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enigmari · 5 years ago

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Oh my GOD Please infodump abt hatoful.... ive repeatedly tried to get into it but have no idea how/how to connect any of the lore. Thanos !

I SAW THE TYPO TOO LATE IT WAS SUPPOSED TO END WITH “THANKS”,

SKDFSKJSLKDFJ no worries anon, it happens to the best of us. Anyways, how should I start this…

So, if you’re totally new here, Hatoful Boyfriend is a visual novel dating sim whose basic premise is “what if cliched boyfriend archetypes… but birds?” And it takes this premise completely wholeheartedly, while still maintaining a comedic tone. You pick classes and club activities each in-game day to increase your skill points, and depending on your levels (and a few dialogue options) you’ll either successfully romance your birdie of choice or get a Bad End. Most of the birds make their interests/level requirements obvious from the start, and you have a bunch of save slots to work with if you wanna go the scum route. Pretty simple and straightforward.

(Actually, that’s a lie, it gets much more complicated later. Don’t worry about that right now.)

Most of HBF is framed through the perspective of the protagonist (I’m gonna use her canon name for convenience) Hiyoko, and she is… not the brightest bulb in the box. Especially in the first game, when events in one character’s route will be foreshadowed in other routes, she will rarely call them out or make note of them. Naturally, this also means some reveals will be spoiled depending on which order you do the routes in. You also unlock documents in the Archive section after completing each route, which adds another level of puzzle piecing to the mix.

(No, this is not the complicated part I was talking about earlier. Sorry.)

In this next bit, I’m going to briefly run through the routes of the first game from least to most complex in terms of lore, as well as what things are foreshadowed when. I’ll also toss in the archive documents when I feel they’re most relevant to the information you have. We ready?

Okosan’s routes: Mostly joke endings, unless there is some greater plot significance to pudding that I’ve missed for all these years.

Ryouta’s route: Mostly about character building, the only real hint you get is that his mother is sickly and it’s implied he inherited this from her.

Azami’s routes: You could get here with the same stats as Ryouta’s route, but then you fuck it up by taking this job opportunity away from him. How rude, Hiyoko.

Sakuya’s first route: He opens up to you about his abusive and bigoted dad, and with some encouragement you encourage him to run away and become a musician like he always wanted. Mr. Le Bel is very important to multiple other characters in this game.

Sakuya’s second route (needs perfect stats/dialogue choices): Same conversation about his dad, but he chooses to live with you instead. Your big hint is at the end, when Yuuya sends you a letter saying there’s “something he’s wanted to tell [Sakuya] for a long time. Something important.”

Yuuya’s route: You don’t actually get to find out what the "important thing" is, whoops. You do find out that Yuuya’s a spy for the Dove Party, Shuu is one for the Hawk Party, and the school has been increasingly influenced by the Hawk Party as of late.

BAD END: You may have gotten it earlier, but now you have context as to who’s killing you when you fail a route- it’s the Hawk Party. The reason why is still unclear.

[CW for gore, child death, medical abuse, suicide, and attempted genocide from here on! This game is a trip!]

Shuu’s first route: Absolutely not a romance route and if you ship Shuu/Hiyoko please block me and tab out immediately thank you very much. You learn that Shuu has been killing students for medical experimentation, confirming Yuuya’s suspicions about the quills in the student store and the food in the cafeteria.

Shuu’s second route (needs perfect stats/dialogue choices): Same ending where Hiyoko dies, but he’s attached enough to her that he takes her head in a jar when he goes on the run. You do learn that Shuu doesn’t care about the Hawk Party’s politics, just that they can enable his personal experiments.

Archive Note 11: Someone (Shuu) knew that Yuuya was a Dove Party agent from the start. He also notes that some of the students are “fascinating”, which you know from his route means they’re good experiment fodder. You learn that he has reason to believe his victims won’t oppose the experimentation, but not the details.

Archive Note 10: Shuu makes notes about human “adaptability measures.” Given that Hiyoko is the only human at the school, you can guess that this will involve her in some way.

Archive Note 06: Notes about the Spanish Flu, how deadly it was to humans, and the connection to an “Avian Influenza.”

Archive Note 04: Notes about a “Goodwill Ambassador” for humanity, who needs a strong natural immunity to Avian Influenza. Hiyoko’s stats show that she has a base level of 800 Vitality, so you can guess that she’s the ambassador. This is why she dies when you fail a route- the Hawk Party saw she didn’t build a good enough connection to the birds, so they take her as a lost cause.

Archive Note 07: Shuu makes notes about “carrier capacity” in the student body, inducing it in some way in a “normal” individual. You can guess this is the details of his medical experimentation, but not who the victim is. You can also guess that the disease to be carried is Avian Influenza.

