This essay contains major spoilers for the game’s prologue and Chapters Two and Three. Read at your own risk. It is long. Subarashii means, roughly, “wonderful.”
In the previous installment, we drew principally on several postmodern thinkers to discuss the character types in Subahibi that display gender performativity, briefly explaining the riddle of desire for futanari. We then approached the question through sexual politics, analyzing why sexual freedom calls for vigilance. We examined the fundamental difference between “the sexual relationship between men and Takuji dressed as a girl” and “the sexual relationship between Takuji and Riruru.” In fact, at our present historical stage, the advocacy of sexual liberation faces both a cultural crisis brought about by heterosexual hegemony and an institutional crisis brought about by patriarchal structures. The former is apparent in the many people who still transplant the master–slave order of heterosexual culture into their own intimate relations. The latter appears when we return to real-world practice: however tolerant the free cultural market may seem toward the liberation of sex and gender, those who do not conform to traditional gender norms remain subject to the institutional oppression of “civilization.” A Freudianism that invokes “eros” to achieve sexual freedom and equality must confront further questions of rights and responsibilities. Reaching this ultimate ideal requires both practical and theoretical consideration.
To discuss practice inevitably brings us to sociology, and even social philosophy. Wakatsuki Kagami has left me puzzling over “things,” while Tachibana Kimika’s directness and daring have prompted me to think about “action.” This installment mainly fills in the gaps, concentrating on Kagami’s and Kimika’s experiences in an attempt to find types that can serve as the basis of analysis. Finding such types means that we can apply their experiences, and the “discourses” hidden behind them, to analyses of characters and even entire stories in other anime, manga, and games.
1. Things and Reification
Wakatsuki Kagami and her younger sister, Wakatsuki Tsukasa, first appear as Minakami Yuki’s childhood friends and play major roles in the prologue. Saying almost anything more about Kagami would entail extensive spoilers. What matters here is her “contribution” to the second chapter. While the other students give themselves over to the savior’s wisdom, she alone tries to correct Takuji’s errors. She opposes Takuji the savior throughout, always acting to protect her sister. Kagami thus forms an external counterpart to the Yuki personality’s internal effort to stop him. Late in the second chapter, however, as Takuji’s savior personality rapidly expands, Yuki’s ability to manifest is further suppressed. Kagami’s efforts alone barely scratch the surface. In the end, protecting her sister costs her a profoundly distressing exit from the story.
After Takuji’s savior personality awakens, players encounter the game’s first “dark, deep, and brutal” scene in his secret base. Kagami comes to stop him and is captured by his followers. First they tie her up, cut her clothes to shreds, and beat her; then dozens of male followers subject her to **. In the cold, gloomy basement, the concrete floor gleams a dim blue under the light. Kagami’s clothing is in tatters, her body marked with deep, bloody wounds. Thin-skinned players could easily put down the mouse and give up here. Yet just as we think that Kagami, having screamed her heart out and finally exhausted herself, is about to die, she strikes back at Takuji in an unexpected way. After the assault, she lies naked on the concrete, looking at Mamiya Takuji with contempt and pity, laughing coldly and mocking him. These anomalous reactions leave the swaggering Takuji momentarily at a loss. Confronting the ferocious male followers, Kagami seems entirely at ease. At the very extremity of humiliation, she continues—or begins again—to hold on to herself. Within this extraordinarily violent, objectifying relation, she becomes a “fetish” through a dialectical reversal, shaking the savior psychologically. But this brief counterattack is not yet enough to reveal what makes Kagami special. The followers then nail her to a concrete pillar with spikes, and she dies in the posture of the crucified Jesus.
