There’s something about visual novels that always seems to return me to younger days, and my own high school and high school-adjacent experiences. Of course, I never actually had a high school experience like the one perpetually portrayed in anime and visual novels – I never sat in that back right window seat, and I never developed the passionate, tangled web of romantic longing that seems to define Anime Youth. But the thing is, I actually was in high school at the same time I was watching through many of these properties, and my own memories are thus tethered not just to my physical experiences, but to the aesthetics that informed my view of what high school life is “supposed to be like.”

It doesn’t hurt that so many of these properties seem painfully aware of the limited window they are depicting. One of anime’s most popular products is unfiltered nostalgia, and this carries over to the anime-esque visual novels standing beside them. Flowers’ opening directive seems to understand that visual novel viewers are seeking a shelter from the everyday, and urges the reader to “please forget your troubles and enjoy this beautiful yuri world.” And yet, in spite of this plea for tranquility, the idea of high school as a vivid yet momentary experience is woven into every element of this visual novel, from the yuri-appropriate flower imagery to the subtitle “The tale of the girls who grow with a season.”

Even the conventional structure of visual novels speaks to wanting to capture and recapture one precious, fleeting moment. Each potential route through a visual novel generally encompasses all the chronological time that passes within that visual novel, and our choice of any one route necessarily implies we’ll be missing many other experiences. The nature of a visual novel is to actually account for that tragedy – by going back and playing through a second route, we are able to capture those lost experiences, and “relive” that golden moment in a new way. A preoccupation with nostalgia and missed chances is therefore baked into the underlying structure of the medium, with visual novels offering the unique promise of not missing any chances, by reversing time and revisiting our steps.

And then there’s the overt, physical format of visual novels. In an era of perpetual multitabbing, where I’m often leaping between an active video, my notes on that video, my twitter feed, and probably a bunch of cat pictures or something, the idea of a cohesive, genuinely demanding aesthetic object is frankly a little unusual. There’s something oddly soothing about booting up a program which takes up my whole screen, blares music even if I’m not tabbed in, and generally demands my full attention at all times. The old-fashioned interfaces, meandering dialogues, and demand for consistent interaction actually forces me to invest more deeply, to sink more fully into their universe.

Given all this rambling talk on the fascinating nature of visual novels, you’d think I’d actually have played a lot of them – but unfortunately, the actual content of these properties is rarely able to keep my attention. Many visual novels are populated by unconvincing anime archetypes, and most of the ones I’ve played didn’t really respect my time investment, too in love with their authors’ voice to account for frivolities like pacing or narrative hooks. Others have seemed to believe the explication of some convoluted fantasy world is itself a story worth telling, as if the process of storytelling and the process of writing a good wikipedia page are identical. Fortunately, my time with Flowers didn’t suffer too badly from any of these issues. The first chapter of Flowers is principally focused on something I know very well – profound, all-encompassing social anxiety.

Flowers first drops us into a brief scene of heroine Suoh Shirahane suffering from profound anxiety, before we jump back to her introduction to Saint Angraecum Academy, when she is also suffering from profound anxiety. One of her first thoughts to herself is “I am aware of my introverted nature, shy and withdrawn.” Suoh has a lot of internal thoughts, because she’s analytical and imaginative and observant, but also profoundly shy. Visual novels are actually perfect for people like her – and in turn, they should be perfect for people like me.

Visual novels’ extreme, nearly structurally inevitable focus on internal voice tends to naturally echo how deeply introspective and introverted people actually engage with the world. Few actions just happen, and few choices are taken just because “they felt right at the time.” Each action of the self-aware introvert is first tested through a thousand mental permutations, which can be perfectly illustrated through narrative monologue. Most mediums aren’t necessarily designed to specifically embrace internal voice – even novels aren’t generally constructed as a running conversation with yourself, and tend to illustrate characters through how they see the world, not how they talk to themselves. But visual novels are the anxious introvert’s playpen, and it’s no surprise they appeal to a lot of shy, almost paralyzingly introspective people.

