VN Talk: Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly - Part 5: Karasuba

Most otome games end up having a love interest I don't particularly care for, and Karasuba is Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly's. Though Hikage can be a sexist jerk, he's the kind of jerk I can deal with. Karasuba's actually twisted and I can't see myself ever replaying his route as I was pretty grossed out while reading it. If non-consent is your fantasy, you may not mind, but the fact that Beniyuri said "no" (while she's obviously in emotional distress) and he went ahead anyway is not something I'm down with.

Probably the only saving grace with Karasuba is that he's complicated. I don't think it makes up for him having a rotten personality, but we can understand how that rotten personality emerged.

Karasuba is a year younger than Beniyuri and was bullied as a kid since his family name is "Himeno" and "hime" is the word for "princess." Being a small, non-athletic kid, he was called "princess" as a put-down. (Even Yamato, in one of his less sympathetic moments, did it.) Beniyuri stood up for Karasuba and brought him into her group of friends, which earned her place as his childhood crush.

When the summer camp accident happened, Karasuba was safe, but freaked out over how helpless he was and how he couldn't do anything to save his friends, so when he grew up, he decided to change himself.

Teenage Karasuba projects an air of cocky confidence. However, he's also incredibly distrusting of people, believing that it makes things easier should they ever betray him. Both in the real world and in the manor world, he is incredibly unsubtle in the way he hits on Beniyuri. It's impossible for her not to realize he's flirting with her, and in the manor world it even crosses over into sexual harassment. (Thankfully the worst incidents are either in optional episodes or his manor ending so they're skippable.)

However, despite his lack of propriety, Karasuba does have one good thing going for him, and it's that he's really good at reading people. He's not always nice in the way he uses it, but when they find the summer camp photo that restores the memories for everyone except Beniyuri, Karasuba is the one who takes a moment to comfort Kagiha, recognizing that there's no easy way to bring up to Beniyuri that Kagiha died back then.

Because of this, Karasuba is also the one to reveal that Hikage is the master, because he knew that there was someone Monshiro liked as a kid, even though Hikage professed to have never liked anyone.

However, his insight into people is used less sympathetically in the real world. Karasuba is right when he confronts Beniyuri about the fact she still hasn't gotten over Kagiha. And he's completely correct in that she's so trapped in the past that she only sees him as the little kid he used to be rather than the person he is now. When he rips her for not knowing anything about his years in middle school because she never thought to ask, it's completely understandable. He doesn't like who he was, and he's gone to great lengths to change himself, but she refuses to acknowledge any of it.

What causes him to lose this sympathy is that he also refuses to let her move on at her own pace. Rather than cutting his losses and moving on himself, Karasuba is hellbent on dragging her (and to a lesser degree Yamato) into getting over the past.

From a plot perspective, Karasuba is a necessary instigator. He gets the ball rolling as he's the one who drags Beniyuri and Yamato out to the lake in their ill-fated attempt to say farewell to Kagiha (only for the bus to get in an accident and the three of them to end up in comas as well). And he's also the one who figures out that Monshiro is the real Kazuya. Major plot beats happen because of his involvement, and yet he's the character who's least interested in going back at all.

At one point in the story, depending on how much Beniyuri wants to remember the past, she has the opportunity to sit down with Karasuba and he asks her to forget along with him. On first playthrough she automatically realizes from the conversation that she does want to remember, sending her back on the main route, but after seeing enough of his optional episodes, it's possible for her to choose to forget.

This gives Karasuba essentially what he wants, though it's not clear how any of this happens. It's kind of like the Kagiha Ending, only we don't see a dream vs. reality dichotomy. Is this all a joint hallucination? But the two of them live day in day out in the group hideout, only there's no one else around and no explanation for how this dream world exists, since I think Hikage would want to keep his game going.

All we know is that Beniyuri seems to have forgotten how their situation had come about (convenient), but she also recognizes that there's a part of her that still isn't ready to move into a relationship with Karasuba even though he pushes for it. Specifically it's like there's a shard in her heart, which is a phrase used in the main path to refer to her memory of losing her friends. Despite the fact she even tells Karasuba "no" in regards to a kiss, he does it anyway, and quickly escalates from there.

