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Sekai Project VN Start of Kickstarter Estimated delivery Actual delivery World End Economica June 2014 May 2015 Not yet delivered Clannad November 11th 2014 October 2015 March 2016 Grisaia Trilogy December 2014 October 2015 April 2018 Memory’s Dogma June 2015 December 2016 Part 1 of 3 delivered August 2020 The Human Reignition Project June 2015 December 2016 Not yet delivered Narcissu 10th Anniversary Anthology Project October 2015 April 2016 Not yet delivered Root Double January 2016 March 2016 November 2016 Chrono Clock August 2016 April 2017 Not yet delivered A Clockwork Ley-Line Febuary 2017 January 2018 Not yet delivered Fatal Twelve March 2017 January 2018 November 2018 Hoshizora No Memoria May 2017 September 2018 Not yet delivered Shining Song Starnova August 2017 August 2018 June 2019 A light in the Dark February 2018 June 2018 July 2019 Tokyo Chronos July 2018 April 2019 October 2020 Frontwing VN Start of Kickstarter Estimated delivery Actual delivery Corona Blossom vol 1 June 2016 October 2016 July 2019 Corona Blossom vol 2 September 2016 December 2016 July 2019 Sharin no Kuni November 2016 October 2017 Not yet delivered Corona Blossom vol 3 December 2016 March 2017 July 2019 Grisaia Phantom Trigger Volume 1 and 2 March 2017 June 2017 March 2019 Grisaia Complete box March 2017 Q4 2017 Febuary 2019 Grisaia Phantom Trigger Volume 3 June 2017 September 2017 Not yet delivered Wonderful Everyday August 2017 January 2018 Not yet delivered Grisaia Phantom Trigger Volume 4 November 2017 April 2018 Not yet delivered Momoiro Closet Febuary 2018 July 2018 Not yet delivered Grisaia Phantom Trigger Volume 5 June 2018 October 2018 Not yet delivered Island August 2018 December 2018 Not yet delivered Sol Press VN Start of Kickstarter Estimated delivery Actual delivery Sakura Sakura August 2017 December 2017 Not yet delivered Newton and the Apple Tree December 2017 May 2018 Not yet delivered Irotoridori no Sekai Febuary 2019 December 2021 Not yet delivered Others VN Start of Kickstarter Estimated delivery Actual delivery Muv-Luv September 2015 September 2016 July 2018 Libra of the Vampire Princess December 2015 November 2016 May 2017 Dies Irae December 2016 May 2017 April 2018 Koropokkur March 2018 September 2018 October 2018 Venusblood Frontier September 2018 December 2019 December 2019 Seven Days September 2018 January 2019 Desember 2019 Aokana June 2019 December 2019 September 2020

A few days ago I watched an anime about a series of child murders. The show was pretty solid except for the fact that I was able to correctly guess the culprit the moment the show established that they were going to be more than just a minor character. Was it because the show was really bad at foreshadowing? No, except for one scene where the protagonist casually mentions that the culprit could be someone he knows. Was the character behaving suspiciously? No, they were cooperative to the point of actively sabotaging the murder attempts. Then what did they do wrong to earn my suspicions right from the beginning? Be a grown male authority figure with a more or less friendly relationship to the young protagonist without being related to them by blood. I'm relatively new to anime and visual novels*, and I've already seen characters fitting this description turn out to be villainous to varying degrees in about ten different titles (in one of them even twice within a few chapters).** Some of these guys are just being forced into doing something shady because of unfortunate circumstances while some them are psychopathic monsters because the writers liked themselves some shock value. Sometimes they are only minor villains or even red herrings, sometimes they are the big bad. What most of them have in common is that they at least pretend to be helping the protagonist out to the best of their abilities while secretly using the information they get from their conversations against them. I found only one example where the character in question is female, and even then the same twist happens another time with the male one being the major villain (#feminism I guess?). I get why this trope is popular with writers. The culprit should be someone who has been introduced early on and appeared in a reasonable amount of scenes for their reveal not to come out of nowhere. They should be an adult to have the necessary physical, mental and financial capabilities to properly commit and cover up a crime. Having a close relationship with the protagonist is a good justification for giving them enough scenes in a story that mostly revolves around younger characters. Add to that the betrayal of the protagonist's trust and you have everything for a good dark twist. So in theory "the nice adult is actually a murderer" can be a very effective trope if well implemented, it's just so overused it lost most of its its element of surprise, at least to me. I suspect that the writers of some of the titles I consumed were aware of this, but instead of not utilizing the trope they took the "let's add shock value by making the bad guy psychopatically evil" route, which is something that rarely turns out well, even if you add in discussions about the nature of psychopathy. I would really love to give examples of cases where I either really liked or really hated the implementation of this trope to add a bit more substance to my rambling. But I have no idea how to discuss plot twists when even mentioning the title of the game means spoiling them, so this will have to do. *This twist isn't exclusive to Japanese media. For example two of the first four Harry Potter books utilize it and I played one well known western storytelling game that does as well. **I even went through my vndb profile and made a list to confirm this. The reason I don't share it here is obviously spoilers.