MasterlistSo I nearly had to stop playing this because it hit a bad button for me, but I struggled through and overall loved it.
It's very similar to Canus's route in a lot of ways, including some
very similar plotting that is either Thematic Parallels or laziness, and the same structure that starts out as fluffy slice of life and ends as fantasy melodrama.
The start of the route hit some VERY UNCOMFORTABLE buttons for me to do with neuroatypicality. Il has poor social skills and tends to accidentally cause trouble doing all sorts of every day things. Now this isn't a real human disability, and is (somewhat inconsistently) explained/dealt with during the Fantasy Melodrama. But there a bunch of scenes early on where some characters condescendingly tell Il it's ok to give up on learning new skills and just stay home and eat candy, and another shouts at him to stop being stupid.
As the route goes on it becomes clear that Il never used to care about learning social skills etc and really
was happy to stay home and eat candy. And once he decides he does care he figures things out pretty quickly. Also Kotone handles things the best out of everyone, and always treats him with respect. But the period when he was trying and failing and everyone else was handling it unhelpfully was QUITE UNPLEASANT for me, and it may take me a while to stop being pissed off at Ignis.
And then that stopped happening so much and I liked the rest of the route! I mean if I think about it as a disability metaphor at ALL I still feel kinda gross, but I'm mostly managing not to.
The fantasy melodrama was delightfully batshit Japanese-writers-poke-at-Christianity humanism. And the romance worked for me really well, it was still fairly high concept but I believe them as a real couple and got pretty swoony. There's also a lot of passionate feelings between men that are
called friendship but are also paralleled with the het romances, and in general while I did have to handwave some annoying individual heteronormative lines the overall dynamic was mildly subversive of typical otome gender roles. Il may be a powerful immortal who spends a lot of time protecting Kotone, but he's also a delicate woobie who cries
very prettily.
I didn't feel up to the bad ends.
Misyr was in this route a lot
and not just swooning over Il, and some moderately important questions got answered, it feels like maybe I was meant to play this later.
Content notes: I spoil some Code Realize twists that got re-used. Suicide. Unfortunate treatment of Magical Disability. Violence from the love interest towards the heroine For Reasons. Zero sexual consent issues though!
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