a couple days ago, I finished Subarashiki Hibi: ~Furenzoku Sonzai~, otherwise known as SubaHibi. i didnt really know what to expect from this vn going into it, i went into it purely off recommendations from people who i knew to be fans of it after reading. i DID know that it was certified larper media, but the thing is, a lot of things im into are pretty larp nowadays so that meant absolutely nothing to me lol. what i knew was that subahibi was going to be pretty crazy, and that i would probably like it
Through playing subahibi, i documented my playthrough in a group chat with some friends. in forming this writeup, im going to be going back through the entire chat, looking at all the screenshots i took, all my thoughts, etc, both to reorganize the thoughts of the entire vn in my head and so i can properly structure my thoughts. i am going to be describing what my thoughts were at the time of certain events, as well as my thoughts on everything in retrospect. be prepared for this to be a pretty lengthy writeup, im pretty well known for dumping out all of my thoughts. dont expect good structure from this, its literally going to be the sequence of events of the story and me going back through in retrospect.
as far as how i played subahibi, i opted for the full voice HD version entirely uncensored as opposed to the steam version, which means i experienced absolutely everything this game had to offer. i also used a spoiler free route guide image, which i typically used to guide me toward side endings before going toward main route.
this writeup is going to be written assuming that the reader has already played all of subahibi and has it fresh in their memory. however, due to the nature of which i went about doing this, it does kind of serve as a summary of important events and what happened. in any case, lets get started!
DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE 1: the first thing that i experienced with reading subahibi was, actually, nostalgia! the first song you hear when starting the very first arc is Yoru no Himawari, and this song actually holds an interesting place in my heart. i actually first heard this song WAY back when i was 7 years old. i discovered it through Kefit's lets play of the fangame I Wanna Be The Barrage, specifically in the Taiko Drum fight -> https://youtu.be/YEhb-XWCNhQ . I was pretty obsessed with this video in particular, Barrage was a fangame that was very special to me back then, i had already been kind of obsessed with the concept of brutally difficult video games, and Barrage to me was one of the hardest video games i had ever known at the time. The Taiko Drum boss in particular was the hardest boss in that game, and so this video would be the one i watched over and over. in this video, during his montage of dying over and over at the taiko drum, he plays this exact song, and it made the video so special to me. when i started hearing this song in its original context, i genuinely started feeling nauseous, i felt like shedding tears, its actually such an insanely beautiful song and ill speak more on how i feel about this games aesthetics later on, but man lol
i guess before really diving into what i wanna say about dtrh1, we can talk about some of the character introductions first of all.
so i guess our first big character is yuki. as far as she goes, i do quite like her as an intelligent protagonist, someone whos particularly well read and is able to logically reason through the course of events over the story. it is interesting though, since the yuki we encounter in these earlier arcs is not the "real" yuki, however realistically the personalities are not THAT different? its just that one yuki is built up without any of the important historic events of the mamiya family in mind. i think the game particularly shows you how interesting she is as a character through her characterization as someone who reads a lot of texts covering the broader scope of philosophy. definitely a big fan of the oneesan vibes, though that matters a lot more in later arcs so ill leave that off for now!
next off was meeting the wakatsuki twins, and honestly? i did immediately find their existence pretty silly lol, i had already known that kagami and tsukasa were characters in subahibi though i had no idea in what way they would fit into the story. first things first i was recognizing that honestly, as far as characters go, i did prefer their original counterparts in lucky star, especially tsukasa like tsukasa is 10000x better in lucky star lol. it does immediately paint this vn as a silly slice of life, and i guess thats kind of the point, its meant to start off with the feeling of being "slice of life with a more serious undertone", and i do think they serve this role pretty well. at the same time in retrospect they end up feeling like a somewhat throwaway addition? realistically what matters more is not the characters themselves, but rather the roles they serve for hasaki and takuji. i guess part of the point is that they dont have much deeper characterization since, well, they arent actually core identities to the story, in fact they are obstacles to the reality that we are seeking.
next is meeting zakuro, and man your feelings for zakuro turn more and more depressing as you progress through the vn lol. i guess id rather describe how i felt about zakuro before LGI since thats a very clear shift through unraveling the truth behind her as a character. prior to LGI, she feels like a pretty mysterious girl, she feels like the connects the story to some higher meta existences, i was already questioning how much this story was going to be bound in reality and whatnot. she explicitly talks about getting us "caught up in all this", which is what especially led to me thinking there was some ripple in the plot as a result of us meeting with zakuro. it did take me a few arcs to think of what the implications of the first meeting with zakuro are though, it literally is a world where you died from zakuro landing directly on you after jumping lol, which i find pretty interesting since i think this is the only time in the entire vn where we deviate from what actually happens whilst still on the main route. at the same time i guess dtrh1 is not entirely relevant to the story itself, its the hook arc that leads into the start of the story that is actually told in dtrh2.
the final big character we meet is otonashi ayana, and man what a weird existence in the entire story lol. every single character is someone who i can say is definitively bound in reality, but ayana is where it gets kind of confusing, since she feels like shes part of peoples heads and yet somewhat not? i think what really throws me off is her interacting with zakuro, since zakuro has absolutely no affiliation with the headspace of takuji, which means that its not like ayana is an existence that was forged by takuji. in any case i think ayana is a pretty fun character to read, every scene with ayana feels particularly tailored toward the character shes engaging with. she has a lot of silly humor when talking to yuki for example, talking about Kant being similar to Cunt and whatnot. that is something i also wanna comment on, i do quite like the humor in this vn, its definitely something that leans on the side of internet degenerate, but at the same time thats not the sort of humor you tend to see a lot, at least in eastern works at the time, but what do i know!
character introductions aside is now time for the actual meat and bones of dtrh1, which is, well, yuri sexual intercourse! i did find this to be a pretty odd way to start subahibi, i remember immediately theorizing from the fact that only after zakuro came in did these weird events start happening between yuki and her "childhood friends". more specifically i was thinking of maybe zakuro being some otherworldly entity who modified the world to create a sequence of events that would be most ideal for the two of them (which is why the true ending of dtrh1 is to go with zakuro instead of the other two). now something else to think about is how absolutely fucking INSANE the kagami and tsukasa ending sex scenes are in retrospect, since if we are to take these as actual things that might have happened in SOME universe, then us hanging out with kagami and tsukasa is really us hanging out with hasaki and her doll..in which case..the kagami ending is us..fucking the doll? LMAO and tsukasa blatantly knows about it too, granted with how hasaki is she was probably fuckin watching it or something. tsukasa ending as well like, tsukasa is far more assertive and cant hold herself back, and if you think about how this would be bound in reality that would literally be hasaki using her chance to use her older brother's body for sexual satisfaction which is WOW that is kinda nuts lmao, but yeah i mean dtrh1 is wacky overall
i guess the next big thing to talk about with subahibi is, funnily enough, the sex scenes as a whole lol. yea its a vn, they arent hot, the voice acting is pretty annoying and the cgs arent particularly that enticing, so i end up clicking through them pretty fast, though this depends on the degree to which they feel like they may have importance. its very evident that us frotting with kagami or tsukasa doesnt matter to the plot though! i think what kind of sucks is that a lot of the h scenes are clearly just sca-di typing with one hand as he is cleverly inserting his barely disguised fetishes into the vn, which to an extent does kind of hamper the games ethos, but at the same time its something i know to be apathetic toward when it comes to a vn. there are also cases where i think the experience of said h scenes does enhance the plot, though more on that later.
anyway with knowing there was definitely something weird with zakuro so far, it was pretty evident that zakuro would be the eventual choice to make to continue the story, which i did at the end. for the rest of it, honestly? truth be told i actually dont have many thoughts on the zakuro date and then the events of july 20 lol, they arent particularly relevant to the story compared to what we start experiencing with dtrh2 onward, especially since the zakuro date itself is actually a fabricated version of events that unfolded prior to july 12 (which we did not see since, at the time, she was interacting with the real yuki).
overall, i think dtrh1 is a satisfying way to start the vn, its a good way to mislead the reader in what the tone for the overall vn will be, especially for the events that unfold in the later arcs hitting you like a truck. is it silly? yea, it is pretty silly, and its a sequence of events to be rejected, but it did do its job! funniest thing is knowing that we got fucking goomba stomped by zakuro
DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE 2: dtrh2 is when we start experiencing the true story of subahibi. the first perspective we go through is that of the artificial minakami yuki created by takuji. i really like the way this story starts off, rather than being baked in mystery, but immediately having our smart perspective be able to recognize the truth behind the events as they unfold. the story presents itself as if its going to be apocalyptic fiction, though honestly, dtrh2 feels like its a very good demonstration of how rumors can propagate with easily faked evidence and hearsay. there were still elements that felt dubiously bound in reality though. for example, everything about zakuro was still baked in mystery due to the metaphorical nature of her speech implying some truth behind the greater meaning to her death.
something that is also really cool about dtrh2 is that, we start getting presented with yuki's faulty memory, and the way the story poses it to us kind of implies that there is something greater about the world surrounding yuki. i remember actually interpreting it as a sign that the world around us is changing, and that similar to dtrh1 with zakuro coming into our life, yukis world was changing around her, essentially putting her on some alternate timeline with events she hadnt experienced. of course this is not true given what we later find out with regard to this being "fake yuki" as well as the holes in memory, but i do like the fantastical elements the game initially presents to you.
