A flock, a herd, a heap, whatever you call a group of butterflies, people sure seem to like it when they vomit on a wall, at least that's what Rin Tezuka thinks. Rin is a character who's origins are as strange as her idle conversation and habits. She comes from a visual novel called Katawa Shoujo that literally translates to broken girls, it's not entirely an encouraging name. Visual novels play out something like choose your own adventure novels, where it is a story and you make choices to change how it progresses while being shown images of the people you are talking to and the outcomes of your actions.
The game was created by a team that organised themselves via 4chan, a place with a rather bad reputation that colours people's view of the game. While much of 4chan can be vile, disgusting, pornographic or rude, Katawa Shoujo is a well written, touching and earnest story about life coping with a new disability, making friends and hopefully finding romance at a new school. The story follows Hisao as he makes friends with 1 of 5 girls, one of whom is Rin
It is at this point that I should point out something that, while used in a beneficial way, has plagued the game since the offset. The sex scenes. They are a product of the genre but in something of a subversion of the norm they are not mean to titillate and move the story along in one way or another, in fact some of them are downright bad for the story. All of them are skip-able and there is only one possible with Rin at any rate. We're going to ignore it because I personally skipped past that scene.
Rin is an amputee, as you've probably noticed, yet she is also an accomplished and habitual painter. She paints using her toes to hold the brush, in fact she does practically everything with her toes, the first time you see her in the game she is sitting on a table, eating some curry with a fork clenched between two of her toes. This physical oddity is also carried over into her personality somewhat as she talks in either short, sentences that belie her anti-social, awkward nature or long, rambling explanations of her complex, seemingly mad trains of thought.
She has little to no social skill and, aside from Hisao and Emi, another girl, no real friends. This is where Rin's reality starts to come in. Her disability and strange speech make her somewhat unreal and unrelatable but her thoughts and problems are all too real. Rin, despite all her eccentricities and strangely philosophical questions about what things are and what people think and do, is confused, angry and upset at both herself and the people around her. She has a very hard time explaining her thought processes to other people, she doesn't understand what people want her to do or expect from her and she isn't sure what to expect from other people.
This feeling of being lost and confused is the thing that gives Rin's path in the game a very personal feeling, while it is one of the funniest in the game it is also, without a doubt the saddest because it's so easy to relate to those feelings that Rin feels. It all comes somewhat out of left field, there is a build up to this revelation that Rin might not be 100% satisfied with being Rin but it is easy to miss the first time around as you tend to be focusing on the funnier parts of your odd conversations with Rin. This, as well as the alternate endings and paths, made me play Rin's route through several times before considering the others and the effect is astounding.
Every frown, every little statement or criticism of her work that Rin made was different now, it wasn't a temporary lull in her normal, sleepy randomness, it was a kick in the nuts from the sad reality of Rin's existence. That doesn't make everything depressing, quite the opposite, it makes the happy, funny moments better, each non-sequitur is a thing to be savoured and every idle conversation becomes more meaningful.
Rin Tezuka is interesting because much like Arthur Dent and Tsukasa Kayoda, she's human despite her circumstances but in a much more relatable way than Dent or Tsukasa could ever be.
While I could only recommend Kamen Rider, Touhou or the Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy, I downright implore you to go and download Katawa Shoujo, read it and experience it for yourself, not just Rin, the other characters all offer a different view and a different feel but I will always guide people towards Rin first. It was released by it's developers for free at
http://www.katawa-shoujo.com/ and is well worth at least playing the first act of.
Just maybe turn on the mature content filter first.
Next time, a slight change in scheduled programming, see, it's not the end of the 3rd day yet so we've got a bit of time to spend searching in the bamboo forest, with any luck we'll find a phoenix.