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7/10/2025, 1:22:44 AM
>>11329768
I think it's become common to be very unfair to Chio. She's been through a lot and it was made obvious to her long ago that it is all for nothing. She cannot have a family and is at the age where she is presumably pushed to neurotic awareness of this. She cannot have a career. She cannot have a meaningful social position and respect unless she manages to be attached to the appointed supervisor. She and Akari have both been drawered for long enough that they reflect answers to the human search for belonging and meaning in continuous circumstances, since the drawer is no longer an extraordinary circumstance to them. Akari finds that there is no meaning, but Chio is different. All she can do at this point in life is try to hold on to whatever minor joy or pleasure each moment, each experience and each person can bring. The epicurean hedonist is not one who lives in the pursuit of pleasure, nor a slave to the passions, but one who chooses to live without fear and to embrace the moment. And despite embracing the moment, despite having no choice, Chio remains afraid. Akari is the stoic who rejects the moment and the impossible while also rejecting fear, but Chio is more faulted. The fantasy of Rin's virginity is a fantasy of attaining enduring meaning, and when that is taken away it hurts because she falls short of being a true hedonist. She pushes her fear aside in the end but it is still visible how it has shaped her and it is not really clear that it is better to overcome that fear than to live with it the way most others do.
I find Chio's death the saddest moment in the game. When she thanks Saeko for everything, it represents the complete destruction of a human being in a way that is possibly more extreme than Clara's destruction if/when Rin gives her his version of the Judas Kiss.
I think it's become common to be very unfair to Chio. She's been through a lot and it was made obvious to her long ago that it is all for nothing. She cannot have a family and is at the age where she is presumably pushed to neurotic awareness of this. She cannot have a career. She cannot have a meaningful social position and respect unless she manages to be attached to the appointed supervisor. She and Akari have both been drawered for long enough that they reflect answers to the human search for belonging and meaning in continuous circumstances, since the drawer is no longer an extraordinary circumstance to them. Akari finds that there is no meaning, but Chio is different. All she can do at this point in life is try to hold on to whatever minor joy or pleasure each moment, each experience and each person can bring. The epicurean hedonist is not one who lives in the pursuit of pleasure, nor a slave to the passions, but one who chooses to live without fear and to embrace the moment. And despite embracing the moment, despite having no choice, Chio remains afraid. Akari is the stoic who rejects the moment and the impossible while also rejecting fear, but Chio is more faulted. The fantasy of Rin's virginity is a fantasy of attaining enduring meaning, and when that is taken away it hurts because she falls short of being a true hedonist. She pushes her fear aside in the end but it is still visible how it has shaped her and it is not really clear that it is better to overcome that fear than to live with it the way most others do.
I find Chio's death the saddest moment in the game. When she thanks Saeko for everything, it represents the complete destruction of a human being in a way that is possibly more extreme than Clara's destruction if/when Rin gives her his version of the Judas Kiss.
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