Part 39: Emi, Relf-Reliance, and “Overcoming Your Disability”

Update 35: Emi, Relf-Reliance, and “Overcoming Your Disability”

You ever heard of inspiration porn? It works like this: let’s say you’re feeling kind of down in the dumps. Life is hard, and it’s getting to you. You need a pick me up, but not a huge one, you know? Something that doesn’t take much time and effort to do. So you hit up one of the billion Facebook groups and subreddits where people post motivational memes and start scrolling. You will, inevitably, unless the group/subreddit specifically prohibits this, hit a meme featuring somebody in a wheelchair, or using sign language, or who the caption smugly informs you has a serious health condition. Sometimes they’ll be competing in the Paralympics or whatever, but often as not they’ll just be doing normal people things – going to the store, working at a desk, spending time with family, taking a hike. The text will tell you exactly what’s wrong with them, then compare them to you, who the text assumes is much better off. It’ll describe about just how hard it is for these poor people to lead ordinary lives, or maybe it’ll just cut to the chase: if they can manage in spite of everything they have to suffer through, you can too. You navigate away, inspired by how brave they must be for what is essentially being alive.

Yeah, you can probably guess we’re not always big fans.

Something interesting about those memes? More often than not, the people in them don’t seem to rely on anyone, whether they’re depicted as alone or interacting with others. We already talked about how disability gets conflated with helplessness all the time, and that’s part of what drives inspiration porn; overcoming that perceived helplessness is something you can supposedly do on your own. This stuff is targeted towards individuals, it’s designed to make you feel like you can overcome your problems without needing other people, you’re strong enough to do it by yourself. And if you’re not strong enough to do it by yourself? Well then, you must be weak. Too weak to lead a normal life, too weak to measure up to anyone else. So, if you don’t want to be weak, don’t want to be lesser, don’t want to be the sort of person who deserves praise just for getting out of bed in the morning, relying on others is a liability. It diminishes you, and you HAVE to be completely independent. Even if it hurts.


So, yeah.

Like any piece of good literature, KS can be dissected a billion different ways, and that goes for Emi’s route too. But today, in this Frankensteinian hybrid of a route conclusion and a disability corner, we’ll take a look at Emi and Hisao’s story through that lens.

Over the course of the next several paragraphs, I’ll deliberately leave something out. If you can spot it, you win a prize, and the prize is nothing.

All right, take it from the top.


It’s pretty obvious from the beginning just how driven Emi is. Not just in how determined she is, but in her approach to other people: we’ve talked about how pushy she can get in the thread, but it’s worth noting she has a strong sense of responsibility (even if she can get careless sometimes). Whenever something she does hurts Hisao, she’s quick to admit fault and accept responsibility.


Not when it comes to herself, though. Emi hates limits. She despises them, she switches from cheerful to angry any time she bumps into one. But she hates being helped even more. She is ferociously proud of her independence, and she covers up her vulnerability with anger if and when it rears its head.


As Emi and Hisao drift closer over the course of Act 2, we get a few glimpses of vulnerability from her. Glimpses she quashes. It’s worth noting that she doesn’t lash out at Hisao for seeing her in a compromised state. She’s not some tsundere lashing out at him in exaggerated anime fear; she’s mature enough to not hold it against him and in fact appreciates him keeping mum. She’s happy with him as long as he doesn’t dig. Which, of course, he does.


From Hisao’s point of view, Emi’s behavior is deeply worrying; he empathizes deeply with her pain and seeing her suffer hurts him almost as bad. He feels compelled to help her so he can make the pain stop. From Emi’s point of view, he’s violating her agency and trying to “fix” something she has under control – and for the most part, she’s right. The game doesn’t make the timeframe explicit, but we are talking about a whirlwind romance here; Hisao transferred into Yamanaku part way through senior year (unless I misunderstood something, renessia can probably check me on this). Her deterioration can’t have taken more than a month or so. We have no guarantee she’s just as badly off the rest of the year, especially since that deterioration doesn’t become obvious until later in the route as the date itself draws near and her feelings about Hisao tear her up inside. Odds are she usually handles the situation and just moves on when she’s done. But Hisao, at least at first, feels compelled to approach her issues like things he needs to solve for her, and she gets understandably pissed off.


