Mirage_GSM wrote:What do we actually know?
1) She gets dizzy going up stairs
No. She
tells Hisao that she gets dizzy on stairs.
There's a huge difference.
(... and a lot more good stuff I sniped ...)
I've been thinking about your reply, Mirage_GSM, and you're got some very good points.
Misha only mentions the dizziness once, so it makes a lot of sense that she is simply being duplicitious here.
That fact that Misha *can* be effectively duplicitious also headshoots and Ausberger's and related ideas.
It also means that we really can't take statements from Misha at face value, including statements like "I came to Yamaku to become a sign language interpreter."
We find out in Shizune's route that the Misha we know and love throughout most of KS is actually an elaborate charade, hiding the real Misha.
This is fairly cool, btw. For most of the VN Misha is a loud, brainless buffoon, and then we find out that she has a deep and sophisticated character.
Anyway, back to Misha's disability, or more generally what brought her to Yamaku.
There's some interesting Chekovian evidence that she has no disabilities. It is pointedly mentioned that Yamaku accepts students with no disabilities. That doesn't make a lot of sense unless there is a meaningful character with no disabilities in the story, and pretty much the only candidate is Misha.
Then again, the only time the pool comes up in the story is when it gets mentions as part of the school facilities, so maybe Chekov isn't the most reliable guide either.
To say that she came to Yamaku to become a sign language interpreter leads to the next question: why did she want to become a sign language interpreter? Did she have a brother that was deaf? Did she have some other disability and learning sign language was the only way to afford Yamaku? Did she have some pressing reason to leave her then-current school and sign language at Yamaku was a decent possibility?
Misha may even be duplicitous enough that the part about getting dizzy on the stairs was the absolute truth. Consider: it's absolutely established that she's willing to hide real pain in order to make things easier on the people that she cares for. It's quite possible that she does get dizzy and out of breath on stairs, and going to class every day, and going to the Shanghai, but she sucks it up most of the time. Perhaps that time on the stairway was the time she told the truth because she hadn't established that strong of a friendship with Hisao yet.
WoG just shot down any idea of mental illness for Misha, so I got nothin'. Just an appreciation for Misha as an extremely complex character.