i, ok wow i just got to me discovering that there was some slimy liquid on zakuros desk LOL ill get to that in the next arc jesus fucking christ
so this is the arc where we start seeing takuji for what he is, or at least how he appears on his face. that one sprite of takuji is so ugly LMAO you should know the one im talking about, i guess its kind of the point though because really he is a massive fucking loser, but man lol. it is interesting though, we start experiencing the headaches and whatnot anytime we encounter takuji, and that did make me initially think that takuji might also be some sort of higher being, though the events of this arc itself shows just how bound in reality all his events are. talking about takuji on a deeper level is probably best for the next arc though lol
so next we end up meeting hasaki for the first time and learning about the white lotus association, granted this early on its a lot more focused on just unraveling the mystery as presented, so we dont actually get a lot of the more important details and plot relevance. similar thing to say about meeting kimika, we just arent presented with a lot to say about her so i dont have a lot to comment on
now i think the night of july 17 is when dtrh2 starts getting especially crazy, with us discovering takujis fingerprints all over our room and zakuros phone in our desk drawer. of course, this early on with not enough information to theorize, it does seem as if this was quite literally "takuji's doing" as a separate entity breaking into our house. we encounter that crazy jumpscare with the ghost like entity in yukis room, and this unironically kinda got to me im ngl. the sped up garbled audio of hasaki talking and panting like, i actually had to sleep under my covers as a result lol. i do like the work that this vn does earlier on in making your perspective seem, i guess "broken"? or as bijuu mike puts it, "this is just like freaking doki doki literature club!" its a good usage of fucking around with text as well as shit in the engine to feel like everything is falling apart.
next is the events of july 18 where we find the hidden area and...kagamis dead body! MAN this is such an incredibly fucking surprising moment, you really do NOT expect this to suddenly be the direction we are heading. kagami being fully cut to pieces and dead, especially this early on when you do not understand their true identity, its a horrifying reality for what is, to us, the life of what should be an ordinary high school girl. i remember finding it particularly creepy that yuki's first decision is to lift kagamis dead body and carry her, though it is a good setup into the eventual discovery of it being a doll and that not being their house. i actually really like this in retrospect, since its a demonstration of how the fake yuki tries to maintain a consistent reality, but there are some events where it literally would just be impossible. for example, opening the door to your neighbors house and they have no fucking idea who you are or the girl on your back is, so you have to see reality for what it is. i started really thinking about unreliable narration, split timelines, etc. i started wondering if dolls were symbolic of dead bodies in the world of subahibi, what with zakuro in dtrh1 being a doll that fell on us in the "world" we split off into. its also cool how it ends with tsukasa turning into a ghostly entity, once again its hasaki trying to talk to us, and yeah it fucks us up!
as we progress further down the rabbit hole into the next day, biting the bitter apple of truth, we encounter the ending where everything falls apart. we see people jumping off of the roof, including mamiya takuji himself. the writing does a lot of falling apart more and more, and this does a really good job at making you feel tense, youve really crossed the border into a world of no return, everything is fucking up around you, and the end is coming. the arc ends with takuji jumping off, and yeah we really have no idea where this could possibly go! all i could think of at this point was "this definitely has to be a bad end. we are in a story where we are experiencing different events with the same characters, so the story must be structured like this, where we eventually will have a good ending where nothing bad happens." this gets thrown out the window of course, but it was good for setting the scene of the next arc
overall, dtrh2 is a fantastic arc, it does a great job at showing you how morbid this story is in reality, whilst also showing its teeth in being pretty psychological in how it abuses writing convention. however, both dtrh arcs end up being the ones i remember the least, primarily because the story hasnt gone all out yet in showing just how fucking bizarre it is.
ITS MY OWN INVENTION: yep.
holy fucking shit man, what a delightful catastrophe of events that this entire arc shows off. it is an endless tirade of "theres no way they did that" leading into "oh my god youre fucking kidding" "WHAT AM I READING" over and over. this is honestly where the story ACTUALLY begins. i remember initially reading this and thinking "oh my god its the answer arc", which is funny when you consider how the story is structured as a whole, to the point where its almost the opposite. dtrh2 gives you questions, then imoi gives you the full sequence of events with holes everywhere, for later arcs to then fill out. nothing to do but dive in i guess lol
so yea imoi is from takujis perspective, and it does such a good fucking job at depicting him as such a loser its unreal. he is such a good representation of like, internet NEETs who masturbate all day and complain on online forums. he pirates from p2p sites? i didnt even know japanese people knew what fucking piracy was. it was especially funny starting from our first interaction with zakuro, where we are just an absolute failure at being able to talk to women. once again, i decided to go for side endings before main route, so my first time around i went with the kimika ending, meaning that i had to deny sexualization of zakuro...not that that changed much about what we did with "zakuro" BUT thats for later on. but yeah man the progression of takujis insanity throughout this arc is unreal, its by far the weirdest narration ive read in any piece of fiction (not that my sample size is that high lol), his endless ramblings where youre like "dude what the fuck is he talking about", spiraling further and further down a path of chaos the further we go and the further he gets ensnared by his own delusions
we meet yuuki for the first time, though as a first impression he does just, seem like any other bully character, i guess ill save talking about him for later. we also see how takuji interacts with the wakatsuki twins from his perspective, and i remember being pretty surprised at how kind of annoying the twins seemed in how they acted to him. the way in which they follow him around or argue with him throughout the course of the story, i wonder how much of that is hasaki and her doll and how much of that is just, nothingness (since it does seem like there are times where yuki interacts with them when hasaki/doll were not even there). if its the former then thats kind of depressing to think of the violence and vitriol that hasaki would be facing while trying her best to see if her tomo nii san would come back, though this wasnt stuff expressly shown in which dreamed it, so maybe that isnt the case!
anyway in some random scene where we are walking down the hall, we suddenly have a flashback.
the flashback.
HOLY fuck dude, what an exhausting sequence of events to go through LOL. is this up there as one of the more controversial scenes of subahibi? probably not, but its definitely the first scene where i was like "no fucking way this vn is doing this". it drags on for so fucking long, when you think its about to be over it just keeps going, starting with being forced to steal the clothes, to being forced to jerk off, to being forced to..give head, to double sloppy toppy? WHAT? are these bullies progressive? i guess game is game bro but DAMN. it was such an exhausting and uncomfortable read, though the thing is, this doesnt make me dislike it. in fact, i do quite like the existence of this scene and the length of it. i think the discomfort that this scene makes you feel, where you really want it to be over, kind of helps get you in the headspace of takuji a lot. i mean, did takuji have a choice in making this scene stop? he didnt, we are experiencing a fraction of the pain he felt on that day, we did not feel any of the senses he felt + we get to click through it pretty fast. this combined with the later revelation that this experience is what birthed the recreation of Yuuki, with takuji's desire to destroy himself and be reborn as the new minakami yuki, a much stronger girl who would not let this happen to her. so yeah as silly as this scene seems, (and i fucking know it was gooning material for some of you), i genuinely think its a great addition. did it necessarily HAVE to be takuji getting raped by men to get the point across? i guess not really, but this is just part of subahibis identity, how its willing to go "that direction" on the lines of absurdity for its narrative.
...or its just sca-di writing with one hand as he pretends to be takuji, who knows
you ever think about how insane this scene mustve been for the bullies? imagine receiving massive sloppytoppy from a sub with yo homeboy before suddenly he turns evil and starts shoving branches in ur mouth and nose and punches them in you causing internal hemorrhaging. holy fuck
then july 12 is once again the point of no return, zakuros death, something i find really weird is the lgi scene of zakuro and co on the roof arguing amongst each other (portrayed as ririrus on takujis laptop). this is where i get a bit confused on to what extent this story is bound in reality, since takuji shouldnt even have a way of hallucinating these events, these are literally the events that happened on that rooftop. otonashi ayana...?
seeing takujis entire breakdown the next day at school is when this arc starts getting genuinely really cool, seeing his brain rejecting and twisting so much information, seeing the way the game plays around with placing text on screen, fucking with the sequence of events, as well as takujis insane rambling in his head. you really get a taste for how fucked up the narrator is, especially with him finally being able to calm down after brutally wishing for the torture and death of everyone in humanity. stuff like this happens from here on out, i really like when he talks to ririru for the first time and her introduction is fucked up over and over and over and over again. not that this is the first time the vn has done something like this, we saw a bit of it at the end of dtrh2 with the IT'S OK, MAMIYA TAKUJI JUST JUMPED OFF THE ROOF or whatever it was, but its such a cool design decision. im glad takuji decided to finally start locking in, since he finally realized that deskussy is the way
the fucking desk scene man
like, im just so impressed, like the vn really did that huh, the vn really did go in this direction huh
i dont even have like, a real justification for this scene, like the only purpose this scene screams to me is the point where takuji officially commits to being the savior and returning everyone to the sky for zakuros sake, but like..dude. dude. LMAO WHY BRO. its not even fucking zakuro, he literally internalizes it as her desk, he personifies the desk directly as opposed to pretending its zakuro herself, and dude HE JIZZES ON THE FLOWERS LIKE WHAT? and the fucking insane revelation you have where its like, back in dtrh1 it was pretty obvious that the weird slimy shit yuki touched was semen, its just that it felt like such a throwaway line that you forget about it and dont take it seriously. then when this scene happens youre like oh my fucking god no that actually did happen, he actually did go and straight up fuck her desk. and i mean, how? like genuinely what was he doing? rubbing against the top of the inside of the desk? on god we all tryin this. overall takuji is the best deskfucker in all of fiction, his only rival is that one code geass girl but idk i didnt watch it
i guess ok, there is a way i can rationalize this scene, it really does show you just how far gone takuji is as a character, the fact that he is in such a state that he genuinely believes a fucking school desk is beckoning to him, taking the shape of a petite high school girl that is presenting to him, but like holy fuck dude what a way of making this point LMAO. i dont even know if this is sca-di writing with one hand either, does he have objectophilia? wait, i just. ok i unironically had a revelation upon typing that but ill get to that later
one thing i noticed a lot throughout this arc was repeating events, often shit would happen where takuji would get caught in delusions, then when we would return, we would return to the exact point before the delusions. im only pointing this out now because i fucking love the payoff where before the zakuro desk scene takuji says "Because Takashima san's flowers are here. Takashima-san isn't. Because Takashima-san's desk and flowers are here. Takashima-san isn't." and then once the events repeat, it says "Because Takashima-san's semen-covered flowers are here. Takashima-san isn't. Because Takashima-san's semen-covered desk and semen-covered flowers are here. Takashima-san isn't." thank you sca-di, that was so worth it. do i have a reason for why so many events in imoi repeat themselves? not really anything beyond just takuji being a very bad unreliable narrator honestly
this arc i think is also when we first get a bit of a taste of zakuros bullying, and i guess kimikas bullying but not really. it doesnt show us that much of it though, we see the falling off incident, but one thing we definitively do not see is the events of july 10. ... .. . yeah
oh yeah another thing thats fascinating about this arc is how takujis sense of time is genuinely so fucked up, i dont think this is even entirely to do with him switching between personalities either since hasaki recognizes takuji standing still at some point and knows that he sometimes just does this, so i think theres periods where hes just blanked out doing literally nothing for hours. we have moments where he sends a message, then he says he will rest for like a few minutes, and then the next message is 3 whole entire fucking hours later. if you really pay attention to timestamps throughout this arc, they are so absurd, once again a very nice detail to show just how fucked his mind is at this point
we next see the fight with yuuki and i, i just didnt even have a good explanation for what happened at the time, i could not fathom a reason for why takuji was able to suddenly be so strong against yuuki out of nowhere
once we start seeing kimika for real, shes honestly a pretty fascinating character after the events of july 12. she doesnt actually believe in any of the shit takuji is saying, she knows its not real, but she believes she has a duty to fulfill for zakuros sake, and she seeks to get revenge on as many people as possible to avenge zakuro. i quite like her, i like how cunning she is, shes learned a lot from being stuck as an underdog, though more to say on that with the alt ending of LGI
imoi also has a lot of very beautiful CGs, because its the arc from the most delusional character in the story, you have a lot of very trippy imagery all throughout. random ghosts all over the school, the fucking batle of ririrus, a lot of them are honestly pretty wallpaper worthy
afterward is once takujis influence really takes storm and he has all those fuckin people showin up at the pool for him to lead them on, honestly i said earlier that this story is an interesting representation of how rumors and hearsay propagate, but im actually going to refine that and say its actually a very good demonstration of how cults form lol, especially with people being convinced of obviously false ideas (which lead to the group suicide at the end). for example he brings up the wakatsuki twins but like they dont fucking exist nobody knows who he is talking about. more elements of this is later when you have the "healing drugs" that he uses on nishimura, which i assume are just massively wicked fucking painkillers since i mean, he does end up dying lol, but it does convince people!