This is the only ending that results in implied sex and it's not entirely clear how consensual it is. Aside from that, it's pretty nihilistic, with no future for either of them. They wouldn't be returning to life, but it doesn't look like they'll be passing on either.

His Aki Ending is better, mostly because I find real world Karasuba more tolerable. (He's definitely a guy who needs societal restraints.)

Like Yamato's Takuya ending, this follows the main path with Kagiha's sacrifice and the living characters returning to the waking world, and in this one, she agrees to ditch school with Karasuba, much to his surprise (since he thought she'd turn him down as always). While ditching, they sit down and have a proper talk about their feelings and their past, and Karasuba agrees to wait for her to catch up with him instead of forcing her forward, which would have been a way better move if he'd done it earlier.

Though I wanted to feel good about that ending, I couldn't really because then I'd flash back to all the incredibly awful things he did in the rest of the game and his id is just out of control.

VN Talk: Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly - Part 4: Yamato

Back when I thought Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly was a more conventional otome, where there would be a central branching point based off a series of choices I made, I decided that I was going to choose Yamato first. It wasn't because he immediately jumped out at me as a character, but because he didn't do anything to push me away from him (unlike Hikage's sexism and Karasuba's bizarre mix of cynicism and aggressive flirtation).

Though Yamato and Hikage are both brusque and prone to bouts of male ego (one clue that Hikage is not the polar opposite personality Yamato's brother is supposed to be), Yamato's more concerned about what he sees as his own personal integrity than putting other people down, and given his backstory, it's not surprising to see why. He wants to become the better person that he wasn't when he was a kid.

After having finished the game and all its endings, I'd also have to say that I'd be fine if my first playthrough had somehow taken me to Yamato's Takuya ending (Takuya being his name in the real world). It's not possible to unlock on first playthrough, but it feels like a very natural epilogue that isn't necessarily incompatible with the best ending.

Like Beniyuri, Yamato is also a person trapped in the past and unable to let go. And it's for this reason I'm much more sympathetic towards him than Karasuba. Everyone grieves at a different rate, and both he and Beniyuri are still suffering from the decisions they made the day Kagiha died and Monshiro fell into a coma. He and Beniyuri get each other, and we see this in the extended version of the prologue.

If the bus accident that sent the two of them and Karasuba into the manor world had never happened, I think Yamato and Beniyuri would have become close. (I can't say the same for Karasuba.)

Both of them had made regrettable decisions as children that changed who they became as teenagers. Yamato's was especially petty, but also completely in line with the behavior of a jealous six-year-old.

Like all of the boys in their group of childhood friends, he liked Beniyuri, but Yamato has never been a good communicator. As a kid he was brash and bullying, always wanting to do things his way and getting him to compromise would only happen after an argument. So even though he liked Beniyuri, whenever they spoke with each other it had the tendency to turn into a fight.

That was not the case with his twin brother, Monshiro. When they were at summer camp, Beniyuri used the ribbon her deceased mother had given her to bandage Monshiro's leg. Unhappy that she used something so important to her on his brother, Yamato loosened the ribbon later, on the pretense of fixing the bandage. He hoped Monshiro would lose it and she'd get mad at him, which is a jerk thing to do but at six completely believable.

What he hadn't counted on was the heavy rain when they were exploring the manor ruins. If the ribbon had remained securely tied everyone would have made it to safety, but because Monshiro realized the ribbon had fallen off, he went back to the ruins to get it. This caused the delay that separated Beniyuri, Kagiha, and Monshiro from the others and eventually resulted in Monshiro's coma and Kagiha's death.

We learn that as a kid Yamato loved soccer and wanted to eventually become a pro, and this is the memory that Beniyuri kept with her even after his family moved away in the wake of the accident. When they reunite as teenagers, she learns that Yamato is no longer playing. In fact, his life now revolves around his comatose brother. Since he's heard evidence that speaking to a comatose person helps maintain their awareness, he visits Monshiro everyday after school in hopes of someday coaxing him back to the waking world. This means he's not in any clubs at school and soccer is a long lost pastime.

In fact one of the touching moments in the alternate Happy Ending, where no one died or ended up in a coma, is seeing that Yamato is in fabulous athletic shape and still playing soccer.