There is, of course, more to the crucial point. If we keep playing with these questions in mind until Chapter Five, the preceding analysis suddenly becomes clear. Wakatsuki Kagami was never a living person at all: she is the rabbit doll Mamiya Tomosane gave his younger sister Hasaki. This involves important plot points from Chapters Four and Five. Mamiya Tomosane is the original owner of this body, which I will call body A. The Yuki and Takuji personalities either invaded or arose within it later. Tomosane deeply loves his sister Hasaki and vows to care for her forever. Just as the story reaches a moment of family happiness, however, their mother arrives with his younger brother Takuji and kidnaps Hasaki. The real Yuki falls from a cliff and dies while trying to save her. Witnessing it all, Tomosane suffers an instant mental collapse. Takuji finally takes up residence in body A as a parasite, while Tomosane’s self is sealed within its unconscious. The rabbit doll, Wakatsuki Kagami, becomes a compensatory substitute for the siblings’ love, providing a “presence” for the “absence” of their bond. The Takuji personality, meanwhile, both cherishes his sister and respects their mother’s desire to sacrifice her. Caught between these two conflicting discursive orders, Hasaki becomes a “symptom” for Takuji. To eliminate his conflict, he constructs a hallucination, recasting Hasaki as Wakatsuki Tsukasa, the younger sister of his opponent, Wakatsuki Kagami. He also displaces his “hatred” of Tomosane and his intense guilt over “killing Hasaki” onto the elder sister, Kagami. Kagami thus brings together three faces: the incarnation of Tomosane’s love for his sister, a vessel for Takuji’s hatred of Tomosane, and a “scapegoat” for Takuji’s desire to “kill his sister.” At this point, players have a rough understanding of the true identities of the Wakatsuki sisters who appear in the first three chapters.
In other words, the “incident” becomes this: a group of followers adhering to Takuji’s teachings sexually assaults a rabbit doll. The script may deliberately exclude “incidental characters” from its narrative structure to highlight events triggered by key characters. With that in mind, we could perfectly well understand the incident as Takuji’s individual hallucination. Empty signifiers such as the followers would merely be offshoots of his consciousness, supplying a bodily apparatus for the event so as to foreground the brutal act of “r*pe” alone. But I clearly do not want to simplify the followers in that way. I would rather assume that they are not puppets of the plot but people endowed, by default, with “understanding.” Two possibilities then arise. First, they undergo a collective hallucination, and the thing becomes a person in their phenomenal world. Second, they know that it is a “thing” but nonetheless r*pe it and derive pleasure from doing so, displaying the structure of fetishism.
Intuitively, we should not reach too readily for the first explanation. For the followers to experience highly similar collective hallucinations would be a coincidence difficult to understand empirically. To say it is simply a plot device would take us back to “simplifying the followers.” Perhaps we should instead turn to a hermeneutics of the relation between people and things. Whether the “thing” appears to the followers as a “person” is not particularly important. We should attend to a deeper relation of objectification: “the thing’s human attributes” and “the human being’s reduction to the attributes of a thing.”
As we have said, the rabbit doll is not a simple thing. It combines Tomosane’s love for his sister with the burden of Takuji’s guilt over “killing his sister.” It reflects both the attributes of a thing as appearance and those of a social relation as essence. If Tomosane’s love remains private in character, the burden of Takuji’s guilt is comparatively social. Its ultimate source is the injunction of a big Other: his mother and the White Lotus Cult behind her. The injunction’s operation upon the followers is merely a repetition of its operation upon Takuji. Through Takuji the savior’s designation, the rabbit doll itself is regarded as filth obstructing the apocalypse, an other to be excluded from the symbolic order. Yet this thing is not an objective reality wholly independent of human consciousness. It is a thing constituted through human relations—a Sache. The story consequently presents a scene of violation. On one hand, it imports the fantasy of male sexual violence against women into this process of exclusion, linking the removal of filth to gender hegemony. On the other, the truth behind the image warns us of the thing’s alienness. The former reveals that the followers bring their understanding of human relations into their understanding of things; the latter shows their fear and disavowal of things. Their dialectical unity constitutes the whole process of “reification” (Versachlichung).1
A Cultural Account of “Things”
The game does not depict coercive institutions or political systems. Instead, it uses the mysterious organization of a cu*t to allude to the superstructure, so invoking Marxist philosophy may seem a little far-fetched. Yet we can pursue this scene’s configuration of reification in a broader social and cultural context. What if Kagami were not a doll but a sex toy? There was once an awkward question on Zhihu: “Do galgames objectify women?” In terms of Marx’s concept of reification, much about this is debatable. Reification describes how, under capitalist relations of production, relations between people are conquered and displaced by relations between things, taking the form of “commodities.” To say that galgames objectify women is itself inappropriate. First, it presupposes a subject that carries out the objectification, creating a subject–object opposition and thereby overlooking both parties’ positions within the overall patriarchal structure and their subtle interaction. Second, it identifies the galgame as the subject carrying it out. An inanimate thing without a will suddenly becomes the persecutor and ruler—an exceedingly strange proposition. It is not, then, that galgames objectify women. Rather, most creators express their own reified consciousness through galgames. Through the outward appearance of things, that consciousness acts back upon people, reflecting reified relations between people—the interactions of male and female protagonists—into the player’s perceptions.
