Oddball wrote:I think Shizune's bad ending was actually better for her character than her "good ending" was.
I agree 100%. I've actually been thinking about this a bit, so you're getting a long reply.
What do we know about Shizune's history? She joined the Student Council and became president at least a year before KS. At the time the SC was fairly large, and kind of an easy ticket. She took on a lot more responsibility, and managed to drive everybody away from the SC. That takes work, especially considering these are Japanese with a famous work ethic. After crash-and-burning the SC, she periodically could recruit new members but they would not last long. Shizune managed to keep things together by driving her and Misha into the ground. Shizune could take the workload and manage classes; Misha couldn't. There's a good chance that school would have ended badly for Misha if Hisao hand't come along.
In short, Shizune is a dangerous asshole. It's actually a style of management that gets highly rewarded in commerce; a manager that can come in and make a team accomplish dramatic things by completely wrecking it. Even if Shizune says she wants to help people -- well, that's been also true of the wrecking-ball managers I've worked with.
My impression is that Shizune has a very limited emotional toolkit to work with at the start of KS. She is very confrontational, and she thinks of everything, human relations included, in terms of won/loss and domination.
Now, what does it take to change a person like this?
In the "good" ending Shizune comes to realize what a hash she's made of things but in a fairly calm, rational way. My belief is that in the good ending she would find ways to rationalize all her bad behavior and continue it. As noted above, she might be able to create a well-reward life for herself specializing in wrecking teams.
"The dark night of the soul". That's when everything has crash around you and you're left with nothing but the final stark realization that it's all been your fault. There is tremendous power in that dark night if you can harness that energy for real change.
Shizune is clearly going through a dark night in her bad end. And I think she needs a dark night in order to truly change. The challenge, though, is to do something with this opportunity. And KS cuts out just when things are getting interesting.
One last note about Shizune. She's displayed a couple of interesting habits. 1) She doesn't mind fudging reports if actually putting them together is too much work (from the scene where she drafts Hisao into helping her and Misha organize festival receipts) and 2) she doesn't mind using SC funds to buy dinner when it's convenient. This two habits, a basic disregard for accurate reporting and a basic disregard for fiduciary responsibility, could mean that Shizune winds up wearing orange sometime in the future. So her good end could wind up being a very bad end down the road.
TLDR; real change takes suffering and Shizune doesn't suffer enough in her good ending.
