ルーパーズ ♾ Chapter 14 (Visual Novel Book Club)

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Current chapter start date: October 21, 2022
Home thread: ルーパーズ ♾ (Visual Novel Book Club) // Currently Reading!

Loopers

Previous part: Week 13

Next part: Week 15

We’re reading ルーパーズ as part of the Visual Novel Book Club!

As of the time of posting this, reading is scheduled for 1 chapter per week. But feel free to jump in and ask questions or give your thoughts later! There are always people watching these threads :eyes:

Pace

The current chapter can be seen in the menu, and you’re encouraged to keep an eye on that if you wish to read at the club’s official pace! To make this easier, the following image also marks the end of the chapter. While the image may not necessarily be a meaningful spoiler, it’s collapsed by default as there’s no reason to immediately display the images to anyone who crosses through this thread. 用心するに越したことはない

Chapter End Image

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Discussion Guidelines

  • Please use spoiler tags for major events in the current chapter(s) and any content in future chapters.
  • When asking for help, do your best to provide context. Pasted text, screenshots, descriptions, etc. Unlike book clubs we can’t flip to relevant pages, so we may need a little help identifying exactly what is being discussed.
  • Feel totally at ease to ask questions or give your thoughts, any time! Clubs live and die by participation, and asking whatever question you have, no matter how silly it may seem, helps others who are reading it and even the answerer themselves.
  • Have fun, and do your best to interpret anything said with as much good faith as possible :slightly_smiling_face:

Participants

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0 voters

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I’m still in the midst of reading (~2000 characters in), but just came across something I wanted to share:

There’s a section that is presented differently from the usual text boxes that at first I thought might not be hookable, but I just had to search through more hooks and found one that worked for it. It’s entirely possible that you might be on one that works for the normal boxes but not this. Thought it might be useful to mention.

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Good to know, thanks! I’ll try to read a bit later, now you got me curious :eyes: .

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Chapter spoilers

That was unexpectedly short :o . Does that mean next chapter will be massive? :joy:

Well there it is. I don’t want to @/mention people inside spoilers obviously, but you were spot on. She is indeed sick :frowning: . It’s a very little touch but when they learned about her being sick, I really liked that リタポン changed her speech to a normal one, that was good. Like obviously in such a situation she’s not going to act quirky. ホリー still talked as always, I wonder if her speech is not that strange? I still have difficulties with how she speaks though, I can’t make sense of those であります after plain verbs, uh. Ultimately I get the idea of what she’s saying, but it’s so weird that であります can be attached to verbs in plain form. It’s also not the first time I see it, I saw it a lot from soldier type characters in both FFVII and FFXIV.

Anyways, other than the disclosure of the sickness and the surgery not a whole lot has happened but wow, this chapter got me sucked into it with its tension. I can’t believe how much I needed the plot to move forward. I think I’ll need to come back and reread some parts though, perhaps because it’s late and my brain is a bit slow.

So the idea is that because she was close to stage 4, she lost every bit of hope towards any kind of recovery. The surgery was a complete mystery and it didn’t guarantee that she was even going to wake up. No wonder she lost hope. However, I don’t think I understood correctly what they said about her “soul” not wanting to return, that definitely needs a reread, but let me know if I got it right. Because her soul doesn’t want to return, that means she ultimately can’t wake up in reality even if the surgery was a success? And タイラ was regretting not forcing her to cross the portal. So now they’re in reality with her but they can’t reach her, and they’re (especially タイラ) hoping that she gains hope back? But how is she going to return either way, if the portal is closed now? I guess that was left unmentioned. And even if she comes back, it’s not so sure that she will be fine. タイラ believes she’ll be fine, and the rest don’t seem so sure…

I was expecting this chapter to be long but I guess the next one or two will be the ones that will deliver. The actual last chapter I suppose won’t be very long, but just taking a guess. I hope two chapters are enough to sort everything about 探し女 though, now I’m a bit worried with big questions still in the air :sweat_smile: . I want them to hop into 時の渦 again and do a massive treasure hunt :eyes: .

Also still no appearance of クロ or カイ. At this point I’m not so sure about them fitting in the story :joy: .

