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floatingcatacombs · 1 year

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once you recognize the secret reason for her exposure, you will feel ashamed of your words & deeds.

12 Days of Aniblogging 2022, Day 9

This is your usual anime blogger’s girlfriend speaking. We watched a lot of the same anime together this year, so in the interests of not stepping on her toes, I’ve decided that instead of screaming about how Togame’s scheming lost the importance placed on it in the original LNs, Prospera grabbing Miorine’s face, or how much I fucking hate Minmay (so much) I’m going to be talking at you about the visual novels I read this year.

THE BIG LIST OF VISUAL NOVELS I READ THIS YEAR:

Umineko No Naku Koro Ni

Full Metal Daemon Muramasa

Coquette Dragoon: Love is a Parasite

AI: The Somnium Files

VA-11 Hall-A (Reread)

Heaven Will Be Mine (Reread)

Can you guess what all these stories have in common? That’s right. Today’s article is all about

VISUAL NOVELS I READ THIS YEAR WITH MAIN CHARACTERS WHO ARE PERVERTS WHERE THAT’S ACTUALLY A REALLY IMPORTANT PART OF THEIR CHARACTERIZATION IN MULTIPLE WAYS AND NOT JUST AN EXCUSE TO HAVE THEM PUT IN SITUATIONS WITH SCANTILY-CLAD GIRLS AND YOU ONLY FIND THAT OUT AFTER HOURS OF PLAY TIME BUT ITS WORTH IT NO TRUST ME WHERE ARE YOU GOING PLEASE COME BACK (or; But once you recognize the secret reason for her exposure, you will feel ashamed of your words & deeds.)

Presented mostly in increasing order of desperation to convince you that no, you have to believe me, it’s actually really relevant ok???

Heavy spoilers ahead, as well as content warnings for discussion of rape, incest, and a whole bunch of other objectionable stuff that I apparently found it worth wading through.

HEAVEN WILL BE MINE

Protagonists: Bratty Saturn, Old Tired Horse Luna-Terra, MILF-Coded Pluto

Difficulty Of Recommendation Due To Sexual Deviation: Saturn gets off on having her mech crushed, stabbed, and shot in the neck; Pluto balances love and the desire to cause pain; Luna-Terra is a leatherwoman and has an absolutely wild relationship with her boss. That said, if you gave this to somebody who wasn’t queer and couldn’t read between the lines, it would just be a story about mech war in space (certain CGs aside).

No It’s Really Thematically Important Trust Me: Heaven Will Be Mine is a game about how mecha combat and gay sex are the same thing, and also how great both those things are as mediums for intimate connection.

Test Pilot Saturn dares psychic prodigy Pluto, who’s always holding back, to unleash her full power and fight her as hard as she can. Sometimes a girl just wants to get hit!

Just because we never see penetration on screen doesn’t mean that certain things aren’t obvious to anybody who can read the subtext: Saturn keeps getting her mech, which is wired into her senses, hit/shot/crushed and always gets really happy whenever it happens; Pluto really wants to wreck her ex but won’t do it unless she asks for it; Luna-Terra, shackled to Earth by her chain of command, wears Memorial Foundation-mandated bondage gear. I could talk about that last one and her deal forever but instead you can just read and comment and leave kudos on and bookmark my manifesto about how incredibly sexually compelling it is here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/37263772/chapters/92975275

Heaven Will Be Mine is also an examination of stances on queer assimilationism and the contexts that shape them (if you paid enough attention to the game, that’s enough to tell you which faction has my heart). The victory condition is whatever happens when all three of the pilots stick together: sex/combat/communication are ways to move forward to whatever future they decide on.

But sexuality/connection/opening a rival’s cockpit up isn’t a good thing in and of itself. The Directors and Halimede, 2.5 of whom were sexually involved with one of the main three pilots, make the failure states clear: opening yourself up for people more powerful than you who only care about your body, or who care about their dream more than they care about you, or who you voluntarily ablate yourself for, or even just who want what they think is best for you if what they want is unhealthy enough, can get you remolded into something you don’t have input over.

