Thoughts on Ebi-hime’s Lynne
This Halloween, set aside the human centipede, zombies, and Frankenstein; those are all child’s play at horror. It’s time to grow up and face something far more terrifying… life as a teenager. The body horror of puberty beats anything in the human centipede, sharp tongued peers will rip out your guts far quicker than a zombie horde, and the hulking presence of Frankenstein could never live up to that of a displeased parent. Ebi-hime’s latest VN, Lynne, explores this period of horror we all go through growing up. Here are a few of my thoughts on it…
For a medium that’s so obsessed with school aged characters, it’s surprisingly rare for a VN to touch on what it’s actually like as a teenager. Many Japanese VNs immediately label their protagonists as “ordinary,” but feeling ordinary is the last thing on your mind during puberty. Uncertainty over your changing body, worrying about whether there’s something wrong with you, being unsure about who you are or want to be.
When they’re addressed at all, VNs tend to externalise
those struggles. How much easier would life be if you could pin all your
problems on an evil counterpart trying to take over the world? I’ll
take that mecha and fight aliens any day over the crippling loneliness
of self-loathing that puberty can induce.
So it’s refreshing to have a VN that recognises that our greatest struggles are internal ones. So Lynne puts us inside the head of a teenage girl going through the very ordinary problems of growing up, something that isn’t ordinary of VNs at all. It makes her plight painfully relatable at times. This works well because of Ebi-hime’s wonderful ability to paint the scene with specific descriptions (like the brand of bread), without getting bogged down with excessive narration that ruins the pace. The dialogue flows naturally without any heavy handed exposition. The characters don’t ask things they should already know just for the benefit of the reader.
The only unrealistic part of Lynne is not liking toasted crusts, they’re the best bit! /s
The atmosphere is effectively set through a little interface addition: an ever present stress meter. There’s an ominous air to it, the way it relentlessly counts upwards as the story progresses. It’s a great way of building tension, what’ll happen when it reaches 100%?
Lynne is a
short VN so there isn’t much time spent with the other characters, but
they each display such an interesting duality. The outwardly shallow
Jas who seems to be hiding her own self-loathing through the TV shows
she watches, the seemingly confident friend whose ego is propped up by
those exploiting her, and the father who abuses out of love and a
frustration with their own inadequacies.
I was initially disappointed at the ending, it comes so abruptly that it took me a few moments to even realise it had ended. I had to go back to reread the last few sentences to make sure I hadn’t missed something. But in hindsight, I grew to like it. Being thrown so quickly into an all black screen gives her last words more of an impact and makes Lynn’s descent into despair all the darker.
I initially thought that her
last dream had perhaps been a warning of what was to come, Lynn being
criticised for what she’d later do to her doppelgänger, akin to Donnie
Darko, but I don’t think that’s true. It’s more likely that last scene
happened purely in her own head, a final rejection of her hopes to be
perfect.
While
my experience reading Lynne might have been a tense one, there’s a
cathartic release to reading someone else going through that same stress
of growing up as you went through. I enjoyed my time with it and if
you’re interested in serious drama with a relatable setting, it’s
definitely a VN worth trying; just maybe hold off until after exam
season~
