Hello to everyone and anyone who will end up reading this blog! As you can no doubt tell from my profile, or from the fact that most people reading this will probably be my friends, I am Andrew Morris. If someone told me 6 months ago that I would be sitting here writing up my first blog, I probably would have laughed and reminded them how lazy I actually am. How time can change such thought processes.
Which brings me to the crux of this first blog- thought processes. Over the past week, I have become enveloped by a bishoujo-style playable visual novel by the name of Katawa Shoujo (http://katawa-shoujo.com/about.php), which literally translates to ‘Disability Girls’. It follows Hisao Nakai and his dealings within the fictional Yamaku High School for disabled children, located in Japan, as the title would alreayd suggest. The main storyline revolves around Hisao and 5 particular girls that you meet. There is Lilly, who is blind, Rin, who has deformed arms, Shizune, who is deaf and mute, Hanako who has severe scarring from burns and Emi, who lost both her legs below the knees. You can engage in a relationship with each girl, and whoever you choose spilts off into a seperate story. Now I can understand that this premis may be a little off-putting, but I promise that it is fantastic. The character are wonderful, the storyline is amazing and the art is incredible. If you follow anime or mange you may like this. So some of you may be wondering why I am talking about Katawa Shoujo.
This is because ever since I have started playing it, it has changed my life and the way I perceive the world and relationships. Before Katawa Shoujo I was content enough to enjoy hooking up and all that kind of casual stuff. However after seeing the beautiful relationships Hisao had with all of the girls, it made me realise that a committed long-term relationship is what I truely want. As such, I have decided to forgo all notions of casually hooking up. For me its either a friendship or a relationship. Kissing someone on a date though is still ok, I am only human after all, haha. I know that for someone my age this is pretty rare and possibly strange, but i’ve never exactly been normal myself. Besides, I am content to wait until I either find a good relationship, or it finds me. The girl doesn’t neccessarily have to be ‘the one’, but at the very least I want to be with someone who likes me for me and not what I do. I want a real relationship, not a superficial one, just like I want a real girl, not a superficial one. I have no doubt it’ll happen one day. For now though I am content to be patient. Which is another thing Katawa Shoujo has taught me, patience.
For those that know me well enough, you probably know i’m not the most patient dude. Now though, I see the value of patience for what it truely is. In the past I would have and indeed I did, blindly rush into relationships without getting to know the person first. I feel I am now able to pull myself back, get to know the person better and wait until the right moment before getting the relationship to that next level. This newfound patience isn’t only aimed for relationships though. This patience also applies to life in general, e.g. with uni, work, or whatever it may be. Instead of becoming frustrated, more often than not I will be able to draw back, calm myself down and go about whatever problem that appears with rational thoughts.
I think the 2nd most impotant thing Katawa Shoujo has taught me is about the stigmatism of disabilities. As I mentioned before, the game follows Hisao and his 5 blooming and continuing relationships with the other 5 main characters. One thing I noticed that reoccured within the game was how the stigmatism of all the disabilities that Hisao saw, were slowly removed as he got to know the people behind the disabilities. It got me to thinking about it all. While the definition of disaiblities is the loss of ability, it doesn’t make someone any less of a person. People with disabilities learn to adapt and even grow strengths that people with no disabilities don’t have. Just because someone is blind doesn’t mean they can’t see some of the beauty this world has to offer.
Lastly, Katawa Shoujo has taught me alot about myself and has allowed me to acknowledge my shortcomings more readily and to be able to act on them. For the past few weeks i’ve been stuck in a rut, sitting at home doing nothing. Now, I am looking foward to going back to uni in a few weeks and working even harder towards my goal of being a psychologist. I think now I am also less lazy than I ever was :P.
There was probably more points I wanted to add to everything above, but sometimes I have trouble collecting my thoughts into one coherent mass, let alone putting them on paper or in this case, the internet. Knowing me i’ll remember them at a later date and add them into the next blog, or the one after that and so on and so forth in that fashion.
To end this first blog, I will add one more thing about these new revelations about relationships. In the past And even up to about a week ago, there has been multiple people I know that i’ve always thought such things as “If given the chance I would date them”, or “Yeah i’d sleep with them”. Now though I can honestly say, out of all my friends on Facebook, there are probably only 2 people I currently know that i’d like to get to know better and maybe end up in a relationship with them one day. Considering how many people I know thats a huge turnaround for me. You’re more than welcome to try and figure out who they are, but I will not give you any clues.
Hopefully this will be the first of many blogs I write in the future. And hopefully you will all take something away from this blog, be it you give Katawa Shoujo a go, you decide to make a change for the better, anything like that. I won’t expect anything though. After all i’m just some dude who wear’s his heart constantly on his sleeve, a man with a complex soul willing to bare his mind and soul on the off chance that people will want to hear what he has to say. This is just a minor insight into the inner workings of my mind, albeit delivered in a major way.
Happy reading everyone and as I continue to write, hopefully my blogs will become better and better.
mrmilleniumfalcon 