now around this point is when i start getting a bit curious about the roles of identities in this story, since yasuko directly tells takuji that the "fake mamiya" could not remember her name, which is evidently referring to yuki. i didnt think too hard on this at the time though, its more that i just kept this concept in mind, the idea of there being some "impostor takuji", it felt wrong that takuji was just being out of it and not remembering shit that he himself was doing, so there mustve been something deeper going on. i started thinking more along the lines of internal discrepancies within the world, especially with the "timeline splits" as i had observed in dtrh1 and 2, and assuming the story was going closer in that direction rather than a concept that was a bit more bound in reality. i am kind of upset with myself that i didnt go the full mile with trying to reason out what couldve happened, but thats kind of not the point with subahibi?
oh i just encountered a screenshot where takuji called adolf hitler his best friend, alright man
ok so the next thing in the lineup is...the entire kiyokawa sequence. this is like the most conflicted ive felt about something in subahibi ever honestly, i genuinely cannot wrap my head around how this got dragged out so far LMAO, like it just keeps going and fucking going and she doesnt stop and its actually unreal, and the thing is its not like kiyokawa is actually an important character to the wider narrative. its not even a good demonstration of the lengths people will go through as a result of their devotion to their beliefs, because once again takuji literally did NOT tell her to do most of what she did, but she did so anyway. it, kind of felt like sca-di just writing with one hand again lmao he wanted to write about a teacher pissing while riding a bike or something. the entire sequence with her and her dad was so fucking awkward to me, particularly when her mom is trying to enter the room, like its actually so painful to read like thinking of this otherwise normal family suddenly having this bombshell happen to them. like as the mom literally what the fuck are you supposed to even do? this is the worlds worst ntr ever bro. kiyokawas end fate also rly sucks like shes doomed to be a fuckin toilet for her last days bro, id just kms at that point
at roughly this point is where we start getting some splits off for the kimika ending, and i guess ill go through talking about that first since once again im reading through my chat log in order. i quite like the entire sequence of takuji and kimika talking to each other while super fucked on drugs, going through skips of time and talking about the same topics over and over, tripping out in the exact same way, its just such a chaotic read and it does a great job at weirding you out, especially with its deliberate humor such as having an hour passing at times while having one minute pass in others. at first i was trying to dissect what they were saying, but more and more i was realizing ok this is fucking ridiculous its just imoi being imoi, and most of imoi is just weeding through a lot of actual nonsense because takuji is the worlds most unreliable narrator ever and right now literally everyone is on drugs.
kimika is pretty cute during this part of the route, dare id say shes honestly the cutest girl in this vn, shes that based autistic chad chick and also shes fascinated with the right to self defense so you know shes the goat. the more you learn about her in this arc the more you realize shes kind of the goals gf honestly.
everything leads up to the ending of the kimika route, and honestly? i really really fucking love this ending. from the perspective of not having any context from the later arcs and treating it like an isolated satisfying conclusion wrapped in a bow, it really is a heartwarming way to end this sequence of events. takujis insanity pretty much stops spiraling too far out of control as a result of kimika, and realistically, he finally attained the ideal companion he wouldve wanted in life. i think with how takuji was characterized in all of imoi as this ultimate loser who jerks off all the time, its really sweet seeing him finally get a similarly autistic girlfriend to share his last moments with before they both die. every single loser thing he wanted in his "past" life up through reaching past the point of no return in the hero's journey, all to return back to the start but having achieved what his "past" self desired. especially reading lines about how all he wants to do is just hold her in the end. they genuinely were too far gone for everything to go back to normal, they would never be able to live a life together, but at least they both died happy. i had a pretty big smile when reading this ending and i honestly would be happy to reread just that ending sequence alone.
in any case we switch over to the main route, where takuji engages his delusions of zakuro. even though in the other route he still fucks zakuros desk, i guess this time it really stuck to him far more, since he goes the extra mile with having delusions that he himself has to be snapped out of, rather than him himself snapping out of them. also by this point, the truth behind zakuro as a character isnt understood yet, so we still see her as a mysterious entity, and i actually posed a theory that zakuros actions are based around the character shes interacting with. yuki is cope about how she likes girls, so zakuro enters her life and suddenly shes able to just have sex with her childhood friends. takuji is a loser who meets zakuro, and suddenly he has this girl whos engaging with his sexual desires......kidding, the game actually trolled me here and led to me thinking thats the direction it was going when it wasnt. however, with how deeply involved his delusions have been, its clear that he will pay far more attention to caring for zakuro..too much to be able to love kimika and bring himself back to relative normalcy.
now where it diverges is when we wouldve had the drug scene with kimika, where we instead have a chat with zakuro and her desk. nice! i too love talking to my ex sometimes. naturally any scene that wouldve been us bonding with kimika is replaced by us engaging with, well, not kimika. thats cool and all, we start with.. the ririru futa sex scene, yea i dunno this went so many directions i didnt expect LMAO like what? well, i do think that there is a bit of chekhovs gun at play here with the takuji rape scene from way earlier, with him now liking cock, though its not like its important for narrative reasons? LMAO, i think this might just be sca-di being sca-di again. then right after is the fucking ayana futa sex scene, i remember unironically being like dude holy fucking downgrade and i really did not like reading this scene at the time since it was absolutely contradictory to all the characterization of ayana up until this point and did not fit in at all. it fit every bad trope of an h scene to me in one, being cherry popping blood, forced milking, etc. thankfully it ended up being fake, the game just bait and switched me again which im surprised i fell for it again considering the entire point of what this arc is, but w/e. later on he straight up is like, if i had such a realistic delusion i wouldnt be able to tell the difference between reality and my delusions, and yeah thats a pretty good way to summarize how fucked of a narrator takuji is at this point, we cannot take any of what we see for what it is.
following this is the fight with yuuki where yuuki dies. there is one thing i actually dont like about this scene. takuji has been blanking out all mentions of hasaki, and there are blanks where yuuki is referring to her...however, there is ONE instance where takuji does hear yuuki say hasaki. this genuinely ruined my ability to theorize about this scene lol, i was really confused trying to figure out what the fuck could fill in these blanks if it wasnt hasaki, since to me it was very clear that yuuki was talking about spending time with hasaki. particularly interesting at the time is being "the only one with a connection to Hasaki".
we then have the kagami torture and rape, and what i said earlier about objectophilia, yeah this scene is literally plushophilia and i immediately recognized that LMAO. its so interesting how even then, takuji refers to her as "this" to refer to what is clearly a doll, though we still mentally parse her as the human Kagami. this ones yet another rape scene but i mean, you have the additional context to go "wait this isnt a real human being this is a fucking doll" and it ends up being mildly comical realizing that these people are genuinely going nuts over a fucking rabbit doll.
eventually after the sans undertale kagami eye moment leading to her getting crucified, tsukasa asks Tomo Nii san for help. Boom. i actually dont know how much i figured out by this point, but i was instantly just like "YUP" "THERE IT IS". thankfully i typed a wall of my thoughts once i finished the arc so ill wait for then to say what my theorizing was.
the kimika sex scene is cute
so yea anyway we end off with us meeting yuki and jumping off, naturally yeah this is a worse ending than the kimika ending (well, technically not, its the same ending as all the other arcs which is a good ending lol). in any case its time for me to talk about my theorizing after concluding the episode. so i was still by this point decently confused, i didnt know what i wanted to identify as anomalous vs bound in reality. i understood there was a deeper connection with yuuki but i didnt know where to go with this, whether it was the wakatsuki twins or takuji's family or even both. i recognized that the cultish nature of the family implied that yuuki mightve had some sort of direct connection to takuji, especially with him saying that he was the only one with any connection to hasaki (plus with how philosophical he was getting toward the end, almost like he mightve been learning from the same mother?). another thing that caught my eye was the fact that when yuuki gets stabbed, we ourselves also get stabbed. i realized that yuuki is actually a VERY dubious existence in this story, since the only display of physical skill takuji ever demonstrated was against him, and he disappears in the time between losing to takuji and getting killed by him. however, to an extent he did have to be real prior to july 12 due to events described from back then. from a consequentialist perspective, we need an explanation as to why takuji's bullying massively stopped. this is where i started getting concerned again about split timelines within an arc. the wakatsuki twins evidently seemed to have some greater existence and some connection to takuji, and same with yuuki. aaaand, thats it! yea i wasnt able to fully reason out some possibilities unfortunately, but once again i think thats ok.
and well, that was all of imoi! so final thoughts on imoi is that is an amazing mess of catastrophic writing, a massive circus of clowns fooling about, seeing what happens when so many people hit rock bottom at the same time. i look back fondly at my experience with imoi, its probably the most "subahibi" that subahibi ever gets, like i think the identity of subahibi and its writing is very closely tied to imoi since this is by far the most bizarre the writing of this novel ever goes. was it exhausting at times? yes, but i think that helps add to the character of the novel itself. maybe there were some alternate ways to make the same points, but it really does show that this vn isnt going to hold any punches, its going to make you go "what the actual fuck?" and you are going to have to deal with it.