In the main storyline, teenage Yamato is still not great at communicating, and he's still impulsive, but he's also much more compassionate.

Though he loses all his memories upon entering the manor world like the rest of the cast, the one thing that remains is that he has an incredible drive to get out and he doesn't know why. It's only later once he starts getting fragments of his memory back that he remembers it's because he's afraid his brother will fade away without him.

Interestingly the first time Beniyuri has a bad reaction to the idea of her memories returning is when Yamato reaches for her after telling her about his comatose brother, and it's likely because that moment is similar to one they had walking home together after visiting Monshiro and the two of them realized they were both dealing with losing their loved ones.

Yamato's place in the manor world is mostly removed from the group, which is narratively necessary since he would have blown Hikage's cover much earlier once people started getting memories back. In fact, Hikage only sends Beniyuri the childhood photo of Yamato and his brother right before Yamato is overwhelmed by despair and transformed into one of the manor's monsters, causing him to panic and run away.

This allows the player to start piecing together previous relationships without Yamato confronting Hikage, but the result is that Yamato spends about a third to half the game sitting in a greenhouse that he uses as his own hideout while staying away from the others. The game's not specific about exactly when he gets his memory back, so it's not clear if he tells Beniyuri not to tell the others about his survival because he's figured out Hikage is an imposter, or because he just doesn't want everyone to see him in his monstrous state, but if it's the former I would have liked him to have dropped a hint not to trust Hikage. I don't like the idea that Yamato would have left Beniyuri in danger knowing that there was something very wrong about the group's leader.

Yamato's manor ending is pretty bleak, with him beating himself up over losing his brother and Beniyuri choosing to share in that loss until they are both consumed with despair, but his Takuya ending is a much better showcase of his growth.

This one follows the main story path, but instead of going to the "best" ending where the group takes a memorial trip a year later to say farewell to Kagiha, we're treated to an earlier point in time after Beniyuri has woken from her own coma and is ready to go to school again. She meets Yamato, who has decided to fess up about what he did with the ribbon to his brother and the two of them visit Monshiro who is still in the hospital (not being strong enough to leave given his ten year coma).

Yamato and Monshiro are able to reconcile (and Monshiro admits he was being a bit of a jerk too because he knew showing off the ribbon would make Yamato mad) and on the way home Yamato and Beniyuri decide to begin dating. And I liked it, because the two of them have constantly been on the same page over their past and now, their readiness to move forward.

VN Talk: Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly - Part 3: Hikage

Continuing my character arc discussions for Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly, Hikage was the second of the characters whose character-specific ending I got.

His route is interesting in that it branches from the main story early on, and it has to in order for Beniyuri to get to know him while he's still a sympathetic character. Chronologically, it's the first alternate ending you can get.

Since he's such an effective villain and the main story makes no bones about how twisted he is, I was curious about how they would make him sympathetic. What they do is make it clear that even though Hikage is incredibly sadistic, there are still moments that reflect who he had been in life, giving him a chance to figuratively pet the dog and show a softer side.

Though I like the self-labeled best ending the most, because it wraps everything up, I think Hikage's is probably the most moving ending.

We don't get to know the mastermind in the main storyline, because his time with the group is a front to get his game going. He plays the pragmatic leader because he knows it's effective, but when it's time to drop the charade he becomes a completely different and arrogant personality, so we know him more by what he says and does than what motivates him in the first place.

He wants the kaleidoscope shards collected and gets a bunch of lost souls to work with him on it. Then he breaks them down until they're consumed with despair. He repeats this over and over again while waiting for the final shards to fall in his grasp and he clearly has no intention of helping anybody but himself. It makes him evil, but we don't really understand why he's like this in the first place. We don't even know if he's really human.

His storyline gives us that answer, as well as the story behind his rabbit-masked servant, Usagi.

Hikage's route plays the most like a traditional otome divergence in that it's a very long, fairly developed story branch, and it's only accessible after having completed the best ending, so when the player goes through it, they have the knowledge that he's the master of the manor, even though Beniyuri lacks it.

This gives us his first real pet the dog scene, when we see one of the masked children of the manor. She's scared of being left alone and latches on to Hikage thinking that he might be the older brother she's looking for, but then she realizes he's not. Hikage speaks gently to her and guides her to finding her way to her brother (who clearly has already passed on) and as a result she fades away peacefully to the afterlife.