VA-11 Hall-A

Protagonist: Jill Stingray, bartender at a tender bar

Difficulty Of Recommendation Due To Sexual Deviation: woman noticing other women’s bodies, thinks about sex a lot, has a pink shirt with SLUT on it hanging in her apartment. Jill is bisexual but prefers women. Male gaze filtered through a woman’s eyes;

No It’s Really Thematically Important Trust Me: Otheredness. VA-11 Hall-A has roots in imageboard culture (just look at Danger/u/) – and back in the day, a huge part of that culture was being really into girls and shipping them together like BL fans shipping guys. Jill looks at the girls she bartends for as special in the same way as the game’s presumed player, as othered from them and longing for them, sexually and/or otherwise. It’s not a coincidence that both jaded jackass Ingram and Jill spend nights with Dorothy where she’s specifically providing non-sexual emotional companionship; they both need a kind of intimacy that neither would be able to accept from a guy.

Jill’s perspective can be titillating, sure, but the tangible love VA-11 Hall-A was written with makes it clear that its missteps come from naivety, not ill intent. One of the money-based thresholds she needs to meet is for a porn subscription; fail and Jill will spend the next day idly thinking about actors’ bodies instead of focusing on her job – but that’s a natural consequence, not a moral judgement. Sex doesn’t make her, or anyone else, impure, and fantasizing about your clients and co-workers is fine as long as you aren’t being a Donovan D Dawson and sexually harassing people.

Attraction between women in VA-11 Hall-A is weird, yeah, but not in a hateful way. It's not an accident that so many people with non-standard relationships to womanhood (trans, non-binary, various flavors of woman-identifying with various flavors of attraction to women) have been associated with the particular cultures around anime, with their specific pedestalizations of women. N1RV Ann-A can simmer for as long as it needs while Fer figures things out. Whatever self-understanding they arrive at will make their next game the better for it.

COQUETTE DRAGOON

Protagonist: Xiomara Rosales, pilot of the titular Coquette Dragoon

Difficulty Of Recommendation Due To Sexual Deviation: Xio gets off on being treated like a child, and also on peeing herself.

No It’s Really Thematically Important Trust Me: Coquette Dragoon is a game about agency and feeling like filth and dehumanization by the vast grinding cogs of bureaucracy and war. It’s not hard to understand why being given a girlhood without agency would appeal to a trans character; incontinence is deeply tied to loss of control/agency. By signing up with the Lilac military, Xio trades her morals and independence for an escape from poverty and a mech. The really interesting thing here is her own interactions with the shame she feels, and not just for killing people for money: not knowing which non-vacuum-sealed food to order is humiliating, and having a room to herself for the first time in her life just leaves her ashamed of not decorating it. She’s not ashamed of her mech, though, just how much she likes it – the power to kill is a heady drug.

Compare Xio and her shame complexes to those of the other character into wetting herself: unabashed little pervert creature Lady Bell-Chime Katzbalger, bastard daughter of a weapons manufacturer on the other side of the war, who carries her stuffed animal everywhere, writes incest rpf about her best friend’s boss and her daughter, and publishes purin pudding tf doujinshi (dear reader, I know you know what those words mean) – but who never talks about her home life, the fact that a genetic disorder has left her incapable of eating solid food, or the nobility loudly whispering about her behind her back.

And here, after Coquette Dragoon, we get to the games with male protagonists. There’s nothing inherently objectifying about having a male point of view character but boy does “it’s ok when girls do it” make for more recommendable fiction.

UMINEKO NO NAKU KORO NI

Protagonist: Battler Ushiromiya, The Guy Who On Seeing His Cousin For The First Time In Six Years Immediately Asks If He Can Grope Her, Who Remarks That His Aunt Has A Woman’s Charms, And Tells His Ten Year Old Cousin To Promise That He’ll Be Able To Feel Her Up Once She Hits Puberty

Difficulty Of Recommendation Due To Sexual Deviation: You read that last phrase, right? If that wasn’t enough for you, there’re sexually-charged torture sequences.

