A lot of things in life come out of nowhere. You can’t sort them out by sheer personal effort — mostly it comes down to the course of history. Plenty of things happen out of the blue. Say you’re a shut-in otaku, and suddenly someone tells you they’ve got a new match lined up for you.

We’ve always said the Japanese have an island mentality. What does that actually mean? It has two senses. One is the textbook island mentality — a reluctance to take in culture from the outside world. The other is the one we toss around online when talking about Japan, which is sort of the opposite but comes from the same root: the feeling that you’re on a tiny patch of land with no resources and no long history, squeezed on one side by America and on the other by a rising China, with things not exactly peaceful at home either. So you’re always on alert, feeling like you’re at rock bottom in the dark, on the edge of being ruled by someone else, and you’d better be ready to suffer. Honestly that sense of crisis is correct. The old saying goes, “Born in adversity, die in comfort.” Which is why the Japanese work so hard — and at least on that count, I’d say it beats China’s habit of being woken up from its “celestial empire” daydreams by a slap across the face. But “island mentality” isn’t a nice word. It’s distorted, a little forced, and a little delusional, and it shows up in Japanese culture and all sorts of works. You’ve seen it in anime — Japan gets colonized, Japan needs a revolution, Japan gets surrounded like livestock, the world ends with Japan at the center. Etc. Etc. (I’m just talking off the top of my head. I didn’t name Guilty Crown, I didn’t name Code Geass, and I certainly didn’t mention Attack on Titan.) And by extension, of course there are visual novels that display the same mentality. Like the one I played this time… From the Future Undying.