Anghel’s route: It’s not actually that complicated, but I think you need to complete Shuu’s route before the “mad love of a fallen angel” option is available. (EDIT: you actually just need to complete one playthrough to unlock this option. Even the Azami solo ending will unlock it.) This ending seemingly undermines all the things we learned about Shuu right before, but this is just Hiyoko’s perspective.

Archive Note 01: A certain student (Anghel) has hallucinogenic properties that can affect bystanders, putting them in a trance-like state. This explains why everything went totally off the rails in his route.

Kazuaki’s route: Again not a romance route (no matter what he says about “waiting”, ew) because the whole point is that Kazuaki is afraid to open himself up to love of any kind. You learn he had someone he cared deeply about in the past but lost, and now he’s been soured from the experience. You also learn that he smells like bleach.

Nageki’s route: You learn that he’s a ghost, that he killed himself in the school some years ago, and that he doesn’t have all his memories. He disappears before you learn anything more, but he’s happy so it’s okay and why am I crying agai-

Archive Note 02: Someone (Nageki) writes about how they are trapped, and can’t remember what happened to them.

Archive Note 05: Nageki remembers he made a promise to someone very important, but he can’t remember who or what it was.

Archive Note 03: Nageki once woke up in a place that wasn’t the library- somewhere with bright lights and a white ceiling. He’s not as trapped as he first thought.

Archive Note 14: Nageki notes that he can move between floors, going from the library to the chemistry lab below. You can guess that the place with the bright lights is somewhere below these two rooms. This also reveals that Nageki knew the layout of the school when he was alive.

Archive Note 12: Nageki notes that after meeting Hiyoko, he feels fulfilled “just as he did back then.” He still can’t remember everything, though.

Archive Note 08: Notes about an underground facility, a fire, and a Subject 00 whose remains are in storage. You can guess that the facility is the place with the bright lights, and Nageki is Subject 00. You can also guess that Nageki set the fire, since he said that he killed himself.

Archive Note 09: Notes about Subject 00′s relative, whose remains are also in storage. You can guess that this is the “important person” that Nageki made a promise to a long time ago.

At this point, the only documents left are Note 13, which is about a terrorist incident at the Heartful House orphanage in which only two birds survived, and Note 15, which is about another terrorist incident some years ago in which the Ave’s High City building was bombed. Nothing in the main routes hints at these notes, so it’s a good time to move to…

Bad Boys Love route: This route is literally the length of the rest of the routes combined, so we’re doin’ more sections, baby!

Kazuaki’s lost loved one and Nageki’s important person turn out to be each other. They were the survivors of the Heartful House incident, and Kazuaki (real name Hitori) took care of his little brother by himself. Nageki was sickly, so he volunteered himself for a medical experiment at the school that could potentially cure him to take the burden off of Hitori.

Unbeknownst to them, the Hawk Party was already in control of the school and their real motive was to investigate the disease Nageki was carrying- Avian Influenza. Shuu was specifically the lead for this project, and he also witnessed the Heartful House incident when it happened. At the time, he went by the name Isa Souma and was a medical researcher. He worked with Ryuuji Kawara, Ryouta’s dad, until Ryuuji’s death from disease.

Ryouta and Hiyoko were also there, because her parents were former human ambassadors too. Unfortunately, they became some of the casualties, which left the two kids heartbroken. Shuu, seeing them and recognizing Ryouta, offered to grant them a wish. They both wished for a world where humans and birds would never fight anymore, which Shuu took to mean “kill all the remaining humans so they can’t fight the birds” because… he’s like that.

Shuu decided that the easiest way to kill all the humans would be to spread the Avian Influenza, and this is why he sought out Nageki. Nageki was forced to kill humans as part of the experiments, and this traumatized him so much that he set the lab on fire to stop it, trapping himself inside. Hitori witnessed this too, and swore to get revenge despite Nageki asking him to destroy his remains and live a happy life. He bleached his feathers and swapped identities with another bird to fake his death, and applied to the school as a teacher under his new name.

Nageki’s plan didn’t entirely work, and the Hawk Party was able to store some of his remains for future experiments with Avian Influenza. This brings us to the timeline of the main routes, where Shuu took advantage of Ryouta’s sickly constitution to make him a new carrier for Avian Influenza. Yuuya tried to interfere on behalf of the Dove Party, but Shuu blackmailed him with the knowledge that he killed his real half-brother because he hated Mr. Le Bel and wanted Sakuya to live instead.

