Discussion topic for Track 6 of Owari no Hoshi no Love Song: Kooru Yume (Frozen Dream). Please support the official release by purchasing the album from iTunes! You can find a translation of the lyrics on ShiraneHito’s blog.
Please tag references to later songs or outside works with the [spoiler] tag, providing adequate context in parenthesis.
0 voters
This isn’t a song. This is just a monologue being drowned out by background music. That has always confused and irritated me. While looking for a proper transcription, I found a Japanese blog talking about how this track means to show that it’s taboo to cheat in love. They drew a parallel to Owari no Sekai Kara and what that girl did. This track in general just feels very strange and out of place. It’s also the most prominent mentioning of advanced technology in the album.
I feel like Maeda felt like composing a VN track, then remembered that he was doing an album and decided to cram a diary inside it for the sake of giving it lyrics.
The music itself is pretty good, and the diary is a fairly good story, entertaining at least, but yeah, it’s far from being a song.
I like this song…which is kind of weird because I do acknowledge it barely qualifies as a song. I enjoy listening to it because this immediately puts my imagination in hyper-drive. The beat that the singer speaks at is very satisfying - the diary setting suits this especially well with the way Japanese dates sound aloud. And I love the how straightforward the delivery is but as things go to hell the anxiety quietly slips into the singer’s voice.
I would like to throw out that I would love to see a vn or a full audio drama for this story. Also lying about having memory loss is ridiculously stupid.
Despite my fondness for the song I don’t really think this is a good fit for this album. I guess it is about a love story, but I feel like it is hard to figure out how it ties in with Closed World. I feel like it fits in the sense that the VR setting is its own closed world - but that is so far removed from how the theme is treated in the other tracks that it just kind of feels like an odd song out here.
The fuck is this shit.
It’s unpleasant to listen too, it’s thematically out of place, and it doesn’t even make sense. I completely dislike this song and will skip it every time. I have nothing to say about this, aside from fuck the dumb girl for her stupid amnesia idea.
And yet I’ve been excitedly waiting for this thread for one very small reason because…
god damn…
look at this shit…
This is the official booklet that comes with the album, and once the lyrics reach the point in the song where shit starts getting weird, THE LYRICS BEGIN TO FADE IN THE BOOKLET BEFORE BECOMING COMPLETELY ILLEGIBLE.
THAT IS SO COOL.
It speaks to the amount of polish this album has when even the lyric booklet invokes the spirit of the song and changes accordingly.
Okay, so it’s is like that in the booklet. Shirane did the same thing on his blog, so I expected that was the case, but you never know for sure.
Whoa what the fuck? This is my favourite so far. Feels like I’m reading something from Little Busters.
(LB Refrain) When I first read Little Busters, I firmly believed that Riki was in a virtual reality, so it almost feels like this was channeling that interpretation I once had.
So, the girl is in some kind of VR space, it would seem. Her own dumb idea of lying about her identity caused the world itself to shit to match her will. But the way they describe it as a ‘bug’, and less of an intended functionality of the program, seems to scream ‘MAGIC’ to me more than anything scientific. Her will shaped the world around her in a way that shouldn’t have been possible, a sort of divine retribution for her idiotic decision. As for how this fits into the world so far, I have no damn clue, maybe I’ll have a better idea later.
This is super spooky and mysterious and I love it! The music reminds me of ‘A World Where Nothing Happened’ from Little Busters. I’ll keep repeating myself, but Maeda definitely seems to be channeling LB here.
Well this is… interesting. Definitely not straightforward, which makes it even more fun to think about. Let’s try and figure it out then, shall we?
One thing is made apparently clear here: the girl is in some sort of virtual world; perhaps a simulation? A virtual reality? Or how about… a game? Rather than the girl at the end being a creator (as implied), what if she was actually a player? And what other type of game involves the player controlling a fictional character, trying to gain the attention of other fictional characters? You betcha! Visual novels! Probably, in this case, a sort of otome game.
So… what went wrong? Obviously choosing to lie about memory loss was incredibly stupid, but we have to ask: “who made that decision?” In most VNs, it isn’t the character, but the player who makes that decision for them. So perhaps we are seeing this from the point-of-viee of the character being played. Perhaps she has access to the VN logs, which seem to accurately represent the whole [Date] --line of text-- format. Wahey maybe it actually wasn’t a diary!
So the little lady’s life was screwed up because the player made a wrong choice. Well boohoo, poor her? But the player can just restart. At this point, the player probably couldn’t do that anymore; the text disappeared from the screen, after all. Hence, the disgruntled player cursing the VN devs for putting such a gamebreaking bug in their release 
and the poor MC losing her own identity in the process.
So, what exactly did maeda want to say through this song? Perhaps it is a critique of how people play VNs these days. Just selecting, resetting, seeing how characters’ lives are destroyed in the bad ends, then continuing from there. Perhaps this song was meant to tell players to actually try to, y’know, consider, from a storywriting perspective what actually happens to their characters when these choices are made. Some choices being so drastic that they no longer even feel like the MC’s anymore, but a totally different character’s. Perhaps that is the “other girl” she sees: the girl who has a totally different personality now. The girl in the other route.
So yes, this is especially relevant, us being a VN-centric community. I think we can learn from this song by considering choices as not just “flags” that lead us down different story paths, but as part of the characters’ personality. The personality that we choose for them. Maybe, through that, we’d gain a new appreciation for how the MCs we love so much grow and change as characters.
Or maybe I’m just overthinking things again 
I think it’s very possible it’s a simulation/vr thing, the girl probably actually lives in the fucked up real world of Owari, and they got to the point where they’ve been creating virtual reality simulations of a better world/paradise, something you see in quite a few post-apocalyptic stories.
The text fading out is the coolest shit though. 
