Part 140: Lilly, Assumptions, and Being the Protagonist

Update 127: Lilly, Assumptions, and Being the Protagonist

Who would’ve thought we get this far into this romantic visual novel before we found the romance novel? As several people in the thread have commented, Lilly’s route is very much a pastiche of classic 19th century romance novels (British ones especially), stealing themes, tropes, and even plot points from the genre. Note how I said pastiche, not parody; it embraces and makes use of those clichés quite elegantly. Really, every route is built on a visual novel stock character or genre: the traumatized wallflower, the manic pixie dream artist, the cheerful girl with a dark past, the assertive girl that probably wants to step on you. It’s just that here they draw on a much older genre that already informed visual novels directly.

Except, take a look at the Wikipedia pages of most classic romance novels, specifically the parts about their reception and themes. You’ll notice that, while many of them weren’t written to do this specifically, all the ones that stuck around took apart some aspect of the genre, whether it’s Jane Eyre’s examination of what abiding by gender roles actually does to a person or Pride and Prejudice bringing the bad boy archetype to heel. Something about forcing characters to come to grips with their assumptions in a genre full of assumptions gives these works real staying power, enough that centuries later imitators are popular enough to spawn some really nitpicky readers. And there’s something that Lilly’s route shares with those works: it embraces the conventions of its genre while inverting one of its key assumptions. It’s just that inversion happens with something that defines visual novels.


In practice, formality is usually used as a way to divide people into groups: emotionally close or emotionally distant, reputable or disreputable, respectable or worthy of respect, and any number of other dichotomies key off how formally to people act towards each other. But in theory, formality exists to give social situations form. When exercised with enough forbearance and openness instead of judgment and condescension, you can use formality to build a sense of the good kind of predictability in a social interaction, the kind where serenity permeates the room, where negative interactions are politely ignored while positive interactions are celebrated, where all participants are equals because the situation demands it. Lilly is a master of this kind of formality. To some extent, it’s the bedrock of her personality. She is both classy and humane, and those traits shape all of her behavior.


The trouble is, Lilly’s attitude isn’t universal. She can’t use her graciousness to navigate her way out of any problem. This sequence, from Lily heading into town with Hisao to the three parting ways for the night, serves a lot of purpose in the game, but importantly for us, it shows Lilly’s limits: she can’t always control the situation, she can’t always read others correctly, and when she does, she can’t always anticipate the effects her actions have on others. While, yeah, that goes for everybody, her standard approach to others requires her doing all three consistently. She can’t always pull it off.


She knows it, too. For someone everyone seems to like, she sure doesn’t have many actual friends. Until Hisao enters the picture, the only person she spends much time with is Hanako, who appreciates the environment she creates as it’s comfortable and predictable. She spends time with Akira and she used to spend time with Shizune, but she grew up with both of them and already knows what they’re about. The bulk of her social circle used to be the Student Council and now is her class, and in both cases she’s an authority figure with defined tasks. Before Hisao, she refused every romantic opportunity she had in favor of nursing a crush on a teacher she knew better than to pursue. At the start of the route, Lilly is a creature of expectations, most comfortable in defined situations.


As Hisao and Lily get to know each other better, we learn there’s a lot more to “creature of expectations” then just the social aspect – and we begin to realize just how many Hisao’s bringing to the table. As a blind person, Lilly navigates her surroundings partly by memory; she needs things to stay in their places so she doesn’t collide with random objects or start using the caraway only to find somebody switched it around with the cinnamon. However, all of her expectations – social, personal, environmental – serve a purpose. She’s polite because it helps her deal with people. She sticks to familiar surroundings because they’re easier to walk around. She is quite aware of her limitations, but she’s embraced them so fully she uses them to her advantage.


Like so. Hisao feels like he’s entering Yamaku in a state of pure flux, but he’s not; he’s watching his expectations of disabled life fall apart and get reassembled. That’s fair, it’s a major shock. Trouble is, he ends reassembling them a little too quickly and lets some real problems slip in.


He accepts that he’s disabled plenty, but he doesn’t internalize his disability like Lily does until the end of the route. Instead of viewing his heart condition as a fact of life like Lily treats her blindness, he talks about it almost like it’s a moral failing, apologizing when it holds him back and trying to push past it for the sake of others as if that’s the kind of thing you do with a heart condition. Lily does gently try to break him of that habit, but she never makes any headway. On a fundamental level, Hisao doesn’t comprehend what his condition actually entails until he ends up in the hospital again. It’s why he has more heart flutters in this route than any two others combined.


Thing is, while Lilly isn’t restricted by assumptions of about her disability, that doesn’t mean she’s in the clear. While she embraces the expectations brought to her character, she seems happiest when she’s playing with or defying them: pouting like a kid when she gets called on something, kissing a guy on the cheek when he wasn’t expecting it, being openly affectionate with Hanako, teasing people about her blindness, having sex with her crush on the floor within hearing distance of their friend before formally asking him out. When the call comes for her to move to Scotland, Lilly feels compelled to comply. It’s what’s expected of her. It’s what she has to do, so she complies and her and the people around her suffer.