The new strain of Avian Influenza that Ryouta carried was enough to make Hiyoko sick and kill her. The death of the Human Ambassador kickstarts the beginning of this route, and Shuu planned for the humans who would retaliate to also be infected. It doesn’t go as he planned, of course, but that’s laid out pretty well in the rest of the route so I won’t re-summarize it here.

Aaaand that’s about everything for the first Hatoful Boyfriend game! I’ll gladly do infodumps/lore summaries for Holiday Star or the other side materials if anyone wants, but this took almost three hours to write as is so I’m going to give myself a break.

#anonymous #ask me #mari.txt #hatoful boyfriend #EDIT: THIS IS VERY SPOILERY. I HOPED IT WAS OBVIOUS FROM THE LORE REQUEST BUT YEAH.#i don't think it'll spoil your enjoyment of the game bc i didn't go into that many details (also experiencing =/= reading) but yeah.

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windsorgirllove · 6 years ago

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The Prince and The King: Dirk Strider and Kazuaki Nanaki

It may be 4 whole months after the Epilogues came out, but guess what - I’m still thinking about Dirk Strider. And who can blame me, considering… well, everything. Dirk caused a lot of different reactions from everyone, but the way that his character finally clicked for me was watching him take over Jake’s mind and realizing “oh, he’s trying to ‘all will be one with the King’ them”. And then I realized that that would make sense to literally one other person in the whole world, so I decided to write an essay about it. As you do.

Spoilers for Homestuck, including the epilogue, and Hatoful Boyfriend and Hatoful Boyfriend: Holiday Star.

I. Who are these nerds?

For those of you who don’t know, I’ll give a quick summary of these two characters before I start comparing them.

A. Dirk Strider

Dirk Strider is one of the human characters in Homestuck. He is the biological father of Dave Strider and Rose Lalonde, and is an alternate Universe version of Bro Strider. He grew up alone in a post apocalyptic world after an alien queen took over Earth. He is the Prince of Heart and a Derse Dreamer. He is a big gay nerd. In the Homestuck Epilogues, his worst traits come out: his self obsession and his splinter selves that come about due to Heart shenanigans, which led to him making some… morally dubious decisions. By which I mean obtained ultimate power and started rewriting the wills of his friends because “he knows best”. Also he’s aware of the fact he’s in a story now, so he became the narrator. And in one of the timelines present in the Epilogues, he killed himself.

B. Kazuaki Nanaki/The King

Kazuaki Nanaki is a bird featured in Hatoful Boyfriend: Holiday Star. He is a depressed college student studying literature. He fell in love with a boy who ended up pushing him further and further into depression, until the two of them decided to kill themselves. Kazuaki went through with it, his boyfriend did not. He woke up in the afterlife alone and scared. He ends up creating a star from a candle and a chair, which attracts other souls to it’s light. He lured people in because he was lonely, but didn’t want to get hurt again, so he absorbed all the souls into his will, and became the King of the star. And then all the characters end up in the afterlife too, most of whom are still alive, and it’s a whole thing.

So how are they similar? Well, they both are clearly mentally ill, both gay, both killed themselves, both took over the wills of their close friends. Let’s look at their big three narrative similarities: their ascension, their revenge on boyfriends, and their takeovers of will.

II. The Ultimate Self v Kinghood

The Ultimate Self is a concept that was brought up at the end of Homestuck and was explored properly in the Homestuck Epilogues. It seems to be the endpoint for all of the godtiers, wherein they fully realize their Aspect. For example, Rose is ascending as well, and since her aspect is Light (ie knowledge), she gains knowledge of all timelines all at once. Dirk’s aspect, meanwhile, is Heart, which here means soul, so his Ultimate Self is all his splinters combining into one person. (As I sidenote, I wonder how much their classes play into this - Rose is a Seer and is seeing timelines, and Dirk is a Prince and is destroying everyone’s sense of self). It also appears to come along with an awareness of the narrative structure and the fact that they are in the story, which certainly does wonders for the mind. Dirk takes control of it - the narrative, that is - because he believes that he knows best for all his friends.

One thing we know for certain is the ascending fucking hurts. To quote Rose Lalonde: “I am ascending, and it’s terrible.” This process was enough to fully push Dirk over from “has poor judgement and a god complex” to full blown “evil and knows it.” He gains the power to take away the free will of all the other characters, and wants to make them all ascend and then stick their consciousness into robots that he made, because it’s “better” for them. He already carries this plan out with Rose, who he selected to be first because she’s the most like him. Essentially, he wants to make everyone just like him.

