Part 117: Rin, Communication, and Uncertainty

Update 106: Rin, Communication, and Uncertainty

Normally I like to skip an update between the end of a route and starting the next (lets people breath), but if I did that here we’d end up going a solid seven days between gameplay updates. I don’t like that, so have this wrapup a day early.

I remember one point maybe halfway through Act 4 when I realized I was getting bored with transcribing this route. I paused and took a deeper look, because, what? Turns out I wasn’t as much bored as frustrated. The endless waves of misunderstandings and miscommunications were wearing me down; I had to push myself to keep going because I was starting to find the experience unpleasant.

Then I realized that’s the point.

I’m kind of weird when it comes to movie endings; I despise tragic endings on a bunch of levels, but my definition of tragic ending seems a lot narrower than most people’s. I remember watching a movie in a high school honors class (and if anyone recognizes it, please let us know in the thread) about a Central American medical professor that one day meets a star pupil of his on the streets; the man’s a drug dealer because that’s the only way he could make a living, and as far as he knows the rest of the professor’s favorite students are even worse off. The professor embarks on a series of exceptionally grim adventures through (I think) the Guatemalan jungle, picking up a medic who deserted from a rebel army after they conscripted him, gave him basic medical training, and forced them to participate in war crimes. Eventually, after finding every single other student either broken or dead, the professor arrives at a mountain sanctuary where the last of his students was supposed to be helping refugees, only to discover she wasn’t there. Exhausted by his travels and injuries, he sits down next to a tree and dies. Then a baby cries somewhere to the right of the screen and the medic grabs the professor’s suitcase before marching off in that direction.

The rest of the class thought it was a crushingly tragic ending; all of his efforts, all of his attempts to find or help his students, came to nothing. That startled me because I thought it was a profoundly hopeful ending. Like, yeah, the whole point of the movie is that everything he poured into securing a positive legacy for the world failed. And then he died. And the person who’s been learning from him for like two thirds of the movie takes up his mantle and goes to carry on his legacy in the way he would have wanted. And yeah, we don’t know he’s going to go help that baby; he might just walk off with the equipment and sell it or something. But after putting himself in danger to have this guy’s back? Not taking the chance to slip away with the goods before then? Identifying an issue that can be addressed with medical attention, then heading towards that issue after ensuring he has the ability to give it medical attention? It struck me as unlikely. I realized this whole class of perfectly nice and accepting but very privileged and abled kids saw that uncertainty as a fundamentally negative thing and I’m sitting on my disabled ass in intense uncertainty every day. I never knew when my brain was going to turn on me and fuck my day up, or when I’d cross some invisible line and piss off people I like again; I didn't have the luxury of certainty. Hell, I didn’t even have the luxury of trying to BE certain, because I’d been burned enough times and enough ways to know fixing my issues just wasn’t in the cards. I also had enough experience to know that I’d recover, that in the grand scheme of things these things hurt but didn’t kill. I’d already hit rock bottom and bounced, so I knew from hard experience uncertainty included the possibility of things getting better as well as worse.

And that, I think, is the core of understanding Rin’s route. Her communication issues, whatever causes them, make her opaque; she barely emotes, her thoughts wander, and she stumbles every time she tries to explain herself. Maybe one day she’ll work out how to get through to people, but not today. Everything about her is uncertain. That makes lots of people want to fix that. But if you approach that uncertainty as purely negative, treating it like a puzzle that must be solved, it’s going to backfire. You have to look at it holistically, taking the good as well as the bad, accepting that you can’t really fix it, and accepting what you can’t change as well as helping where you can. And that might sound similar to how I talk about disability.

So, some of the routes we covered translated better into the LP format than others, but just about all of them lost something. That’s inevitable: as similar as they are compared to other forms of media like movies or music, visual novels and straight text with commentary like this are fundamentally different. But Rin’s route suffered the most, hands down. The way it throws up smokescreens around its important choices and what they mean both reflects the communication failures between the protagonists and force the player to emulate them. In most routes, it’s comparatively easy to deduce which choices have an impact on the ending, even if which choices get which endings aren’t clear. Not here. Here, the complexity around that first set of choices leaves the player questioning if they’re on the right track on a meta level, which makes them more likely to close-read the route to make sure they know what they’re doing, which leaves them more vulnerable to the uncertainty the characters experience, which makes them both invested in getting the Good Ending and unsure whether they can – which closely parallels the protagonists’ motivations. It’s a highly effective piece of game design and a (deliberately) emotionally exhausting one. But it relies on uncertainty to function. There is no uncertainty in how I presented it here, and couldn’t introduce it without sealing off too much content or throwing us into another Ending. So instead, I’ll dissect this uncertainty and what it means right now.