LOOKING GLASS INSECTS: pain. so much fucking pain. its, its so fucking painful man.
fuck man, this arc was just. awful to read. in a good way. like, its not that it was awful to read (low rating), its that it did such a good fucking job at being awful that it makes me genuinely really fucking angry. there were so many moments when my heart was genuinely racing and i was breathing heavily because i was just so fucking mad at the events i was reading, and they just kept going and going. japan really is the fucking lebron james of bullying dude. god. thankfully i first started with the end of summer ending, which means i have a bit of time to look at happier events first before having to dive into suffering.
the most immediately interesting thing when we get into lgi is seeing takuji acting cool while smoking on the roof, the parallels to yuki are very clear and i feel like its probably the first very blatant giveaway that these are the same human, everything prior were just strong hints. seeing mamiya from zakuros perspective shows us that we have this same dude whos personality suddenly switches from interaction to interaction, and the entirety of the arc helps you piece together "oh, yeah wait this is a yuki scene!" or "oh yea, this was a takuji scene!". its, like, the answer arc to both of them combined! LMAO. earlier on at some point i did indeed say it was interesting how it seemed like zakuro was talking to a portrayal of takuji that he wishes he could be, but the actual takuji was like guhh herp derp women i like fapping! since i mean, this is actually spot on with what yuki is supposed to be, at least the newer yuki that was created afterward.
we see hasaki come up and approach takujin in this chapter, though this is as yuki (the real one at this time, given its july 3). i immediately noticed that hasaki was holding a very suspiciously kagami shaped doll, i do like how pieces slowly fall into place over time, at least until jabberwocky when the game just flat out tells you everything. however, it was for a brief enough period that i kept my attention toward takuji unfortunately.
overtime we see zakuros developing interest in takuji, and its pretty surprising seeing just how...normal, she is? up until this point we have seen her as a rather mysterious character, but right now it appears shes just a sweet high school girl. maybe something changes on later days? what endlessly worried me was knowing that we would probably get to see what happened on july 10. what the fuck could have happened on july 10 that was so bad that megu and satoko recognized they probably broke her?
eventually we get the date scene between takuji (yuki) and zakuro, events that happened prior to dtrh2 and imoi, reflecting the exact same date we saw with yuki in dtrh1. it actually took me a while of reading before i said these exact messages: "dude hes just like yuki" "wait" "hes" "just" "yuki" "like its not even just them doing the same shit" "he smokes" "he can play the piano" "hes always reading on the rooftop" eventually as we enter the gay bar and meet Master for the first time, he says "Oh, Yu-... No, wait, Mamiya-chan." i think if even by this point you havent figured it out and you genuinely needed until jabberwocky then ur kinda the media literacy final boss. well ok, i say this but honestly it did take me a bit, my initial impression was "we are seeing things, this is literally just yuki, this isnt takuji". i did some more thinking and realized the hasaki scene didnt make sense as a result, though i also noticed the only time we got to see hasaki and takuji together was when it was "dubiously" takuji. then i also recalled yuuki saying he was the only one with any connection to hasaki. after this brief period of reflection really the only conclusion i could come to was they were all directly connected in actions, but i couldnt conclude if it was multiple personalities or something that is less bound in reality.
now once again thankfully, i went for end of summer route first, so i get to delay talking about the actual meat and bones of this arc for a long while! the split happens when megu and satoko are trying to get kimika to masturbate on camera, and zakuro is able to successfully drag them out of there. man im just. like even writing this right now, i just really wish this was how things actually happened man, the main route is so upsetting LOL. in any case the majority of what happens afterwards is kimika being an absolute fucking girlboss, we get to see how skillful she is with regard to being cunning and well crafted, both when it comes to manipulating and navigating around human action but also with weaponry. you know if she were american she'd be fighting hard for her second amendment rights lmao, though honestly? she doesnt even need those, like she'd be so good at using just fucking biological warfare and chemistry to her advantage, i really do like the way shes characterized here a lot, honestly a lot more than in the kimika ending of imoi.
now eventually we and kimika end up meeting takuji for the first time together. whats very odd is that takuji here acts very tough, and recognizes zakuro as the girl whos clothes he was forced to steal. i recognized this is, really weird. this is OUR takuji, but we also already have "our" takuji. evidently its someone whos experienced the same events but isnt "takuji". yea more and more the story is leading you down a fishing line of "dude, they are split personalities"...and, yeah this is the moment where i officially say it actually lol, the interaction with takuji (yuuki) is where i finally deduced that its all just split personalities inhabiting the same human being. its such an interesting way to slowly drip feed you the solution over time before just outright telling you in jabberwocky word for word. another thing takuji (yuuki) says is that eventually you wont be able to meet any other takuji other than that one, and i immediately understood this to be "there is going to be some fight where the personalities are going to have to duke it out, and one of them is going to emerge victorious". i, REALLY should have thought about this a little more and tied it back to the fight scene in imoi, but oh well, at least i was honestly at the right answer at this point lol. later on a rooftop scene hasaki appears again and calls him tomo nii san, like its a really elegant way to slowly show us the truth behind the situation we are in.
the final battle against the bullies where we get protected by takuji (yuuki) is honestly just a good demonstration of how takuji is actually perceived by everyone else who knows him (since zakuro is the clueless outside observer), and it ends up making you feel really happy seeing these pieces of shit get what they deserve, though unfortunately that happiness fades away when you get to the main route lmao.
anyway after some more interactions with takuji (yuuki) that lead to more rumination over the role the three of them have in the story, we end up at The end of summer. also known as...july 19! ayana tells us something very peculiar, which is that the mamiya from the underground was supposed to be the victor, but because of our choice, his soul has changed directions. holy shit, is this the most W ending of all time? ayana brings up yet again the repeating worlds model, except with regard to him being able to break free and walk a different path. this is the first time we encounter mention of takuji the creator, the destroyer, and the harmonizer (which it is pretty easy to figure out who is who by now). we get to experience the Wonderful Everyday and...i remembered i was on a side arc and not the main route LMAO it made me so fucking upset since i realized all the good shit that was happening wasnt actually the main sequence of events
we end with the kimika sex scene where they love each other yadda yadda and thats that! honestly, as happy as this route makes me for existing, i honestly found it to be the thing that i had cared about the least up until this point. its probably because its the most "legit" experience, and nothing happens that makes you feel any emotional extremes. in essence its kind of an ending where neither zakuro nor kimika get to experience the shit that defines them (granted zakuro dies LITERALLY right after as a result). its great seeing the two lovers being able to escape their unfortunate fate, it just ends up being i guess not too satisfying of a payoff? its just kind of what youd expect, they make it out and they are able to be lovers. well, its not like im complaining, since its time to switch to the..main route.
july 8 is the day our bullying truly starts getting bad, with megu and satoko making us do sexual activities after nonconsensual drug use. just the events of this day were enough to make me mad as hell, i genuinely wanted every single one of them to die. this is the most wicked case of bullying writing ive seen thus far, its kind of insane how it only managed to get worse from there. this was the day where zakuro was made to masturbate in public, followed by singing naked at a karaoke bar and they tried to get the employee to fuck her. she is so obviously distraught over this concept and they let her off the hook, but you know that something bad has to happen, i mean its not even july 10th yet. this arc just keeps going and going, the events never stop, youre just stuck going through the same torture that zakuro is forced to go through. you experience the same delirious state that zakuro is going through, shes trying to figure out whats happening to her but cant because the drugs are too powerful, etc. it really does suck seeing such a sweet innocent girl being forced to go through something like this due to shitty individuals who realistically werent gonna live much longer anyway...er yeah quite literally lol, shiroyama did straight up die from falling off the roof while tripping.
the next day we go to school and theres all the red paint in the old pool in which case senegawa comes to us and tries to save face by punishing us for it, and man like the anger i felt made me feel like i was takuji, i felt like i was 14 years old again, i genuinely really wanted to see her get manipulated into her death like in imoi. and yeah the bullying just doesnt stop. its insane, do we have this in the west? i never got bullied in school, and when we did bullying it was genuinely only on a verbal level, i never really saw physical violence happen, and i didnt really see much tangible damage either. to be fair its also possible i just didnt see any of it because i was an honors and ap student so i just didnt hang around shitty people, i was in an entirely different culture in my school, but i dunno its not like i heard of any of it either. not even in elementary school did i see anything crazy happen to other kids. youd also think that someone like me would be the type to get bullied so the fact that it didnt happen i feel like kind of reflects that maybe my generation is different?
the bullying just keeps going man, i had to read in such short sessions during this arc with how much it was pissing me off, them cutting zakuros clothes and forcing her to dance, and the fact that it just wouldnt stop...and then nighttime comes, where we are taken into a car...in which case i have the horrific realization that we are already here, july NINE is the date that it happened, the messages were july 10, the day after.
and its just, awful. what a horrific rape scene man, what was it like probably around 20 perpetrators? like she really doesnt deserve it man, for the simplest resistance and this is what she got in retaliation, its just so frustrating thinking of this happening to someone who is innocent enough to not even understand the concept of selling ones body. its probably the most fucked up rape scene ive seen in fiction, not that the sample size is that high i guess but i dunno like id be pressed to find even professional studio hentai that have rape scenes as fucked as this one.