Fortunately, Suoh lives in a yuri visual novel, so her first experiences upon arriving at Saint Angraecum involve stumbling directly into a sequence of girls who are all dazzled by her regal beauty. Though this game’s portrayal of social anxiety is acute, its interpersonal dialogue is a little messier, with characters regularly spouting lines like “I was happy to hug someone so beautiful, and with such gorgeous hair.” This game is a fantasy, yes, but even fantasies benefit from the audience truly believing their avatar has earned their rewards. And pretty much every story benefits from dialogue you could theoretically imagine any human being ever articulating.

That said, even the extremely messy horniness with which every character in this universe interacts seems loyal to both social anxiety and adolescence in its own way. Suoh constantly finds herself second-guessing her actions, assuming she’s made some terrible social blunder, only to find out (or fail to realize) that her partner was just as anxious as her. Flowers does an excellent job of illustrating how upon entering a new social environment like high school, most people will simultaneously feel sure they’re making all the wrong choices, and equally sure that everyone around them is acting from a position of perfect knowledge and total confidence.

Suoh’s feelings go beyond default anxiety though, and into a realm of profound social paralysis I felt painfully relatable. There’s a sequence where Suoh is supposed to meet up with some upperclassmen to get a tour of the academy, but finds herself too intimidated by their aggressive private conversations to actually break in. Then time passes, and it becomes even more awkward to interrupt, and eventually she just runs away, wandering around and trying to look busy while stewing in her shame and anxiety. I don’t just relate to that experience – I’ve experienced it. That’s what it’s like.

Profound social anxiety isn’t just a feeling of discomfort at the thought of large crowds, or a sense of difficulty in properly articulating your thoughts. Anxiety can be the life partner you confer with before taking any possible action, a partner whose demand for undivided attention and total lack of faith in your social abilities often leaves you ashamed and paralyzed altogether. Like Suoh, I find parties incredibly draining, and will avoid them if at all possible – but I also tend to feel anxious about just meeting one new person, or even people I’ve met before. I worry greatly about coming off as insensitive or standoffish, but the problem is never that I harbor any resentment towards the other party – it’s always simply that fear of contact, fear of speaking, fear of hearing my own words trail off and realizing that’s it, that’s all, there is nothing left of me to share. Even among my closest friends, I often find myself echoing Suoh’s feeling that “I am literally overwhelmed and, unable to speak to anyone, I withdraw into myself.” Being my friend means knowing that is going to happen – that sometimes I’ll just be quiet for a long time, and that is probably who I will always be.

Flowers is built on an understanding of that anxiety, and even its structure seems to agree that communication is pretty tough. Saint Angraecum’s signature tradition is its “Amiti^ system,” where each new student is partnered with another, who will be their pair for all three years of schooling. Throughout this game’s early scenes, my own anxiety and Suoh’s were perfectly aligned, as we shared the terror of hoping to say the right thing, the correct words that won’t screw up our whole experience. Should I be nicer to class president Rikka, or the outspoken Mayuri, who frankly seemed a little intimidating? How much should I embrace Suoh’s anxiety, and how much should I try to embody confidence, even if I don’t possess that confidence myself? How should I even assess getting so troubled about these visual novel choices in the first place, or is that itself something of the point?

In the end, it might not even matter. I made a bunch of choices in the first chapter, but it ended by revealing that this year, Amiti^ pairs would be replaced by Amiti^ trios, and thus Suoh, Rikka, and Mayuri are all grouped up together. There’s a certain comfort in that; though visual novels are theoretically designed by choice, the most freeing moment of this first chapter involves realizing that sometimes choices don’t matter, that sometimes things just happen. Real life is more like that than a visual novel – we are so bombarded by choices at all times that rather than the captured nostalgia and set binaries of visual novel decisions, we always have the chance to try another route, to live today differently than we lived yesterday. We can’t go back, but we can always go in a new direction. Outside of these pleasant sanctuaries, I suppose that’s the best we can hope for.

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