Meanwhile, Kinghood seems to have a lot of similarities. Kazuaki seems to gain some reality warping powers once he dies - he is able to transform a room with a candle and a chair into a star with a lighthouse and a throne. He basically makes his world run on fairy tale logic. This extends even to his form. Throughout the game, the characters are represented by photos of birds. However, when Kazuaki is the King, he is rendered in watercolors like the rest of the Holiday Star. Later, when he gets angry, he distorts into a darker colored being with multiple heads, and in his true form he is a monochrome pencil sketch. He also can appear anywhere on the star at any time, because all the residents of the star are under his hivemind. He can control the layout of his home, which is also visible from the outside (in the real world). He can create zones in the star specific to the people within in order to convince them to become one with him. And perhaps scariest of all, he can know the secrets of the people in the star, and toture them with their deepest darkest fear.

So ascending and Kinghood are very similar, except that Kinghood seems to be more in the line of eldritch horror.

III. “I’ll Never Let You Break My Heart Again”

Dirk and Kazuaki also have meaningful romantic relationships with other boys that go super duper bad and end up being their start of darkness. Their whole evil plan can basically be boiled down to getting revenge on the boy who wronged them.

A. Jake

Jake English is the boy that Dirk was in love with. He is from the same universe as Dirk, but from several centuries in the past (which is the present for us). He is the biological father of Jade Harley and John Egbert. He grew up alone on an island in the Pacific, and styles himself as a manly adventurer. Jake and Dirk end up dating when they enter the game, and break up after a few months because they’re dumb teens who can’t communicate and so are all of their friends. In the Epilogues, Jake is unwillingly wed to Jane Crocker, another of their friends, in the Candy Timeline. In the Meat Timeline, Dirk has taken control of the narration and forces Jake to confess his love for Dirk in front of a huge crowd.

B. Uzune

Hitori Uzune was the guy that Kazuaki was in love with. He was a fellow college student at the university Kazuaki was attending, and was similarly fucked up and depressed. He convinces Kazuaki that they should kill themselves, and the two of them overdose on pills. But just as Kazuaki is drifting away Hitori gets up and steals Kazuaki’s identity in order to get revenge for his dead brother. That whole thing is actually the main plot of the game, kinda. Hitori refuses to call an ambulance for Kazuaki even as he changes his mind, and let’s him die.

C. Angry Gay Selfrightousness

So first of all I think we can agree that Kazuaki is a little more valid for going off the deep end here. But they both did have a similar experience in love. Both of them felt deeply betrayed by the boy they loved. Both of them were super pissed about this, and it shows in their supervillain plans. Neither of the are directly setting out to get revenge, but their desire is written all over their actions.

With Dirk, he spends an inordanent amount of time calling Jake stupid while he is posing as the narrator, as well as inserting thoughts about himself into Jake’s mind when he’s about to have sex with Jane. (He’s also just weirdly horny the whole epilogue, in general.) After driving Jake to do his public confession in the Meat timeline, Dirk responds with “And to love Dirk is to obey him” in the narration. And finally, right before he’s about to fuck of to space Dirk plans this epic confrontation that ends with the quote that heads this section.

As for Kazuaki, the whole way he was able to become the King was because of the trauma that Hitori put him through, namely the killing him part. He absorbed people because of not wanting to be left alone again. And once Hitori enters the dream he turns all his focus onto him, blinding him and forcing him into a small pocket of the dream so he can’t hurt anyone again. And even after he is defeated he still reaches out and tries to grab Hitori.

Even when the two of them try to move on, they can’t.

IV. “All Will Become One With the King” - Narrative Takeovers and the Hivemind

In order for there to be a narrative takeover, there has to be a narrative in the first place. And both Homestuck and Hatoful Boyfriend certainly have one, and I don’t mean in the sense that they are a story that we consume. I mean that there is a narrative thread that the characters themselves are aware of.

A. Homestuck “Canon”

Let’s start with Homestuck, which in the Epilogues actually brought the term “canon” into the vocabulary of the characters via one Rose Lalonde. As a Seer and fanfiction writer, it makes sense she would be familiar with it. In the epilogues she discovered that there was something wrong with the timeline they were in - it was “non-canon”. This is different from the timeline being doomed, although it is similar. In both cases it means the timeline in question is fading away.

As defined by Rose, in order for a timeline to be canon, it has to be three things: 1. It has to be true, 2. It has to be essential, and 3. It has to be relevant. True as in true, essential as in essential to the characters or the story, and relevant as in relevant to the audience. Knowledge of the idea of canon seems to come along with ascending to the Ultimate Self, since the only people who know about it are Rose, Dirk, and Alt!Calliope.

