Five Figure Fanwork Exchange

Title: Wonderful Everyday. The subtitle translates to "Discontinuous Existence"; a lot of fans use a shortened version of the Japanese name, SubaHibi, when referring to this game.

Media: Visual Novel (which is basically a CYOA novel in video game format with added pretty pictures and voice acting, for people unfamiliar with the genre)

Approx length: 35-50 hours depending on your reading speed

Where to find it: You can buy SubaHibi on JAST USA or on Steam. If purchasing on Steam, make sure to download the restoration patch, since the unpatched version only contains the first 10% of the game! The original game doesn't have male voice acting (with the exception of Mamiya Takuji), although an updated Japanese version added male voices. I haven't used it myself, but there is a patch you can find here to add male voices into the English release if that's something that interests you. If you wanted to play the Japanese version, the fully-voiced HD edition is available on DMM.

What is it, in summary?: SubaHibi is a little hard to encapsulate into one genre or one concrete story without spoiling a lot of things. That said, an easy way to put it is that SubaHibi tells the story of the events of a fictionalized July 2012 through the eyes of many different people (in first person POV), and you learn a little bit more about what actually happened upon each retelling. The primary genres are probably psychological horror, mystery, drama, and philosophy.

The first chapter is markedly different from the rest. In Rabbit Hole I, Minakami Yuki (our protagonist for both Rabbit Hole chapters) meets a strange girl after said girl (Takashima Zakuro) drops a doll on her from the top of an apartment building. She speaks cryptically and seems very mysterious, and Yuki is drawn to her. The rest of the chapter is mostly slice-of-life GL moege fare (with some added philosophy), in which Yuki can choose between her childhood friends, twin sisters Kagami and Tsukasa, or the mysterious Zakuro. When choosing one of the sisters, Zakuro moves away and Yuki lives the rest of her life in peace with her new girlfriend, but... If Yuki chooses Zakuro, the game goes slightly off the rails; reality is put into question, and the chapter ends with the very eyebrow-raising line "Yuki opened her eyes".

The next chapter and all chapters following it take place in a more realistic world, one that isn't all fluffy sunshine and rainbows with cute girls talking about their favorite philosophers. Certain events start unfolding at Kita High (the high school that most of our main characters attend), including a string of unusual deaths over the course of a week, and Yuki tries to get to the bottom of the mystery. But maybe what lies beneath is more than what Yuki bargained for... There are rumblings about the world ending on July 20th - the End Sky, that all humans must be returned to the sky before then, and things seem to be heading in that direction the more that Yuki uncovers.

What do you love about it?: The theming and characters in SubaHibi are amongst my favorite in any media I've consumed in a long time. Tachibana Kimika is one of my all-time favorite characters, and there's so much shipping potential between all of the girls! Kimika/Zakuro is AMAZING for messy childhood friends with loyalty kink and misunderstandings, if that's a trope you like and have been longing to see more of in F/F (like me). (They are also situationally canon if that is a selling point!) Kimika might not ever be a POV character, but she's definitely one of the more interesting characters in SubaHibi and I really love her motivations/reasons for doing things/the way she views the world. Her relationship with Takuji is fascinating and touching, too, but hard to talk about without spoilers. I'm also a big fan of Yuki and Zakuro, both individually as characters and together, and there's an M/F ship that I really like that is unfortunately a massive spoiler.

The absolute descent into madness that is It's My Own Invention and Looking-Glass Insects is something I also super appreciate and really loved as I was reading; I think It's My Own Invention especially benefited from being in visual novel format since I don't think it would have worked as well as a book or as an anime. SubaHibi really used the medium well to illustrate how and why the narrators of these chapters lose their grip on reality.

Something I also really love about SubaHibi is that a bunch of things are deliberately left up to interpretation. I think it's really neat seeing other people's theories about what's actually going on in some instances where the answer isn't obvious or is left intentionally vague. (On the flip-side, you will probably be left frustrated if you need answers to every single question, or even most questions. While these two pieces of media are very different, I'd say the way it handles answering questions is somewhat similar to LOST.)

What sort of things are you likely to request for it? This fandom has only one short one-shot in terms of fanfiction as of the time that I'm writing this, so I would love anything! I have a handful of favorite ships and characters that I'm requesting (het smarm, m/f, and f/f, in addition to solo female characters), and I'm open to extrapolations of canon, canon divergence, and post-canon scenarios, in addition to whatever unusual story you would like to tell!

I love IF and would be very happy to receive it for this canon if you are inspired to write IF.

I'm likely to request this fandom for Heart Attack.

Content warnings and other notes: Content warnings include and are not limited to noncon (m->f, f->f, dog->f [this scene is maybe 20 lines long], f->m, and m->m; some if it is horny and some of it is played for horror, almost all of it is from victim's POV), incest (noncon daughter->father, consensual brother/sister, consensual m/f selfcest), suicide (including POV character committing suicide, POV character witnessing suicide, and mass suicide), POV characters having delusions of grandeur/persecutory delusions/religious delusions/psychosis, gore and violence, murder, flashing lights, very intense bullying, nonconsensual drugging and recreational drug use, a lesbian character getting raped by men (this isn't corrective rape but I still thought it probably merits a warning).

All characters are "over 18" according to the title screen; that said, one of them looks very young and I know the word "coded" is misused a lot, but this character is coded as 14-ish and is involved in on-screen sex (she is explicitly at least a few years younger than most of the rest of the cast, who are in their last year of high school, and some dialogue implies she's around four years younger; her appearance is barely pubescent).

It's also probably important to note that a few characters talk like they exist on late '00s/early '10s 4chan; this is a deliberate translation choice that usually feels in character, but it leads to a lot of ableist slurs/language and some homophobic/transphobic slurs too. There is a minor okama character who is the butt of some unfortunate "jokes".

The POV character of It's My Own Invention (the third chapter) is extremely polarizing and it's by far the longest chapter in the game, about 34% of the full length. If getting deeply into a stereotypical 4chan otaku's head does not sound like a fun time (including all the bigoted parts), then you're probably going to struggle with most or all of this chapter. This is also the chapter that contains the most intense psychosis segments.

I know this is a hefty content warning list, but I think that SubaHibi is known as a classic/one of the highest rated VNs of all time (both in Japanese-speaking and English-speaking spheres) for a reason and it's well worth the read if none of these things are deal-breakers. Lots of terrible things happen in this game, but I came away from it feeling a new appreciation for life rather than feeling depressed.

If you have further questions/concerns/need to know if something I didn't list in the content warnings (but is a deal-breaker for you) is present in the game, please feel free to DM me on dreamwidth (shamebucket) or message me on Discord (I go by shamebucket on the Exchanges After Dark, Triple Crown, and Yuletide servers). You can also leave a comment on my general contact post if you'd rather remain anonymous or don't use dreamwidth/Discord.