Thorny, vantablack comedy, dripping with its own caustic bitterness. Successfully defines the difference between the pain of intentionally pressing your thumb against a sharp edge and someone else doing it. However, some incredibly clear moments bleed through the cacophony and will probably stick around in my mind for some time. Even a single character like Anri herself will probably cause me to collapse at some point in the near future - looking forward to that.

It might not yours, but Hello Charlotte 0/3 evades my rating scale. It's the messiest shit I've played... ever? To confine it to one conclusion would do a disservice to it, but most importantly to me. I need time with this.

edit: time's up, 5 stars.

🎵drugs drugs🎵 AYO TURN THAT SHIT UP CHARLES” And I am still wondering who is Charles????

In the world there are 7.4 billion people, but also in the United States there are 2.4 million people named Charles. So now that we’ve narrowed it down lets look at Orlando, Florida where Dream lives. Out of the 2.4 million Charles’ there are only 700 living in Orlando Florida and out of those 700 there realistically could only be 7 people he could be talking about because there are around 100 regions where Dream could be in that another Charles could be in and out of those 7 people the average white male (Dream) in this case only interacts with in a day is 4 so there could only be about 2 Charles he is talking about and the average human usually knows 3 Charles in there lifetime which leads us into this endless math loop so chances are he saw a Charles at some point whilst outside (unless hes scared to go outside haven’t seen the light in ages) then his brain remembered the name and when going to think of someone to use whilst tweeting he said Charles From the True Realm.

has some questionable pacing compared to 2 but unlike 2 it absolutely manages to stick the landing so they are about as equal for me. i might prefer this one more the more i think about it.

great series overall.

Edit : i ended up preferring 2 by the end.

"All ended well.
There was nothing to be sad about."

A lot of this genuinely messed with my head and made me feel icky. Which was honestly most likely the entire point.

I really dont recommend playing these games (especially this one) if youre mental health is not good

Goodbye Charlotte.

hello charlotte episodes 1 and 2 should be played not just to be caught up on the story, but to watch a developer gradually learn to express what is at their core. this also means that hc is a series with some growing pains, including but not limited to how it can be: hit or miss in its sense of humor, unevenly paced, and full of puzzles that even if thematically fitting are largely forgettable. i'd put hc1 as a little bit above average for an artistically inclined tumblr user's first rpgmaker game--plus i think its very funny in how eager it is kill you--but i can understand not liking it. hc2 is actually quite good and a very compelling leap forward from 1, and sows some very important seeds that make it ESPECIALLY crucial to be paired with hc3, but its still just shy of excellence on its own. they can still showcase etherane's specificity and intelligence pretty well, and having some of the context for what she's informed by and responding to--which is to say not just rpgmaker in general but that filtered thru tumblr fandom--lets you understand some of where she's coming from. but these two games alone do not exactly feel like fully confident and complete works.

by contrast, etherane's first game after hello charlotte, tomorrow won't come for those without ██████, has a more experienced and steadied hand guiding it. it's standalone and more concise, but this has its advantages over the relative bulk and bloat of the series etherane worked on previously. it's partly because its more contained and wastes less space that the fog of all the tensions twc suggests to us feel so dense, making it like a short story that invites rereads to find something new each time. its more distanced tone and tighter writing also brings a weight and sobriety to it that hello charlotte did not have as consistently. basically it's more "perfected" in what it aims to do with its narrative than any hellchar, and i would call it a capital G Great game for that. only the puzzles still feel hc-tier but that's not a big deal. i do wonder what i could have gotten out of this creator's oeuvre if i had started with hello charlotte and then built up to twc, but i think playing it first was a good way to assure me that ane is the real deal, enough to want to see their first series through to the end. even with the growing pains or whatever other superficial hangups i may have had as i went through it.

