Part 95: Shizune, Misha, and Masking

Update 85: Shizune, Misha, and Masking

That was an… Interesting route. You know, at first I was happy to see all the posting; just the first week in this route generated as many posts as the thread sees in a slower month, and always nice to see people so excited and engaged. Except that engagement came from anger and frustration over all the mediocre writing and terrible behavior that characterizes her route. Like, look. I will always defend the fact that equal treatment means judging a person’s actions regardless of their disability outside of where it immediately affects their behavior, and that judgment can be as negative or positive as it can be for anybody else. It didn’t escape me (as was pointed out) that whenever Shizune’s Deafness came up, it was to contextualize how communication failures on a practical level might shape our perception of her behavior. Except some of her behavior proved unquestionably awful, which threw the thread into a tailspin several times. Honestly, I’m glad to see this route go, and while I don’t actually hate Shizune, I’d rather not dwell on her any longer than necessary.

So I’ll spend most of this post dwelling on Misha instead.


Misha is a cartoon character from the moment we meet her. In theory, her boisterousness isn’t more outrageous than Shizune’s manipulativeness, Rin’s otherworldliness, or Kenji’s Kenjiness, especially in the much broader and less refined first act; she’s just one oddball among many. But Hisao notes from the beginning just how aggressively loud she gets, how much her behavior stands out from those around her. There’s something inherently fake about Misha, though in all the noise it just registers as anime-standard unrealistic. Either way, she and Shizune are inseparable, moving almost as a unit through the start of the route proper. The route uses all the slice of life content to establish the dynamic of their relationship.

And then Shizune and Hisao start dating.


Almost immediately, she cuts off those gigantic drills, kind of a drastic decision since the game implies she’s worn them since she got rejected by Shizune. The doldrums between the trip and Misha’s visit to Hisao’s room show them gradually drifting apart; Misha shows up less and less, whether she has an excuse or just doesn’t show up.


When she does show up, occasionally, the mask slips. She’s very, very good at keeping her emotions hidden, but as the pressure mounts, she starts making mistakes – most notably offhandedly insulting the Student Council, Shizune’s baby. She spent the whole game supporting her in absolutely everything, then casually implies all their efforts might be worthless.


The mask slips around Hisao, too. He gradually realizes just how little he knows about Misha; she’s hollowed out her personality so thoroughly to fit Shizune’s that she’s never shown Hisao, who she considers a friend, anything she does for fun or on her own. The most he gets is her affection for parfaits, and the moment we actually see how she one, it becomes clear she kind of doesn’t know what she’s doing.


The whole point of a parfait is that it comes in layers, but when we finally get a good look at her eating one, she just watches it melt and indifferently scoops up the remains. This, too, might be just another baffle, something quirky she came up with for people to focus on without letting them in any deeper. That and it symbolizes how, though she’s a sweet all the way down, she has layers you couldn’t see from the surface. Misha, despite going along with the stuff Shizune did in Act 1, is a kind and supportive person who wouldn’t hurt a fly. She genuinely considers Hisao a friend even as she steals her crush, as the route tries to emphasize. She’s also a mass of depression compounded by the stress of years of suppressing her personality and putting up a front.


Eventually, the stress and isolation break her. She goes from occasionally erratic behavior to outright coming on to Hisao. It’s hard to say why, exactly, but as inexplicable and dramatically out of character as it is, it feels about right to me; I’ve been in that position before, pushed to and past the breaking point, and I’ve made similarly baffling decisions that I couldn’t explain after the fact. I can also identify with just how dangerous the resulting self-loathing is.


In the final version, Misha either pulled herself together or watches her friends drift away. In the beta, she committed suicide no matter what decisions you made. In the Bad Ending there, the trauma drove Shizune and Hisao part; in the Good Ending, they bonded over it, eventually naming their first child after her. I can’t say I object to them cutting that out of the finished product. This already cuts a bit too close to home; if they kept that element in, I probably would have put down the game after seeing it and not picked it up again. At least in Hanako’s beta route the game implies she and Emi hooked up, stabilizing her, though I guess the rest of the suffering in that route kind of cancels out any bonus points.

Anyway, as I said, the route only has one decision in the final version. If you make the worst possible choice at the end of Act 3, the next scene drives home how it drove a wedge between the three characters. In Act 4, first you go through the same scenes with maybe a couple extra lines of tweaked dialogue, but instead of Misha gradually coming back, she and Shizune grow more and more aloof. Shizune retreats into her own head, gradually shutting out Hisao despite his best efforts, until she comes to his door one morning and asks him to take a walk with her.


During the Bad Ending, Hisao, Misha, and Shizune at no point actually sit down to discuss their issues and needs. They spend Act 4 practically ignoring each other until their relationships break for good. If you take the other route, as you saw, the three of them get their shit together and start talking to each other. Granted, it’s not quick and easy, and it actually takes Misha most of the act to claw her way up out of her depression, which tracks. Depression is a property of your brain chemistry, after all; even if things improve, it takes a while to stabilize yourself. But she does, and the Misha that comes out the other end is more honest, open, and capable of advocating for herself then she’s been since we met her. She undergoes the most character development of the three, by far, and that’s what makes her the most interesting character in the route. Honestly, while I still think Best Girl is someone else, I’ve developed a soft spot for her during this LP. Possibly because she masks a lot.

