VN Talk: Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly - Part 7: Beniyuri

Beniyuri does not have her own route in Psychedelica of the Black Butterfly, but since I'm doing character arcs this time rather than game routes, I decided to devote one last week to talking about our protagonist. This also seems a good time to point out that this is the first otome I've played with a voiced protagonist, which surprisingly changes a lot of my impression of the character. Oddly, this likely explains an issue I had with the Code:Realize anime.

Most otome protagonists are unvoiced, so the player can self-insert. The protagonist tends to have a few character traits due to word choice in their unvoiced dialogue and/or habits mentioned in their first person narration; enough to know whether they're optimistic, bad at studying, or proud about their athletic skills. How a particular piece of dialogue or narrative is read can therefore be left largely up to the player.

This is where I'll digress into Code:Realize a bit. I read Cardia's dialogue as being pretty dynamic and lively after the other characters indicated that she was opening up, which made it hard to reconcile the Cardia in my head with the anime Cardia, who was voiced with a subdued personality for most of the series.

So now we have Beniyuri. Because she was voiced, it was very clear from the get-go how her lines should be read, since they were being performed. Unfortunately, that put a barrier between me and Beniyuri because I wanted to read her more favorably toward what I wanted in a protagonist than who she actually was.

It was interesting to see how much of a disconnect there was just through the voice even though the written words were the same.

This might have come down to casting choice, but I think it's also that hearing Beniyuri's distress verbally instead of just reading it made it more annoying to have yet another crying and helpless protagonist. It's not that she's crying and helpless all the time. I genuinely liked the finale where she realizes she has to kill Kagiha to stop Hikage and send everyone home, and I loved the scene where she dives into the Abyss to save Monshiro, but the scenes where she's feeling miserable and betrayed are long and extended and so emotionally charged it's draining just listening to her. (Heck there's an entire chapter of her feeling bad.)

That said, I had hopes for Beniyuri in the beginning. When she first sees Yamato and Karasuba she is the first one to summon a weapon to try and save them, and she does it based off her memory of what Monshiro did when he saved her and Hikage. In retrospect this was probably a narrative misdirection to avoid Hikage being too knowledgeable right at the start, but it was still great that she was the first to figure it out. Until suddenly she can't do it a second time and Yamato has to show her. I mean, sure, you get a nice picture of him helping her out, but it could have been the other way around too.

Initially, Beniyuri seems to be a generic not-to-competent otome game protagonist until you start getting to her flashbacks. Oddly, she was really spirited as a kid. She got upset, fought with her younger sister, and it's surprising to see the contrast between her as a child and her as a teenager. I'd like to say the change in personality is due to the accident, but it's more likely that the social standards for being a mouthy girl in elementary school are different from being a mouthy girl in high school since she's still pretty subdued in the alternate Happy Ending.

What saves her from being generic is her flaws; specifically her inability to let go. She looks happy on the outside, and tries to be upbeat and friendly with Yamato and Karasuba prior to the start of the game, but she's not, and she's hiding it both from her family and her friends.

In fact, one of the nice things about the expanded prologue that encompasses the Real World ending is that you get to see how Beniyuri is consciously trying to keep her distance from Karasuba. She's not blind to the fact he likes her, but she recognizes that she's not in a position to be in a relationship with him. All things said, she'd just like to keep their relationship at being friends.

And as the audience, we can see the disconnect between what she says about Karasuba and the kind of person he presently is, well before he calls her out on it. When the two of them meet Yamato for the first time again in years, she laughs and talks about how none of them have changed, when it's pretty obvious that Karasuba is no longer the soft-spoken little kid he used to be. That's just how she remembers him, and not reflective of his current personality, so it's easy to see why he ultimately blows up over that.

Beniyuri's hang-up over the course of the game is that she feels guilty over Kagiha's death, and this causes her to withdraw because she never wants to lose a friend again. This feeling of guilt is so strong that when Kagiha is taken hostage, her childhood friends refuse to tell her that the reason they're not rushing out to rescue him is because he's already dead. They know that if she knew, then all that guilt would come back again.

The first time I played through I actually didn't understand why she felt so guilty to the point it breaks her during the showdown with Hikage, because I missed that she was the one who suggested they look at the ruins in the first place. Instead I focused on the fact she's the one who suggests they brave the flooded path to escape the ruins. While it wasn't a good idea, they were in a bad situation with few alternatives, so I didn't like that she was beating herself up over making the best of a bad situation, and the choice to go back for a ribbon wasn't hers at all.

It was only on replaying the flashback that I realized Beniyuri is the first to suggest going to the manor, in which case I can understand her blaming everything that happened there on herself. I think that scene needed a little more pushback from other characters. Instead, everyone except for Kagiha agrees with her, making it so easy to forget that it was Beniyuri's idea at all. As a result, I thought she was being excessively hard on herself.

Unlike a lot of otome protagonists though, Beniyuri does grow, and it's not because a new boyfriend swept into her life and made it all better. The finale against Hikage, when she's the only one who can save all her friends, is still a standout moment. It's not merely the physical act of being the only one free enough to shoot, but the fact that by doing so, she's finally accepting that Kagiha is dead and will never return. She faces the truth that she was trying to suppress the entire time in the manor world.

Before passing on, completely this time, Kagiha lets her know that he doesn't regret giving his life for her and his last request is for her to live on. The Beniyuri we see in the best ending (and the Takuya and Aki endings) is finally at peace with the past and ready to let go.

I don't think Beniyuri will end up on any list I make for favorite otome protagonists, but she wouldn't be at the bottom either, because even if I have trouble relating to her, she's still her own character with her own personality rather than a bland self-insert.