No It’s Really Thematically Important Trust Me: Once you finish this two Les Miserables long behemoth and then read the Confession Of The Golden Witch chapters in the manga you will feel ashamed of your words and deeds.

Okay so the story goes to pains to point out that Battler is being awful from the beginning; after he tries to pull his shit on Jessica she tells him that his dick hasn’t grown at all, elderly housekeeper Kumasawa harasses him and everybody laughs, and then, when he tries to grope Kinzo’s servant Shannon, he’s legitimately shocked and upset when she doesn’t stop him, implying she’s been a victim of sexual assault by Kinzo.

Wow! You might think. The author sure wants to portray this guy as a horny idiot. That’s not really enough of a reason to make him so sex-obsessed though. And it isn’t!

Shortly thereafter Umineko reveals what it’s actually about: Japanese family norms enabling horrific intergenerational trauma as victims take all their pain and hatred out on those weaker than them.

(and then the murders start.)

(and then the magic meta-world reveals itself.)

Battler then goes on to be tortured and humiliated by the “blonde and bouncy is best” witch Beatrice, her servants, a set of seven penetration-loving sisters in identical slutty little outfits, leashed with a chain, stripped naked and treated as furniture, etc etc.

Wow! You might think. The author sure does love femdom!

And then we get magic battles and mystery-solving and intergenerational cycles of abuse and “wow! What the fuck is wrong with Battler” falls by the wayside.

…

HEAVY HEAVY SPOILERS AHEAD

Four and a half Mobys-Dick into the five-plus Moby Dick visual novel, the reader has been shown an awful lot of suffering Ushiromiya women: Eva, smartest of family head Kinzo’s children, whose father forbid her from attending college and whose excessively anime skill in martial arts stems from a deep-seated complex around the comparative weakness of her female body; Rosa, who endured years and years of horrific abuse from her father and siblings, and who now takes all that pain out on her ten-year-old daughter by hitting her just as she herself was hit, convinced that Maria is the reason men don’t want her; Natsuhi, who was forcibly married in to seal a business deal, whose inability to bear children (before Jessica’s conception) alone left her near-suicidal for years, and whose husband’s status as the heir has left her the target of vicious harassment by the other Ushiromiya women; Kyrie, for whom marriage into the Ushiromiyas was an escape from an even worse family, and who would kill with a smile on her face for love; 18 year old Jessica, who goes by Jessie at school and delivers a heartbreaking lecture about how having even one place where she can be herself means she can last through absolutely everything else at home; ten-year-old Maria, who turns to magic as a coping mechanism for her mother beating and screaming at her; and Ange, who was left at home because she was sickly and spends the next twelve years wishing for her older brother Battler to come home to her. Every single one has something to tell us about the culprit, and so, by the time we finally get the culprit’s backstory and motives, it doesn’t seem so outlandish or contrived.

It's a very Revolutionary Girl Utena style of character development via foiling: Tsuwabuki informs Miki informs Saionji informs Touga informs Akio.

Five or so Moby-Dicks in, critical clues to the culprit’s identity and backstory are finally revealed: Kinzo, the Ushiromiya family patriarch, raped the daughter he’d had with his secret mistress. When that daughter’s (male) child fell off a cliff, his servants rescued the child in secret, performed genital reconstructive surgery on the damaged portions of that child’s body and raised her in the image of her mother so that their master would have somebody to apologize to.

That child, raised among cruel servants years older than them on the Ushiromiya family island, dreaming of magic and reading mysteries, fell in love with Battler when he and his family attended yearly family meetings. (Maria: special interest as coping mechanism; Rosa: abused woman convinced a man will save her). He promised to take her away from the island and then forgot about it (they were both like twelve) – but she convinced herself that she’d get married and have his children and have the kind of family together that she so desperately wanted. (Ange: years of praying for Battler to come home; Kyrie: Love as escape and as something worth killing for, when you have nothing else.)

