Non-stop Bullet Debate!
Finally posting my piece from the @saioumazine featuring trial thematics from V3! Had a lot of fun with the angle in this piece, I hope everyone who got the zine enjoyed it!
Alright! So I admit I don’t remember the origins of the naming scheme. I remember that I had some other pattern for the titles at first, but as for what is was, I’ve got no idea.
But somehow I got to the point where I was thinking about using yojijukugo, a.k.a. four-symbol idioms (here’s a random page with examples) that fit the theme of what was going on. However, I found that searching for them was quite difficult. There was no convenient page I could find that had a large list of them, especially not translated properly.
I believe Chapter 1 is the only title that ended up being a yojijukugo (but maybe not because it doesn’t seem like an idiom?), but I know I just ran into it while searching.
It means, “refusal to accept the present situation; denial of the existing situation,” and if that isn’t the perfect way to start off Kind Lie, I don’t know what is.
After this one, however, I think I struggled to find any more, so I let go of the idiom pattern and just looked for preferably-4 character Japanese words that represented something important about the chapter.
My method was to pick an english word, plop in into my english-japanese dictionary, and look for a result that felt right.
Meaning: to meet unexpected difficulties, to be delayed
Chapter 1 ends with Kaito declaring that he’ll go to space despite his illness. In responce, Chapter 2 is essentially a message of “that’ll be a lot harder than you think.” I believe the keyword I used to find this word was “difficulties.”
This is my absolute favourite chapter name so far, because it has multiple meanings that were just so perfect for the chapter!!
Meanings:
1. to bear, to carry on one's back
2. to take responsibility for; to accept a duty
3. to be injured
4. to owe
1. Kaito is bearing the physical weight of his illness and exhaustion; Even better, he is also literally carried by both Maki and Kirumi in this chapter.
2. Kaito’s long accepted the duty of helping Maki and Shuichi grow and gain confidence in themselves. He feels completely responsible for their development, and by the end of the chapter, decides that his sidekicks can’t find out about his illness, because he can’t be the reason that they withdraw from their growth. Second, Kaito’s also being told to take responsibility for “bullying Kokichi”. Third, is the question of who is actually responsible for Kokichi’s supposed injuries. And on a more positive note, Maki, Shuichi, and Kirumi all accept the task of helping Kaito.
3. Kokichi’s injured, Kaito’s injured—how is this word so perfect for this chapter???
4. A bit of a more abstract one, but Kaito feels like he owes it to his sidekicks to act like nothing is wrong. Meanwhile I was also thinking about how Maki and Shuichi owe a lot Kaito, but he doesn’t realize it.
For the record, I picked the name after I wrote the chapter. To me it’s incredible how well this matched up. I used the keyword “injured” for my search.
Meaning: partially out of despair, partly in desperation, somewhat out of frustration
The keyword was one of those nouns, but honestly I can’t remember which one. Chapter 4 mostly features space_hero and usotsuki talking. “Partly in desperation” can describe quite a lot of things, can’t it? From Kaito’s denial, to Kokichi’s lying, to Kaito forcing himself to admit what the problem is, to Kokichi forcing himself to talk about himself—these boys need a better motivator.
“Partially out of despair,” is an interesting one, but one that I was pleased to include. In the scene analysis I just wrote, I sort of mentioned how Kaito will do anything to hold onto hope. Since “despair” is such an dramatic word in the danganronpa series, it holds so much weight to imply that Kaito might be doing something out of despair. But more so, for now at least, Kaito is doing a lot of things in rejection of despair. But that can only work for so far...
"Out of frustration” is less important, but represents Kokichi trying to get space_hero angry so that he can be tricked admitting his honest thoughts, as well as how often Kaito gets frustrated with himself and with his situation this chapter. Not to mention how frustrated he is with Kokichi.
As for Chapter 5,
I haven’t decided on a name yet, since the chapter isn’t done.
However I tried some searches, and found a couple ones that you can translate if you want a sneak peak. ;D
骨折り損 is my favourite I think.
