scytale: (Default)
Scytale ([personal profile] scytale) wrote in [personal profile] waterscroll 2019-11-04 04:48 am (UTC)

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 [personal profile] 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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