I love this scene. It’s one of my favorite in the game. Watching Lilly lower her expectations only to see them shattered over and over again never gets old . But think about what’s actually happening here. What did Rin do before and during this scene?

1. Rin went for a walk in town.
   
2. Some passers-by asked her whether she was all right, since she looked lost.
   
3. She ran into Lilly and Hisao and greeted them.
   
4. When they asked her what she was doing, she answered.
   
5. She made a comment about the passers-by.
   
6. She talked about what she’s going to do next.
   

When you pull all the way back, it looks like just an ordinary social interaction. But when you get up close the nature of that interaction is lost, buried under the digressions, odd circumstances, and failed similies. Lilly, the avatar of gracious social interaction, is so baffled by this intermediate layer they can barely communicate. Rin isn’t trying to make this difficult; everything she says lines up with her experience. But the moment any ambiguity comes up she gets twisted in it. In situations with little ambiguity, she can, in fact, communicate…


… As this scene amply demonstrates. Even then, there are some oddities in there (like how it may or may not imply she’d be comfortable with him pulling down her underwear), but it’s pretty straightforward. But that’s an exception. As the pressure on her rises, whatever infrastructure she has in place to support herself crumbles and even that momentary clarity vanishes.


It’s funny, but in a sad way. She isn’t saying goofy things because she’s being goofy; she’s saying them because she’s genuinely trying to bridge the gap between her thoughts and Hisao’s and failing. She is trying. She wants to succeed. It’s just outside of her power.

But it takes at least two people to have a relationship. Hisao’s invested in Rin. He wants to bridge that gap so how does he do it? Well, he can just demand she bridge the gap herself and get the Bad Ending. Remember that choice at the end of Act 3? If we demanded she explain herself, this is what would happen next:


We've seen Hisao get angry at her behavior before, but here it completely consumes him. Ironically, for all Rin’s communication issues, HE’S the one whose misinterpretations spoiled their relationship for good. He let his frustration take over and select one interpretation of her behavior to believe, the wrong one, the one that assumed the worst of her against all evidence to the contrary – and there is plenty of evidence to the contrary, from her body language in the scene to the way she haphazardly spills her concerns to him in one go from time to time because she gives up on presenting them coherently. He goes to sleep having failed on his part and ruined something that could’ve been beautiful.

You get the Neutral Ending by passing up your chance to burn everything to the ground at the end of Act 3 and taking a different tack in the aftermath of Rin’s collapse at the gallery. If you remember Update 103, when a harrowed Rin said she wished she had someone who didn’t ask her the kinds of questions that just gave her a public panic attack, we asked her what it would be like if she knew someone who DIDN’T ask her those questions. If we’d blithely told her she should be happy with people liking her paintings, we’d get this response instead:


The show is a success, and Nomiya and Sae are both thrilled (though Sae’s a bit more bittersweet). Hisao rushes through finals only to find that Rin won’t talk to him – when he shows up to the gallery and sees her coming down the street, she literally turns around and walks away into the pouring rain. He chases her down to pull something out of her on why she’s so disengaged and in return gets one of the most heartrending scenes in the game in exchange.


This is technically the Neutral Ending; you avoided the catastrophic Bad Ending but didn’t stick the landing, so now you get something in the middle. But a lot of people consider it worse, for good reason. In the Bad Ending, you burn whatever relationship you could’ve had to the ground, but you do so so thoroughly you cut yourself off from further consequences. the ambiguity of the future is irrelevant. The Neutral Ending rubs your face in it. It forces you to acknowledge that you can’t make this ambiguity go away, that not only can you not help her, you may have permanently harmed her trying to help make things less ambiguous. So how do you work with someone like Rin? How do you know how to work with someone like Rin?

Funnily enough, we’ve actually covered that in the thread. Think about how people tend to approach disability with a mixture of condescension and contempt. The former comes out as the more brutal and direct forms of ableism: refusing accommodations, discounting their opinions, and manipulation, violence, eugenics. It takes disabled people and attempts to cram them into categories that don’t apply, punishing them when they don’t fit. It looks at the uncertainty inherent to the disabled condition and deems it a personal flaw. So in the Bad Ending Hisao, pushed to his limits, lashes out at Rin for her unpredictability. He blames her for every miscommunication and assumes she’s doing this for her own amusement or out of laziness or whatever. He refuses to take responsibility for his role in events. So she tells him to fuck off. For good.