抜山蓋世 is a little ironic.
会心の友 is interesting, but only if usotsuki shows up this chapter.
猫を被る is another very interesting choice, depending on what happens in the rest of this chapter.
Though I no longer need to stick to the 4-character format, I’m probably going to force myself to stick with it. After all, 4 has some interesting meanings... 🤔
hi im just here to show off my lil kokichi pin i got! i have it for some time already and not sure if its still in stock, but check it!! its by @florosprout
Anyways its super cute and great and I love it!!!! Sometimes he looks into two different directions and it looks super stupid and makes me smile everytime and i lovehim i lvoe hhim i love h
Hey, I really want to hear you talk about Kind Lie because I'm always so impressed at the amount of thought you put into your writing. I wanted to ask what was the most difficult scene to write so far and why ? Can you do a commentary of that scene ? I'm also curious about the chapter titles. How do you chose them ?
Thanks for leaving an ask, and thank you for showing interest in KL as always, even when it’s been almost a year since the last update.
There’s a scene in chapter 3 that popped into my head immediately thanks to a huge mistake I almost made, and looking back at that scene, there were some other tricky parts just before it, so I’ll just commentate that whole part of the story ;D
The context is, Kaito has woken up after (essentially) passing out the previous day because of exhaustion and a minor head injury—and suddenly remembers that he missed his arranged meeting with usotsuki.
(under the cut)
Alright so not much to talk about really, but I do remember having no idea how to describe the frantic spamming of mouse clicks that a person does when impatient.
Again nothing special, but Kokichi’s lack of worry here is notable for two reasons:
First, despite Kokichi always making a lot of assumptions whenever he can, it’s still always based off of some sort of evidence. If there’s no reason for him to assume something, he won’t. He has no reason to think something went wrong, so he has no reason to assume so. Similarly, he has no reason yet to even consider the possibility that he’s talking to Kaito, something a lot of readers don’t seem to realize. Kokichi is just smart, not omnipotent.
Second, it’s just reminding the reader that Kokichi doesn’t know about space_hero’s condition and thus has no reason at this time to worry. That changes quite quickly, however.
Alright, and here we get to one of the two really difficult parts of this scene, and the most difficult part about writing a character who thrives off of denial.
Kaito would never let himself finish the thought of, “what if I had died,” which makes it really hard for me to express what specifically he’s not-thinking about in this scene.
There are plenty of moments in KL where Kaito is an unreliable narrator/POV, and there are so many times where I’m not able to actually talk about what is going on through Kaito’s head because he’s actively avoiding/burying it. Since KL strictly follows his POV, I can’t suddenly jump out with a detached description saying something like, “Kaito refused to even think about dying from his illness” because Kaito is refusing to think about it.
Personally I think this makes for an interesting read, because I have to depend on the reader to fill in the blanks themselves. But that can also make it more confusing. Let’s take a look at what follows:
If the reader can’t understand what Kaito was stopping himself from thinking, they can’t understand why he reacts so dramatically. Kaito is so unwilling to even think about the possibility of his illness being terminal that he has to physically jerk himself out of his thoughts.
I think I played around with this scene a lot, because I was really worried about it being very hard to guess how Kaito was going to finish his sentence. I’m sure there’s some way I could have made it more obvious, but it’s just moments like these that make it really hard being stuck in Kaito’s POV.
Another difficult thing is describing the physical symptoms of his anxiety towards his situation. This is most notable in chapter 4, but it’s something I was concerned about as I reread KL for this ask. For Kaito to start suddenly coughing, hyperventilating, or for him to tense up at a moment’s notice—obviously all of that seems very questionable. However, that’s not what’s happening.
What’s going on is, Kaito is subconsciously and sometimes willingly ignoring himself beginning to tense up, or forgetting to breathe and relax. That leads to the physical stress building up without him noticing, and he only becomes aware of it when something very stressful or shocking happens, which causes that stress to overload and cause a huge physical reaction.
But again, if a reader can’t consider that, then it seems like I’m just dialing Kaito’s physical state to whatever the moment needs it to be.
