Peklo said:
Flowers is a four-part visual novel serial set in a Japanese Catholic all-girls high school. It owes much to its genre predecessors, notably Maria Watches Over Us, and the wider Class S typification of lesbian fiction in engineering a social system for ritualized intimacy between girls, which historically has been weaponized to diminish and deny women loving women as being real beyond the boundaries of adolescent playacting. Flowers is set apart by its directness in exploring and confronting such pre-dispositions and language: instead of perhaps the one character on campus standing apart as the designated lesbian, it is an entire cast of sapphics, of varying openness, self-identification and acceptance, but that's the point of it, as no one character needs to fulfill the obligation of futilely representing all for something no one person ever can. It can often feel like even works directly about women loving women have difficulty plainly saying and incorporating words like "lesbian", "gay" and "homosexual" into their vocabulary and thus leaving an absurd but present layer of plausible deniability in place, but such ambiguity never comes into play in how Shimizu Hatsumi writes her characters--the Class S semiotics are invoked and ultimately rejected in favour of treating all internal turmoil, flirtation and attraction as genuine and recognized as such by all parties involved.
The breadth of perspectives found in the series is bolstered by its serial format, in which the passing of the school year and seasons shifts the protagonist viewpoint of each game: bookended by the softspoken and timid Suou, and joined by two other students for the middle chapters. Erika is the main character of the summer months and second game in the series, though she is present in the supporting cast for every other game too. As a disabled wheelchair user, Erika represents an almost total exception in video games, in maintaining not only a regular presence but also a main character status in the narrative she's part of. Disability in the medium is often treated as something that's not a present factor besides cosmetic flavour; characters subject to physical disability might even be more regularly empowered by it, through some narrative contrivance or fantastical mechanical contraption that immediately addresses and effectively negates the situation. Erika is not any more special than wheelchair users you or I know are: she needs to use one to have access to the places in society and everyday life she otherwise wouldn't, and that's largely the extent of it.
The sheer mundanity of her condition is what humanizes her above all, as she's never put on a pedestal beyond reproach, or treated as a "broken bird" to be protected; Erika is the first to crack a sardonic joke about her unresponsive legs, or just matter-of-factly acknowledge the needs she has compared to others, which in turn draws people closer to her. She is not a character defined by her disability, just informed by it; you'd just as soon point to her wry sense of humour, inquisitive problem-solving, foodie-level passion for cuisine, or a bottomless repository of literary (and other pop culture, a series signature motif) references she draws upon, both obscurely intellectual or low-brow chuckles. I have not encountered a character elsewhere in the medium who explores and experiences sexual attraction to an older authority figure, without it ever turning unethical and abusive on the other party's part, nor have I often read as compelling a treatment of a painfully sarcastic mystery-solving teen who's both a great, kind friend, and an acerbic, compassionate lover. The beauty of Flowers is that it would not be difficult to spotlight other characters in such a way as this, as it's up to the individual whose particular story resonates most strikingly--the material is there to support a multitude of readings.