then there's hello charlotte episode 3, sitting between the amateurish but inspired explorations of the series before it and the more fully developed twc. childhood's end fits as a subtitle, a sign of not just the finale of hello charlotte as a series (mainline, at least), but also an assertion of itself as the break from the artistic immaturity of previous entries that's now been outgrown, so to speak. this may sound like i'm saying this is where etherane finally reached their potential of greatness, and my answer to that is, essentially, yes! but 3 has more of an adolescent energy to it; even as its subtitle declares being done with childish things, this can be taken not as an objective assessment of itself but coming from a sort of teenage urge to prove that they can overcome their past, by any means necessary. these means are often bratty and practically asking to be disliked. it diverts hard from the last 2 entries, sabotaging the mostly harmless and maudlin cringe for more provocative cringe that at times, tbh, can be offputting for the wrong reasons. at a glance, its lack of subtlety in its belligerence at points can make it seem like it amounts to little more than an overly hammy, bridge-burning heel turn. all these rough and serrated edges often do the opposite of bringing greater coherence that hc2 hinted at, making for an even more unbalanced experience than what came before.

alot of this is done to address a realization that the previous two games, even with their own strengths and self-awareness, lent themselves to being taken as scatterbrained misery entertainment; stories of a soft nice and easily likable character getting her shit kicked in constantly to “become relatable to the max", as a character puts it. fandom attaches to this easily and often uncritically, and as this attachment informs their own interpretations as told through fanart and fanfic, the work itself and characters within get untethered from the creator's control & intentions. many such cases of rpgmaker games--or rpgmaker-ish ones too--that this applies to, and hellchar practically speaks directly to that context it’s situated within. frustrated with the shallow regurgitation of angst back and forth, ashamed of having played into it previously without bristling at it enough, paranoid towards giving a personal story up for voyeuristic dissection (especially for this audience's expectations for authors to unload their traumas and neuroses in a correctly consumable manner), hc3 lashes out in order to separate itself from this and take the narrative back. the guro danganronpa nietzsche-pilled "this is LITERALLY 1984" theatrics, cringe they may be, have a sincerely felt anger and pessimism underlying them. it's painfully aware it's entrenched in a juvenile world and only knows juvenile means to escape it, writhing within what feels like a meaningless feedback loop.

this is the set up for one of the most scorched and restless reconfigurations of identity i've found. hellchar may have gotten so wound up about the subculture it's within, but it doesn't turn its back on it completely in the end because it remains, just as it had been previously, a vector for speaking on its specific preoccupations and troubles. idolization of creators, the ways presumptions about others reflect yourself, fear over losing some cultivated idea of purity from contact with people, having your own life dictated through your psychosis...these are things it wants to express that are inextricably tied with this world it has so much friction with. it comes to understand that even art that is embarrassingly derivative (figuratively and literally) or selfish projection can reveal something, if the author is really willing. its critique of stories that hand out catharsis like its nothing wouldn't mean much if it wasn't so committed to reaching an actually useful catharsis of its own. it strains itself to go further and deeper into its pain, despite all the nihilism it talks up, to eventually finding meaning within its own efforts to change, to keep moving on. here was when etherane showed what true vulnerability is: letting you in on something that would otherwise be kept secret, not hiding behind subtlety--its genuinely smart and incisive in its opaqueness--but also not oversharing or self-flagellating for cheap sympathy. anyone can speak honestly, but very rarely do you see someone really understand that you aren't just speaking in a vacuum. after pulling back all the layers of failed perceptions that attached onto it, being frank about its perceived failures to form attachment before, it's then that hc3 finds a space to hit more directly than anything else it could be compared to.

this game is a mess but it's also a maelstrom, one that's craftily and furiously and courageously leaned into to find where truth really lies. tomorrow won't come is technically a more respectable effort, but in retrospect it is the collected sigh after the panic attack that hc3 was. an extremely fraught but incredibly observant moment of soul searching that haunts what comes after, whether it's heaven's gate or twc or probably the freshly released mr rainer's solve-it service (haven't got to it much yet but i trust post-hc3 ane with my life so it will be the greatest gaming sensation of this week, at the very least). the big bang, scattershot as it may be, of etherane's full voice, and it's the instability specific to it that makes this my favorite game from them. with all its entropy and fevered tantrums in the background, it managed a connection and communicated something invaluable to me. it knows that anxiety of leaving yourself defenseless to others seeing the rear of your head, hating to imagine what their eyes see and doing that despite yourself--and also knows the desire to crane your neck backwards in the hope you'll see it for yourself. it will look grotesque and humiliating and idiotic to go through all those contortions, but don't you want to get one good glimpse for once? and if you can't do it, you might as well try to impress how hard you're trying to anyone who dares to watch.

