STAB TIME!: Katawa Shoujo Yandere Fun-Happy Knife Frenzy!
Posted: Mon Aug 23, 2010 9:55 pm
There are a good couple of dozen pictures on the Mishimmie featuring the various KS girls going all School Days on us like it's 1999. While these are all made in jest before anything else, you still have to wonder... just who amongst the cast is most likely to snap under the pressures of life at Yamaku and go postal, leaving poor Hisao with no recourse but to peg it and pray that his bum ticker doesn't give out before the swiping silver blades catch up with him?
Emi?
To a casual observer, a yandere seems just like a doormat housewife, but of course nothing could be further from the truth. Yanderes are horrifying creatures, and to understand the fear they inspire you have to understand that that servile abasement before their man is merely the external shell - even if they are not conscious of it in the depths of their psychotic derangement, yanderes are unbreakable iron fetters of manipulative control. They are a masked evil, a reference-destroying and disorienting inversion of expectation. They are passive in the way that a minefield is passive - it's not attacking you, per se, but still, put one foot wrong and you're done for.
Emi has already exhibited a mothering side with her home-made lunches and her corraling around of Rin in her more scatterbrained wanderings... and has also shown a more demanding and controlling manner with her notorious health kick. Neither of those clinches the deal, though - what makes Emi a yandere as opposed to simply being a bossy little madam? The difference is that she's doing it out of a sense of obligation, out of wanting to help, instead of dispensing down instructions from higher authority. She sets herself in a subordinate position even as she directs others - with those puppy-dog eyes, she's appealing to another person's decision and power, but still forcing only one action on them. All of the yandere powder is assembled... all there needs to be is a spark to set it off.
Rin?
Rin seems to be the most immune to the yandere contagion - if she's not independent as such, she's at the very least idiosyncratic, and that self-possession does not readily subsume itself into another person. Still, her own ineffable thought processes are similarly detached, and she might just settle on something which seems entirely sensible to her, but is harrowing madness to us!
Shizune?
Shizune's openly commanding personality would seem to render her incapable of being a yandere - however, that does not preclude her from a murderous rampage of spree-killings in a similar vein (or artery, for that matter). Desperation and anguish that no-one is listening to her; jealousy and indignation that Hisao might presume to spurn her - her, the greatest woman to ever grace the Millenial generation, to whom everyone should be grateful for her condescending to spend time with them.
Lilly?
You know when there's been an outrage or an atrocity of some kind, and the journalists come sniffing around the neighbourhood of the perpetrator like carrion circling around a cooling corpse, the locals suddenly having microphones thrust under their chins always remark how they're astonished at what happened and how he always seemed like such a nice man who never caused anyone any bother...
Beware the quiet ones.
Lilly is a signal study in measured and gauged comportment... but she still feels the burn and sting of emotions as much as anyone. Behind that demure exterior, without any valve or outlet to relieve the agonising, crushing pressure, is steadily-accumulating resentment, frustration, anger, rage...
Hanako?:
Hanako is so cripplingly antisocial that it's difficult enough for her to form a relationship, let alone take control of one - but then, once attached, she will fasten like a limpet. Hanko has all of the hallmarks of the clingy and needy girlfriend, relying on regular doses of affection to fill up the hole draining her own self-esteem... and like most addictions, she needs more and more and more and moreandmoreandmoreandyou can't spend time away from me if you don't have any limbs, Hisao!
Misha?
Misha is something of a wildcard, mainly because the interpretation of her tendency is quite subjective. Until we have a better handle on the conditions that may or may not affect her, is her loud and gregarious manner a natural trait of her character, or something that she affects as a defence mechanism to bury and dull a hidden misery? Something that a few hard knocks with love and loss in the wider world might just unearth?
Kenji?
It's possible that Kenji's chronic paranoia might be aggravated to the stage where he believes that the only way he can possibly limit the malignity of the feminist conspiracy is a pre-emptive strike to take out as many as he can before the manipulated authorities crash down on him. If that occurs, the likely result is him tying dynamite to his scarf, throwing it over himself like a bomb belt, and leaping into the girls' changing rooms to go out in one blooming, bouncing blaze of glory. I suspect not, however - Kenji is unlikely to give the dark forces of the world the satisfaction of closing down his options and checkmating him in this way. Ironic that it actually makes him the sanest of the whole group...
Nurse?
Sure, Nurse-kun seems well-adjusted and a genial fellow, but that eye, that eye... peering, searching, fixing, inspecting, interrogating, judging. How long until not only the exercise-averse Hisao, but the entire school is found wanting? The cafeteria food is bad enough as it is, no-one would notice the odd taste of Nurse tipping the entire contents of his medicine cabinet into the swill before it was already inflicting its deadly punishment. The ailment is inadequacy. The prescription is death.
Mutou?
I think everyone can agree that Mutou hates his job and hates his life. A few years back the government here in Blighty ran a recruitment drive for teachers, with the slogan "those who can, teach" - very ill-advised, because it was immediately derided and transformed into "those who can't, teach" - and Mutou feels the cutting cynical truth of that statement acutely. He wanted to be an academic, a researcher, a pioneer charting new shores of truth and reality... but instead he's stuck in a school, not a laboratory, and attending PTA meetings, not research conferences. Instead of chiselling his own name into the rock of understanding, he's stuck regurgitating other people's work, other people's talent, other people's intellect, other people's discoveries. His haggard, unkempt appearance isn't just due to poor organisation... it's the crumbling facade of a man who's wondering what's the point of carrying on anymore. How many drunken Friday nights will slosh around in his system before the dam bursts?
Yuuko?
By her antics in the Shanghai Tea Shop Yuuko has a well-known desire to do well, and to be seen to be doing well, as well. She's widely believed to be the unfortunate soul whose well-meaning attempt at outreaching tenderness towards a lonely, unhappy boy messily backfired and threw Kenji into the dark corners. She wants to make amends, she wants to help, she'll do anything to set things right again... but what will happen if she comes to think that she can't?
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Poor Hisao. He hasn't got a chance, has he?