it gets even worse seeing zakuros deteriorating mental state, her instability and depression following these events, knowing she lost her virginity due to violent gang rape instead of with the kind of person she would have loved, all her self pity at how weak she is and how she is a worm, god man yea nevermind take me to the alt route lol fuck this dude. yea i had to stop reading after this and save it for another day, it was just too awful to experience
eventually when shiroyama does end up dying, it did make me feel actually happy, like yea its fucking deserved at this point dude, take your instant gratification behavior to the grave and dont force it upon innocent people who dont deserve the harm to their physical body that you inflict upon them. not that hes a sole perpetrator, i mean realistically the masterminds are megu and satoko who convincingly use their body to sway the men, its just, fuck dude, they all truly deserved dying unhappy lol
oh yeah shiroyama died because he and numada always do chin ups on the roof, are they fucking stupid?
anyway zakuro ends up finally meeting up with usami and ayumi, the two she ends up performing the suicide with. these two honestly serve a really weird place in the story since i wonder what specifically led to them finding zakuro. im not going to take it as the literal story they tell of their past and their reincarnation of course lol, im going to assume that one of them did some convincing of the other with some delusions, its just interesting how they were specifically able to come to zakuro at some point.
we eventually find out about ayumi's backstory and...its the scene! ever since i started reading subahibi i was told that there was a bestiality scene in it, and i genuinely could not imagine what the fuck the context could possibly be, and as i kept reading more and more i genuinely could not figure out how this could fit in. it makes sense, its because its with absolutely none of the existing cast as we knew until now. as far as the scene itself?
its, 5 lines guys. genuinely i saw so many people being warned about this scene or talking about how awful it is, how its the most uncomfortable thing in the vn and the steam version gets rid of it etc. its, guys its 5 lines. are you telling me you read two full fucking days worth of zakuro having the most obscenely horrific bullying torture ever with permanent ramifications including honestly even a potential unplanned pregnancy? i guess this is a realm where i do have relative apathy, its pretty rare for something to genuinely gross me out just in concept alone, and i mean i guess i can understand why people wouldnt wanna see that cg, but like, how is THAT where people draw the line? its like 5000x more tame than the events you are forced to slog through up until now, in fact im genuinely surprised sca-di didnt go the full mile with it.
but yea its clear that zakuros mental state is far over the line, shes finally found a new purpose in life because shes been able to be convinced of this, and honestly this is another instance where this story does a good job representing how cults form, except this time i guess its not really a cult, though the principle still applies. in this instance you have someone whos lost everything and has no allies being convinced that there is one way they can have a purpose, a family in life, just if they believe x and y. something subtle thats extremely heartbreaking is zakuro on her bed saying that once she recovers her power, theyll all be kind to me. "My mother, and my classmates, and... Mamiya-kun too." her mother? like, its such a subtle thing to slip in, but yeah maybe she just doesnt have a good relationship with her parents, or even parent (singular), i mean shes been coming home with tangible effects of bullying and yet we have never seen any scenes of her mother consoling her in any way, so yeah i guess its possible. man dude, this sucks.
we arrive at july 12 which is where we overlap with the start of dtrh2, and man its so depressing having the full context behind the first scene of dtrh2. i guess ill wait a bit before speaking my thoughts on that though. we end up seeing who is who in the former ririru computer scene, before zakuro and co jump off. its so fucked seeing how scared they all are as they are being pushed by zakuro toward this future, i mean she genuinely has nowhere else to go and her mental state has completely deteriorated, but we do not know the full details of the backstories behind the other two. their resolves werent strong enough, and yet they were forced to cross over the edge anyway.
now ultimately with the end of lgi, you realize that...zakuro was just a normal human girl. there was nothing mysterious about her, all of these metaphors she would use and all of these very odd terms, they were just, ramblings that she was absolutely convinced of after having her mind broken. the zakuro we saw on july 12 wasnt some sweet girl with mystery behind her, some higher being. she was a formerly sweet girl who experienced the total loss of innocence, the destruction of her own psyche, passing the point of no return into her own suicide. her entire life was miserable in the moments leading up to her death, you honestly would not have expected it was this bad from the brief details you heard in the previous arcs. there was nothing about her predicting the end of the world and trying to signal to all of us how to save us...it was just...all unfortunate in the end. we end with a white flash, i guess signifying the hitting of concrete. and, thats that!
overall, lgi is, a really good fucking arc. its one of the most painful things ive ever experienced in fiction, and its not painful because of bad writing. its so fucking painful BECAUSE of how good it is at doing its job. im a strong believer in intended negative emotions in art, and i think youre stupid if you let clearly intended anger make you dock points from something because "i wasnt happy, and more happy = more points!" no, this was so well crafted, it truly did its job well in making you feel the absolute misery that zakuro went through. what i said earlier with the takuji rape scene about being put in his headspace and how the length of it is meant to make you feel similar amounts of misery. i feel this same way with zakuro, its necessary to experience just how horrific these events are, how drawn out they are, how they absolutely wont fucking stop, even the most minor things like being in class and just having your skirt snipped, or having your sewing shit stolen, etc. you truly cannot appreciate zakuros pain without having to experience it yourself. id like to use haruhi as a point of comparison here, but i dont want to spoil haruhi to those who still havent watched it. if youve watched haruhi you know exactly what the fuck i was about to talk about, yes i am one of "those", and yes the movie is fucking amazing. in any case, that was lgi, thank fuck its over since we get to move on to Chicken Jockey
JABBERWOCKY: this is the start of the second half of the story, or rather when we actually see the deeper elements of subahibi, the truth behind the events as they are told. you find out that this time we are going to see the events through yuuki, which should be immediately exciting since he said hes the only one who had any connection with hasaki, which means that now we are going to explore the connections takuji has with his family! now even though i was confident that these three all were the same human, i was still conflicted a bit at the fact that "yuki" didnt know hasaki and evidently not a lot about takuji, so there had to be some detachment going on (which is kind of true, "yuki" is not the real yuki). anyway the story eventually drops the official line "And of course, since I share the same body with Mamiya Takuji, she's my little sister too." i was still concerned though, since yuki still felt detached and hard to fit in, but once again, fake yuki.
early on and the relationship between yuuki and hasaki is already well characterized as "yeah these two are going to fuck at the end of the arc" LMAO, the cold brother who always tries to push her away and the obsessive younger sister who always tries to be around him. not much to say about this, i mean im reading a japanese work, i dont really care, its very par for the course.
as we begin interacting with yuki as yuuki, more things start to click in. one thing that i actually had gotten wrong was i figured that yuuki was actually takuji's ideal end goal, not yuki, given that yuuki was very strong and could beat the fuck out of all the bullies, but granted yuki is quite the girlboss and ends up having the same effect.
anyway yuki points out that hasaki's doll is named kagami to takuji, and surprisingly this is not actually a direct connection i had made, i guess i just didnt have my brain on all the way up until then, and i had to start rethinking dtrh2 and imoi all over again, since i connected "dolls" to dead bodies and more to zakuro, but this was prior to lgi and i guess i just didnt continue thinking once lgi was over. its also funny seeing the explanation behind why they are named kagami and tsukasa, like its literally just the fact that takuji is a fan of lucky star and...thats that! its silly, like they seem so fucking out of place when you get into reading subahibi, and it turns out the reason for them being like that isnt entirely random (though its still a bit mundane LMAO). but yeah the scene with yuuki talking to yuki in effect just ends up being "hey reader, here is literally EVERY single thing about the story told straight to you." i think in essence its kind of clunky, its the japanese problem of being really bad at "show, dont tell", to me it doesnt make sense for these two to have such a blatantly explanatory conversation about the subject, but i mean i guess i dont care about it too hard.
whats fun is now we get to witness the same events again, but we get to see it from the perspective of the switching personalities themselves. for example zakuro comes up on the rooftop, so we literally switch places with yuki since yuuki is bad at interacting with women. dare i say, this is quite like the answer arc, to subahibi! another cool way this manifests is by us waking up in different places at different times, showing how broken both yuki and yuuki's memories are, combined with takuji's actions that have effects on where they are at any given moment. this would also be why takuji randomly wakes up in the wrong room too, usually that would be as a consequence of yuki's actions. trying to piece together the events of every single day on a timeline is pretty satisfying, and i would always keep track of what happened on every single day so i could refer back to the events and see what couldve happened between the different personalities. the interactions with hasaki and talking about the wakatsuki twins and their real identity is also when i started having the realizations about dtrh1 (LMAO) and then dtrh2 ( sad face )
we re experience the birth of yuuki, and yeah like really imagine man, imagine youre some really fucked up bullies and you rape this lil jit who suddenly turns really powerful and he fucks your shit up, its so funny lol, but it also is in a way sad, thinking of this being what finally broke takuji (at least based on the story we have been told up until this point)
anyway yeah a lot of early jabberwocky is really just us being able to fill in the gaps in the plot up until now, as well as knowing the truth behind certain falsehoods. for example, the description of yukis history with the wakatsuki twins as a strong boyish type who protected them, in reality being the strong boyish yuuki protecting his sister. we do also find out about the "incident" that mentally scared and hospitalized hasaki, but we dont know what it is, we dont have the "right" to know what it is yet.
over time of more uncovering truth behind interactions and yuki as a character, we find out about kimura for the first time. truth be told? i honestly dont dislike this guy as a character, i think its nice seeing that over time he switches from "i am into this because i need a new scoop" to "i am interested in this because...wow this is odd, whats happening here?" to what feels like imo "i am into this because i care about these people and i wanna see the best for them." however, i do think that he is a very bad way to serve as a vessel for the explanation of the story, his role in the story i think kind of serves as a net negative, and the alternatives for the role he fills i think were much better options. so he the character is fine, but his existence is a problem. i also realized i never talked about master either, but realistically we dont have a lot to say about master at this point, his entire gag right now is just that hes gay and likes crossdressing LMAO, i do like his backstory though especially with yuki being his daughter and him seeking to protect the child that yuki sought to protect.
