Katawa Shoujo Forums

Continuing from another thread...

Oddball wrote:This is what we know about Saki, taken from the April Fool's post.

Saki suffers from Spinocerebellar ataxia, a degenerative disease that makes her gradually lose muscle control, amongst other issues. She uses a crutch to help her balance, but is going to lose the ability to walk and eventually, all daily tasks and even eating and breathing. Fated to die with no hope of a cure, Saki is a conflicting figure. She has to live with a horrific, degenerative condition every day, yet she is outgoing and fashionable just like any high school girl. Saki takes the clumsiness caused by her condition in stride, even going against it by taking up activites that require fine motor control such as joining the Yamaku art club, where Hisao meets her. He finds Saki an engaging but troublesome person to deal with, due to her incredibly frank and complex personality. One moment she might be giggling about the new spring fashion line, the next, stating her bitterness for her crippling illness, yet never dropping her dazzling smile. But even Saki, for all her openness, holds things inside she would never tell anyone else...

There's no mention of a fashion club or her being a bitch.

Also, the artroom CG has a girl that looks like Saki with longer hair.

artroom.jpg

Somebody asked who the first person to put Saki in a fashion club was.

I don't know, but the first time I saw it was a one-shot story where Hanako was interviewing her for the school paper. I have afeeling that's not where it started though.

I just did a forum search for "Saki" and "fashion", and this is the first post in which both of the search terms appear together. The mystery deepens.

EDIT: The first mention of the Fashion Club is in "2400 words from a path never written", located here. I assume this is where the fanon began, or at least was first manifested.

I seem to remember an 'achievement' in another thread in which someone tongue-in-cheek said some of us might try to become experts in disabilities etc because of KS. I must say it was that April Fools' joke that made me first look up 'spinocerebellar ataxia'.

There are literally more than two dozen kinds of SCA, some of which are fairly similar, some of which kill early, some of which debilitate early, some of which do neither early, and some of which do both early. SCA8, for example, can start at earliest 18 and gives a normal lifespan; SCA11 is potentially relatively good too. These will give a fanfic author a relatively easy (not so many manly feels) ride and space for normal character development. SCA1 and SCA7, and most of the others, probably allow either a quick tragedy or a drawn-out melancholic one.

I had a scene in my head canon where Saki looks at Rin and envies Rin's fine and overspecialised foot motor control, while her own artistic talent spasms its way out of control into futility. Then she realises that Rin is like her in deliberately choosing to take up a challenge, and so Saki mentally grits her teeth and spends her remaining few years of life pouring her soul into art. In Hisao's bottom drawer is a little palm-sized portrait that she made of him, as she did for all the members of the art club…

That said, maybe she felt the same way but decided to start a fashion club instead!

brythain wrote:I seem to remember an 'achievement' in another thread in which someone tongue-in-cheek said some of us might try to become experts in disabilities etc because of KS.

Guilty Because of KS, I now have a real interest in Epilepsy and Phantom Limb sentations.

Okay, so what do we know about her in Canon and Fanon?
Personally, I've not read the Pseudo-Route, so if people generally use that as a fanon base, I'm clueless

I think I read somewhere that the disease saki had causes depression swings (you can be happy one second and the next want to jump off a cliff). So how could she be in like the popular group if she can go all bubbly and happy to mopey and sad the next?

RandomPerson wrote:I think I read somewhere that the disease saki had causes depression swings (you can be happy one second and the next want to jump off a cliff). So how could she be in like the popular group if she can go all bubbly and happy to mopey and sad the next?

I think if anywhere, Yamaku would be the place where mood swings and bouts of depression are pretty common. Teenagers are grumpy gits, and on top of that all of them at Yamaku are cripples :p

On top of that, I think Saki is made out to be one of these universally pretty girls and let's face it, humans are definitely aeshetic creatures

Munchenhausen wrote:

RandomPerson wrote:I think I read somewhere that the disease saki had causes depression swings (you can be happy one second and the next want to jump off a cliff). So how could she be in like the popular group if she can go all bubbly and happy to mopey and sad the next?

I think if anywhere, Yamaku would be the place where mood swings and bouts of depression are pretty common. Teenagers are grumpy gits, and on top of that all of them at Yamaku are cripples :p

On top of that, I think Saki is made out to be one of these universally pretty girls and let's face it, humans are definitely aeshetic creatures

You may be right. If I knew I was gonna die when I was 30 in high school, I think I'd already be dead from liver disease or something

I still don't see how any of that leads people to think she's a bitch. I mean, Lilly is supposed to be universally pretty, but she's super nice.

