I’m finding it hard to finish this routes before the podcast, and I still have to do the Sayuri mini route…
Anyway, here are some general thoughts, and just before the Podcast I think I’ll post something more detailed, deep and I’ll have a look and analyze your thoughts as well.
So far, I’ve found this route to be the most easy to read. It was full of hilarious moments and even if there was no comedy at some points, just hearing Sayuri’s voice or Mai’s sprites made it enjoyable. The think I liked the most about this situations is how you had to guess most of the time how Mai was feeling just by looking at her sprite or by noticing the most subtle actions she made. It left Mai’s feelings up to interpret by the reader a lot of the times.
I coincide like most of you in that the day part of the route was much better than the fights against the demons:
Yeah, we aren’t told much about these demons. Up until the end, the only think we know is that they are there, they kind of try to attack Mai for no apparent reason, but neither Mai nor Yuuichi ever get seriously hurt. Then, all of a sudden, Sayuri gets severely wounded in two occasions. It looks way to plot-convenient. It felt a bit off, but still, it helped advance the storyline.
One theme in this route is friendship, however, not friendship in a way I hate to see: the typical shone situation in which for some reason some strange “power of friendship” saves the day. No, I mean true friendship, the one about helping others or caring about others when they are having a bad time. Obviously, Sayuri and Mai are a vivid representation of this kind of friendship, but you could say the same about Yuuichi in this route. He ended up caring not only for Mai, the route’s heroine, but also for Sayuri. He really felt guilty when something bad happened to either of them and tried to help them regardless of what could happen to him. I’d say this is the most human Yuuichi I’ve seen so far.
As for the ending, it was certainly emotional, and profound. The whole “you’ve got to accept yourself” concept was really well put here as I’ll expand on in another post. However, the moment Mai commits suicide is quite unexpected, and in a bad way. The more I think about it the harder I find it to find a logical explanation as for why would Mai do something like that.
This is the closest I get to some logical explanation. Maybe she really wanted to hurt herself as a punishment for what she had caused, like Yuuichi says just after the second time Sayuri gets sent to hospital.
About the last part, I’d say this has a very similar feeling to CLANNAD (Heavy After Story spoilers) It feels like when Tomoya finds himself embracing the lifeless body of Nagisa. Is all that happened afterwards an imagination of an alternative world or reality itself.
I guess we will never know, but both interpretations are a good ending, though the one in which Mai remains dead looks like the true ending to me.
I’ll go read the Sayuri mini route now and try to post something more before the bookclub. Cheers and I hope to see you (or rather hear or read from you) during the podcast!
Edit
I finished the mini route and I’ve got to say that even though it’s short, it condenses Sayuri’s backstory very well. Something I liked about this route is that Sayuri doesn’t get her backstory from the fact that she tried to commit suicide. She had her own personality even before we knew about her story. That’s something you don’t see usually, since most of the characters I’ve seen in Anime and Visual novels tend to be only remembered for their backstory rather than from their personality.
Anyway, now that I wrote the obligatory paragraph about Sayuri I’ll get into the demons symbology.
The demons are a manifestation of Mai’s power, this is what we know for sure. However, what does Mai killing the demons represent? As some of you have already said and is partially implied in the VN, Mai is rejecting her own powers because people were afraid of them. This leads to a self-reject situation and what I feel this represents is that Mai, in the process of rejecting her own powers, she is rejecting what she herself is, her very own essence.
This is why Mai’s limb grow darker and starts loosing her balance and strenght as she keeps on killing those demons, because what she really is doing is killing herself. Summed up, it would mean that rejecting a part of us is like rejecting what we are, so we would be negating our own existence. For me this is the most important theme in the route.
That is exactly what I think. The damage cause to the school is the colateral damage she is actually causing to both Sayuri and Yuuichi.