anyway during the bath scene, we get to a very odd choice to split the route. when hasaki asks if he loves him but "thats just as a sister, right?", youre presented with: "Of course it is" (Of course i only love you as a sister) -> Takes you to the Hasaki route where you fuck Hasaki. vs. "That's not all" (I love you as a sister, but there is more to it) -> Takes you to the Yuki route where you fuck Yuki. i find this to be a very odd choice honestly, its backwards from what you would expect imo. i feel like the other arcs have made it kind of apparent that when you try to embrace a certain character, youre going down "their" route. if you embrace your delusions with zakuro, you end up loving zakuro and having that dictate the rest of your decisions henceforth. if you dont embrace your delusions with zakuro, you end up growing attached to kimika instead. same with lgi, where if you choose to take matters into your own hands to save kimika, you get to an ending where you both live happily together. i find it quite odd that they are switched here, however.
now what did i pick? well i was told that this is THE BIG choice of the game, and i genuinely didnt know how to pick, so i was advised to pick "Of course it is" for now, for the reason that "the bottom choice first made me not like a scene until some later context" (which i agree with and will talk about later).
anyway after some unfortunate sequences of us missing out on lots of days and time is running out, with yuki eventually being replaced by "fake" yuki, we have the CD scene where yuki is able to create an incontinuity that leads to a dip in memory for her to come in and meet with yuuki again. we are at a dangerous moment for them, since now july 12 has passed, the turning point where zakuro has died and takujis mind is getting more and more broken, with him initially rejecting her death. this moment with yuki combined with more interactions with hasaki (who is so relieved to finally be able to talk to us again since we have disappeared for a while) made me realize that, at some point during subahibi, i was definitely going to shed tears.
during july 13 is when we start getting through the distortions of takuji on the day following zakuros death, however this is when we see a very interesting scene. i took screenshots of it but i honestly wasnt able to tell what it was at the time. it looked like someone was holding a knife up to hasaki's throat, but i honestly wasnt able to tell who the perpetrator was through the distortions. this was followed by a very redacted conversation of yuuki and takuji yelling back and forth at each other, with a dead yuki and hasaki needing to be killed, with yuuki protecting her. what made this really hard to unravel was the intentional misdirection at the fact that yuuki and takuji's voices are swapped from what we have been experiencing the entire time (since i mean, thats what their voices actually wouldve been, our current takuji was the former yuuki lol). all i could gather was that yuki, yuuki, and takuji were all most likely three separate human beings who had existed in the past, and that this was a memory of the incident that had scarred hasaki. i did not know the extent they were related, whether by blood or by white lotus association. we hear yuuki's voice talking about being the savior, yeah really well done story for the misdirection here since i was really lost at how to interpret this. by this point though i was kind of done thinking, this is a story that will tell me everything anyway, so ill just ride the waves.
after training with yuki we end up in july 17, where we return to the house to meet kimura who takes us to the gay bar to meet with hasaki. we end up fighting master while saying that we will not disappear, we WILL beat takuji, and we WILL protect hasaki. by this point i genuinely did not know what to expect from the routes. i did not know if we were going to be on the main sequence of events, or if maybe we were gonna detach? i didnt know that neither route changed what actually happens, i figured that we would actually have a definitive good end and a definitive bad end. everything up until now has been presented to us as if it were a bad end where yuuki loses, and i was really worried about what could happen.
we lead into the hasaki sex scene, i dont mind its existence honestly. do i think its necessary for the narrative? eh, honestly this one i cant really justify. i think you couldve still gotten the point across that they loved each other in a taboo manner without this, i think this is just eroge being eroge. im fine with it though i mean its whatever lol its pretty detached from the rest of the arc and has no external ramifications i mean its not like fucking hasaki gets pregnant or something. all i can say is the CGs sucked
in july 18 i spent so much time going back and forth on trying to figure out if it was different or not, i was literally the "ITS OVER" "WE ARE SO BACK" graph on every new line since i was constantly flipping between "HOLY SHIT ITS DIFFERENT YES ITS HAPPENING THIS IS IT" to "OH WAIT NO IM TWEAKING THIS IS THE EXACT SAME FUCK DUDE". now during this scene is when it gets revelead that the name in the blanks from back in imoi was indeed Hasaki, and honestly i dont like this since i mean, at the end takuji does end up hearing Hasaki as Hasaki instead of a blank, and that led me astray for so long up until this point since i had no idea what else couldve reasonably fit in the gap other than Hasaki so i just gave up on thinking of it lol.
anyway the worry and fear kept growing, since i realized that the conclusion of whats going to happen is that the body of takuji is goig to get stabbed no matter what, whether it be takuji to yuuki or yuuki to takuji. i started especially fearing the idea that the events beyond july 18 might not have even happened (which isnt the case) and that we actually just died right then and there. anyway yea hasaki is right next to our body crying to us, and she reminisces to us about the past because she wishes she could just keep takling to us and... i. WHAT?
i just read my own messages saying "it just flashed an image briefly" "and i saw silhouettes and" "nevermind" "i was gonna cook up the insane idea that like yuuki was actually what came first and became takuji who then created yuuki on the rape day lmao". WAS I THE GOAT? how the fuck did i come up with that on accident LMAO i dont even think i ran with it, wow i cant believe that lol thats insane
anyway we end right there on july 18 with hasaki clutching us by our side. by this point i just assumed the reality was that we, the body, actually did die right there, and the events afterward arent real. not true but, that just, made me really sad back then lol. i didnt end up shedding tears, but it did hurt thinking of the fact that this is how it would end for hasaki. the idea that no matter what, its a bad end for her. whether takuji wins or whether yuuki wins, the consequence is that her beloved older brother is going to die because the body will be dead. i reckon if i were to reread it, it would make me shed a lot of tears.
one last thing to fit in before final thoughts is honestly just talking about the other choice, might as well, it has ramifications in jabberwocky 2 but the effects in this arc are minimal enough that i can just bring it up real quick. picking "That's not all" results in us fucking yuki during the cd scene. honestly, this, is a pretty jarring scene to me conceptually lol. what my friend said about not liking this scene until further context makes a lot of sense. i think only after jabberwocky 2 do you really get the full context behind why yuki and yuuki would feel this way toward each other. prior to that it just seems like sexual tension and humor, but the sex scene just feels so out of nowhere in comparison. anyway yea the yuki sex scene replaces the hasaki sex scene which i guess is W onee-san vibes but yeah it is kinda weird to me lol
anyway final thoughts on jabberwocky? i mean honestly its hard for me to talk about this arc in isolation, i feel like i see the entire second half of subahibi as one continuous sequence due to the relation the characters have to each other. its definitely a cool arc, especially for being able to understand the deep reality behind the events that pertain to the roughly 2.5 week timespan of summer in the story. i dont think i feel that crazy about it compared to all the other arcs though, the emotions i felt were not quite as strong, and i think the payoff is delayed for later on beyond this arc. dtrh2 gives a bad end to yuki, imoi a good end to takuji, lgi a horrific end to zakuro, but jabberwocky to me gives like, a bad end that you know is going to be explicitly built on. we know exactly where we are going from here, we arent done yet. my thoughts exiting jabberwocky were "i really want to see what post july 19 is like for hasaki man" since i mean, i still had believed that this was it for us. i was hoping that the next arc was going to show it really badly.
WHICH DREAMED IT: im going to just agree with everyone else who says that which dreamed it is definitely the weakest arc. i think it is a bit necessary for narrative reasons by giving us the final piece of the puzzle by letting us see from hasaki's perspective, but i think its also pretty unimportant in the grand scheme of things. we genuinely learn nothing new in this arc since jabberwocky taught us everything already, and any new information is something we already would have gained from jabberwocky 2 in a far more elegant way. its only importance really is filling in the absolute last of the last holes that we had remaining in what the sequence of events were.
in any case very early on in wdi is when hasaki wonders if tomo nii san will ever come back to her. this reconciles the point that takuji apparently used to be all great and strong, and that its not that yuuki is a manifestation of what takuji used to be, but rather takuji literally used to be yuuki himself. now we still dont know enough to know that this is from yuuki gaining the personality of takuji, but its along the lines. and, honestly? i feel like this wouldve been better if this as a point was introduced to us in jabberwocky 2, specifically after takuji's death. if that is when the explanation happened i think it wouldve been a lot more elegant and especially climactic.
any wdi starts pretty late, i mean its like the shortest chapter i think lol. i gotta say hasaki in this? shes, so fucking uncultured dude, seeing her be so stupid when it comes to computers and the internet is like holyyyy fuck dude PLEASE! i guess she did have 7 years of ptsd to live through but like come on, you could at least know what a fucking forum is, actually girlfailure behavior
yknow its actually actively hard for me to come up with thoughts i had during wdi, as i said a lot of it is pretty unnecessary. i think the first interesting scene is seeing hasaki's perspective of the interaction with fake yuki at the apartment. we actually get to see an explanation behind the "Takuji is my father" line. its not just absurd sca-di humor like it seems at first, it actually had the intent of gauging how much knowledge this fake yuki had. one thing that is really funny though is when hasaki asks if this yuki, likes, her childhood friend twins. is this hasaki cunningly planning the moment where she will sexually harass her brother by larping as the twins until they get to frot? was dtrh1 our hint that hasaki would do such a thing if she had the choice?