The latter comes out in the softer and benevolent forms of ableism. Unlike the former approach, it acknowledges the uncertainty. Like it, it views that uncertainty as a fundamentally negative thing. It tries to fix it, whether by encouraging disabled people to ignore it, stepping into their lives to remove it for them, or trying to pin everything down in the belief that tightly defining it will make it go away. It confuses that uncertainty with the negative repercussions of disability, and since the two aren’t always related, it tends to backfire. In the Neutral Ending, while Hisao acknowledges his responsibility, he doesn’t fully wrap his head around what that means. He decides he wants to help and he acknowledges she has control over her own destiny. That’s great! And by trying to pin down her future he just tries to put her in a friendlier box, one that isn’t necessarily any healthier. The Bad Ending feels bad because when Rin finally makes her feelings clear, the feeling is rejection. It feels worse in the Neutral Ending because now she feels betrayal. Hisao came close. He came so close, and he fucked the landing so bad he alienated her from herself. “I'm sure I can become a real artist. But if I do... I might not be able to be me any more." That glimpse of the possibility of success makes it all the more crushing when you fail. The player’s attempt to remove negative possibilities just reveals further, darker ones.

Or you can accept that some things are beyond your power and just stick by the person you love. Beyond the random lurching of legislation, beyond the risk of discrimination, being disabled means something abled people take for granted is off-limits to you – and that means anything that relies on whatever is off-limits is also at risk, and things that rely on those are also at risk, in ways even disabled people struggle to understand. Being Deaf not only means you can’t hear conversation, but you can’t hear announcements or warnings and take major risks just trying to cross the street. ADHD doesn’t just make it hard for you to focus, it makes keeping track of all the appointments and bureaucracy you need to jump through to get treatments for it nearly impossible. If you want to understand the social construction of disability in action, here’s where you look: disability disrupts the unquestioned assumptions society runs on in counterintuitive and unpredictable ways, keeping punishment on disabled people for failing to meet expectations that just happened to be impossible. This is what I mean by uncertainty.

But instead of trying to ignore or force his way through it, in the Good Ending, Hisao just accepts it’s all beyond his power and offers Rin what support he can. In return, he gets more uncertainty: he still can’t tell what she’s thinking, he still can’t save the exhibition, he still can’t protect her from Nomiya, he still can’t secure her future. It feels like a desperate compromise rather than a victory, closer to the Neutral Ending in other routes then a proper Good Ending. That’s part of why this route hits people so hard, I feel. The rest of the game conditions you to think every route has a happy ending. Not a perfect one, all the Good Endings feature plenty of suffering, but one that’s a lot less ambiguous than Rin’s. But sometimes? It’s not that desperate compromise is sometimes all disabled people can hope for, it’s that desperate compromise is unambiguously better than most of what we’ve been conditioned to accept. And if you can start forcing your way up that ladder, you may very well reach a Good Ending one day that didn’t exist when you started. The ending we got was tragic and fraught, but genuinely hopeful too. It redefines our definition of victory to match reality, then meets it. And isn’t that the goal of this thread?

Now, like all good works of art, Rin’s route reaches so deep you can look at it through a bunch of other lenses, too; Nomiya and Sae’s toxic mentorship deserves special attention, as do Rin’s lack of professional support, her actual mental state, and the unexplored nature of Hisao’s relationship to art. I could’ve written a whole other route wrap up (or disability corner) on how profound and destructive the association of disability and art really is, given how much of a role it plays in her route. I could’ve even developed this post further. But the LP’s getting a bit long in the tooth. According to my records, we’re sitting at between 470,000 and 510,000 words for this whole project, depending on what you count. My capstone project in undergrad, the portfolio of every substantial piece of creative writing I’d written in four years of college, sat at about 64,000 words, and that’s with plenty of padding. I did this in eight months. I can keep LPing indefinitely, but I’m wearing out on this topic and I’ll need a break soon. Like, I was GOING to do Summer’s Clover, but I don’t think that’s in the cards anymore. I played through it to see, and it’s not that it’s BAD, it’s better than Shizune, but it’s disjointed and a lot harder to work with on a technical level. Plus… I think I’d recommend KS game to anybody with the same disability as one of the protagonists, with some caveats for Deaf players. I wouldn’t recommend Summer’s Clover to somebody who has narcolepsy with cataplexy. If I had more energy, I couldn’t do it justice, but I don’t, so I won’t. The next route, Lilly’s, possibly my favorite in the game, will be our last. Then, I dunno, something light and stupid for a few weeks before I probably do Doki Doki Blue Skies.