The thing is, we know there are other souls trapped within the manor besides our main cast, but they're all children. They wear masks because they are so close to forgetting everything they were in life that they don't even have faces anymore, and they use the masks to hide that. Usagi makes it clear that the natural order of things is for souls to forget everything and depart for the afterlife.

This means that in most cases Hikage is allowing the process to proceed normally with children. He primarily incorporates teenagers and adults in his game, and by helping a little girl along after the player already knows he's the villain, we get to see another side of him. There's no advantage for him to be as helpful as he is in this situation as either Hikage the pragmatic leader or the manor's insane master, and it's the kindest we ever see him.

Aware that Hikage still needs to be revealed as the manor's master, the game also lays out a parallel story within the route itself to set him up as a sympathetic character. In one of Kagiha's childhood side episodes, we learn about a story where two white butterflies are separated by death and the living one goes on a journey to see the other again.

In Hikage's route, the title of that story is finally dropped and of course it's Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly. Beniyuri finds the book in the hideout and reads about the still living white butterfly who's looking for psychedelica, the place where the living can meet the dead. Over a long and arduous journey the white butterfly becomes black with dirt, but eventually it finds psychedelica. She's puzzled though when she discovers the end of the book has been torn out, so she doesn't know what the butterfly does once it actually gets there.

Hikage tells her the rest of the story and how it doesn't have a happy ending. Ashamed of how it looks, and fearing the other white butterfly would no longer accept it, the now-black butterfly turns away from psychedelica and dies alone in the desert. Beniyuri disagrees with the ending, thinking that the white butterfly wouldn't care what the other butterfly looked like, but Hikage says he understands how the black butterfly felt, which is important since his personal story parallels it.

(As a side note, the game does show where the last page of the book is. Hikage keeps it in his study! It's just you don't get that scene if you follow the chronology of his route.)

Since Hikage himself is not forthcoming about his true identity, his route handles this through getting to know Usagi. We've known that Usagi is different from the other masked children in that she's actively working on the master's behalf and that she still has a face even though she's wearing a mask. She comes and goes without fanfare to keep the hideout stocked with food or to deliver messages, and Beniyuri gets the idea that she can try plumbing Usagi for information by leaving notes for her in the food basket.

Initially their conversations are a bit silly, especially when Usagi learns that Beniyuri might be attracted to Hikage and tries to play matchmaker, but eventually Usagi decides to lay all the cards on the table in order to save her brother, who turns out to be the manor's master.

That's when Hikage's backstory comes into play.

Usagi was born to a wealthy merchant and his wife in what was probably Taisho era Japan, but was terribly sickly. Eventually, an older brother, Hikage, turned up at their manor, which caused a rift between her parents since Hikage was the child of a mistress and was presumably being brought into the household as an heir under the assumption that Usagi would die before adulthood. Because of this, her mother hated Hikage, but Hikage and Usagi got along well and became close.

Over time, their father's finances dried up, and along with it, the ability to pay for the medicine for Usagi's treatment. Hikage did everything he could to scrounge up the money for it, even debasing himself in front of relatives who hated him, but ultimately failed when the promised medication didn't arrive. Usagi died, and Hikage went insane with grief, killing the uncle who reneged on the promise of medication and then going full-on occult in search of a way to bring back the dead.

This led him to the kaleidoscope, which can breach the barrier between the living and the dead, and he activated it, creating the manor world that now exists in-between. Because he did this on the shore by his manor, the in-between is like a surreal version of the manor he actually lived in (and the ruins the main cast explored as children at summer camp). Hikage shot himself in the head, killing himself, and fell into the water, entering the manor world the same way the rest of the cast did.

This also means like everybody else, he forgot who he was on entry, and the reason everyone's weapon manifests as a handgun is because he shot himself with a revolver.

However, because his intention was to meet with Usagi, she was also pulled into the manor world even though she had properly passed on. This makes her different from everyone else and is why she retains her memories. She would like for her brother to also pass on, but because of his strong attachment to the resentment he had in life, he's unable to fully let go even though he has otherwise forgotten enough that he's become faceless. Usagi hides her face because she doesn't want him to remember her since it makes it harder to move on.

