tl;dr you failed to understand the route and you didn’t even bother reading anything in this topic
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I’m going to have to argue with you on this. I do not believe that Kud’s route, per se, has character development.
Let me apply it to the tale of the bat, which you have reminded everybody of. Yes, she struggles trying to fit in, and yes, it explains why she is the way she is… But, during the course of the route, does she try to fix any of that? Does she fit in more with the rest of the school (Little Busters excluded) after what happens in Tebwa? No, she doesn’t. She solves her problems, and remains the good 'ol Kud that everybody knows and loves.
Therein lies the lack of character development. Because Kud’s character doesn’t change much over the course of the route. Her character does not develop.
And this is where I side with Aspirety: There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. The point of the route is not to develop her character, but to solve her regrets. I honestly think it was beautiful, in that regard.
You know, I think that is a common pitfall I see in many of Key’s works. A lot of people I have argued with hated Clannad because of the ending being, well, a cheap plot pull. That is one thing that I think people should stop trying to bother understanding with Key works. It’s not about how the problem was solved, or how the ending came to be. Key never tries to explain these (well, Rewrite did), but rather, focuses on the emotions behind the characters and rewarding them afterwards.
For lack of better words, Kud’s route is a very traditional Key route. And to the critics I say, stop trying to think about it, and just feel it. LB is a more emotional VN, as are all of Key’s works.
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Sorry for putting up my thoughts on Kud’s route Naoki. How silly of me to do that in a Kud discussion thread. Nothing in the topic has any importance to what I said my thoughts were. So, by all means, continue telling me I don’t understand her route. Obviously that must be the only explanation as to why I disliked it.
And the ending to Kud’s route removed all the emotion from it. I really, really do not like miracle endings.
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Eeh personal preference then, I guess. I honestly thought of Clannad as the most “miracle ending” out of all of Key’s works 
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Is that a one-liner reply? o.o You got angry at me for doing that! >A<
Can you at least explain why you think people don’t understand the route? You keep saying people don’t understand or have forgotten, but you haven’t said anything that I consider a mind-blowing revolution that changes my view on Kud’s route. You know we all read through the same thing, right? Why can’t people just have a different opinion?
Oh, and from what I can tell, Solidbatman’s comment was an answer to the first post… The rest of the topic has nothing to do with someone’s opinions of the route.
I agree with it~ My reaction to the Kud route ending is similar to the reaction anime-watchers had at the end of Refrain - O.o
It’s because from my point of view, it’s impossible to see the route ending as an ass pull if you understand it and know the meaning behind the events (we talked this part over in the chat) and the same goes for not remembering the Tale of the Bat, which is, in my eyes a solid example of a character-oriented moment which other people said did not exist in the route.
I’ll gladly go more into detail if there’s something about my previous explanations people didn’t understand. I’ll gladly back up my reasoning if you say that my explanations do not prove my claims. But if people claim the opposite of what I’ve written and explained without backing it up, I naturally assume they didn’t read it.
I don’t forbid people from having their own opinions. However, to me, a discussion is far more than just one-sidedly stating your opinion and refusing any kind of dialogue. If it was like that, we wouldn’t need discussions or online forums for that. Writing that stuff down in one’s own diary would suffice.
What’s supposed to happen here is a discussion, a dialogue. So when people write things that go beyond subjective opinion-stating, I expect them to back up their statements and consider what others have written to that topic (like, when in a dialogue, listen to the others before speaking).
To name an example, a discussion is what’s currently going on between me and Pepe here.
While the tale of the bat really doesn’t seem to have produced much character development, I’m pretty sure that character development has happened in the route. We just weren’t shown the results of it.
Think about what happened in the very end. The ultimate goal of the route was not physically smashing the chains that physically bind her, thus ensuring physical survival and allowing her to return to Riki’s side.