Reification simply names the objective fact that relations between things displace relations between people: women and their sexual organs are regarded as commodities and tools. Reified consciousness, meanwhile, means that people accept relations between things and bring that acceptance to bear on the creation of things, making them reflect the hegemonic order of reality. The two arise not diachronically but synchronically. Hence the Japanese scholar Hiromatsu Wataru recommends replacing wuhua (物化) with wuxianghua (物象化) to emphasize what Marx really meant: tangible, material things (Ding) are the outward appearance of commodities; intangible, immaterial things (Sache)—social relations—are their inner essence. Marx emphasizes the thing’s “alienness,” but this must not be understood as its “having no self.” A verrry Hegelian reading, that. Reification must occur “intersubjectively,” not through a “subject–object opposition.” In short, when an otaku plays and gazes at the beautiful girls in a game, it looks as though he is personifying things. In fact, he perceives relations between people beneath the appearance of relations between things, while becoming entangled in relations between things himself through his transference onto those girls. In a sense, if an absolutely devout male otaku existed, pouring all his desire into two-dimensional characters and taking reification to its furthest extreme, he would actually be the most harmless of all. The problem is that reification reveals precisely why a commodity stamped with human social relations cannot become a “fetish” from which “people” have been excluded in this way. Nor can the otaku become wholly a “thing.” Rather, in fetish worship—or sexual fetishism—he acquires an illusory form of transference. On one hand, desire for things in games does indeed make the heterosexual male otaku keep real women at a respectful distance. On the other, he cannot entirely refuse the reified human relations he receives through commodities. In the end, he still reproduces that consciousness to some extent in real social interaction. Unless, that is, he becomes a “fat otaku robot” in a cyber-society, devoted to “drooling over 2D characters.”
In feminist criticism, by contrast, objectification is linked to the gaze and is comparatively easier to handle. Objectification is not only subjective—a person relinquishing their own subjectivity and identifying with an external, alien power. It is also an objective, systematic procedure that turns a thing into an object of observation. A particular thing-like feature is isolated from the object and placed beneath the observer’s gaze, expressing a political relation of unequal power. Objectification functions here as the process through which the object of the gaze is commodified. Compared with the Marxist concept of reification, a prominent difference, apart from the lesser idealist coloring, is that feminism generally identifies men as the agents of objectification, rather than capitalist relations of production. To give a more concrete example: while Marxists may occasionally sympathize with loutish, hopeless otaku who have no voice in mainstream consumer circles, radical feminists are more likely to take a critical attitude, targeting both the overall patriarchal structure and individual sleazebags. At the practical level, the feminist concept of objectification seems more capable of prompting action. It is also more widely understood and has made many powerful contributions.
Marxist philosophy’s criticism of male otaku tends to focus more on a critique of ideas, with a fairly pronounced Kantian deontological coloring. Feminism, by contrast, asks how objectification concretely operates. Empirical disciplines such as communication studies and sociology are now attempting to investigate the correlation between pornography and sexual crime, a matter currently under considerable dispute. (Zhihu has hosted answers on whether pornography affects young people’s physical and mental health. One answer by a communication-studies contributor is worth reading: zhihu.com.)
