- Aug 23, 2023
- 314
- 621
Imo this cycle specifically could very well be the therapy they all need. Just a very unconventional and extreme one where you simply will learn because we won't let you die nor break until you get better. Mysterious narrator says at the start of the game that this place is one where, from time to time, mysery will seep in - and you'll learn to notice beauty in spite of it (or maybe even because of it).Honestly? What about half of the cast needs more than anything is serious, professional clinical help. The girls are dealing with loss/abandonment, sexual assault (not all of it from Sensei), and various forms of PTSD. None of the adult women (excepting maybe Tsubasa) is exactly sane -- with reason. And some of the characters... Ami? Yasu? Miku? Io? Sensei? These people are not capable of caring for themselves. I'm not going to say that psychiatry offers any kind of guarantee, but aside from Io's overflowing pharmacopeia, we don't see any sign that any of the grieving, fucked up women (and one man) are getting any help at all.
Which, I don't know, may be the point? I mean, this is a horror AVN. And what's scarier than a broken mind?
I mean, Akira's whole thing is that he didn't learn how to properly deal with what happened to him. Maybe that's what "remember to smile" is after all. In a more positive interpretation, it could be "face all this shit, but learn that even then you could still smile." of course, even in this positive interpretation, it's only a few of the people that seem engaged in this idea (like Himawari), and it seems like a new one.
Like they had this torture chamber all set up, and used for torture for a thousand cycles, and then this is the first time when an intern shows up and says "hey, maybe we could use it to help people instead", and is one of the few people working there that believes that or knows about this new initiative lol