I finally have a few hours of no-frills free time. It's time for
again.
Solistor wrote:I'd wish I had a time machine so i could jump to when this story was finished
I wish you had a time machine so you could tell me if I finished my story. And so that you could prevent the death of Owen Hart.
Comrade wrote:Haha! Take that emi!
Mirage_GSM wrote:You think so? I can't really picture Lilly getting along with someone as jaded as Iwanako is right now...
Great chapter again. I'd say you hit Emi's character perfectly.
I'm glad you think so. There's basically no source material for this kind of scenario as it pertains to Emi (the closest thing is her apologizing to Hisao for racing him, and that doesn't really rate in comparison) so I had to play it by ear, which was nervewracking. I get nervous about Iwanako getting the best of Emi (and to a lesser extent, Shizune) because I'm trying to keep her out of Suesbekistan, and emotionally crucifying a main character can constitute taking a step inside. It doesn't help that Iwanako looks vaguely hypercompetent compared to Hisao, which I know isn't hard in Act One, and I feel I've compensated by giving Iwanako considerably more issues*, but it's always a concern.
The entire time I was writing Emi, I kept thinking "should she be shrugging this off?" In the end she didn't, but I was expecting a backlash.
Kyler Thatch wrote:Also also, how do you forbid someone from attending a festival?
This isn't a spoiler, so let me just clear the air on this once and for all. Emi isn't at Yamaku right now. She's living in downtown Sendai with her mother until the suspension is lifted. She won't be at the Festival because for the time being she's not even permitted on school grounds.
As somebody who has enjoyed quite a few out-of-school suspensions back in the day, let me just say that I really don't understand how they constitute a punishment. Wow, you're telling me I can stay home while my parents are at work, eating junk food and watching the box set of
Dawson's Creek? Well, hot damn! (Yeah, yeah, I know it's different in the context of private school.)
Blasphemy wrote:Unless suddenly Iwanako's dad becomes furious knowing about all this and demands Emi's expulsion and that's that?!? Who knows!
If Iwanako's dad got angry enough to do something about it, he would have his secretary pen in a time for chewing out the faculty some time three weeks from now, only to cancel it when he meets a prospective client and forget to reschedule it.
Blasphemy wrote:Also man, that must be a terrible feeling for Meiko, waiting outside and listening to her daughter getting chewed on like this, uh oh.
Meiko originally had a larger role in this chapter, but I couldn't think of anything for her to say, and I couldn't imagine Emi just showing up at the hospital on her own, hence her waiting out in the hallway eavesdropping on the whole thing. If Iwanako had been more forgiving of Emi, Meiko probably would have come in and thanked Iwanako for her magnanimity, but obviously that didn't happen here so Meiko comes off acting maybe a little weird?
I really really like Meiko though. That's all I'll say for now.
Reese8 wrote:Iwanako, having no idea that the prevailing opinion was that Hanako ought to be handled with kid gloves if at all, walked right up to her and asked her for help.
I want to point out here that even if Hisao had tried this in that scenario, he would not have been received nearly as successfully.
Mader Levap wrote:Emi deserved it. She should be happy they did not expelled her on spot (for sure Nurse doing - he did everything he could to prevent that).
If Iwanako had died, Emi would almost certainly be expelled. In fact, that's why I made the decision not to require Iwanako to go back into surgery here—even that could be seen as grounds for expulsion. Since she's mostly fine (Iwanako's concussion is load-bearing in a lot of meaningful ways), expulsion doesn't strike me as particularly realistic.
Also, Nurse has no power whatsoever to influence a decision like that, so I don't know why you think that's the case.
Mader Levap wrote:Presence of Hanako and Lilly IS surprising. Wonder what business they have? Do they know about obliteration of Emi? Will see how it goes.
People are forgetting something very important about Lilly.
Reese8 wrote:By the way, Leaty, what field is the term MTTB from? My Systems course introduced it as Mean Time To Failure.
Mean Time to Failure is probably the more widespread term. I don't actually have any engineering background. A quick Googling turned up the phrase (and a graph) in a thesis about power cable defects for an Electrical and Computer Engineering degree, so there you have it I guess. (That Googling also turned up
this, so thanks, mysterious Reddit reader.)