Masking, for those unfamiliar, is a set of strategies a lot of autistic people develop to pass as neurotypical, but while that article explains what it looks like from the outside pretty well, let me tell you but it looks like from the inside. A lot of neurotypical interpersonal skills are unconscious, learned during ordinary childhood development. We miss out on most of those: they call it a developmental disability sometimes for a reason. Instead, many of us learn how to cobble together almost a surface personality, a mask, based on observations and hard lessons about what others expect from us in social situations. Ideally, it lets us anticipate and respond appropriately to social stimuli based on our reasoning and experience instead of our subconscious. Think of it like we’re constantly running a simulation of all the people around us, their wants, expectations, and past actions, and attempting to sketch out acceptable responses so we can deliver them in a timely matter with the same parts of our brain we use to carry on the conversation. And yeah, I guess there are lots of people who do that subconsciously, but that’s the whole issue: we have to do it consciously, running all these calculations in the background while broadcasting “I am an ordinary neurotypical” through our actions and words AND contributing to the conversation. You can probably guess it’s way out of reach for lots of people, and even for those who can handle it on the regular it’s fucking exhausting.

Like, look, I LIKE talking with people, I’m very proud of how I’ve assembled my mask and the ways I use it to get my ideas across. I approach using my mask as an interesting challenge, and that’s extremely rare among autistic people. So I think about it like it’s a tough test in a subject I’m good at. 30 minutes of conversation? As long as I know what I’m doing and I know what’s on the test (what a person wants to talk about), it’s a serious investment but nothing I can’t handle. Spread that out to an hour, and by the end I’m pretty wiped, though not so much I can’t go do something else. At two hours I’m pretty much done for the day I’m still highly invested, at four I can’t keep my thoughts organized anymore, and at six I might as well be drawing unicorns on the scantron - and many social functions last even longer. And this is all under ideal conditions. Prevent me from studying (I’m in a situation I’m not familiar with), put me in an environment not conducive to test-taking (it’s loud, noisy, and full of distractions), and make it on an unfamiliar subject (I don’t know any of these people), and you can halve or even quarter those times, and this is for someone who enjoys it. What’s that? You don’t want to do this for eight hours or more? Tough luck, fucker, you’ll just have to keep up the façade as long as everyone around you expects you to or your relationships, job, and once in a while life may be at risk. You’ll just have to tough it up and take the long-term psychological consequences.


… Huh. That sounds awfully familiar, doesn’t it? Let’s go down the list:

• Stress and anxiety? Hinted at by her avoidance of stressors (Hisao and Shizune) and low grades, which she commits to raising near the Good Ending as her anxiety lets off.
  
• Depression? Oh yeah.
  
• Exhaustion? Maybe, maybe not. She sure does spend less and less energy working on things in the student council as the route goes on.
  
• Delayed identification of autism? Well, nobody knows what her disability is.
  
• Loss of identity? Big time. She leaned so hard into her persona she completely lost track of what she wanted as a person; she’s only starting to draw boundaries and get back in touch with herself as someone who isn’t Shizune’s accomplice by the time the Good Ending wraps up.
  
• Risk of autistic burnout? Probably not. Autistic burnout is a very specific thing that stands apart from other kinds of burnout, characterized by exhaustion, heightened sensory difficulties, and a loss of skills and knowledge, sometimes permanently. That doesn’t really show up here. It does sometimes cause erratic behavior, sometimes to the point of…
  
• Increased risk of suicidal thoughts? We saw.
  

It’s hardly a perfect match, but parts of the article were so eerily on the nose at one point I went to check whether it came out long enough ago that the devs could’ve consulted it (obviously not, you saw all those study dates). Misha comes across as someone who felt compelled to mask for years on end until the pressure spiked beyond what she could handle, shattering her.

And I would go further explaining and justifying that, but… I just don’t have enough to go on. The signal-to-noise ratio in Shizune’s route is very low. It’s even lower in Hanako’s route, but that’s a vital part of the narrative; here, it feels like the writer tried to do the same thing to hide Misha’s breakdown and stumbled. They just leaned hard into the slice of life, I guess thinking that it’d endear us to the characters and get us invested so the eventual gut punch hits harder. But that just left the whole route feeling a little plain; compared to the rest of the game’s peaks and valleys, the relatively steady tone makes it feel flat and straightforward, not helped by just how little agency it allows the player. The core theme of Shizune’s route, as has been hammered home over and over again, is the importance of communication. So it’s kind of a shame this route communicates so badly.

Sort of. See, the thread’s been really down on Shizune’s route for many reasons, good and bad, but the fandom as a whole? Not so much. Sure, it’s widely regarded as the worst written route and Shizune sits at the bottom of most popularity polls, but her route has a dedicated following. To many people, the low stakes and less strident tone feel less flat and more grounded, compared to the world-shaking, life-changing events that characterize the other routes, at least. It can register as a ray of light amidst a lot of dark subject matter and it sticks out because of it. I used to like this route specifically because of how different and close its tone was, but coming face-to-face with its issues like this kind of spoiled the fun. And that’s not a bad thing. I’d rather know the issues with Shizune’s behavior and not enjoy one part of one piece of media quite as much than ignorantly endorse its message; that’s how so much disability activism goes wrong, after all. To be honest, in spite of everything, there’s still a lot of ableism in the KS fanbase, though it’s more “we haven’t generalized the lessons we learned” than “we don’t understand the lessons at all”. I have no idea how to fix that, and trying to is frankly beyond me. The least I can do is point it out and show people a better way.

(If you’re looking for better treatment of Act 4, I recommend reading this work, or if you’re looking for a good wrap up of Misha’s character arc this one (plus its Shizune and Hisao-focused companion piece). But you didn’t hear that from me .)

With that, I think it’s time we wrapped this bad boy up. Remember:


Depending on the level of discussion we get in the thread, on either Friday or Monday we transition from one of the lightest routes in the game to probably the darkest: Rin’s.