Hakuouki on different levels

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I've been chatting with scytale about Hakuouki and I realized it's time for more Hakuouki posts. One thing that has been on my mind: I keep saying that Hakuouki works on many different levels. So let me try to list them.

Levels on which I read Hakuouki:

1. Kinky porn. I never was into the whole vampire thing when I encountered it in western canons but Hakuouki made blood drinking sexy to me. No shame. :)

2. Character studies. Just about every route featured a character that was lovely and worth getting to know.

3. Love stories. Let's not forget the obvious. One thing I like about the genre of otome novels is that what love looks like and means is different on different routes, so it makes clear that there's no one (or no best) way to love. And since routes keep getting added, the possible ways to love are potentially infinite.

4. Thinking about history from different perspectives. The different routes experience the same historical events but the characters understand what is happening in different ways. I find this very powerful.

5. A philosophical dialogue about the meaning of honor and the nature of the good life. Each character embodies different virtues and has very strongly felt opinions about how to live honorably as a warrior in difficult and complex circumstances and they often change over the course of the route. Since I've been playing (and replaying) Haukuouki I've often found that when I'm dealing with a tough real-life question I feel an impulse to replay a certain route, and that might lead me to realize what virtue and what understanding of honor and the good life I need right now.

6. A meditation on the consequences of war and the struggle of living with war-related PTSD. This is a topic very close to my heart and I appreciate the varied possible responses to it in the different routes. Although reading it this way is part of what makes me partial to Sanan for obvious reasons.

Any I'm missing?

I find that my reactions to the routes can go back and forth depending on which level I'm reading on and what I'm looking for. Hijikata, for example, has swung back and forth from being one of my least favorites to one of my favorites.

Comments

[alias_sqbr]

An ensemble story where everyone has complex relationships with each other, that we see from different angles on different routes.

Similar to 5, but: An exploration of various ethical/political questions to do with single minded devotion to your own group vs general compassion for all people, including outsiders who have hurt those you care about in the past.

Also some explorations of What It Means To Be Japanese which kind of went over my head but seemed interesting.

A fantasy story with moderately consistent worldbuilding which interweaves real and imaginary events in an interesting way.

Wish fulfillment fantasy beyond the romance: being accepted as part of the club by a bunch of cool historical figures, feeling like an unlovable gross monster but being accepted for who you are, Ordinary Girl Is Actually Fairy Princess etc.

Probably others I'm forgetting!

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Also some explorations of What It Means To Be Japanese which kind of went over my head but seemed interesting.

I've been thinking about this a lot but couldn't find a way to put it in my post. I think talking about its history is one way that a nation learns to understand itself. Just like a person's identity is largely made up of what was done to them and how they responded to it, so too a national identity. This is one reason I *love* the visual novel/branching story framework for thinking about history, it accommodates and can reflect and even create a dialogue about different ways of thinking about national identity.

But yes, I'm looking at this as an outsider so I can't go too deep into it and I miss some things. I keep being worried that I've stumbled on the Japanese equivalent of Gone With the Wind and I'm just too clueless to notice.

[alias_sqbr]

Same, I barely recognise the American equivalent when it's slightly less obvious than Gone With The Wind, despite being a lot more familiar with US history. The other day I recommended a fictional book dealing with the US Civil War to someone because of it's interesting usage of ghosts, and was told it regurgitates a lot of unfortunate pro-Confederacy ideas that went entirely over my head.

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This is one reason I'm content to be in a very small corner of fandom. I always feel with these historical otomes like I'm teetering on the verge or war crimes apologism, and I don't have a good way of knowing if it's gone too far.

[alias_sqbr]

Yeah, same. I guess one nice thing about stuff set in the Sengoku era is that it was all a very long time ago, which hopefully softens the blow of any unfortunate implications.

[scytale]

This is a really great and lovely list!

5 is really my favorite part. <3 I've also found playing Hakuoki interesting for reflecting on the good life and honor -- and also, the responsibilities of being a leader. The way Nagakura, Harada, Heisuke, and even Hijikata reflect on the mistakes Kondo makes and how (to a certain extent) he's letting his own ego take precedence over his duties. I haven't played Hijikata's route yet, but I think even in the other routes, you can see the burden weighing on him -- what's the right thing to do, when you have a duty and so many people depending on you?