Upset at her body’s failure to develop into a woman’s, and feeling that that was why Battler hadn’t returned for her, that girl thought she’d be able to cut off her emotions and give up on him by starting to disguise herself as a boy. (Natsuhi: failure of her body to do the things she felt a woman’s body should do; Eva: a woman longing for the perceived strength and emotional deadness of masculinity; Jessica: compartmentalizing makes everything fine)

Pretending to be a boy doesn’t give her the emotional deadening she wants. She discovers that she’s bisexual when she falls in love with Battler’s cousin Jessica; Jessica herself develops a crush on the waifish and gloomy boy who she thinks has just been hired as a new servant. A third Ushiromiya cousin, George, falls in love with her as a girl, and she starts to return his affections, making it impossible for her to boymode fulltime without losing somebody else she cares about.

When the culprit solves the puzzle Kinzo has laid out for her (his original mistress loved mysteries) and learns her whole history, she has to contend with the fact that everything about her – her body, her love of mystery novels, her upbringing on the island – was deliberately controlled and seeded to make her into somebody Kinzo could believe was his daughter returned to him in his dying confusion. Worse,

[I was shuddering with disgust.]

All three people she’s hopelessly in love with, who could save her and take her away from her miserable life on the island, are her cousins.

And yet she can’t bring herself to stop being in love with them. She has nothing else good in her life! Moving forward would mean hiding this from them – and hiding her body from them – and, to her, replicating Kinzo’s incest-rape.

And this is why, when she writes the first two parts of Umineko, she portrays Battler as an incestuous horny creep. How could he be anything else for wanting something as disgusting as her? Of course Jessica and George are shown as ridiculously blithe; neither has noticed that they’ve fallen for her worksonas – but it’s Battler she loved first, and Battler who the witch Beatrice loves torturing most, and who she wants to unmask and kill her.

And once you know this, other pieces start falling into place. “Shannon”, the culprit’s work name while dressed as a maid, is so cartoonishly well-endowed because she’d been stuffing her shirt the whole time, insecure about her body not developing in the ways she’d wanted it to. Shannon is also oblivious as a parody of the perfect stereotypical girl that the culprit hates herself for not being able to embody. “Kanon”, her work name while disguised as a boy, is so bitter and depressed because he’s a way for her to act out her feelings of self-hatred. The Seven Stakes are dressed like that because she was deliriously horny and repressed and Battler gets penetrated by stakes repeatedly because that’s what he wants, isn’t it? Someone who should have had a dick. And so on and so forth.

…That cis Natsuhi’s years of depression and near-suicide over not being able to have a child are compared to the culprit’s despair over her inability to get pregnant and have the family she’d always wanted is an incredible act of compassion.

SOUKOU AKKI MURAMASA

Protagonist: Minato Kageaki, Guy Who Can’t Stop Apologizing Even (Especially) When He Kills You

Difficulty Of Recommendation Due To Sexual Deviation: This is a Nitroplus game, with the level of gross and awful that entails. Partway through the first act, a teen is forced to rape another teen at swordpoint. Every single sex scene that isn’t outright rape, Kageaki’s included, is about the defilement of purity. A monk rapes the daughter of his dead best friend on stage; a father watches his daughter get raped by a bunch of racing executives for funding; a woman is raped and beaten to death. This game is trying to make a point as hard as it possibly can, and because of that point it can be deeply unpleasant to read.

No It’s Really Thematically Important Trust Me: I’ll get there eventually, okay? Full Metal Daemon Muramasa has a very simple moral: Killing people is bad. No, it doesn’t matter how hopped up on honor, nationalism, or justice you are, how much you’re suffering, or how incredibly cool killing people is (Narahara Ittetsu believes the coolest thing in the world is when two people walk toward each other with their swords raised incredibly slowly while he explains in detail and with diagrams the histories of their respective schools of swordsmanship and the techniques they might both use, and he’s so fucking right. It is the coolest thing imaginable). Murder is a hideous and indefensible act; every life you take will fill you with life-ruining guilt and you should celebrate that, because if you ever stop feeling that guilt you will have become monstrous.