Once Dirk ascends and realizes that the timeline they’re in is “non-canon”, he seizes control of the narrative in order to steer it back to canon and stop it from fading away. And once he takes control, he gains the same knowledge that the author would have of all the characters (except for Roxy because of his voidy-ness). He also wants to make everyone else ascend to their Ultimate Selves as well, and then take away their agency. How this worked is that he believes that their bodies wouldn’t be able to handle ascending (even though his did) and he makes them robot bodies because he’s just so nice. And the first people he assimilates are Rose and Dave, his children. And also as I said above, he inserted thoughts into people's heads and made them do things they wouldn’t normally do.

And Dirk taking control of the narrative isn’t an isolated incident, either. The narration has been passed around like a basketball, or more accurately stolen like loose change by a clumsy pickpocket. For the most part it is regulated to the cherubs - Caliborn and Calliope, as well as Doc Scratch - and Andrew Hussie. And that’s not even to mention all the people that give commands to the characters. The fabric of the text is very present in Homestuck.

B. The All Knowing Eyes of the King

The King also tries to take control of the narrative as well, although not in the same way as Dirk. He isn’t aware of the fact that he is in a story in the same way. However, by trying to bring the whole cast into his hive mind he is essentially taking control of the narrative, since whoever controls the characters controls the story. He can’t full on insert thoughts into people’s heads like Dirk, but he can know the secrets of the people in the Holiday Star, similar to Dirk gaining the knowledge of the author. Then he uses a person’s deepest fear to convince them that the world outside is too scary, too dangerous, and it is safer to stay with him. Plus he uses creepy picture books to do it, which is certainly an aesthetic choice.

Two of the best examples of this is how he deals with Shuu and Yuuya. In Shuu’s case, it’s his most effective argument for staying on the Holiday Star - possibly because it is so similar to his own. Shuu was in love with a (married) colleague of his, but never told him, even as he passed away. Being as this was the only person Shuu cared about, he fell into a depression and also started murdering people. The King convinced him that there was nothing more in the real world that he could find a use for - that it would be better if he stayed here, where he could experiment and research forever. It worked so well that it took the ghost of his love to shake him out of it.

On the opposite side of this we have Yuuya. Yuuya was not actually supposed to be on the Holiday Star, but he dove in (basically) in order to save his little brother. And The King probably had the best chance of blackmailing him, because Yuuya has done some shit - including the murder of his infant half-brother. He did this in order to help his little brother, but still, jeez. The King uses this to convince him that he’s a bad person, that he would be better off in the Star, where his guilt couldn’t hurt him anymore. This doesn’t work, mainly because Yuuya is a more emotionally mature person that the King. He refused to be converted, because all the bad things he’s done has made him the person he is today, and to get rid of that would be irresponsible. His whole speech ends with this truly phenomenal quote: “It’s my grief. And you can’t have it.”

V. Conclusion

So, what have I learned from this? Um, don’t trust gay men I guess. And also that mental illness and suicide is a very serious thing. I feel that with this essay I have run into the problem that my professors have told me numerous times - I can identify an interesting point, but I have trouble drawing meaning from this. So if any of you can figure out what this connection means, please let me know! Mostly to me it seems like there are definite links between my favorite stories, and it’s that giving in to despair is not the answer.

VI. Miscellaneous: The Meta of HB - Hiyoko as the Narrator

Hatoful Boyfriend is not quite as meta as Homestuck - nothing really is. But it isn’t the benchmark of weirdness for dating games for nothing. And most of this weirdness revolves around Hiyoko, which makes sense. She is the narrator after all - and I don’t just mean that in the normal story sense. I mean that in the Homestuck sense as well.

Hiyoko is aware of the fact that she is in a game. She makes references to her stats, and is aware of the interface of the screen. She also doesn’t know the name of the town she’s lived in all her life until someone else says it in Holiday Star, because it was never established in the first game. She is also aware of alternate universes of each romance route. Because Hiyoko dies. A lot. She dies in Shuu’s route, in the neutral route, and in the true route. And in Holiday Star (which in it of itself is an alternate universe to the main game) she meets Death and is able to recognize him from all the other times she’s died.

The important thing to get from all this is that unlike Some People, Hiyoko never goes crazy from this fact. She’s in a game, and she knows it, and she’s cool with it. It should probably be pointed out that Hiyoko is dumb as a box of rocks, and with ignorance comes bliss, they say. But still, it is interesting to see an example of a character with meta knowledge who manages to deal with it, instead of going full supervillain.

#homestuck #hatoful boyfriend #homestuck epilogue #hs epilogue #hb #hatoful boyfriend holiday star #dirk strider #kazuaki nanaki #the king (hatoful boyfriend)#hs meta #My writing #she speaks!#six whole pages #be grateful #also let me know what you think!

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