Dealing with change and loss, accepting change and loss as inevitable, and how you remake yourself (or don't) in the face of it, and whether or not you even should. Saito's route has a lot of meditation on what he is without the sword and how modernization takes away both his philosophy and his way of life. Sannan's route and Hijikata's, I suspect, come up with different answers to the question.

Bildungsroman for Chizuru. Learning about and coming to terms with her identity as neither fully demon nor fully human, discovering the secrets about her family and coming up with her own opinions about it, and learning from the Shinsengumi even as she loses them. And I like how in different choices, she comes up with very different answers to the questions of what she owes to the Shinsengumi, and how she can help them (and whether or not she even should).

I also love the extent to which sometimes it feels like Chizuru doesn't fit in with anyone. She can't go with Sen (because that would mean either giving up her love or her conception of herself as a human), and she rejects Kazama, Kodo, and Kaoru's visions, too. In most of the routes, the cultural trauma that the demons experience and react to isn't even hers. With the Shinsengumi, she's still a prisoner, and while they are her friends, they lock her out when serious war conversations are happening, and she's desperately lonely and unsure of what to do in the common route. One of the things I found most poignant about the normal end was how Chizuru is there as a witness at the end -- she's lost the Shinsengumi, and she doesn't fit in with Kazama. And both the demons and the Shinsengumi are going away in this new Japan, but she remains. I haven't played Kazama's route yet, but I suspect it will take on this question and have a Chizuru who comes to a different understanding of her identity. I really enjoy the wish fulfillment that alias_sqbr mentioned too, and the fact that I can get both from the same game at once felt charmingly weird and fascinatign.

An elegy to the real-life Shinsengumi. It feels to me that the writers really love the history and admire the Shinsengumi's bravery (while not flinching away from the fact that yes, they were killers and torturers), and it tries very hard to extrapolate sympathetic motivations for the historical figures and to show the struggles they had to face. Even the fix-it endings that I've seen so far have an elegiac feeling to me, with the difficulties of life post-war (Okita still having tuberculosis, Saito's and Chizuru's rough life in exile as farmers, Chizuru and her love interest ending up in the demon village apart from all society in some routes)to the uncertainty of how long everyone's life will last as furies (which is also a really interesting take on vampires, in general, since it very much rejects the more common concept of vampires as immortal -- the furies are even more vulnerable than humans to the passing of time).

Something something mono no aware. I don't have the literary background to understand this fully, but Hakuoki made me meditate on how transient everything is-- our friends, our own ideas of ourselves, our society, but how it's still possible to find joy. And how fragile our societies and the worlds we build are and how change and loss are inevitable, and how to accept that with grace and try to figure out how to be good, while understanding that one person can only make so much of a difference. The characters in Hakuoki are living in a turbulent time (but then, maybe there's no such thing as a non-turbulent generation!), and that resonated with me a lot considering how much scary stuff there's happening in the world. I was playing Heisuke's route during the California wildfires this year, and the chaos and uncertainty in the game and the helplessness the characters feel against larger societal forces really resonated.

An example of really satisfying, bold writing. I expected "The Shinsengumi are vampires!" to be a lot more cracky than it is, but the allegories are just wonderful. And the way it's used to provide the necessary fixit to keep characters alive so you can romance them (without negating their deaths! <3) was brilliant. I also love how the demon plotline continues exploring the themes of war and change -- it's not just there to provide supernatural suspense. And how the otome format is used to add more resonance to all of it, by letting the player decide what happiness looks like in a time of chaos and creating tension between the expectation of a good end and the historical realities (which I gather from internet osmosis is not uncommon in otome, but it is new for me!)

I feel like there are some others I'm missing, too - and in general, that makes me really happy because there's so much here. <3

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Saito's route has a lot of meditation on what he is without the sword and how modernization takes away both his philosophy and his way of life.

I actually got into Hakuouki through Saito. I was looking for a story about someone strongly committed to a particular value system who watched the world and its values change around him and had to adapt, and someone recommended that I look for stories about Saito. I started with Rurouni Kenshin and ended up in Hakuouki.