RandomPerson wrote:I think I read somewhere that the disease saki had causes depression swings (you can be happy one second and the next want to jump off a cliff). So how could she be in like the popular group if she can go all bubbly and happy to mopey and sad the next?

That would throw me into a confusion loop, if someone I know did that.

Also, the first link in D2R's post makes me sad. Which, in of itself confuses me. I have Asperger's, I have very little emotion.

SpunkySix wrote:I still don't see how any of that leads people to think she's a bitch. I mean, Lilly is supposed to be universally pretty, but she's super nice.

Lilly, the girl who is so nice, she hides the fact that she's about to move out of the country permanently from both her boyfriend and her best friend?

And, not only that, but began the relationship with said boyfriend, knowing she'd have to move, and even asking him to never leave her, then turning around and dumping his ass with almost no warning?

SpunkySix wrote:I still don't see how any of that leads people to think she's a bitch. I mean, Lilly is supposed to be universally pretty, but she's super nice.

You say that, but Lilly doesn't know she's going to slowly degenerate and lose movement to the point where she'll be on life support whilst fully conscious, and be faced with either euthinasia or a slow, painful death as each of her organs shut down in her final hours, whilst everyone around her is bound to live about three times as long and not have to deal wih any of that.
That married to the fact that there is no cure on the horizon and it's nobody's fault that she has to suffer this demise.
Saki has to deal with knowing all that, but also maintain a happy façade for her friends.

I really couldn't blame her for being a bit of a bitch.

Edit:
What if her being a bitch may be intentional..?
She doesn't want people to miss her when she inevitably goes down, so she tries her best not to let many people too close?

bhtooefr wrote:

SpunkySix wrote:I still don't see how any of that leads people to think she's a bitch. I mean, Lilly is supposed to be universally pretty, but she's super nice.

Lilly, the girl who is so nice, she hides the fact that she's about to move out of the country permanently from both her boyfriend and her best friend?

And, not only that, but began the relationship with said boyfriend, knowing she'd have to move, and even asking him to never leave her, then turning around and dumping his ass with almost no warning?

Stop trying to pick fights, bhtooefr. You know damn well what they mean.

Munchenhausen wrote:

SpunkySix wrote:I still don't see how any of that leads people to think she's a bitch. I mean, Lilly is supposed to be universally pretty, but she's super nice.

You say that, but Lilly doesn't know she's going to slowly degenerate and lose movement to the point where she'll be on life support whilst fully conscious, and be faced with either euthinasia or a slow, painful death as each of her organs shut down in her final hours, whilst everyone around her is bound to live about three times as long and not have to deal wih any of that.
That married to the fact that there is no cure on the horizon and it's nobody's fault that she has to suffer this demise.
Saki has to deal with knowing all that, but also maintain a happy façade for her friends.

I really couldn't blame her for being a bit of a bitch.

Edit:
What if her being a bitch may be intentional..?
She doesn't want people to miss her when she inevitably goes down, so she tries her best not to let many people too close?

I could see that... I guess what I mean is, I can see her being a bitch because she's frustrated sometimes or wants to hide herself away, but I can't see her being a stuck-up popular girl. Those are two very different types of mean.

Xaredian wrote:

RandomPerson wrote:I think I read somewhere that the disease saki had causes depression swings (you can be happy one second and the next want to jump off a cliff). So how could she be in like the popular group if she can go all bubbly and happy to mopey and sad the next?

That would throw me into a confusion loop, if someone I know did that.

Sounds like most popular girls at my High school
Though I don't think any of them had SCA XD

Xaredian wrote:Also, the first link in D2R's post makes me sad. Which, in of itself confuses me. I have Asperger's, I have very little emotion.

I'm on the other end of that spectrum friend. I have troubles controlling said emotions.
Which is bad, because there's only three emotions I easily show: Melancholy, Happiness and Anger. (and I can cycle through those three really, really fast.)

I really love saki as a potential person in the game. There's just so much potential for a great route, you could go like you guys are talking about how she is the popular one who is a bit of a bitch because she doesn't care and is gonna die anyway. Or the complete bitch route and just thinking fuck everyone nobody's gonna miss me like munch suggested. Or you could go a different way and make her a lovely girl who just wants everyone to make the most of their life and gets along with everyone because of that. There's so many ways you could go but the ending is inevitably a sad end where she dies a slow and painful death after slowly gaining to love her character.
I think the moral of her story is :

No matter who you are, life is improbable and death is inevitable. Theres a million things that can kill you every day, just live life how you want to and stop worrying about what could happen, because we all end up in the same place eventually anyway.