Hikage eventually goes full-blown psychotic mastermind on his own route, but only after we know all of this, and because of Usagi's side of the story, there's now incentive to try to save this guy. The attempt goes poorly, though, and I respect the fact that Hikage's ending is not happy.

When Usagi and Beniyuri try confronting him, he decides they're conspiring against him and shoots at Beniyuri, only to be stopped by Usagi who takes the bullet for her. When Beniyuri removes Usagi's mask at her request, Hikage sees his sister's face and his memory comes back to him, causing him to effectively lose her all over again as she returns to the afterlife.

We also learn that Hikage, like the black butterfly, actually turned away from psychedelica once he found it. Even though he activated the kaleidoscope, he realized that everything he'd done to get that far had changed him into a kind of person he didn't want his sister to see, so he broke the kaleidoscope (yes, he's the reason it's broken in the first place) before shooting himself. Only he didn't realize its power was still active when he died and fell in.

With his memories back, Hikage bids farewell to Beniyuri, knowing she and her friends now have all the shard pieces they need to reassemble the kaleidoscope and leave, and shoots himself again to pass on to the afterlife.

Beniyuri does try to get him to go back with her, but Hikage quite rightly points out that his body has long since rotted so he couldn't go back even if he wanted. (Presumably this is the case for Kagiha as well, but Hikage's ending doesn't bother addressing what happens to him.)

His ending does have a bit of a hope spot, having Beniyuri meet a pair of siblings at the lake in the real world when she comes to say good-bye to Hikage. They're heavily implied to be the reincarnated Hikage and Usagi, and the brother is even wearing a shirt with a black butterfly monogram.

I was surprised by the amount of sympathy Hikage got from me considering what an absolute dirtbag he is in the main route. Even when he's playing the role of party leader, he's sexist early on towards Beniyuri and prickly about what's "manly" behavior. Though he has what as a stand alone piece of art looks like the most passionate kiss in the game, when you actually get to the scene it's a forced kiss with the implication that he could easily go further whether Beniyuri wants him to or not, and this is while he's still playing the part of group leader.

When I first started the game, I thought that I would like Hikage based on his personality type, but he constantly kept shooting himself in the foot as if to remind me that I really should not like this guy. So while I was shocked he was the mastermind, I wasn't dismayed about it.

In a way it's too bad though, because Hikage has some funny scenes where he's fairly likeable. Since he's so uptight as group leader, there's a side episode where everyone realizes that despite being seemingly proficient at everything, Hikage has no idea how a smartphone works. Though Kagiha doesn't either (which is likely because they've both been dead prior to the invention of smartphones), it's a lot funnier with Hikage trying to figure out how to type on a screen that has no buttons, and the eagerness with which he explains his newfound knowledge to Kagiha is charming.

Though it's not a trick of the written narration, there is one visual element of the storytelling that gives an extremely subtle hint that Hikage is not the Kazuya he pretends to be most of the game, and that's the two moles under his left eye. He's introduced as the Two-Moled Man prior to picking a door name and it's a facial feature only Hikage has. Kazuya doesn't have moles in any of his flashback images and once we learn Monshiro is the real Kazuya it's pretty clear that he doesn't have any either.

One thing that I kind of wish had come up regarding Hikage's disguise is that no one asks him what happened in between Kazuya falling into a coma and now. While his disguise is not perfect in other ways (he doesn't behave like Kazuya and there's the facial feature he apparently cannot or chose not to change), it seems asking about the coma ought to have been on people's minds, especially since Hikage says he arrived in the manor the same time as Beniyuri, Karasuba, and Yamato. Hikage doesn't behave like a six-year-old who's been unconscious for the past ten years.

In fact, what gives him away to Karasuba in one of the side episodes is that Hikage ends up answering a question as himself rather than as Kazuya, in regards to whether there's a girl he likes. While it's a nice catch, it's not the first thing I would have asked in Karasuba's place and it seems like Hikage should have expected someone to ask about the coma as part of his disguise. It wouldn't have had to be anything elaborate, he could even say he's not sure, which is why it's weird that the game dances around addressing it at all.