spoiler

When the feels train hits you the first time, you really don’t feel any urge to fap. You just… breathe, and walk around a little, wondering what the heck just happened.

In honor of Katawa Shoujo’s recent release on Steam (and Itch) (originally announced in u/Suriko’s post here), here’s a blast from the past. An old poll of 4chan (one of the earliest polls to my knowledge, though I could be wrong) was done in 2012, with interesting results.

Now that it’s more than a day since KS got released on these platforms to a wider audience, some of new weebs would have been hit by the feels train and can vibe with this meme.

KS was also the first time the original “I know that feel bro” wojak exploded in popularity (to my knowledge), and that wojak has outlived rageface comics to form a core foundations of memes even a decade later (doomer wojak, depressed wojak, and so on). The impact which KS has had on Internet culture is probably vast and unknown, yet the positive impact it has had on the lives of those that played it is, as shown by the survey, no less vast, and certainly no less real.

Yes, some folks at r/visualnovels who have played great Japanese VNs (which probably inspired KS) made by full studios might sometimes consider KS to be a relatively decent effort made by a team of amateurs and not quite on par with, say, the likes of White Album 2. But even most jaded VN purists there would grudgingly admit it was a special game in many ways… “Lightining in a bottle” is often used to describe certain unrepeatable events like Hololive’s Gura’s meteoric rise, and it’s no surprise the same was used to describe Katawa Shoujo’s cultural impact all those years ago (credits to u/alwayslonesome for the great comment).

So whether you’re new to this rodeo, or you’ve been on it long enough to shitpost about it, welcome to the feels train and the visual novel community! For those KS veterans, here’s a little gift whether you were always there from the start, came as a result of Gigguk’s video in 2022, or somehow found out about this work of love somewhere along the way.

For those interested in what happened to members of 4LS after Katawa Shoujo’s successful original release, some have unfortunately passed on (RIP Raide - an artist and director of Katawa Shoujo), while a few still walk AMONGUS over at r/katawashoujo (where the >!casualties of the feels train go to recover!< and reminisce). u/CplCrud (main writer for Hanako) and u/Suriko (main writer for Lilly, co-writer for Hanako) have worked on other VNs since then, with First Snow, Twofold, and A Tithe in Blood all VNs which Suriko has worked on, and Historia as a VN CplCrud has worked on. If you enjoyed their work in Katawa Shoujo, you might enjoy their later creations too!

(If you’re very lucky, you might catch a glimpse of u/4LS_Aura, the writer of Rin’s path, somwhere on Reddit. But most of the original crew are active on Twitter/sites other than Reddit.)

Source: 2012 Katawa Shoujo 4chan Survey