#oneaday Day 751: I Love You, Shizune

This is the fourth of several posts regarding the notorious amateur-developed visual novel Katawa Shoujo. If you are intending to play this game and proceed down the “Shizune” path and would like to avoid spoilers, I recommend you skip this post. I’ve even put the spoilery discussion below the break. Aren’t I nice?

If you’re still reading this, it’s highly likely you already know what Katawa Shoujo is but just in case you aren’t and/or you haven’t read the previous posts where I included this exact same paragraph, it’s a visual novel developed by 4 Leaf Studios, made up of members of the much- (and usually justifiably-) maligned 4chan community along with other itinerant creative types from around the Internet. It was developed following extended discussion over a sketch by Japanese doujinshi artist Raita, and is the very definition of a “labour of love”, having come from discussions on 4chan all the way to a full-fledged, professional-quality game between the years of 2007 and 2012. It’s been described by some as “eroge” or an erotic game, but I feel this does it an injustice; there are sexual scenes in the game, yes, but the point of the game is not to get to these scenes — rather, they are part of the plot, and not necessarily a “victory” for the player. They are also not terribly frequent compared to the rest of the game, which focuses on interpersonal interactions and psychological issues.

If you want to check out Katawa Shoujo for yourself, take a peek at the official website. My previous post regarding Emi’s path can be found here, and if you’re too lazy to scroll down, yesterday’s post on Hanako can be found here, and the previous day’s post on Lilly can be found here. Following this, there’s only Rin left to go.

I found playing Shizune’s path quite interesting because I actually spent a lot of it not being entirely sure if I liked her or not. Her competitive, dominant, bossy nature is somewhat at odds with what I personally find attractive, and so I found myself wondering if pursuing her would have the same degree of emotional impact as the other girls. I still haven’t quite made my mind up about it, as yet, but it was certainly an interesting story, despite being the least interactive of all the paths through the game, with only one meaningful choice to make.

At the outset of the game, the player is trained to think of the deaf and mute Shizune and her bubbly interpreter Misha as a single unit. It’s difficult not to, as they’re always together at the beginning of the game, Shizune only appears to speak in ellipses, and Hisao has to understand everything she says through Misha. Misha, being something of a wild child, has no sense of when Shizune is being sarcastic or scathing, but Hisao proves himself to be fairly astute early on, mostly understanding the intent behind Shizune’s words but occasionally being surprised.

Despite her businesslike exterior, Shizune is actually quite immature and childlike underneath. She enjoys competition — making everything a game. At the slightest possibility of something becoming competitive, she’ll challenge Hisao to “beat” her at it, usually offering punishments for the loser rather than rewards for the winner. She is proud, though, and doesn’t back out of the consequences she set for herself, even if she does lose at times. We see this in the scene where the pair are carrying Kenji’s inexplicably huge crate back to his room — she’s the first to stumble and is perfectly willing to wind up carrying it herself.

Shizune’s competitive nature is a coping mechanism she developed to get people to interact with her. As someone who could neither hear nor speak, she was isolated by her very nature. When we meet the rest of her family, including her cross-dressing brother and her irrational, trolling father, it becomes very clear that her childhood couldn’t have been easy. The rest of her family clearly had no desire to learn how to communicate with her in sign language, and she came to resent having to communicate with her notepad. This is abundantly clear from how resistant she is to using it in her conversations with Hisao.

Shizune’s story ends up being as much about Misha as it is about Shizune, however. When we’re initially introduced to her, the player is left wondering exactly what she’s doing at Yamaku. It’s actually one of the other paths where we find out that the school isn’t solely composed of disabled students, and since Misha appears to be free of physical deformities, we find ourselves wondering if she either has some sort of chronic condition, or some kind of mental disorder. Her seemingly unstable personality is arguably strong evidence for the latter, but we also find out in another path that Yamaku doesn’t cater to those with mental disabilities, either, so it can’t be that.

Misha, it seems, is simply there because she wants to learn sign language and go on to become a teacher in it. Hisao, to his credit, doesn’t immediately assume that there’s something “wrong” with Misha, but it’s something of a natural conclusion for the player. As we get to know her throughout Shizune’s path, however, it becomes clear that it’s simply the sort of person she is — wild and bubbly for most of the time, but with occasional moments of clarity. And a love for the tilde.

The most interesting scenes with Misha come towards the end of the story, as Hisao’s relationship with Shizune deepens. Misha comes to Hisao, utterly depressed, and asks him to comfort her. If he does, the two end up having curiously dispassionate sex, with the feeling afterwards that things have irreversibly changed. And sure enough, down this route lies the “bad ending”, down which Shizune’s nature causes her to end up alone.

It’s this side of Shizune that is the most interesting thing about her, and a key part of her relationship with Misha, also. Shizune says to Hisao throughout the course of the story that the games she plays are a means to draw people in, to bring them closer. It works, too — we see even the chronically shy, retiring Hanako join Shizune in a game of chess at one point, drawn in by Shizune’s magnetism.

What Shizune has trouble with, though, is knowing what to do with people once they are close. This is perhaps partly due to her difficulty in communicating with them, but it’s also part of her personality. Given that we’ve established she grew up in a family environment that wouldn’t have been all that supportive of her disability, she wouldn’t have had a good model of what “people who are close” did with one another. This explains her detachment, and her businesslike nature in all matters. It also perhaps explains why when she and Hisao have sex for the first time, she ties him down and takes total control of the situation.

This detachment is a source of difficulty for Misha, who fell in love with Shizune some time ago. She sees how well Hisao and Shizune’s relationship goes, and this depresses her, leading her to her potential late night liaison with Hisao. If Hisao displays some strength of will and refuses to go with it, Misha eventually gets back to her old self — thanks to Shizune’s positive influence on Hisao.

Shizune spurs Hisao on to learn something out of his comfort zone — in this case, sign language. Her competitive nature also has a positive impact on his own personality. While he doesn’t become as outright competitive as she does, he takes on some of her better traits, such as refusing to give up on people when they have given up on themselves. This particularly helps Misha, as Hisao absolutely refuses to let her sink so deeply into a pit of depression when it’s clear that the two were such good friends. Eventually, we see Misha realising that she can’t keep trailing along behind Shizune the whole time — Shizune has her own plans for the future, which involve becoming by turns a ruthless businesswoman and subsequently a philanthropist. Misha, meanwhile, elects to pursue what she is good at, even going so far as to take out-of-hours classes to improve her grades and score herself an international scholarship to continue her signing studies.

In fact, by the end of the story, it’s only Hisao who ends up left without a firm idea of what he has to do by the time he graduates, and the realisation dawns on him that after the journey he took over the course of the year, he wants to help others. He wants to make sure that others turning up to Yamaku as depressed as he was when he first arrived are met with the same degree of friendship and support as he found when Shizune and Misha latched onto him. He decides he wants to become a teacher, accepting the fact that his heart condition means he’ll probably die younger than other people, but wanting to make the most of the years he has.

Ultimately, Shizune’s ending is much like Shizune the person — practical and businesslike. It doesn’t have the romance of Lilly’s ending, the raw emotion of Hanako’s ending, the “finally, we understand each other” nature of Emi’s ending — but it is a positive outcome for everyone involved. Hisao’s life looks set to take a turn for the better as he has a clear goal, and his time with Shizune taught him that.

So while personally speaking Shizune may not have been the most appealing character, she has a positive, inspirational effect on Our Hero. And such is true for many things in life; the things that are best for us, the things that lead us on to Great Things aren’t necessarily the things that provide us with the most instant of gratification. I can certainly relate to that.