Learning about and coming to terms with her identity as neither fully demon nor fully human

Yes! And how the way she resolves that is so different in the different routes.

And how the otome format is used to add more resonance to all of it, by letting the player decide what happiness looks like in a time of chaos and creating tension between the expectation of a good end and the historical realities (which I gather from internet osmosis is not uncommon in otome, but it is new for me!)

Hakuouki was my first otome novel as well and I still haven't found anything quite like it. And yes, as you say, the otome novel format ends up feeling both fanservice-y and profound at once, which is a nice trick.

ETA: Something something mono no aware

Yes, absolutely this. I've been also thinking of it as something of a Buddhist parable, in which human warriors, furies and demons all try to figure out who is strongest and the answer is that no one is because the cycle of suffering is inescapable. In the end all the warriors of all kinds end up putting down their swords because what else can you do.

[scytale]

I started with Rurouni Kenshin and ended up in Hakuouki.

I did not know what Rurouni Kenshin is about, and now I'm intrigued!

I've been also thinking of it as something of a Buddhist parable, in which human warriors, furies and demons all try to figure out who is strongest and the answer is that no one is because the cycle of suffering is inescapable. In the end all the warriors of all kinds end up putting down their swords because what else can you do.

I can see that.

None of the routes I've seen so far have really presented much of a middle ground between "fade into obscurity", "die in battle", and "raise an army, murder everyone, rule" (every single villain in the routes I've played).

The game feels very ambivalent on honor, to me (and I think proving who is strongest is tied to that, especially for both Sannan and Kazama, who tie strength to worthiness). It feels like the game sometimes glamorizes honor, but at the same time, it doesn't exactly present good things happening because of the honor, either. The characters get a happy ending only when they back away from the idea of their honor, and for Kondou and Hijikata, the honor seems muddled by their ambition. And there was that bit with Itou, which I think was supposed to be read as horrifying.

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I thought Saito, and in a very different way Souma, had very interesting arcs around honor and finding new meanings for it.

and for Kondou and Hijikata, the honor seems muddled by their ambition

That was why I struggled so much with the Hijikata route. I kept calling him the Bad Decisions Bear because he not only makes consistently terrible decisions but drags everyone else into them. But at a certain point something shifted and I started seeing things from his perspective and reread his route and cried from beginning to end.

And I have zero patience for Kondou, and the hardest thing for me about the Okita route is that at no point do you get to explain to Okita that Kondou was a *terrible* foster dad who treated him very poorly. But I guess Okita will never be in a place to hear that and in a sense it doesn't matter.

[scytale]

I thought Saito, and in a very different way Souma, had very interesting arcs around honor and finding new meanings for it.

Hmm, I can see that. I was mostly thinking in terms of the warrior's honor, originally.

Oh, what did Kondou to do make him a terrible foster dad? I sped through that route really fast, so I think I forgot a lot of the backstory.

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Okita was placed in Kondo's care as a small child and as far as I can tell Kondo never taught him much other than how to fight. I don't think Kondo had much interest in caring for the emotional needs of a traumatized child. When we meet him, Okita sees himself as Kondo's tool. Kondo strikes me as a fairly selfish person and I wonder if Kondo valued Okita as anything other than a tool.

Having said that, there are definitely more positive readings of the relationship in the fandom, and I've seen a lot of fics in which Kondo is great with young!Okita. You could also make the case that none of this was Kondo's responsibility, he didn't ask to be a dad.

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Oh! Rurouni Kenshin is an anime and manga about an assassin working for the other side, so one of the Shinsengumi's worst enemies. It takes place ten years after the end of the war when he's trying to come to terms with everything he did and the new world. It co-stars middle-aged police officer Saito as an occasional antagonist and occasional reluctant ally.

Unfortunately I can't really recommend it because the creator is a pedophile (was convicted of possessing child pornography) and you can sort of tell in the work. The women characters are much younger than the men characters and while the men are all survivors of the war and dealing with its effects the women were too young to be in the war and their arcs mostly revolve around the men. So it is a very flawed piece of work. But there are some very good things in it, including its take on Saito.

[scytale]

Yikes. :| That's a good thing to know and not something I would probably have found out on my own, thank you.