..LMAO
anyway, the next scene i find interesting is seeing the other side of the ghost jumpscare during the fingerprints scene of dtrh2. its nice having this click and realizing yea this is just how yuki would perceive hasaki if the wakatsuki twins have no reason to be there. this game tends to show you horrific shit when it comes to information that takuji is trying to reject. hearing the ungarbled versions of hasaki talking to yuki...well, truth be told, it doesnt make the original garbled audio any less creepy LMAO, but it is nice knowing where it actually comes from. this scene is also a nice reminder of yuki freaking out that takujis fingerprints are all over her room, and its like, yea, because those are the fingerprints that came from quite literally her own body.
oh man, in the same room, we get the OFFICIAL explanation behind the past for yuuki and takuji. and, once again, yeah i do strongly believe this wouldve been more elegant if done in jabberwocky 2. i feel like its pretty inappropriate to have kimura be the one explaining this to us through him doing research on us. i think its a moment he doesnt really earn, and this is far too important of lore behind these characters for such a mundanely delivered scene. i did at least get a tiny wetness in my eye from finding out about this and being told about the events, of yuuki protecting hasaki by killing takuji and being so fucked that he takes his personality, but like. i just, it wouldve been so much more powerful if instead of TELLING us this, they SHOWED us this in jabberwocky 2. once again, japanese people being bad at the concept of show dont tell.
jumping ahead to yuuki getting "killed", it only really settled in that in reality, everything was with takujis face and voice. the game was showing us obfuscations through yuukis face and voice, but really it was takuji's this entire time, i just never thought about it that hard.
hasaki asks kimura to call an ambulance. is this a split? is this going to be good? well, i got excited and then immediately realized that no, all this means is that we are going to relive july 18 and july 19 from hasaki's perspective now and its still going to be a bad ending. i felt fucking horrified since i immediately remembered the implications, but...at least. its kagami. its the doll. NOT hasaki.
its really funny seeing how the followers react to takujis orders on raping the doll. its also funny seeing how into it some of them become at the plushophilia. the CGs are just...dude. LMAO. like yeah i guess that is what would happen. they, fucked the doll? how? did they just rub themselves on it? also the people who fuck the doll are SO mentally out of it, the dialogue shows them talking super fucking weirdly and stuttery, and some of them seem to be roleplaying what the doll would be saying.
next thing thats cool i guess is seeing the other side of the dtrh2 scene of yuki discovering the body of kagami, though i mean its kind of just information that could have been inferred, it wasnt wholly necessary but i guess it is nice seeing it from hasaki's perspective, especially how depressing it is seeing yuki warp the memories of carrying hasaki with carrying kagami. we end with yet again hasaki being perceived as a ghost once reality became far too difficult to keep consistent.
the end of wdi is...really depressing. this is i think the only part of this arc that explicitly sticks out to me, its the only thing thats worth it, is the way it ends. without the context of jabberwocky 2, it is such a tragic fucking way to end. having hasaki decide, i cant do this, if this is going to be how it ends, then take me too. reaching out to clutch onto takuji as they fall together, so she can die with him and rest in peace...even more wicked is the background slowly turning more and more red, which to me felt like it was representative of our blood pooling out on the concrete. by this point i was still convinced that these were just, bad endings. we had ONE arc left, something HAD to have changed, right? this was just the same events all over again, all of these have just been bad tragic endings, and this is the final bow to wrap it all up, seeing hasaki's perspective as she takes the plunge too.
final thoughts on wdi? yeah, its pretty weak lol. i dont think it NEEDED to exist, it just kind of felt like it existed to fill in the conceptual gap of having hasaki's perspective. the way it handles its explanations is clunky, and wouldve been much better if it was left to being done in jabberwocky 2. however, the ending sequence is genuinely really good, and honestly? i think of the main line endings, it might even be my favorite up until this point. the emotions you feel toward hasaki and her relationship with her brother, to seeing her finally decide to give up and set herself free at the end, really is depressing. i think if i reread the ending and detached myself from the context of jabberwocky 2's ending, i would actually start shedding a lot of ears thinking of if thats how it really ended. in any case, we have one arc left! Chicken Jockey 2, The Sequel.
JABBERWOCKY 2: the final arc of subahibi. as i said, i think the second half of subahibi more as one continuous big block, and its hard to say how much i explicitly like this arc. i want to say jabberwocky 2 is my favorite arc, but it only works when you connect it directly to j1 and wdi. it doesnt stand alone as its own well written arc, its more that it ends up being, i guess to me, "subahibi", itself. this is the arc that settles everything, it gives us the full context as to the situation we are in by showing what life was like in the past, and the incident that happened 7 years ago that led to everything now. it then also serves as our ending where we get to finally see what happens on july 19, post ending sequence of every single other arc.
as youve noticed ive kind of had less to say about the second half of subahibi compared to the first half, and thats honestly because its just, far less absurd on a scene by scene basis. its easier to talk about the arcs as a whole, and i think your thoughts on these arcs are more or less just painting your thoughts on the story of subahibi itself.
j2 is broken up into two halves to me, you have the first half of 7 years ago and the second half of the present. my thoughts on the first half is, well, its very warm. i do enjoy reading the slice of life between the three of them, its a very nice calm before the storm and it finalizes the characterization of yuuki and yuki, especially since well, this is our first time seeing their actual selves! it does do a good job at helping you internally grow the connections between these characters, more and more you just wanna root for hasaki and yuuki. it sucks though knowing what is going to happen, knowing that these happy days are going to end, and that yuki is going to die, nothing to do but wait i guess!
we eventually end up at the point where we see kotomi and...the real takuji. im not gona lie like it kind of immediately caught me off guard when i saw him as yuuki with yuuki's voice, i mean like obviously thats what it was in reality, but like i was so taken aback lol. i also find it interesting how takujis personality is like, very much so not that submissive here, compared to what yuuki eventually takes over as.
now young takuji is..brutally annoying. i dont think he pisses me off quite as much as megu and satoko, but the way he talks as if he is always correct definitely pissed me off. he would use terms like "logical conclusion" without knowing what that even means, like you cant just say a sequence of thoughts and go "isnt that logical"? damn dude i just realized im beefing with a fucking elementary schooler, alright
anyway the tension grows more and more as hasaki is lost and we and yuki try to look for her, theres a lot of subtle imagery with regard to entering a road shrouded in darkness, the road crosses the border to the underworld, etc. we eventually have our alone scene with yuki where its definitely starting to breach into real oneeshota territory. later on when we go back to the present yuki says that we are the same age that she was back then..which implies that at worst it was 8 and 15 and at best it was 11 and 18? LMAO, that is pretty nuts i gotta say, like the story really didnt make it seem like it was this drastic of an age gap but when you do the math that is a bit ludicrous, yuki talm bout some "youre getting so manly" to yuuki like bro his balls havent even dropped yet what do you mean 😭
and then catastrophe starts to strike. takuji with a knife against hasaki's neck. man it just, it really does piss you off, like the story has given you a couple hours of time to really enjoy young hasaki as an innocent character, shes really shy and sweet, she flinches at even the slightest sound, and now this fuckin twat is trying to kill her because of muh savior. and then, yknow, it happens. she gets thrown over the cliff, and yuki jumps after her to protect her with her own death. you then have the scuffle between yuuki and takuji, where takuji gets stabbed and dies.
truth be told i cant make myself feel strong enough emotions over the scenery of yuki's death, and i think its because of the fact that we already had it described to us prior. i really do wish that we were just shown it rather than having it be implied. i think if we were told absolutely none of the events that pertain to yuki's death and takuji's death, this would be an incredibly powerful scene that would be like, an instant tearjerker. alas, it ends up being about what youd expect, i was already too apathetic to really care that much and i was instead just looking to the future, worried about returning to the present into unknown territory.
now one other thing that i kind of dont like is that it really goes in the imagery and idea of takuji "cursing" yuuki, he will live on just through yuuki himself, i feel like the implication here is just that takuji both so convinced of his beliefs and also scary enough to convince yuuki of this, but id rather go for the belief that this is just yuuki's panic after realizing what hes done, seeing takuji's face and parsing the evil in it, and immediately convincing himself of this sequence of events.
flash forward back to the present, and we are now in the ending sequence of j2. earlier in j1, i chose "Of course it is", which put us on the Wonderful Everyday route. im gonna juxtapose both endings before providing my actual thoughts on the ending of subahibi and what ending i like better.
in the Wonderful Everyday route, this is our final meeting with yuki. after this, yuki is going to rightfully fade away since i mean, in essence she does kind of have the least right to exist as a personality. the last conversation between yuki and yuuki genuinely made me shed a tear, hearing the brokenness in yuki's VA as she bids her final farewell to yuuki, calling her our hero, her hero. this to me is the point where yuki REALLY dies. what i said earlier about not feeling strong emotions over the real yuki's death, id say i essentially treat this as yuki finally dying, no longer being carried on through yuuki anymore. its time for us to finally move on from yuki, accept the fact that shes dead, and we have a real little sister to attend to.
we instantly continue with, hasaki holding our leg. WHAT a fucking continuation dude. the fact that in reality, none of the endings of the other arcs have actually been ENDINGS, theyve just been incomplete. i spent all my time wondering how subahibi could end, and if the point was that we were going to finally split off, we were finally going to be strong enough to overcome takuji and achieve the fate we desired, but its also a story pretty well bound in reality so that couldnt be the case. but instead, we get to see what happens right after. yuuki comes to and makes his decision, he has to do what he must to save them both. i was so tense, i knew that this was something that was very much so possible. people have survived falling from the golden gate bridge, or in fact there was a woman who survived falling from a plane and suffered minor bone fractures. i was just praying, hoping, for a good ending for these two. i was really hoping that this would not just be hasaki living on with yuuki dying, protecting her just like yuki did on the mountain.
we fall and...survive. i was so fucking happy man, i was so glad. this was such a good way for it to end, by being simply just, the final part that we hadnt seen yet. the parallels to yuki saving hasaki with her body to yuuki saving hasaki with his body, and thinking of this from the lens of the sheer willpower for yuuki to come back to us, he and yuki really did everything they could to ensure they could have a good future
when it cut to Wonderful Everyday and i found out that a year had passed, i was just smiling so fucking hard man. i was so fucking happy, we made it out without even needing to branch routes, none of these were bad endings, and we have been alive for a full fucking year. truth be told i dont have a lot to say about the events afterward, i dont feel too strongly about the scenes, but. when yuuki goes to play the piano and we have the ending sequence there?
yea, i cried. lol, it really was good.
as far as the other ending goes, hill of sunflowers, our divergence is the fact that yuki does actually stay "alive", and it ends with us being able to live happily with yuki and hasaki, the split personalities still exist. (or you could interpret her as a ghost i guess if you wanted, one that hasaki can see)
so now its time for me to be able to type all my thoughts out in bulk on the second half of subahibi, the plot of subahibi, as well as how it ends, since yeah its been pretty difficult to talk about these on an arc by arc basis and on a scene by scene basis.