It would be hard to summarize this I think. The most I can add to the small but fruitful conversation are simply collective anecdotes, which mostly consisted of spiraling down in self critique. Like, did you know I write fanfiction? It used to be "wrote" until recently when I picked up the Wings of Fire books and now I've added on a whole other world of things to help get both my emotional pains/frustrations out as well as seek affirmation to myself through shipping and what not.

This is relevant in HC3 because HC3 is at least partially about this sort of 'growing up' reflection, reconciliation, and reconstruction. It lashes out at everything it stands for and critically destroys and demakes its own ecosystem but it, at the end of the day, respects where its roots came from and how that transformed them to how they are today. Even despite the reactions of the cruel unforgiving world of Viewpoints that it then received. There is also so so so much more than that. A cascading rhythm of brutal acts of cleaning/detoxing the system by looking at what you've made like glass structures to throw rocks at. An immense cry for help to be heard by others but largely yourself. An attempt to reconcile with deep traumas that instead of being comforted by venting instead multiplied and become a duplicitous monster of a creation you regret. There is a plethora of interpretations that Childhood's End gives you and they are all frictional and ethereal and eternal.

But I kind of ruined some of that magic. Another part I find myself reflected here, doing the awful deed of continuing to graft myself onto these works is one of parasocial schisms within. There's a point in HC3 where there is a paranoid direct breakdown of feeling your move stalked and then duplicated to others. And unfortunately I imagine I'm one of those parasitic entities. I'm at a point now where my first step could hardly be a true one in most things anymore, there are multiple people I have watched from afar making myself like a kaleidoscope of parroting people. I've gotten better with it in that I no longer occupy those spaces to where I could be hurtful even indirectly and my mind is more clearer in my direction but the taint remains.

It feels wrong to sort of throw that sort of personal life off scenes (that do indeed super reflect that tho) but I find myself so personally changed on this journey that I find it difficult NOT to talk about it. It's funny because there's really not a year going by where I hate the "self" i was 1-2 years ago. It's like I don't stop 'growing' and I change almost to the point of instability when trying to consider what's 'me.' But I digress, the idea here is that HC1-3 as well as TWC were a turning point in terms of what I value in fiction, myself, and a big light on the path of where I go from here. I'm still going to write all of that fanfiction. Looking forward to being proud of it.

Where was I going with this again? I'm not sure. Let's hope there is something TO go to, the idea is after all to eventually move on from these selfs we might leave behind or grow discomforted with the thought of. I feel equivalently ready to move on as much as I do ashamed that I never quite gave the selfs enough "form" to move on from. I think from here though it's a new day and I'll press on, and worry less about the pasts of myself and more what I can do. It's time to put an end to this cyclical self destruction in some fashion, and I mean that in as little an ominous sense as I can possible.

Se existe uma franquia que eu me agarrei emocionalmente, esta é hello charlotte. Já devem fazer uns dois ou três meses que finalizei, mas mesmo assim estes jogos não saem de minha cabeça. Seus personagens trágicos, suas histórias tristes e todo este mundo de deuses falsos criados por um escritor inseguro me prendem até mesmo nessa manhã que escrevo. Claro que, com o tempo, estou esquecendo de algumas cenas, mas eu até agora não consigo esquecer o final deste jogo. Ver o charles se libertar de tudo aquilo que lhe prendia a dor do próprio é lindo, mas ver que o próprio sofre até mesmo para isto é o que humaniza mais ainda o personagem. Sem contar os últimos momentos que temos com a charlotte que cuidamos. Estes momentos com ela foram os que mais me quebraram emocionalmente numa mídia. Eu reagi como se tivesse visto alguém que conhecia e amava voltar a vida. "Se existe algo te incomodando agora, ou você acha que não consegue mais seguir em frente... Por favor, lembre-se que um novo dia virá. Obrigada. Obrigada por cuidar de mim. Vamos nos encontrar novamente um dia." Pela primeira vez numa mídia, eu simplesmente derramei em lágrimas do início da conversa até o fim. Eu estou encantado por essa jornada, estou mais ainda apaixonado por todos estes personagens, em amor platônico pela história da própria criadora enquanto fazia estes jogos e, em amor verdadeiro por tudo que a franquia representa. Fomos de um pequeno mundinho, até uma grande história sobre tudo isto. Mas, como é a vida, tudo tem que terminar uma hora e nós temos que passar em frente. Embora ache que nunca vou me recuperar deste jogo, sei que vou conhecer outras obras. Entretanto o carinho por esta obra será o maior que eu tenho por qualquer vídeo game por ai. Tem uma tv na sala e, na televisão existe uma garota. Uma garota que é o mundo. Olá, mundo! Olá, Charlotte!