Muramasa is very very interested in the coolest possible things because the more of them it can dangle in front of you the easier it gets to justify murder – and at the end of the game, Kageaki is forced to admit that, despite all his apologizing and weeping, he really does just love killing people.

Minato Kageaki and his mech/giant spider/elf waifu Uemon-no-Jo Muramasa the Third are hunting down Minato’s sister Hikaru and her mech Ginseigo, who are committing seemingly random acts of terrorism throughout Japan. They are bound together by the Law of Balance, a principle forged to bring an end to war by an elf who had a revelation about subjectivity: peace can only come when people understand the true impact of death and value the lives of their enemies. The Law of Balance decrees that for every ‘evil’ person killed, they must also kill someone they deem ‘good’, ensuring in theory that they will never treat death lightly.

Each heroine, in Fate/stay night tradition, maps to a solution to the problem of violence.

Hero of Justice Ichijou Ayane’s response to “everyone thinks they are good and their enemies are evil and so war will continue forever” is “Do you fucking know what evil is? When that monk raped that girl on stage, that was evil. Trying to obscure the pain he caused is cowardice. I’m going to kill him.” And then she kills him.

A few days later, she reads about his death in the newspaper and vomits as the magnitude of what she’s done sinks in. She has sex with Kageaki to wash the taste of death out of her mouth.

It’s not good sex. Kageaki is horrifically rough, and his internal monologue goes on and on about how he hates himself for how much he loves sullying her purity and using her to get off – but Ichijou herself feels she needs to be punished for killing that rapist, even though she doesn’t regret it.

And then afterward, in a visual novel full of gross awful graphic sex-as-defilement-of-purity… she’s fine. She’s not treated as disgusting or corrupted or a porn character, even if she needs to feel like one for a scene. She asks to have sex and doesn’t regret it, and she stays her unbreakable self.

Eventually that monk’s servant catches up with her and confronts her with the harm she’s caused; even killing ‘absolute evil’ causes harm. The universe is trying its hardest to force her to admit that killing people is bad: he forces the fetus his sister miscarried after they were thrown out onto the street and starved because their patron died into her mouth… and she chokes it down and accepts responsibility for the suffering she’s caused without ever regretting killing that monster. That servant is just another person she needs to save and protect.

And in keeping with this… Kageaki never really manages to prove her wrong, even when she kills him at the end of her route. True evil is something you know when you see it, and rapists and child-killers deserve to die.

Noblewoman Otori Kanae’s response to “everyone thinks they are good and their enemies are evil and so war will continue forever” is “Of course. All those who kill are killed; that’s what justice is. That’s what the nobility’s endless blood feuds are for; to kill each other and protect the interests of the common people by killing the corrupt in the process. Also murder is fun.”

She just accepts the cycles of trauma and violence. It’s a scathing indictment of traditionalism in a story that loves traditional Japanese culture. But Kageaki begs her to kill him for his crimes, and that opens something in her twisted heart. Their sex scene is the only time anybody ever exerts any kind of control over Kageaki in bed, and he’s deeply uncomfortable until he manages to turn it into more standard Muramasa “oh I’m defiling her she was so pure and now she’s all fucked up I am so bad I am so evil”. One of the ‘good’ people Kageaki has had to kill was secretly one of her relatives, and she eventually kills him; one of the people she killed on her mission for the Western powers occupying Japan was his father, so she lets him eventually kill her. Neither regrets it, and so her solution is validated – it is the solution on the macro level in which the least number of lives are lost, although the story doesn’t shy away from declaring it morally repugnant.

