/jp/ - Otaku Culture

>>16924555

At this point I’d like to pose three questions to the reader as they are some of my biggest doubts, if you will, about Subahibi.

1. Was the amount of suffering depicted in LGI really necessary? And, in addition to that, how did you personally feel while reading this route? I can’t tell if my biases are still coming into play here or not, which is why I would be interested in hearing other opinions, but I really don’t think it made the VN any better even from an objective standpoint, and from a subjective standpoint it actively made it worse for me. I also have a hard time accepting Satoko, Megu, and Shiroyama and the Fuckers as legitimate characters. They seem to just be incarnations of evil, created for the sake of tormenting other humans. Maybe this is exactly the point though, and justification for Zakuro turning to her cult thing, if it indeed is a cult and not the truth.

2. What was Zakuro’s real role, in relation to the narrative and the theme? At first I thought she was going to play a pivotal role but the plot ended up being much more about Tomosane’s mind. So as far as the story goes, was she ultimately little more than a trigger for the events of the story and Takuji’s ascension? I feel like there has to be more than that. Speaking of Zakuro, did I miss something about her black bunnies? She got them from Kimika a while before the events of the story, I believe. But, surely, these are the same ones that Hasaki gave to Tomosane as seen in JW2, so what is going on there? After reading the first two endings I thought “Tsui no Sora II is probably gonna be another 5000 lines and explain this” but that was obviously not the case. And as far as Zakuro’s thematic relevance I won’t even attempt to give a theory myself since I don’t understand the work well enough on the surface level, let alone the thematic level.

3. How do the supernatural events in the story happen? This is the biggest question for me because the answer determines your whole view of how you interpret the workings of the story. While there are any number of interpretations you could make, here I’ll lay out the major three that come to mind. First, if you take the story at face value, then you could try to say it all takes place in reality, as-is, and any “supernatural” happenings are just a result of hallucinations or other mental facilities. But this viewpoint is flawed. On one hand, it is easily arguable that many of the “supernatural” events are not supernatural at all, and the story itself leads you to believe that. Takuji’s martial arts abilities come from just accessing Tomosane’s somehow, his mind reading is fairly basic and can be explained via cold reading or other techniques, and his magic elixirs are just drugs. It’s actually really clever how the story tricks you into thinking there’s nothing supernatural going on by presenting it as if it were indeed supernatural, but also provokes you into “reading between the lines” to see that it’s all a hoax. But, two questions cause this interpretation to fall apart. The first, more just raising a doubt, but still relevant: “Why can Hasaki see Yuki in the Himawari no Sakamichi end?” Naturally you could just say that Hasaki is having hallucinations as well, but this seems awfully convenient - why did it take so long for her to develop the same hallucinations as Tomosane? And how do they match up so perfectly, to the point of being able to have three-way conversations? But there isn’t really any need to dwell on that question, because the second is good enough to prove there is something else going on: “How did Takuji see, in detail, Zakuro’s rooftop suicide?” Not in any timeline nor any personality is there any way that this should be possible. So we need to look at it another way, continued in the following post.