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This one is only about 5300 characters long, one of our shortest! Right after I said I thought they’d be long, heh.

Spoilers

Yeah I think that’s basically it. The way I read it is that the doctor says the surgery was successful, but for some reason she’s still in a coma. Leading them to the conclusion that it isn’t the disorder at fault anymore, it’s the fact she is locked away in the time vortex, leading to her body just sleeping. And they themselves acknowledged they have no known way to pull her out. Which I suppose is obvious enough but was the exact theory I was gearing up to post before they made it explicit.

Agree on this being a solid chapter! Personally had never heard of this disorder, has anyone here? It does seem to be real, though I didn’t look into how accurate the description of stages or the surgery was.

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Spoilers

Nope, not at all. In fact I read a little bit about it superficially on Wikipedia afterwards. Doesn’t sound fun at all, I’ll tell you that :frowning: . The alternative of a perpetual limbo in which you relive the same day over and over and over doesn’t sound like an amazing alternative either. Terrible situation to be in either way. Hopefully they find an alternative that fixes both problems. I’m still hopeful for a massive treasure hunt :eyes: I want them to team up and search for hints that lead for other hints and mysteries and whatnot. I’m high on copium because we don’t have many chapters left, but hey, maybe!

Edit: just rereading a bit the Wikipedia page, it doesn’t mention anything about the surgery or the stages sadly. I’m not sure how accurate that might have been in the VN :thinking: . A quick search in the web doesn’t mention about the stages, either. Not sure how accurate I’m being with these searches, though.

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Chapter spoilers

I was also quite curious about this disease. The latest research article I found on this disease was from 2016. The section about the treatments doesn’t mention anything related to brain surgery as possible treatment - largely because the underlying cause of the disease remains a huge mystery, with theories both proposing issues at the brain and hormonal levels.

The theories related to the brain concentrate on the hypothalamus and thalamus area, so I guess that could be the target of the surgery, but I can’t find any evidence that it’s ever been proposed, much less performed. Patients with this disease very often go through brain imaging MRI (mostly to discard other diseases), but it seems no alterations or abnormalities are detected there, so it’s hard to imagine what the surgery could do exactly.

I also cannot find any reference to the 4 stages, but there’s mention that the episodes tend to become more frequent and last longer as the person ages.

It also doesn’t appear to be deadly in most cases. Some people suffer from it in childhood / adolescence but turn back to normal around their twenties. Others continue to experience episodes from time to time (an average of 6 months) and episodes can last for 6 ~ 80 days. During episodes these people might sleep 20+ hours, but most of them still wake up every day even if for a little while.

So there does seem to be a few tweaks made to the disease for the sake of this story.

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This chapter ended up being shorter than I expected, especially since last week’s was short too.

Spoilers

Like everyone else, I had never heard of this disease until now. I didn’t really do any research on it though, just a small google search when it was mentioned cause I was confused.

I am going to guess that somehow サイモン finds a way to get the gang (or maybe just タイラ) back into the 時の渦 by the end of the game and then have some huge emotional scene with them saving ミア. Since the surgery was a success, I think they’d only have to convince her to leave the 時の渦 and then she can live her life again in the real world?

When I read Monkeys there was a character that had a speech style similar to that. I don’t know why but something about that style annoys me :joy:

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spoilers

image

I definitely started to read this as “Akuma de kanousei…”
I’m really not sure if that’s Street Fighter rotting my brain or too much anime in general, lol.

I thought this was a little weird. I’m assuming it was not an easy surgery, but it seems they were done within a day and were not expecting someone to be out afterwards? Not that it matters in grand scheme of fiction, but… well, it seems with the rest of the comments they’re taking liberties on the medical stuff. It’s an enjoyable read regardless.

This was kind of the same as the prologue, but in my case it broke text hooks so after that section I had to save and reload the game. It’s not to say they were completely broken, but something was going on that it was generating new hooks every so many characters (even mid lines).