AntonSlavik020 wrote:I actually really like "Iwahanako". I don't know why. I think it's from people referring to the various Mass Effect pairings in the same way(Shenko, Shekarian, ect...) and Hisao' s name doesn't really blend well with any of the girl's names.
Every time somebody says "Iwahanako," I debate having an aneurysm. Here, as it happens I'm fluent in Mandarin so I can do this pretty easily (kanji are almost all just traditional hanzi):
Iwanako/Hanako: Stoneflower (岩華)
Iwanako/Lilly: Sandstone (砂岩) or
Canefish (藤魚) (Lilly's name is in katakana so I used the family name)
Iwanako/Shizune: Soundfish (音魚) or
Stonestill (岩静)
Iwanako/Emi: Stonesmile (岩笑)
Iwanako/Rin: Jadestone (琳岩) or
Fishmound (魚塚)
Iwanako/Misha: Rock Empire (岩御) (this one is ridiculous, but the "Mi" in "Misha" literally means "imperial")
Iwanako/Momomi: Peachrock (桃砂)
Iwanako/Hisao: Stone Age (岩久) ("久" literally means "long time")
Okay, these are mostly terrible but they're still better than the alternative.
sanduba wrote:I'm really enjoying it. It's slow paced, but still good.
Compared to what? Are you talking about my update speed? Bluescreen is actually
faster paced than Life Expectancy. It's only slower if you compare it to the Rika or Kagami pseudo-routes, and those are faster-paced because they don't actually cover all of Act One like this one does.
neio wrote:Serious question, when you thought up/wrote down that line, did you flinch? Because I just replayed the Emi route and wow, did that hurt. I physically winced. Hard. It's worse because it makes sense (even if it's a little exaggerated).
I don't know if I
flinched, but I replayed Emi's route to write this chapter, and, yeah, I definitely thought "this.
This is the moment where my readership turns on Iwanako." Obviously Iwanako has little idea of the gravity of what she said (she didn't even notice Emi's prosthetics,) but I thought for sure that people were going to think Iwanako was a psycho bitch anyway. I'm more than a little surprised that most people think Emi had it coming, especially since she's so well-liked.
Personally, I'm glad I (practically accidentally) came up with such an
for Iwanako, because I want my readers to believe that there was more to Iwanako in
Katawa Shoujo than just a sad little wisp who felt like a failure over her ability to bring Hisao out of his depression. Obviously this permutation of Iwanako is much more jaded, but I'd like to think it's a pretty good wake-up call for the reader when Iwanako goes Murder Mode on Emi.
neio wrote:Still, despite the understandability of Iwanako's rage, I find myself wondering if Iwanako would have actually preferred no apology at all. Separately, would Iwanako's life have been affected for better or worse had Emi not tried to apologize? (And what about Emi's?)
I wasn't sure how to answer this at first. The best answer to this question is that when I was writing the Iwanako/Emi encounter, I read through Misstep again (Hanako's bad ending, not Doomish's bad fic), and much of Iwanako's explosion at Emi was deliberately meant to be a parallel to Hanako's eruption at Hisao. (In fact, read those scenes side by side if you want what I daresay is a damn good illustration of how Hanako and Iwanako differ as characters.) The Iwanako/Emi encounter can definitely be described as Emi Misstepping Iwanako, and much of the logic in that scene applies here as well.
Could Emi have avoided Iwanako's wrath and still apologized? Perhaps, but Iwanako was already a ticking time bomb
before Emi walked in, and Emi then proceeded to say basically all the wrong things. It doesn't help that Emi isn't an adult (and is therefore not an authority figure,) and thus Iwanako feels much more comfortable giving her the third degree. Probably the
best course of action for Emi would have been to apologize after the suspension was lifted and the Festival was over, so that there wasn't a perceived undertone of "please plead with them to lighten my sentence."