Getting the Good Ending for Lilly’s route requires defying propriety in subtle ways. Every choice that leads to the Good Ending has Hisao refusing to hide behind politeness: telling Lily what he thinks about her resilience, telling her what’s on his mind even when he doesn’t want her to know, opening up to her about his past. Unlike every other route in the game, Lilly’s does not have a clearly defined Bad or Neutral Ending. If you keep any of those things to yourself, all stuff that you’re well within your rights not to share if you aren’t comfortable with it, you just get a game over when Lilly leaves, ending the route early. If you open up about everything, be honest and forthright and not hide anything because you’re embarrassed or don’t want to burden her, you continue the route with a Hisao who’s had his expectations of his new life weakened enough to let him defy his fate.

So he gives himself a heart attack.


In most routes, for all that they stress the girls’ agency and responsibility in improving their lives, Hisao drives the plot. He enters their lives and causes them to react, setting the plot in motion and determining their fate (at least in the short term) by which questions he asks and which responses he gives. This isn’t a bad thing, even Shizune’s route handles Hisao’s position as most active part of the plot gracefully, it’s just a feature of how the game works. But Lilly’s route works differently. Go back and look at the choices we made: almost all of them, including all the ones that matter, cover ways Hisao can respond to Lilly’s questions or behavior rather than the other way around. She proposes the vacation, she initiates sex, she receives the summons and fails to break it to her friends. In this route, Lilly, not Hisao, is the protagonist, at least on a structural level.

So when Hisao runs off to claim the girl and earn his happy ending, he gives himself a heart attack and ends up hospital-bound while Lilly ties up the plot offscreen. We don’t see the action of the plot – Lily deciding to stay, what she said to her parents and her sister, what arrangements she made, anything – because that’s protagonist business. Hisao gets the girl not by seizing control of the narrative, but by facilitating Lilly’s character development. He is fundamentally a reactive force in this route, which is what makes it a good pastiche of a classic romance novel; it doesn’t just use the clichés right, it inverts some of the genre’s assumptions and forces its characters to accept those assumptions were wrong to get their happy ending.

And that’s where the route falls short, because getting into it means seeing someone triggering a life-threatening disability as romantic. That’s kind of a troublesome thing to ask, especially given the entire rest of the game (and the route). Like it or not, the narrative rewards Hisao for hurting himself. You really can’t get around that. There’s plenty of nuance there, but that fact kind of weakens the message.


For all that, this is still one of the most satisfying endings of the game. Stupid risk or not, Hisao symbolically finally comes to accept his disability by walking back towards Yamaku hand-in-hand with Lilly. Akira gets her hands on a visa for her boyfriend, Hanako strikes out on her own, Lilly and Shizune reconcile (a bit) – the plot threads the route lays out her all tied up as our protagonist and her boyfriend walk almost literally into the sunset. It all comes elegantly to a close, and with it, the game itself.

As usual, this analysis skipped over a few things, most blatantly much Lilly’s blindness played into the day-to-day of the route and how little it mattered on a thematic level. Like, I literally forgot to mention her blindness in the first draft of this thing because I was looking elsewhere. E: I also missed a brilliant element that Cobalt-60 pointed out:


More to the point, I could have also talked about what exactly Lily’s formality means and how Lilly came to be who she is in the game. Lily is (and forgive me for linking TVTropes but they have the best explanation of the concept out there) an interpretation of the Yamato Nadeshiko archetype, right down to the compulsive “my, my”. Whether she was like this when her parents left Japan or whether she consciously adopted it, how her biracial heritage played into embracing such a strongly Japanese concept (even if it has British equivalents), how it reflects on her found family in Hisao and Hanako, and what role it played in her both accepting her parents’ offer to leave Japan and ultimately defying it are all strong enough questions to support essays on their own. Likewise, you could talk about her and Shizune, how her relationship with Hanako develops differently in each of their routes, and whether I was hallucinating the CG of Lilly with woad and claymore striding across the moors I swear the game showed my first time playing this route when she said she was part Scottish. Or you could talk about how she seems to drive a lot of fanfiction, everything from heartfelt romantic crossovers with fucking Worm of all things to readable but baffling pieces about time loops.

But if we’re talking fanfiction and Lilly, I’d be remiss not to mention Sisterhood, the standout work of the KS fandom. While technically a follow-up to Hanako’s route instead of Lilly’s, it keys so heavily off the latter’s route I couldn’t recommend it in good conscience until we finished both of them. It bills itself as an epilogue to Hanako’s route, but it’s substantially longer than the route in question; it takes us from the moment the route ends through the next couple years, taking time to focus on Hanako’s gradual, halting progress and developing Lily’s family into characters in their own right. It’s heartwarming, engaging, and occasionally deeply uncomfortable in the way good literature can be when it tears apart something you thought was true. If you’re looking for more KS to read, Sisterhood is where you should start.

Until then, don’t leave the thread quite yet. We have one more update to go, a conclusion that will go up on Monday.