This discussion was disappointing. Not only was reception to the song negative despite it being the most Maeda thing since ONE, but you guys missed so much.
The most obvious sign that something is amiss wasn’t even mentioned. The day she makes the lie is April 14th. Then the next entry is on April 31st. Not only is that a ridiculously large time gap for a diary, but April 31st doesn’t even exist. This is what leads to a giant hint as to what is going on… But I’ll mention that at the end.
Secondly, there wasn’t much mention of Owari no Sekai Kara. These songs are very similar, they tell the tale of someone who tried to change themselves so much that they ultimately replaced themselves. We’ve seen this multiple times in Key VNs.
We didn’t have much talk about the presentation either. This is a diary, and that is important. Note the large gaps in time between some entries mark this diary as unreliable narration. The worst part is events from a week ago will be referred to as “yesterday.” After a while this is made even more extreme, and instead of referring to events in the diary incorrectly, she refers to events that weren’t even in the diary. The events of the “apparently I had Coconut Curry yesterday” thing as well as the events noted by the previous entry are not in the diary, so where does she learn the information?
We’re missing around a month of information here. Not only is that bad for us, but it is bad for the heroine, because she too is reliant on this unreliable narration. The information in the diary we hear is also the only information held by the heroine. The date format not only shows us the April 31st mystery, but it also serves as a way to disconnect the final couplet from the rest of the diary, those final two lines not being marked by a date but by a “The next day…”
There are also discrepancies in the descriptions of various things. For example the seat placement of the guy is contradicted several times.
It is also interesting to think about whether this is written in third person or first. You’d naturally assume first person, but treating “I” or “me” as a separate character to the heroine is likely the way to look at it. I know someone with a memory defect and they treat their past self from beyond a certain point as a different person. This diary looks to portray a similar thing, at a certain point she stopped being herself.
We’ve also got a semicolon thing going on, with her receiving phone calls from herself after a gap in time.
There is also a fun little pattern of the heroine’s actions. The fading begins by her distancing herself from reality, and she furthers this to the point where, by the end of the song, she is physically running away from it all. She isn’t being made to disappear, she is trying to disappear.
So with all of that in mind, here’s what’s going on.
At a certain point, this girl split with herself. The two live in parallel at the same time, but one exists a day later. That’s a weird sentence, but here’s why I say that. At the start we have day-by-day entries. This is a daily diary, but that pattern is broken with the weird date April 31st, a day that doesn’t exist. This is the day in which the split is first noticeable, and the split occurred in a weird way. One lives in a normal world. One lives in that same world, but with a slightly different calendar. Still the two write in the same world-spanning diary. This messes up all the dates because they have different calendars despite living at the same time. What happened yesterday on the 4th for one, happened yesterday on the 5th for another. The fact that there is two of her is not only shown by the blatant doppelganger stuff, but by the fact that one of the writers remembers her childhood while another has no memories outside of the diary. One knows a lot, and one knows very little.
If this is true, the only day in which the two would live parallel to one another by date number would be May 1st and July 1st. The split would have happened in May, and the two exist together on July 1st, this would be the bug. Two people existing at the same time is hardly normal, so one of them was removed or something.
The last bit of the song is obviously the bit everyone will focus on, but why is it in the diary? The fact that these lines all exist within the same diary leads me to believe that this is still the same world. The Virtual World thing just seems too easy an answer, it makes the rest of the song rather throwaway. We do know from previous songs that the world of Owari will reject contradictions, so maybe it is that. If not, at least the headset lady exists within the virtual world.
…
that aside, pretty great thing you got going on there! Would love to expound that a bit more. Like, why are there two girls running in parallel? What does that have to do with her original dumb confession? Is the “girl with amnesia” she invented the one who lives in the virtual world? Or is that girl something outside of her own power?
I think the basic idea going on here is very similar to ONE as well as Haruki Murakami’s End of the World. Compared to the rest of the album Kooru Yume feels like an Anachronism, but the same could be said for the Eternal World in ONE or the Illusionary Word in Clannad. The people within these worlds are distinctly different to the real people they represent, and also run at a different time along a different time scale, but ultimately are one and the same. In Clannad for example the tale of Tomoya’s dreams are established in the past, but appear in the present and occur in the future. The time of this strange world is at odds with reality, yet it is so.
In that way I’d say they are both representations of the same person with a major alteration made to them. Contradictory beings that are the same. The Visual Novel theory you brought up follows a similar mindset but chooses to fictionalize the events of Kooru Yume, whereas I believe the events of this song are very much real to the world of Owari.
The earlier comparisons to ONE and Clannad also bring some understanding to why the diary writer split in the first place. These were worlds born from a disconnect, one made by a person distancing themselves from reality. That distancing can be seen in Kooru Yume by both the lying throughout the diary, the act of running away during the concluding lines of the song, and through the obvious fact that this world isn’t the harsh post-apocalyptic reality we know. There are multiple levels of rejection, one bringing birth to the titled frozen dream and one causing the drama that ultimately ends or reboots the dream.
The interesting thought to have on all this, one that ONE brought up, is whether the rejection was the cause for the ending, or whether the girl being dragged out of the dream caused these events to transpire. In a similar way to an alarm clock altering a dream, an outside influence (such as the headset girl) could have caused the diary writer to start her escape, rather than her own will. Her disconnect from reality clearly came from the destruction of the world, but the cause of her disconnect from the dream is unknown.
As for
I’d say that they are the same person. She is simply responding to her own actions without acknowledging her true self. She sends a call, she responds with rejection, and by constantly refuting this self that holds memory she makes the amnesia come true. Think Kanon, several characters in that VN force a change of reality by rejecting truth.
Jesus fucking christ we’re bad.
…in my defense I don’t like this song so I cared not to look closely.
