Sister Other Paranoia

I have some pretty mixed feelings about this VN. First off, I think the presentation is gorgeous. The character art is lovely and expressive, with a lot of pretty girls and handsome men, and there's a lot of attention paid to the UI. The story is split into five 'chapters' you can read in any order about five different characters, and each chapter has its own custom border around the text which changes the further into the chapter you read to reflect the mental state of the characters in question. For instance, one character, who is represented as a caterpillar, has a border of leaves, which slowly get more decayed the more you read about him. The imagery adds a lot to the narrative, and it's clear a lot of thought went into the visual elements. There are also some intersting visuals around the way choices are presented. With Mr Caterpillar, there's a pretty nice segment from his POV where you have to click on a pupa to advance his inner monologue, and as his inner monologue becomes more self-pitying, the pupa starts to ooze blood with your mouse clicks. The imagery is pretty obvious but I think it's quite Aesthetic, plus it serves a purpose of making the reader feel complicit in this character's suffering: his inner monologue wouldn't keep spiralling if you didn't keep clicking for more. The music is great too, with each character having their own theme song. The music is quite discordant and has that horror-ish vibe which works well for the story, I liked it a lot. I think the weakest part of this story would be the writing. The story is (mostly) told in 1st person from our MC, Hasuya, though there are parts where other characters get to narrate the story, usually when their mental health has been pushed to the brink. Hasuya is a young up-and-coming author who has published exactly one light novel which was well-received, but now he's struggling to come up with an idea for a sequel. Hasuya spends a lot of the VN moping that he can't write, moping that social media is evil, moping that everybody in the world is stupid and shallow except his genius angel little sister, Sahana, and making references to classical paintings, classic authors like Dazai and Hemingway, and philosophers like Wittgenstein to no real end. The VN feels less like a story with well-defined characters and a plot and more like a manifesto. There is very little dialogue in the VN (and when there is dialogue, it's presented in NVL format with no dialogue tags, which makes it hard to tell who's talking), and the majority of it is comprised of the Hasuya's inner monologue. His concerns about his writing and whether he's a hack if he can't put out a sequel to his successful debut feels a bit like the author, Nyalra, worrying about the success of NSO and wondering if he can put out another story which will be as popular and well-received. I don't know Nyalra personally, of course, and it might be tasteless to speculate on the real author, but the VN places so much focus on writing, the creative process, what it means to be a writer, how the public perceives writers, and being afraid of being unable to meet the public's demands that this VN feels like it was created solely as a means for Nyalra to vent about his own personal problems. Hasuya is pretty insufferable as an MC, given he's so judgemental and rude about everyone and everything (again, apart from his little sister), and there's also an unpleasant note of misogyny that runs through the VN. Hasuya is clearly a misanthrope who hates people equally, regardless of gender, but the way he tears down female characters ia always equated to sexuality and supposed promiscuity in a way it isn't with the male characters. Hasuya's mother, who is in an unfulfilling marriage with a man who pays her no attention, is a dumb bimbo nympho, a girl in his literature club who talks about The Patriarchy and analyses novels through a feminist lens is a man-hating uggo who's upset because men irl aren't attracted to her, this artist on social media who posts cutesy illustrations is clearly only doing it for male attention, and as for Hasuya's crush, Botan, who gets fleshed out the most? She sadly is a fool who can't understand Hasuya's immense intellect and literary references, and when we get to her POV, she praises Hasuya for being a genius and ~oh so much smarter than she could ever hope to be~ [spoiler]Her death scene also feels oddly sexualised, with her making an ahegao face and drooling while also pissing herself, something which is drawn in great detail. The other death scenes in this VN are similarly gory and brutal, but this one felt like Nyalra read DDLC, saw Sayori's death scene, and thought, "OK but what if this was even more exploitative and shocking?"[/spoiler] I don't really have a problem with unlikeable MCs, and I think they can be fun to read about, but it feels like Hasuya doesn't really go through much character development. His little sister, Sahana, offers some pushback about his general solipsism, but it doesn't feel like enough, and it's quite grating to hear Botan fawning over Hasuya and calling him a genius in her POV. Hasuya does get a "damn, maybe I am a bad person and it's wrong to judge people so much" moment in the true ending, which I appreciated, but it's followed up with Sahana going "actually onii-chan you are really hard-working and wonderful and I love you lots and lots", so it doesn't feel like any serious self-reflection is ever done. As for Sahana, Hasuya's little sister, she's barely an element in the story. The VN is called Sister Other Paranoia, and she was plastered all over the marketing material, but she's mostly used as a manic pixie dream imouto plot device who exists to soothe Hasuy's ego and call him a good special boy. She is not allowed to be her own person independent of her onii-chan, but that's par for the course with this VN, where everything is filtered so heavily from Hasuya's POV. Part of me thinks it's quite disingenuous to hype up the little sister so much and use her in all the marketing material when she's barely a factor. It feels like this VN was deliberately trying to bait a certain kind of audience, only to pull the rug out from under them. It also feels a little hypocritical the VN uses the cutesy anime aesthetic when there are portions of the story poking fun at otaku for liking 2D heroines, including some lines which specifically call out the VN studio Key by name for making unrealistically uwu cutesy heroines. I would counter that Sahana in this VN is a similarly unrealistic uwu cutesy heroine who has even less to her than your average Key girl, and I think it's a bit sus she's the only female character in the whole VN which isn't called a dumb slut by virtue of the fact she's the MC's adoring little sister who fawns over him, but that's just me. The story of this VN is almost non-existent, the characters (other than Hasuya) are quite thinly sketched, and the undercurrent of misogyny that runs throughout it discomforting. I will still recommend it regardless, however, because I loved the visual presentation and the music, and there were just enough self-aware moments where Hasuya thinks "damn maybe I am an ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ after all" which were cathartic to read. The VN is short enough I think it's worth checking out by the virtue of its aesthetics, and it is interesting to see a VN attempt a more ~literary~ style which leans more into stream of consciousness inner monologue than dialogue, even if it doesn't always land.