General Ashikaga Chachamaru’s response to “everyone thinks they are good and their enemies are evil and so war will continue forever” is “Violence for violence is the way of beasts and beasts is all we are. I am in pain and I make the choice to hold my trauma supreme.” An alien god is constantly screaming in her mind and she commits atrocity after atrocity trying to kill it.

But when she makes the choice to say “my pain is bad enough that I will do anything to stop it”, she’s also declaring that other people’s lives and agency mean nothing to her. She mind-controls Kageaki into helping her with her plan, and, it’s suggested, into dragging her aside after a meeting with the shogunate and borderline-raping her. Sex, for her, is both a way to block out the constant screams and a way to pity herself more. Playing along and serving as her weapon is a dead end.

Minato Hikaru’s response to “everyone thinks they are good and their enemies are evil and so war will continue forever” is “the world is awful. Violence is the only way for me to break the world’s intolerable laws, and I will kill every single other human being on Earth without ever considering any of them evil to get what I want before I die.” This is the one unacceptable answer for Kageaki, both because her mech hits hard enough to rearrange coastlines and kills corresponding numbers of people and because what she wants is for him to have sex with her. When he does kill her after truly understanding her, he doesn’t need to satisfy the Law of Balance because years of tending to her through her chronic illness and caring for her as his sister, not a lover, mean he knows exactly how hideous and horrific it is to end her life. He’s killed somebody both ‘good’ and ‘evil’ with a single swing – which is incredibly cool, in yet another temptation to the viewer to decide that maybe violence might be good actually.

Mech Elf Muramasa gets treated like a tool by Kageaki, trying to erase her culpability in the deaths they’re both causing. Her response to “everyone thinks they are good and their enemies are evil and so war will continue forever” is the Law of Balance: peace can only come when people understand the true impact of death and value the lives of their enemies. Therefore, for every ‘evil’ person killed, you must also kill someone you deem ‘good’, ensuring in theory that you will never treat death lightly.

But when she does get treated like a person? When Kageaki erases himself and lets her control him, instead of being the one in charge of her, so they can attain true unity of mind and defeat his sister? Love breaks her resolve, and she’s willing to bend the Law of Balance and stand by a monster. Her second H scene is the closest thing to “nice” sex in the entire visual novel; Kageaki teases her instead of dragging out her insecurities – but this sex is ultimately what corrupts her, because she leaves her morals behind to follow the man she loves straight off the edge of the slippery slope.

There’s one other interesting use of sex in Soukou Akki Muramasa, and it has to do with Kageaki himself, traditionalism, and committing wrongs to stop other wrongs. It’s never stated directly, and needs to be inferred, but in order to maintain the bloodline in charge of guarding the forbidden sealed mechs, Kageaki’s mother, Subaru Minato, drugged her ten-year-old son and raped him. This is what kicks off the chain of events that lead Hikaru to try destroying the entire world, and why Kageaki is so brutal in bed – his fundamental ideas about what sex is were irreparably damaged by the woman who should have been keeping him safe. You can draw a line from Revolutionary Girl Utena through Tsukihime, Fate, and Umineko, where the fundamental wrong at the heart of the world is rape, often incestuous – and Kageaki is the first male entrant in that line I can think of.

He’s a guy for a very specific reason: because that makes it a lot harder to say “oh he’s not culpable”.

AI: THE SOMNIUM FILES

Protagonist: Date Kaname, Weird Pervert

Difficulty Of Recommendation Due To Sexual Deviation: Guy just cannot shut up about pussy (although, amusingly enough, he met his best friend, who was canonically in a sexual relationship with a man, in a gay bar. Why was he in there? Oh you know)

No It’s Really Thematically Important Trust Me: It’s not. He’s just like that.

Yeah this was fine in the moment (loved to see the culprit in Boss’s body) but the child abuse plot line and also almost everything else it’s trying are so much weaker than Umineko. Also I can’t fucking stand Tesa or her fucking patty cake song thing. Ugh.

#12 days of anime #umineko #full metal daemon muramasa #why did I do this

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