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Hahaha that’s a great way to parse that actually. Feel like I probably would have too but something I’ve read a little while back liked to use あくまで enough that I’ve got it pretty ingrained now. Can’t remember what…

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As usual with VN’s and anime. It’s still better than the ubiquitous “mysterious unnamed terminal disease” :smiley:

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35 minutes for this one. Some things were clarified but it was as I expected so not much surprise there. Curious how they might try so solve this though. Getting (slowly) closer to the end!

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I am seven text boxes/screens into this chapter (second time Simon says something in this chapter) and…

Rant

SERIOUSLY?!?!

How is it that Simon has never explained that they might have blue tinted vision once they go through? How is it that he never explained how the gate would work until it appeared and they were standing right there? How is it that they never decided the order of people walking through the gate and discussed this in detail before hand?

It is as if they never ever talk to each other except when they were on screen; even when narration suggested otherwise. Which would explain every weird thing I have mentioned noticing: no one has family, no one has friends, absolutely no one knows even the smallest thing about Simon’s research, no one has an inkling Mia would stay behind, etc. etc.

Because if it isn’t on screen, it didn’t happen/doesn’t exist.

They literally have nothing else to talk about except the looping conditions. There is no new weather, no new family/friends developments, no new assignments, no new TV/books (not that we have any indication any of them are taking advantage and reading all the classics or learning new languages or ANY OF THE COOL STUFF THEY COULD HAVE BEEN DOING), literally nothing new happens in their lives except after Tyler gets them all treasure hunting. But they seem to chill out at the end of the day together, HOW COME THEY NEVER TALKED ABOUT ANYTHING?

It makes no sense.

So yeah, that is why all of them feel paper thin and I don’t care that it seems like Mia might be lost to them forever. They feel so unrealistic, it is impossible to care.

Well, technically I cared for Hilda about Leona. She’s the only one that has felt like she had some depth. This could have happened with Tyler too, because we do get a lot of background on him too, but he’s so emotionally/personality one note still I can’t suspend my disbelief.

It is frustrating, because as many of you have mentioned in previous threads (I haven’t read the posts here yet since I’ve barely started the chapter), there are good bones here. There are glimpses of what these characters could be if they just got fleshed out. They should have cut Holy, Ritapon and Joe, and spent that extra time on Mia, Tyler, Simon, Leona and Hilda. Perhaps flashbacks, or scenes were they miss their family and (other) friends, because those people must feel incredibly robotic, doing the same thing and probably saying pretty much the same thing every single day. Can you imagine the agony of that?

Like, why wasn’t the emotional impact of the looping ever milked ON SCREEN? We only got told it happened. To the two comatose ones, to Leona. To the three extras. As far as I remember, we don’t really get any indication of Simon having struggled with it, nor Mia except for being bored.

So much wasted potential. :sob:

I’ll go back to reading now. Unless the game does anything outrageous, I’ll let that be my last time I rant about this. (And maybe in the next couple of text boxes I will be proven wrong, that Simon had told them, they just all collectively forgot it because of their ditsy brains or something.)

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Anyway, now I’ve finished the chapter too. So I guess it took me 1 hour and change.

Chapter spoilers

I didn’t even bother looking up the illness, now I wish I had, but I can’t be bothered to go back and find the katakana to figure out which one it is supposed to ape. Thanks @2OC3aOdKgwSGlxfz for the details on how it works!

I really didn’t have to check because it was immediately evident they were ignoring medical reality. Maybe I’m completely wrong here, but thinking someone will wake up immediately upon completion of brain surgery is TV-show nonsense. She’d probably have some time of sleeping to fully get out of anesthesia, and then it isn’t like she would necessarily wake up immediately.

Definitely saying she is in a coma five minutes after finishing surgery just… nah, doesn’t work like that. (At least from what I’ve picked up. Not a doctor/nurse or anything like that.)

But setting that aside, I really wonder how this looping works. Because if the loop still exists as it did before, that means that everyone else lived on while they were stuck in the loop and everyone was just brain dead/in a coma. But then that got wiped out when they exited the loop? Or maybe there are multiple parallel universes?

The other option is that by the gate opening and closing, something changed with the loop, and time finally started to flow again. So how would they get Mia out? Because another gate probably won’t appear.

