Visual Novel: Dont Take It Personally Babe It Just Aint Your Story
don't take it personally babe, it just ain't your story [sic] is a 2011 Visual Novel by Christine Love, creator of Digital: A Love Story.Set in the year 2027, the protagonist is a middle-aged guy called John Rook who, in the midst of a nasty mid-life crisis, switches careers and becomes a high school English Literature teacher. His new school has a zero-tolerance policy on bullying, and to help facilitate this, Rook is (discreetly) given complete and total access to the school's social networking service, including all the private messages of his students.Can Rook sort out his own personal problems, learn to be a good teacher to his students and keep the lid on his voyeurism?
don't take it personally babe it just ain't your story provides examples of:
The Rant: And be prepared to hear plenty of reasons why high school English is awful.
Big Brother Is Watching: And his name is Mr. Rook. As it turns out, everyone figures but nobody really cares.
Bilingual Bonus: Akira's mom posts on AmieConnect on the topic of his coming out in Japanese. It roughly translates to "It's about time you did lololol"
Blue and Orange Morality: The bizarre concept about privacy. Not to mention their sense of humor...
Book Dumb: Most of the class is doing pretty badly in John's class, and it's probably not all due to his inexperience and the frequent distractions from his actual job. It doesn't matter anyway, because in the end the school imposes a ridiculously generous grading curve to maintain their reputation.
Brain Bleach: John's normal reaction to thinking about his students having sex.
Brand X: AmieConnect is totally not Facebook, and 12channel is totally not 4chan (and not 12chan either, you perv)! Amusingly, the former "real thing" is referred to by name towards the end, and the Internet equivalent of a Collective Groan occurs when an (old at the time of the game's publication, much more so by 2027) Interrupting Meme from the latter appears in its equivalent.
But Thou Must: The VN stops you at several points and forces you to lurk on 12channel. It does the same thing if you don't read a plot-relevant status update or message soon enough.
Depraved Homosexual: Inverted. The gays in the class are, for the most part, quite sane and well-adjusted, while the heteros have all sorts of emotional issues.
Hot Teacher: John Rook is extremely well preserved for being nearly forty years old, a fact that does not go unnoticed by the students.
If It's You, It's Okay: Nolan finally settles on this when it comes to his relationship with Akira.
Image Boards: Mr. Rook is a lurker on 12channel, and several cast members are heavily implied to be participating. Imageboard culture mostly hasn't changed over the course of 16 years. Also, Akira and Kendall act out a thread for their big project...
Leet Lingo: Kendall converses primarily in chanspeak. This is heavily lampshaded in an AmieConnect conversation about how conversations between her and Akira turn out utterly incomprehensible.
Manipulative Bitch: Taylor convinces Akira that Nolan isn't attracted to him, and just hangs out with him because he needs a friend.
Metafiction: Both the books on the curriculum and the anime 12channel foreshadow important events. And just to make things double-meta, Rooks even discusses metafiction in one of his classes.
Moral Dissonance: It's wrong to be a homophobe and/or a bully but to trick your teacher into thinking that it's his fault that a person killed themselves, constantly send them creepy messages and pretend to be a shinigami is A-Ok! And reading everybody's private messages is okay as well.
Mythology Gag: "J. Rook" was the administrator of the Lake City Local BBS board in Digital: A Love Story. He even acknowledges that his last job was "with computers".
Obligatory Joke: On the forum, Christine Love said, "“All I ask is if you don't like it, come on, at least make the obvious joke ;)”. This paid off amusingly in this review, in which the reviewer observes the similarities between Rook's Back Story and his own.
"The Reason You Suck" Speech: Yes, you can give one to Taylor. No, you're not going to get one from Mrs. Yamazaki.
Schoolgirl Lesbians: Kendall and Charlotte, though the latter seems to call herself pansexual.
Secret Keeper: Taylor, for Arianna. If Rook cites school policy when chewing Taylor out, she'll fire back by threatening to expose his relationship with Arianna. He talks or bluffs his way out of it.
Shared Universe: With Christine Love's other game, Digital: A Love Story, which is set in the Lake City of 1988. Turns out it Never Was This Universe. In this universe, the Internet evolved from an AI cloning itself, and AIs are a common sight.Digital even features a brief appearance by Eriko Yamazaki, Akira's grandmother and author of some of the books Mr. Rook assigns. (Confusingly, there's also a "J. Rook", despite how young that would make John; perhaps his father?)
Shinigami: It starts stalking you after the supposed death of Isabella. Turns out to be a friend of Akira's mom, as part of an incredibly elaborate prank.
Shipper on Deck: That could be you, depending on what advice you give to the various members of the resident Love Nonagon.
Stylistic Suck: The students and 12channers do not necessarily type with perfect grammar.
Teacher/Student Romance: You can have a fairly platonic one with Arianna or you can dive right into it and make out with her but never more in chapter one.
Title Drop: During dialogue between Rook and Isabella in one of the endings.
Played with a bit, in fact:
Isabella: Well, don't take it personally, babe, but...
Rook: I know what you're going to say: but it's not my story, right?
Isabella: No, that's stupid. Why would I say that?
Too Soon: An in-universe example. After one of the students commits suicide, Rooks decides that Romeo and Juliet would be rather inappropriate material, and switches to Twelfth Night at the last minute.
Transparent Closet: One of the characters realizes he's gay end works up the courage to come out. When he does, everyone else is surprised it took him this long.
Two-Teacher School: We get some evidence of there being other teachers and classes in the school, but Mr. Rook and his class are the only ones to have portraits or speaking lines.
You Bastard: Subverted, or perhaps zig-zagged. You're set up to think you'll get chewed out for creeping on all of your students' private conversations, when in fact you get a far milder lecture on how the concept of privacy has changed.
Artistic License - Linguistics: Slang changes almost constantly, the way the students talk and the conversations on 12channel wouldn't look as they do. It would have evolved onto something else.
Shocking to see this from a creator so obsessed with English as well.
[sic] is a 2011 Visual Novel by Christine Love, creator of Digital: A Love Story.Set in the year 2027, the protagonist is a middle-aged guy called John Rook who, in the midst of a nasty mid-life crisis, switches careers and becomes a high school English Literature teacher. His new school has a zero-tolerance policy on bullying, and to help facilitate this, Rook is (discreetly) given complete and total access to the school's social networking service, including all the private messages of his students.Can Rook sort out his own personal problems, learn to be a good teacher to his students and keep the lid on his voyeurism?
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