Iwanako didn't actually need an apology to begin with—she hates receiving apologies, especially since so few of them are ever genuine. Frankly, if Emi hadn't visited her in the hospital, Iwanako wouldn't even have remembered her name or recognized her face in the halls, unless somebody else pointed her out. Emi was just a force of nature to her until this scene. Emi
did need to apologize, because she would have felt guilty and because everybody would have egged her on to do it, but honestly Meiko should have warned her—I imagine her having received a similar apology in the past for the accident that killed her husband and not receiving it warmly.
In my original envisioning of this scenario (back in 2012!), called "Missile Crisis," Iwanako was prescribed bed rest, but allowed to return to the dorms early on Thursday morning sans concussion, so she heads to the 3-3 classroom to tell Mutou she won't be in class for the day, only to walk into the events of "Cold War." Shizune tries to bring Iwanako into the argument the way she did Hisao, only for Iwanako to go absolutely nuclear on her for a perceived lack of concern, and when a shocked and appalled Lilly (who has never met Iwanako) says something along the lines of "that isn't called for, calm down," Iwanako proceeds to snap at
her, too, before being pulled out of the room. As a result, when Emi comes by the dorms later to apologize to Iwanako, it was more of a muted "slam the door in her face" kind of deal, because she had already exploded.
I was so excited to write that scene right up until I circumvented it entirely. It also had a cameo from Rika.
cptngarlock wrote:I by no means want to imply Iwanako isn't intelligent or well-informed, but...those two words strike me as 10-dollar words that even an intelligent teenager would not know, let alone use to describe something in their head. The idea that a Japanese teenager like Iwanako knowing what a "Victorian memento mori daguerreotypes" even is strikes me as extremely odd; both instances brought me out of the story. You're free to disagree, of course, but these strike me as too wordy for a stream-of-conscious story.
Okay, this isn't the first time somebody has brought this to my attention, so I want to explain my philosophy behind this.
First of all,
memento mori is a pretty common phrase, and when I was a kid I learned the word "daguerreotype" from
Dinotopia: The World Beneath, literally a children's book (but still one of my very favorites ever.)
Tabula rasa is the name of a
Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode, and the word "lachrymose" not only appears in
this excellent essay by Tim Kreider but is also etymologically related to "lacrimosa," a
Mozart composition that was covered by Evanescence. So these words are out there and exist in popular culture.
When I began to characterize Iwanako, I knew I didn't want her to be like Hisao, so one way in which I decided to distance her from Hisao (and create new story possibilities) was to make her bad in many of the areas where he's talented and good in many of the areas where he isn't. So while Hisao can't speak English to save his life, Iwanako is fluent at it. Hisao has a great aptitude for math and science, Iwanako barely understands the subject. Hisao is bad at reading people while Iwanako is both empathic and self-aware. Hisao has a surprising amount of willpower but Iwanako has an almost Sisyphean tendency to backslide into complacency and despair. Hisao reads books while Iwanako watches films. Hisao believes he can find love again and Iwanako doesn't.
So, yeah, Iwanako uses a lot of fancy words, because she has a precocious mastery of language and a good memory for vocabulary. The fact that she sees herself as upper-class only provides more reason for her to want to speak like a highly-educated, sophisticated individual. She doesn't always communicate at that level (as her letter to Hisao demonstrated,) but I don't feel bad about using the words for an internal monologue unless I'm writing a particularly tense, fast-paced scene.
Also, in retrospect I'm really glad that I didn't make Iwanako a book-reading, science-loving nerd girl, because that character would have been like a much much more boring Aiko Kurai and it would have absolutely sucked.
*
Remember how scene five is called "New Game Plus"? Iwanako's characterization kind of ties into that. In a New Game Plus you generally start out with more stuff and retread familiar territory, but encounter greater, unexpected challenges, which I think suits this entire fic nicely. It's replaying Katawa Shoujo on a higher difficulty with a new character.
Personally yes, I believe you have turned Iwanako into her own person and a fully fleshed out human being. She has friends, a family, hopes, dreams, struggles, baggage and regrets like the rest of us. I even forget that she is canonically just the one-scene catalyst for Katawa Shoujo's male main character, sometimes, instead of a quasi-OC you created wholecloth.