The way he (and the player) deals with that compulsion determines which ending you get. Many of the choices you make in this route don’t have direct mechanical effects; they just provide you with a bit of context, then have Hisao reflect on that choice later on in accordance with the themes of the rest of the route. This here is the first choice that makes a mechanical difference, and it’s a doozy. If you choose to ignore Mutou, the game disables the next two choices, forcing you to blow off of the Nurse (which has no mechanical effect) and follow Emi after she runs away at her house (which absolutely does). While you do get a Hail Mary (which I’ll talk about later), if you ignore that too, then… Remember when Emi tried to force herself to break up with Hisao on the rooftop? In the Bad Ending, there is no “try” about it. By that point Hisao had repeatedly ignored her wishes, invaded her privacy, and assumed he knew how to handle her life better than she did. While he only had the best of intentions, he paved the road to hell with them over the course of the last Act. She definitely could have communicated better, but he also could’ve stopped constantly white-knighting her. So she fucking dumps him on the rooftop and that’s that.

It's kind of funny that, as much as the thread seems to side with Hisao over Emi (for good reason), I’m actually more sympathetic to her. It’s awful to have people step in and make your decisions for you. It’s a special kind of hell when those decisions are better than yours. If it’s consistent, after a while you end up unable to trust yourself and start deferring instinctively to others, so low in self-confidence you assume they know better because they aren’t you. I’m willing to bet Emi knows this, she may even have seen this in the hospital; it’s tragically common among disabled kids whose caretakers dominate them well into what would otherwise be their adult lives. A lot of abled people, I’ve noticed, kind of assume kids inevitably escape their parents and go out on their own, but if someone’s rigorously raised to be helpless, they’re probably going to end up being helpless into adulthood whether they like it or not. I can’t blame her for making self-destructive decisions when that seems to be the alternative.


But if you stop to listen? Well, that starts to reveal something that wasn’t immediately apparent. So far, I’ve presented the choice between help and no help as a binary, implying you have to either go it alone or submit to the control of someone else. Emi certainly seems to think so. She’s wrong. In a way, she’s falling into the same fallacy we talked about at the beginning of this post. Emi may be doing okay, but she isn’t doing well. All those caveats I attached to her situation earlier don’t change the fact that she refuses to take care of her health, or cries in her sleep, or couldn’t maintain her last relationship, or deliberately never thinks more than a month ahead, or has so much trouble forming social bonds despite her friendly nature that her closest friend is someone she can count on not trying to understand her. She can keep going as she is indefinitely, and if Hisao decides otherwise, she will correctly tell him to go hang. But it’s possible to support others without robbing them of their agency. It’s kind of ironic that Mutou, the eccentric and spacey science teacher, consistently offers Hisao better life advice than the Nurse (whose mistakes Psycho Lawnmower has so excellently explained), but Mutou talking about conducting observations at a step removed inspires Hisao to do the same with his relationship, first with the Nurse, then with Meiko. They don’t just give him useful information, though. By giving him context and advice, by checking his worst impulses without forcing him not to follow them, they teach Hisao by example how to do the same for others. And if you fail to talk to Mutou, remember that Hail Mary? After following Emi at her house and getting bawled out by her, Hisao spends the next couple days avoiding her and moping. Eventually, Misha confronts him on the rooftop about what’s going on with their relationship. If he plays it off, only then do you get the Bad Ending. If you decide to let her speak:


I know the thread doesn’t like Shizune and I understand why, so who would’ve expected her to help save their relationship ? But if you think about it, she and Misha are doing exactly what Hisao should do: their advice and support are unasked for, definitely, but they make him realize his mistakes and bring him around instead of just jumping in to fix things for him. And if you follow their example?


From there we jump to the start of the scene that takes us to the graveyard, and aside from a few textual tweaks, everything is the same up till the good ending.

