effective; heartwarming, pleasing, interesting, and simply wonderful.