Breakfast Soup · 11:03am Mar 30th, 2020
I wanted to write this exhaustive academic analysis after revisiting Butterfly Soup, a short visual novel by Brianna Lei, creator of Pom Gets Wi-Fi. She literally writes the best character dialogue since William Shakespeare, so you should buy this game immediately.
(also it's free)
I won't spoil anything at all here, just wanted to describe how the VN makes such a smart choice about story structure.
The game is about these 4 friends (oops, spoilers) in highschool, and the story is split into 4 chapters, each from a different character's point of view. You see them from the outside, before you inhabit their mind and experience their inner life. You see the stereotype first, then who they really are under the surface, all Breakfast Club style. Except Breakast Club didn't have chapters or episodes, a pity.
This isn't new, it's something I've gone on for years about how the British teen drama Skins nails perfectly. Each character gets an episode from their perspective, each a self-contained arc with character development and catharsis, and the whole series adds up to one bigger arc. I love it when episodic stories do that.
The question is, where do you start? You can't make it feel right from the start that you're going down a checklist, you have to at least hide it by having a good reason. Skins picks Tony as its first character for a very interesting reason, and Butterfly Soup starts with shy athlete Diya. On a surface level, it helps that both these characters are the center of their friend groups, the one everybody knows.
In the later chapters, Diya is so quiet that sometimes her presence goes unnoticed. Or she's awkward, potentially coming across as cold or unfriendly. By starting with Diya and her inner voice, you're already the most familiar with her whenever she appears later. All the other characters are much more talkative, so this isn't nearly a problem with them, it's ok to start with your first impressions (whether positive or negative!) and develop on that later. Diya has to be first, so you don't assume wrongly about her. This has to be a deliberate authorial choice.
Though it also helps that in hindsight, she's also the perfect starting character for the plot. It feels so natural that you won't really notice, it's not like it's manipulative or anything. So maybe I'm entirely wrong about this being deliberate.
But oh yeah, I mentioned the arc thing, right? It's not nearly so dramatic as Skins, and it feels more like 1 story split between 4 characters, instead of 4 stories for 4 characters. Each chapter does have its own mini-arc, but it doesn't really do that episode thing I like so much.
... but I think it might actually be something better.
The stakes aren't that high. It's more slice of life than teen drama. It may be one story split into 4 parts, but I think it's a mistake to think that it's just one character's story. Characters don't exactly grow here, at least not in that significant degree we tend to expect from dramas. In truth, the story isn't about the characters as individuals, but the relationships between all four. Those spaces are where the spotlight is aimed.
6 relationship stories told within 4 chapters. That's 50% more efficient than Skins! checkmate
(if i did a patreon, would you pay for more junk like this?)
Cool I’ll try it out!
I would definitely pay money for more of these posts (starting in May); I need codified blogs to want to comment on to get me to actually ever watch/read anything ;_;