It was about solving a mental problem that mentally prevented Kud from staying with Riki while also remembering the incident. It was about dealing with her self-deprecation, her self-awareness as a “useless gear” and the train of thought, according to which, she’s useless and should keep becoming a sacrifice for other people’s sake, even if it means death.
I think the anime picked up on this pretty well, by the way.
SPOILER:
It stated that Kud had returned to her home country just as she wished in a previous loop, but her route still repeated itself because her problem wasn’t solved.
In short, her way of thinking changed by the end of the route, thus character development has devinitely occured.
We simply didn’t see how exactly that has changed her overall, because the route ended the moment Kud returned home.
It’s an ending that follows a “game logic” which states that if you have overcome certain challenges in the game, you can unlock a better ending to the story. It’s a reward given to you as a player for clearing optional content. As a game ending, it makes perfect sense, but as an Anime ending, it naturally makes almost none.
In a purely non-gaming logic, I would justify that “miracle ending” as follows: Tomoya worked hard and he gave happiness to many other people. Thus, he deserved a better ending than that which he was given. Key magic granted him what he deserved even though it wasn’t realistic. That’s what Key magic does in my opinion.
However, I believe that Kud’s route was not solved by Key magic like certain other Key routes.
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I had to revisit Kud’s “cave scene” to answer this. Thank you LP videos!
I always viewed the goal of the route was “I regret not being as good as my mom; I regret not being able to help ease such a crisis; I regret being such a useless gear”. She only thought of being a sacrifice as the only way to ease that regret.
But what I understood happened at the end of the route was Riki convinced her to keep on living, because that’s what she wanted, deep down. She figuratively threw away her regrets, which was in the form of that burnt-up gear. Her regrets weren’t “solved” because, well, you can’t solve something like that; you can’t bring back people from the dead, unlike other routes, where they can fix up their own mental issues
What I believe happened in the end of the route is that Kud simply got over her regrets, and decided to keep living. Riki himself said that “Her feeling of being out of place […] that wasn’t correct. She thought herself a useless gear. That wasn’t correct at all” which implies that, well, she really didn’t care much about feeling out of place. Her regret was being a “useless gear” (it could also imply that she never should have felt out of place, but I think that makes less sense given the context).
Now, after what happened (after Refrain, I mean), did she still think of herself as out of place? I most definitely think so. Did she still think of herself as a useless gear? Well, that is open to interpretation, but I believe it can go both ways. Was she able to let go of her regret? Yes, that is what the route solved. It convinced her that what she truly wanted was not to save everyone, but to keep on living.
Now, leading it back to character development, I still thinks this points out to her being the same Kud as the beginning of the story. The only thing different is that she no longer harbors regrets for that tragic event that had haunted her.
Given my above argument, I think her only way of thinking that changed by the end of the route was “I want to sacrifice myself to save my family” to “I want to continue on living” which, rather than being character development, is a changed response to the tragedy.
Well, the whole “secret of the world” is Key magic in totality XD But no, it wasn’t solved thanks to Key magic, which is why I don’t think it as much a “miracle ending” as my example, Clannad’s ending.
I think the problem that people had with Kud’s route is identifying the conflict. With other routes, it is easily identifiable that the conflict is “this girl has problems, how will she solve them?” With Kud’s route, many readers probably misunderstood the conflict as “bad people captured Kud, how will she escape?” which, as we all know, isn’t the conflict, and is rather, a metaphorical representation of the same conflict as other routes. Which is why people might have felt it a cheap ending because the solution to what they thought was the conflict was indeed really cheap.
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Guys, can you try to clean up this thread with [spoiler] tags? Any reference to the secret of the world should be tagged.
I feel like the cave scene as ametaphor is a lot easier for VN readers to stomach than Anime only viewers. In the Anime, we’re shown everything that happens, so it’s much harder to accept that it was all an illusion. Of course, with the way the secret of the world is, it’s entirely possible to explain everything we see. But that doesn’t mean that the Anime won’t throw people off the trail a bit.
