Kindred Spirits on the Roof, for those who don't know, is a visual novel. More specifically, it marketed itself as "Steam's first uncensored sex game." While technically true, that certainly was not what the game is about. Honestly, though, don't get me started about it; I've written about it three separate times on my website/blog thing (see my profile). In fact, it was through writing about it for my blog that I realized that I still had a lot I wanted to explore about this series. So, I did this. Despite taking eight classes this semester. Despite my engineering and music degree (no creative writing lol). And despite it currently being 10:35 PM as I finish uploading this and me not having done any homework for tomorrow yet (shit .-.). The stories of Yuna, Hina, Megumi, and Sachi were so emotionally impactful to me that I ended up reading the VN three times almost essentially back-to-back (much as I did for Avatar: the Last Airbender), while also dealing with pretty much every piece of media from this series that I could get my hands on.

Anyway, moving onto the fic itself.

Canonically, this fic was very hard to write. Sachi and Megumi's final farewell at the end of the VN was very emotional, and having them come back in any form would have trivialized that moment. At the same time, I felt that Yuna would have had some things left unsaid - some things she would have liked to say to the two kindred spirits, and this was confirmed in a single line in the series' first drama CD ("...I think they'd be proud."). As a result, I tried to keep the focus on emotion and dialogue, with much of the exposition and internal thoughts taking place in first-person perspectives.

Speaking of which, this fic is written in the style of a first-person VN. Much of it is dialogue-driven, and the speaker appears over each piece of dialogue, unless the speaker is unknown to the person whose perspective you are viewing or if there are multiple speakers. This actually caused me a huge problem, where I realized FF's editor makes it hard to deal with hard returns and soft returns. In fact, I usually write on Google Docs, which does not visually distinguish the two. Eventually, I realized that I could copy the entire thing over to Microsoft Word and do replacements of the special characters the signify the different returns, which was a good thing; Word helpfully told me that it made over 3000 replacements. I am glad I did not have to do all that by hand.

Finally, since I had not had to do any sort of serious writing (not to mention creative writing) since last year, I was worried that my own voice would come up in my characters' voices. This did end up being the case, but I think there were still some magical moments; the third day, in particular, is my favorite.

Specific notes:

This section is just for a few formatting things. I didn't really want to write this like a traditional piece (third person, etc.), because part of the magic (to me) of KSotR is in its visual novel style; I even copied how it names its own chapters in-game. Now, obviously there's no visual part of this fic (also, my visual art skills are nonexistent anyway), but I think being able to follow the first-person thoughts of a character is what made KSotR magical.

That, and its soundtrack. You'll see scattered around the fic numbers like this: [0]. These are to enhance the story (I hope). I found the soundtrack to enhance the VN, so once I was finished with writing this piece (about 17 days, multiply by something like 2 - 3 hours per day on average), I went back and inserted songs from the soundtrack where I thought appropriate. The numbers in the brackets refer to the track on the soundtrack. A YouTube search of "Kindred Spirits on the Roof soundtrack" should take you to a playlist of them, and just match the bracket to the song (which should be put on repeat, and no autoplay). A bracket of [0] means silence.

Finally, there's the perspective itself, marked by tildes (~). When you see lines of this, it just means a shift of perspective so you get a different character's thoughts. If there's no name, that just means that you don't know whose perspective it is yet.

Updates:

November 2, 2016: Regarding Taiwan on the verge of being the first Asian country to allow same-sex marriage, I changed Miyu and Matsuri's ceremony to be in Taiwan instead of California since it's physically closer and plane tickets would cost less.

November 13, 2016: Changed all instances of "Obaa-san" to "Granny", to better fit the English writing (despite Japanese honorifics).