(This is a cross-post from my blog. https://saab900blog.blogspot.com/2022/05/hello-charlotte-and-conversations.html)

I don't understand why I love Hello Charlotte. Not in traditional terms, anyways.

Most of my favorite stories have elements that I can easily understand as to why I fell in love with those stories in the first place. Evangelion and loneliness, Fata Morgana and empathy, Subahibi and subjective reality, Omori and forgiveness. With Hello Charlotte, it's not that easy for me anymore, and I don't really understand why. And I don't really understand why I don't understand. It's not especially subtle with it's themes, I feel like I understand what etherane was trying to say, and what feelings she was trying to impart onto me. I feel like I mostly understand the narrative, in a way that left me satisfied. In every respect, I should feel satisfied moving on from this work. I can't though. That's what I'm trying to figure out. Why am I so fixated on this story?

I've been thinking, and I think it's because it's more than the sum of it's parts. I can't really think of any other reason. And I think the reason why I'm so confused on this game is that, in general writing terms, I don't really think it's that good. To say the narrative is loose would be an understatement - it feels less like a progression and more like a tangled ball of yarn, going in and out of various plot threads like trying to untie a knot. The characters are not especially affecting to me, nor was the ending, or the music, or art. And yet, when I think back on the time I spent with this series, an indescribable feeling bubbles up within me, a feeling I feel so rarely that it justifies me writing this more-of-a-rant-than-review thing.

Hello Charlotte is honest.

This story knows what it is. It knows that it's "narrative" is convoluted and messy and not really thought out, like, at all. It knows the characters are mostly run-of-the-mill Tumblr-esque RPG Maker fanfare. It knows the music can be grating, and the gameplay boring and frustrating, and that it kinda seems like it thinks it's smarter than it actually is. And it all ties back to what a story is. Should a story need to be enjoyable to be good? Should a story need to be tightly written to be considered worth the time investment? It's typical critique ideations like these that I come back to time and time again. I've tried and tried to unspin this tangled yarn of what a good story is. I still don't know - no one does really - but for me, I think the conclusion that I feel is right is that a story is different for every story. Some stories are lectures. Other stories are invitations. Every author and the stories they create interact differently with the audience, and I think that, above all, Hello Charlotte is a conversation.

Of course, the individual is going to interact with these stories in different ways. Just because I felt my experience with Hello Charlotte was a heartfelt conversation with the author doesn't mean that others feel that it might be a self-important lecture, or an ignorant invitation to some fairytale utopia that doesn't exist. Those are just as valid.

To me, Hello Charlotte was an honest, back and forth talk with etherane. It was a conversation about trauma, about the cyclical nature of stories, about beginnings and endings. Saying that a story is personal is a copout in my eyes - every story is personal to the author - but to Hello Charlotte, it felt less personal and more person. I felt like I met part of the author through this story, their faults, their strengths, their imperfections. Which isn't to say I feel like I met the individual, because that's silly - all I'm saying is that I feel like I was able to feel what they were feeling, or at least a part of what they were feeling at some point in their life, if at least for a brief moment.

Hello Charlotte is a work I can't really describe with words. All I can say is that, I've never experienced a work that feels this authorially oriented, rather than audience oriented, if that makes sense. It feels like truly delving into the mind of someone else, and connecting with that mind. Even if that's fake, even if that's silly, I think that's what this story is: a conversation, ending in connection.