Less is more, here.
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Got it, cap’n. Spoiler tags are hard
I have a reason to believe that her mindset truly has changed beyond what you have described. The reason being the symbolism of the melted machine part and the chains that bind her.
In the anime, she used the melted machine part to smash the chains, but it was different in the VN. There, she threw it with all her strength and when she did, the chains turned to rust and exploded into fragments.
SPOILER:
Kud described that melted machine part as ‘the wreckage of my feelings’ (“Regret. Affection.”), but I also see it as a representation of the “useless gear” that Kud considers herself to be. Therefore, the chains have shattered when she threw away her useless gear. This, in turn, would mean that she changed the way she was thinking about herself. She stopped considering herself a useless gear that can only be useful by sacrificing herself. Thus, she refused to die as a sacrifice and was released from her chains.
Spoiler tags don’t seem to be working at all right now. Looks like it’s a technical problem. Putting things in italics seems to bug out under certain circumstances as well.
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In a response to your spoilered text, while I agree with it, I know a lot of people would disagree by saying it is too little too late. The character development is juuust before the ending, and is a small amount of development. Until KudWaf is translated, those people will have no answer to whether that development was significant or not outside of the Tebwa stuff.
Sometimes when you put certain formatting tags in your post, they wont show up locally for a while. It’s a bit weird… You just have to trust that they are working for everyone else~
Well, I’d have to disagree on that. While it is literally a “useless gear”, I never interpreted that she used it to symbolize herself. Rather, she used it to remind herself of the accident. At this point it’d be hard to gauge validity since it’s all a difference in interpretation
Well you could certainly interpret it as a symbol of her thinking herself a useless gear.
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Happy Birthday Kud! You’re already one of our most discussed routes, but I won’t let that stop me from giving you a birthday boost. Wafuu!
I finally finished Kud’s story route and overall I thought it was pretty enjoyable. It was fun to know a little bit more about our Wafuu heroine and the dramatic moments were really heavy on the feels. I found Kud’s problems to be relatable, and her backstory regarding her relationship with her mother was pretty powerful. The bad ending was brutal and I felt really sad for what happened. As for the true ending, I can understand why some might say it’s contrived but I thought it was really heartwarming. I like to see the whole gear connection between Riki and Kud as a part of Kud’s psychology in that she’s imagining Riki telling her to break the chains. Additionally, I agree with @Pepe that these kinds of stories are trying to give us what our emotions want to see and logic plays little part to it. It’s kind of like the earlier Disney movies such as Snow White and Pinocchio. The CG’s were really nice and I like the Ending track. I wouldn’t say Kud’s route is my favorite because for one, I haven’t read all the routes in LB yet, but I still liked it.
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This is my opinion of Kud before reading Refrain. It is subject to change.
Kud is one of my favorite characters in Little Busters!, if not my absolute favorite. She’s very energetic and outgoing, but she also knows her limits. She is very much a child, always looking for help from others and being oblivious to dirty topics. Her enthusiasm for pretty much everything helps her stand out among the cast in Little Busters!.
Now, about her route…Where do I even begin? Although the first half of it is quite heartfelt and does somewhat help build the chemistry between Riki and Kud, the second half is all over the place. Constant innuendo, NSFW CGs, and a forced romance in the middle of a heartbreaking plot really threw me off during this route. Both ends are heartbreaking, but the bad ending makes a ton more sense. I’m really beginning to get worried about Kud Wafter…
I still like Kud very much, and I like her route. But unless Refrain changes my mind, I’m afraid I can’t fully appreciate what Shirokiri did to her route.
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You read the EX version? o.o That might be your problem…
This was from the vanilla version of the game. Sure, there was no straight-up sex, but I feel like that was only holding back the writer from doing so. This route feels so lewd that I can think of at least two occasions where Riki and Kud could have had sex. It’s uncomfortable. XP
Don’t even get me started on the ‘good’ ending.
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