Last possibility: all this will be ignored and never explained. xD

I really hope we won’t have a scenario where the parents/hospital go “if she doesn’t wake up in 48 hours after this massive brain surgery we did, we will pull the plug” because that is just stupid. That would feel like a completely artificial way to create urgency in the story. Please please don’t do. :pray:

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fold

Thankfully not. Its not the greatest ending and gets pretty animeish, but I think its passable… At least better than your worst case here. Well, youre reading these much faster now so Im sure youll see everything in no time. Good luck and have fun!

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Chapter notes

Welp. Guess it was the illness after all. At least it was something where she can be totally fine one day, and potentially not fine the very next day, so it makes sense that she never shows any signs of the illness in the loop.

I wonder where the “I have done everything and nothing provides any joy for me anymore” thing came from, then. I guess the miracle didn’t last and everything felt same-ish after a while? And it probably didn’t help that she saw her looper friends suffering, and being convinced that it’s her fault.

I also wonder if she would’ve just exited the loop with the others if she never met Tyler, considering that the 時の渦 held no joy for her anymore… (Of course she would’ve possibly continued being jaded and emotionless even after getting back to the real world, so… it’s not like that would’ve been a guaranteed good scenario either. If she gets saved from the looping hell that she has prepared for herself, “having met Tyler” is definitely the better scenario!)

Glad to read that. Didn’t get that vibe from the mother either, and… I guess they are used to her not waking up for long period of times either way.

Questions

What’s the だけ doing there?

Is that (literally) “The only path left to me, concerning rays of hope, is getting the brain surgery”?

Is that “Does that mean that it was bound to happen that she stayed?”?

Is that second sentence “Thinking about the thing that doesn’t exist here, the today that isn’t believed in by Mia, brought tears to their eyes.”?

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だけ has a secondary meaning that is “to the extent of” or “enough to” (See definition 2 in jisho).

ミアには => For Mia
そう決意するだけ => enough to taking that resolution / decision / determination
の何かがあったの => something existed
かもしれない = perhaps.

“Perhaps, for Mia there was something that was enough to make her take that decision.”

Not confident at all on this one but this looks to me like the structure にかけては, which means “when it comes to”, where the は has been omitted for some reason. Literally “When it comes to slivers of hope, having brain surgery is the only thing”.

Yes, I believe so. It comes from this grammar structure:

ここにいない存在 => The being/existence that is not here.
ここにいない存在のこと => The fact of “the being that is not here”
ミアが信じられなかった今日 => Today, which Mia couldn’t believe in.
ミアが信じられなかった今日のこと => The fact of the “today, which Mia couldn’t believe in”.

These two are the “facts / ideas” that they are thinking about: を思い

When they though about “the being that was not here” and of “today, which Mia couldn’t believe in”, they shed tears.

Where “being” I guess simply means Mia in this case… I think.

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This chapter and the last one, Hilda started to really grate on my nerves… D: I know she’s supposed to be this energetic, not-thinking-about-stuff character, but really, she’s just blindly spewing accusations and making a bad situation worse with her attitude for all others. Taira especially.

And then in this chapter, she has the nerve to tell him ‘she understands, but he should calm down’ (or sth to that effect, I can’t remember the exact words.

I’m also a bit bemused that they all need ‘genius Saimon’ to explain what’s going on at this point. Like, what might have been Mia’s thought process and oh look, the time she fell into a coma coincides with when the loop happened/she stayed behind, whatever might that mean?

I was also expecting them to feature into the story somehow… but when everyone was back in the real word and they were still in the wheelchair and all, I remembered how Saimon explained before that whoever crosses the gate while comatose will awaken 2-8 years after the fact. That was one of the resons Hilda was so deperate to get Reona to wake up.

I know right! That’s been bugging me too! :joy: Why would you need a constant supply of new stuff coming out when there’s already so much available that you could never finish everything that is of some interest to you in a lifetime already?

…Sorry about replying to people directly after so long. I needed to get some of my frustrations about the story off my chest.

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Precisely! Yeah, sometimes I feel like entering the loop also turned off all their brains, except Tyler’s and perhaps Simon’s.

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