Hanna, We’re Going to School, by Kastel
Sometimes I play a game and it’s like sinking into a warm, familiar bath – I’ve got a history with the genre it’s playing in, the cultural signifiers are familiar, the character dynamics are ones I’ve directly experienced. With Hanna, We’re Going to School, I’m facing the opposite situation, though: while presented as a fairly standard piece of choice-based IF, per the author’s note at the end it’s directly responding to a visual-novel subgenre I’ve at best dimly heard of (and in fact specific games within that tradition). It’s set in a Singaporean high school, though it’s an international school that cleaves more closely to the John Hughes model than you might imagine – though that’s little help to me, since I went to a boarding high school and those traditionalist tropes are just as foreign to me. Meanwhile, the situations the protagonist, Jing, faces turn on gender-based bullying and stereotyping, not to mention navigating her relationship with her best friend’s ghost (I am a straight white dude and am friends with zero ghosts).
Alienation is maybe not the worst standpoint from which to approach Hanna, We’re Going to School, though. Beyond creating a perverse sense of identification with the uncomfortable-in-her-skin Jing, it’s also clear that the game is more interested in providing a critical take than serving up warmed-over tropes as comfort food. The most hilarious example of this is too good to spoil, but I’ll just say that while you’re given plenty of options as you help Jing navigate her teenage wasteland, there are only two choices that determine which ending you get: the tack you take when you finally confront your bully, which is appropriately dramatized as a high-stakes encounter, and another completely unheralded moment that you or I might experience every morning (well, more so those of you who live in places where it rains, I suppose). It’s hard not to read this as cheeky commentary on the most fundamental premise of choice-and-consequence gameplay, lifting up the absurd triviality of the decisions on which whole lives can turn.
Not that this is a cynical game. Jing is a hesitant protagonist, riven by self-doubt and perennially unsure of what she wants, much less how to get it, but she’s utterly sincere in her emotional responses, feeling compassion for a victim of cool-kid teasing, passion for the idea that there can be some justice somewhere, and deeply connected to her best friend. Hanna’s a unique character in her own right – a trans girl who killed herself because of the rejection of her family and most of her peers, including Clara, the school’s queen bee, she failed to move on to the afterlife and is now tied to Jing. They make for an appealing double-act, Hanna mothering Jing and trying to look out for her, Jing honoring her memory and struggling to accept the world that threw her away. Seeing Jing navigate the high-school hellscape while Hanna tries her best to act as a guardian angel – though she’s just as young and occasionally clueless – is endearing.
It’s also often quite funny, since for all the dark themes the writing here crackles with wit. When you first meet your classmate Harold, his name is highlighted, indicating you can click it to expand some new text explaining something about who he is: when you do, you learn he’s “a guy who really likes to draw tanks during math class.” When you go down your building’s elevator, there’s an impressively large store of random gags that can fire as Hanna struggles to time her levitation appropriately. And I loved this little excerpt, which describes the entry to the school and makes clear that this is a turn-of-the-millennium period piece:
…preschoolers crying, elementary students playing their Gameboys, middle schoolers tittle-tattling about their crushes, and angsty high schoolers listening to Linkin Park through their cracked earphones all in one bus.
So yes, there’s angst here, but it’s presented with heart and perspective – and it helps that Jing isn’t just struggling with the typical no-one-understands-me blues. A lesbian, she’s acutely aware of the ways that social pressures are pushing her to conform, especially the ostensibly well-meaning overtures Clara makes to improve her dating life. And she’s also got a sneaking suspicion that she won’t fit into the grown-up world school is theoretically helping to prepare her for, anyway – this is especially foregrounded through sequences showing the strong holding up the weak to ridicule, or asserting stereotypes about submissive Asian women. The character work makes these themes land, too – heck, even Clara, who’s a bit of a monster, appears to sincerely understand and appreciate poetry, and is given surprising depth in some of the endings.
Hanna’s portrayal, interestingly, is a bit flatter; for all the horror of her death, there are very few moments where we see her reflect on her struggles, or the existential precariousness of her current position. While she’s an active character who’s constantly talking to Jing, we get the clearest view of her subjectivity in flashbacks filtered through Jing and Clara’s imaginings of her experience. To an extent this makes her slightly flat, but then, she is a ghost; a reminder, perhaps, that there’s a sort of privilege in even the terrible parts of life being reserved to the living.
This review is, I know, a bit of a cop-out; “look at all the interesting things going on here,” I say, without landing on a particular core for my critical reading. This may just be a consequence of the fact that I’m a bit of a stranger in a strange land here, ignorant of the dialogue into which I’ve blundered, or that this is a rich text that resists oversimplistic reductions. But it’s also, I think, emblematic of the confusion of your teenaged years and school experience: a lot happens, the choices you make may matter but the way it all adds up is elusive, until you grow out of it and impose a narrative on it in retrospect. Unless you don’t grow out of it.