overall, i really really like the way subahibi is structured as a story. the fact that you are re experiencing the same events over and over, but through different lenses, unlocking new pieces of the puzzle and continuously getting closer and closer to the truth, i think ends up working very well. the fact that even until the end, nothing ends up changing, the story just finally reveals to us what happens in the end, i think is such a satisfying way to approach ending the story. i feel like it wouldve felt a bit weird if it ended with suddenly in j2, yuuki is in a world where hes more conscious and now he can win the final fight against takuji and get the good ending for us! in reality, j2 is just...post yuuki "dying" in j1. its us being shown the memories of our past, and using this to solidify our resolve and be able to return to save hasaki once and for the last time. its a story about remembering truly how much you care about your loved ones, and having full devotion to a happy life with them. these have been a long and depressing 7 years for the two of them and especially to hasaki, and its nice seeing the hard work yuuki puts in to try and ensure a good future.
now how do i feel about the ending? well, my opinion is that Wonderful Everyday is by far the most elegant and proper way to end subahibi. the reason for this is that if you think of what the consequences of that ending are, its simply just...yuuki is returned to his rightful body after a very long battle of 7 years. i think it makes more sense for yuki to be left in the past, just like takuji ends up being. i mean, yuki DID actually die, the real yuki no longer exists and hasnt existed for 7 years. the story also continously hints at the eventual death of the real yuki, being slowly killed off by takuji in favor of the new minakami yuki. in any case, everything thats been happening was our long mental struggle as yuuki, and the way it ends is with yuuki finally being able to live a happy life with hasaki. there are absolutely no strings attached to their future life, yuuki just returned to his rightful place and ends up living normally with her.
compare this to Hill of Sunflowers. in our "final" meeting with yuki, she instead practically tells us she will see us on the other side. the net result of this ending is that, simply takuji is the one who finally dies, and we get to live together with an "alive" yuki. but, why? both of these people are really dead, the only reason any of this happened is because yuuki gained PTSD as a result of killing his brother, and ended up taking on both personalities. is it really fair to allow for an ending where this isnt reconciled, and instead they get to live with someone who still doesnt exist? yuki's existence is equally as dubious in reality as takuji's, so to me i think it makes more sense for her to die as well, and for yuuki to i guess be "cured". ultimately i guess both are valid endings, we still maintain the universal constant that yuuki and hasaki get to live together, its just whether or not you put yuki to rest or not.
so yeah, i do really like the Wonderful Everyday ending, it does feel like how the story is "meant" to end. plus, it also just makes our final meeting with yuki so much more powerful. it kind of blows just having an entirely happy ending where shes like "good luck soldier, see you on the other side." i feel much stronger emotions to that final meeting where yuki thanks him, and says hes always been a hero, her hero, etc. i mean as i said, i literally shed a tear over it lol. i think it does a better job at making you feel like this is really it, this is the last part of the journey, so its time for us to succeed. sure i guess the epilogue expands on Hill of Sunflowers, but dude the epilogue REALLY does not matter LOL, its just fanservice, i genuinely do not care to think of it as an actual important component of the story and i wont even write my thoughts on it.
now, we have one last thing left, and thats the ending you unlock after witnessing both of these, End Sky II. what you notice pretty quickly is it seems like we are actually in a story that is tied to DTRH1. we are currently the fake yuki who is talking to ayana on the roof. ayana brings up the egg theory, which is the idea of a single being who re experiences life through all lifeforms to have ever existed. she speaks of herself as living through the lives of all the characters in the arcs we have experienced thus far, and it ends with... well. miu comes up to us, and tells us its time for the graduation ceremony. its time to return to where it all began.
if you go back to j2, you are presented with ayana, who gives you a few choices for what to do. one of them is Still Dreaming, which takes you back to DTRH1.
now, this is actually where i was going to leave off my specific thoughts on elements in the story. however, while i was writing this, i was actually guided by my friend ava who told me that i honestly should reread dtrh1. i, honestly do agree. i did feel incomplete finishing end sky ii, it felt like the game really did want more from me. she said that the game is practically begging you to reread dtrh1 there, and i really do agree right now, it feels like its the biggest sign where ayana is telling you, hey, go return to where it all started, right now. so... plot twist! i actually AM going to go read dtrh1! once i finish doing that, i am actually going to come back to this writeup!
DTRH1 (REVISTED): rereading dtrh1 is a very interesting experience since it kind of reframes your understanding of everything you have read, though its also pretty difficult to make conjecture. so just as a summary of important events, on july 12 we have a doll that falls directly on us, this later being told to us as zakuro. we are the new yuki, and though zakuro remembers us, we do not remember her. a bit after, zakuro sends a text out to the 158 people on her phone, the text message about her death, which she refers to as a prank. the current time is july 12 2012 at 10:44 PM, and it flashes an image of a hospital bed with an IV drip. we specifically are told by zakuro that there are no words in the sky (the sky is not full of anxious words). overtime its evident we are talking to a zakuro that has experienced the events up through july 12, she grimaces at hearing Building C and she mentions the art club as well as there being an accident. when we meet otonashi ayana, she says its been a while and she didnt expect to see us in a place like this. we witness zakuro dropping a doll from building C specifically on july 16 2012 at 5:58 PM. this is also very important since this is the exact time that senegawa fell from the roof.
later on we have our zakuro date, and she explicitly says that the person she loved is no longer of this world, and that even their face has changed. zakuro mentions that even in this kind of place shes surprised that otonashi ayana can exist, and that the last time they interacted is when ayana told her that the fate shes chosen cant be changed now, whether its inevitable or a coicidence isnt a distinction that a human can make (which iirc does indeed happen at roughly the end of lgi, i think the night before her death? while out on the street?). we have the spirit room attraction and the end sky, which i do not know how to parse at all. the different exhibits are a convenience store, living room, apartment corridor, classroom, and hospital bed. these are very generic scenes but they are also ones that would have been experienced by both zakuro, hasaki, and us. by night time, everyone has disappeared.
once we get to july infinity and enter the milky way express, we find out that we are the girl who is the whole world itself (which yeah it seems like this is entirely a world created by us), and that zakuro is trying to return us to our original world because we got caught up in all of this.
so what can i make out from all this? conjecture is honestly, pretty difficult. the first problem is trying to understand this from a chronological perspective. end sky ii is told through the lens of our yuki, who has experienced the events of our main timeline, however she is able to recall events of dtrh1 (experienced by fake yuki) when primed about it. why do we have memories of this? end sky ii almost makes it feel like, rather than dtrh1 being in its own isolated bubble, the main sequence of events is actually the bubble itself, and dtrh1 and end sky ii are events that take place outside of that bubble? do i want to believe in this being a cycle of events that keep happening over and over? ayana does bring up egg theory, do i want to go with this? we encounter end sky ii as a result of choosing the route that lands us neither with hasaki nor with yuki. we dont have the end scene with hasaki, which i think could simply imply that we have died. could dtrh1 be a depiction of takuji's ideal world? zakuro does say during the date that the person she loved most in this world is now gone, and even their face has changed (which would imply we literally ARE yuki now, the ideal yuki that takuji wanted to become since the events of his rape), though i dont think this is the direction the story is trying to go.
when does end sky ii even take place? is it after we the body have died, and this is a detached spirit of real yuki engaging with ayana? could it possibly be us in the hospital? and once again, why do we have memories that pertain to dtrh1? it is also interesting that ayana herself is coaxing us into rereading dtrh1 as a result, to return to where it all began. we went through several arcs of the same events over and over again, though by end sky ii we have memories of what happened in dtrh1, an experience that had not happened to us. yeah, i dunno, its far too difficult for me at least right now.
overall i do think rereading dtrh1 was worth it, its just very difficult for me to make conjecture, i think there is an extent where it might come from my own philosophical illiteracy, and i would have to do a lot of thinking on it, though i do think i am overall satisfied with my experience reading subahibi.
FINAL THOUGHTS ON SUBAHIBI: i think i would like to say that subahibi is probably an 8/10. i think it has some critical flaws, there are some things that i would do in drastically different ways. i think my biggest problem with subahibi is the way it handles its own explanation. japanese media tends to have a weird habit of being bad at the act of show, dont tell. i think wdi is a very good example of this, where the story directly tells us the events that happened 7 years ago through kimura and how hasaki responds to him, rather than just waiting to show us it in j2. there are of course things you could say are jarring like the way the story handles incest or age gap or whatever, but those arent topics that im really concerned about, since they do not really affect the narrative that is being told itself. sure, the way in which its over the top can be quite silly and wholly unnecessary at times, but i do quite enjoy the character of the work itself.
when subahibi is absurd, its absurd in some of the most entertaining ways you possibly could have, with the takuji desk sex scene and all the hallucinations and the way the game plays around with meta elements of the engine itself. when subahibi is extreme, it is extreme in ways that really will strongly get to you. lgi is by far the best example of this, it does such a good job at tugging at your heart strings and making you feel desperation, hopelessness, and exhaustion.
i think if i were to order the arcs based on how much i like them, it would be like
j2 > lgi > imoi > dtrh2 > dtrh1 > j1 > wdi
its kind of unfortunate that it does feel like the second half of subahibi is weaker in how its written overall, i think me placing j2 as the highest is unfair since its only good as a result of the previous arcs worth of context, but i think the story being told throughout the second half is something i care for far more than the story being told to us in the first half. when i think back to subahibi, it is 100% going to be primarily focused on the relevant details of the second half, with yuuki and hasaki's journey to achieving a better life together, even if the first half was by far the more exciting part of the story. subahibi has such a beautiful conclusion, especially with the wonderful everyday ending, that i think is a very satisfying payoff after experiencing the incomplete events thus far.
so yeah, that has been my writeup of subahibi, this ended up being far longer than i thought, but it was kind of hard for me to concisely form my thoughts on the story without going arc by arc and thinking scene by scene. plus there was a lot to think about, and i thought it would be nice if i demonstrated the progression of my views over time. if you actually read all of this, you shouldve done something better with your time, but also thank you for reading lol, i will see you in the next writeup i form on what i think is pretty damn good media