All of this is mostly just classic Kaito distracting himself from his thoughts. I’m also trying to set up the fact that he and Rantaro actually are friends, that Rantaro travels and skips school a lot, and also that not a lot of people stick around Hope’s Peak Academy during the weekends. It was mentioned earlier in this chapter that Maki, Shuichi, and even Kirumi had somewhere else to be during the weekend. In Chapter 2, Kokichi went on a small rant that everyone, “even Ryouma,” hadn’t stayed at the school that night.
All of that, as well as Kaito knowing who would be around at school during the weekend, as well as “why can’t anyone normal ever sticking around” implying that this is a complaint he’s had before, implies that Kaito, unlike a lot of his peers, doesn’t usually leave HPA, and that that isn’t normal for an Ultimate student. Which might lead the reader to think that maybe Kaito has nowhere/no one else to visit.
Of course, there’s also enough clues to realize Kokichi also doesn’t leave HPA. If the reader knows about Kokichi’s and Kaito’s event where they’re the only two students around during the holidays, than perhaps it’ll be easier for them to go, “oh yeah.”
Alright, here’s the part that made my instantly think of this as the hardest scene in the fic:
It’s just that one line, but it was a pretty big deal to me.
Because originally, that line happened, and then Kaito kind of just wasted the rest of the day doing nothing, and it would be that way until he got a response from usotsuki.
I came back a few hours later to continue writing, reread that part, and it suddenly struck me how completely out of character that was.
Normally I’m pretty confident in my interpretation of Kaito’s character, but in that moment, I had completely lost a part of Kaito—the one that never stops trying.
Because that’s the reason behind Kaito’s entire denial. It’s not that he doesn’t believe he can get sick, or doesn’t acknowledge death as a part of life—Suddenly Kaito is being told that he has no choice but to abandon all of his dreams, and that he should accept the fact that he’s likely going to die, with no control over any of it.
No one is telling him that if he takes really good care of himself he can push through, or that it’s still possible he can recover and go to space. If that were the case, then we’d probably see a very different story, one where Kaito aims to do absolutely everything to ensure his survival and fitness. Instead, it’s a firm, 100% statement of “it’s impossible, there’s nothing you can do, and you need to give up.”
There is no space for him to try. There is no solution to the problem. Kaito is someone who needs to believe that he has control over the situation, believe that he can choose his own fate. Acknowledging the reality of his situation would break him, and thus denial is the only thing keeping him together. If Kaito loses hope, then he can’t go back.
Small little tangent aside, I felt like in that moment, I forgot what the root of this entire story was. And thus, this scene became a moment where I was pulling from my own feelings more than Kaito’s.
Now I’m a lot more careful about it and I’m often checking that Kaito is true to his beliefs, so hopefully there are no other moments like this in the future.
“That’s stupid” is a call out aimed directly at myself, haha. I do want to say that I left one line of Kaito’s inclination to do nothing just as a sort of tease of sorts. Right now Kaito isn’t giving up, but will that always be true?
Another bit of what could be foreshadowing, or maybe an innocent spark of foreboding for the readers.
Space is Kaito’s motivation, the embodiment of his dreams. In the past, looking at the sky gave him hope, but now there’s a sense of fear(—fear that he might not ever get to reach them). Once again, with Kaito hiding his negative thoughts, I really hope readers can put the pieces together and understand what the “sense of dread” is about.
But hey, this time I quite directly imply what it was. I’m quite lucky Kaito is at least vocal about his “positive” thoughts.
And with that, we end the scene with even more of Kaito distracting himself from all his problems!
I hope that this was somewhat interesting!! This might not be an important scene in the overall plot, but I guess it’s a good representation of Kaito’s denial, as well as a good representation of how I sometimes like to hide extra information in unassuming paragraphs.
TLDR, this scene was the hardest to write because my point of view character is preventing me from actually describing what’s going on, and also it’s sometimes hard to separate his attitude from my own.
(I’ll answer your second question in a separate post, just because of how long this got.)