Okay, did you spot what I left out? At no point in this post have I directly mentioned Emi’s legs. That’s because the route writer did something very, very interesting. Instead of making them the focus of the story or a cosmetic detail, they turned her legs into a story element. Her legs are part of her life, yeah, but they aren’t directly important to the story: they’re important in that they symbolize her connection to the accident that cost her her father. After Hisao gets used to thinking about them, the narrative only really focuses on her legs when something goes wrong with them, things only go wrong with them when her character flaws catch up to her, and her character flaws catch up with her whenever her dad comes up. They’re treated like any other object or mannerism that connects a character to their backstory. They aren’t the point of the story, they’re literary devices. Hell, they’re not even literary devices in and of themselves; they only matter when something about them furthers the story. I cannot express just how refreshing that is. As a rule, whenever a disability shows up in a piece of media, it’s a major plot element. Whether it’s part of the premise, a defining character trait, or even a threat, it always ends up the focus of whatever’s going on. The only exceptions throw them in as background details and forget about them, or maybe, MAYBE use them as a red herring. Seeing someone’s disability used like any other character feature is nearly revolutionary, it takes the assumption that a disability defines a person and brushes right past it. It treats it like it would any other aspect of a person from a storytelling perspective, and as you can tell from me rephrasing the same sentence over and over again for half a paragraph, to me at least it’s a really big deal. With the proper placement of Emi’s disability in the hierarchy of plot elements, the story uses it to underline its broader point. It breaks that stereotype, turning what new readers might have expected to be the focus of the story because they’re familiar with that pattern I mentioned into simply a way to reinforce the point.

And that point is the lesson of this route: the best way to handle your problems is neither dealing with them entirely by yourself nor relying entirely on others, but instead accepting help from others while making your decisions for yourself. That’s a powerful and nuanced piece of life advice a lot of people need to hear. It is especially important for disabled people, and disability activism in general. A lot of us just can’t live independently, no matter how badly they want to. It’s infuriating, it’s humiliating, but it’s neither avoidable nor a knock on your character. On the other hand, some of us don’t need help at all and live perfectly ordinary lives. But the funny thing about ableism is that, like so many other -isms, it’s structural. “Disability” means a lot more than what a dictionary will tell you; it’s a label that sits on top of a massive complex of observations, assumptions, and biases. While individuals have a role to play in breaking those misconceptions down, they can’t hope to do so by simply showing they’re more capable than their disability might suggest; it just feeds the narrative that gives birth to inspiration porn without challenging the assumptions that make it tick. It’s a trap: we’re conditioned to believe that we can defy a disadvantageous category through hard work and dedication, but we’re actually just climbing into a predefined subcategory within it – one that brings with it personal advantages, yeah, but one that exists so success stories don’t challenge the categorization as a whole. It’s something we need to work together on, something we can only break by discovering what a world without ableism might look like and fighting towards that. And we can only do that by listening to each other, discovering things we missed, covering each other’s weak spots, and relying on each other even as we push on by ourselves.

Which is why Emi’s route validates the existence of my job .

There’s plenty more we could talk about here, both positive and negative: the nature of Emi’s relationship with Rin, how unrealistically mature Hisao is for a mildly traumatized teenager, Shizune and Misha’s role in the narrative, how the route uses humor to generate emotional whiplash, Emi’s personality shift between Act 1 and the rest of the game, why the Nurse is a terrible medical professional. But by my best estimate this part of the LP broke a hundred thousand words several updates ago, making it substantially longer than most novels. I think it’s time I gave this part of it a rest. That doesn’t go for you guys, though. Remember, once we finish a route all restrictions on discussing spoilers and things I missed or skipped over in that route are lifted; feel free to talk about anything in that route, no spoiler tags necessary.

This isn’t the last we’ll see of Emi. As we’ve discussed in the thread, every character shows up in every other route, so she’ll pop up from time to time going forward. But for now, let’s move the spotlight on to someone who’d probably want to avoid it, to someone both completely different from and startlingly similar to Emi: Hanako Izekawa.