This part of Subahibi does not raise reification to the level of society as a whole. But consider it from a non-human-centered standpoint. Kagami’s final mockery of Takuji seems precisely to suggest the “thing’s” taking over from its master in the master–slave dialectic. Portraying the “rabbit doll” as a woman like Kagami may have been an accidental stroke, yet it gives concrete visibility to objectification in gender relations. Women’s position as objects under the patriarchal order so closely resembles things’ position as objects under the human order that a new avenue for feminist thought opens up. Kagami’s brief seizure of power at the end signifies more than the reification through which human social relations fall under the control of alien creations and things take on the form of human relations. Perhaps it also figures Haraway’s vision of a posthuman age. Kagami suffers every humiliation and is taken to the extreme of objectification, yet thereby constructs a subjectivity that deconstructs the human center—the phallic center. Once her true identity is exposed, she retroactively ushers the symbolic cyborg into this dialectical conflict. Finally, the enraged humans—men—nail it (her) to the concrete pillar. Kagami ends her mission in the form of Jesus’s Passion, telling a tale of a “holy maiden’s” suffering.
Although this episode may seem insignificant within the whole story, it offers players much to ponder when connected with Otonashi Ayana’s mystery and the game’s overall pursuit of the grotesque. It can prompt further interpretations of “things,” while helping us recover the function of the “dark, deep, and brutal” scenes in sadistic games. That would, of course, take us too far from this essay’s subject, so the analysis stops here for now.
2. Yuri in Practice
If interpreting Kagami’s story entangles us in the complexities of idealism, Tachibana Kimika’s story has firmer empirical grounding. No player who follows the story carefully can fail to be moved by her acts of atonement. Broadly speaking, this character’s very existence is a feminist narrative. She not only protects her subjectivity through her individual actions from beginning to end, but also displays a restrained fidelity in her yuri relationship with Zakuro.
Chapter Two, told from Takuji’s perspective, lets the player occupy the subject position of the male gaze and spy on Kimika’s every move, just as in the usual perspective of a bishōjo game. Until Chapter Three, however, players do not know the particular significance of her behavior. The nonlinear narrative’s multiple viewpoints cleverly conceal her true self and her desire at the structural level, so that their eventual revelation produces an unexpected response. Even if we isolate Chapter Two, it is not hard to find her “charm” in her absolute loyalty to Takuji and the clear-headedness she retains throughout. In Takuji’s route, she does indeed become an important assistant. To win his classmates’ faith, the savior makes three prophecies during an apocalyptic speech in class, including an explicit prediction of the next “death.” Takuji, whose personality is unstable, unexpectedly misses the best moment to set things up. Ultimately, Kimika acts under his name and completes this “pre-established harmony” single-handedly, greatly enhancing the savior’s prestige among the students. Later, at the secret base, she even volunteers to become his chair while he gives his speech, letting him sit on her. In Kimika’s alternate route in Chapter Two, she also uses her extraordinary knowledge of chemistry to refine his drugs, removing their addictive component while retaining their hallucinogenic effects. On the school rooftop, she and Takuji enact a lovers’ flight together into space.
Here we can readily see Kimika’s fundamental difference from the other followers. While everyone else hesitates in their faith and waits for the prophecy to arrive, she decisively sides with the savior, even helping him consolidate his sacred authority. She fully displays the freedom of the for-itself and is even more self-disciplined than the savior. For some particular reason—or, as Takuji guesses, to “atone to Zakuro”—she uses his status as savior to wreak radical revenge upon those who bullied her and Zakuro. It is this relationship, structured by revenge, that is the key to Kimika’s faith in the savior, and to what distinguishes that faith from everyone else’s. Players reaching this chapter are shown the result before its cause. This not only foreshadows what follows, but places the meaning of this relation of faith beyond the chapter itself.
At this point, we must discuss the bond between Kimika and Takuji in her alternate route. Takuji the savior vaguely senses her difference from the other followers. They dread death and surrender their fate to him in the hope of being reborn after the apocalypse, forming a passive subjectivity. Kimika, however, is intent on dying. She gently brings real social relations into the cult’s domain, forming an active subjectivity. Takuji cannot bring himself to kill the devoted Kimika, nor can he explain why she blames herself so terribly for Zakuro’s death. Kimika not only appears more fanatical than the other followers—engineering the teacher’s suicide, improving the drugs, asking to become Takuji’s “chair”—but also displays an aggressivity toward his identity as savior. The recipient turns into the one making demands: a master–slave reversal. The savior finally realizes that he can no longer linger within the cult’s university discourse and is forced to develop a negative hallucination—he falls in love with Tachibana Kimika.2 Following the overflow of the imaginary, he finds reality and, in her route, displays his feelings as a human being. But players reaching Chapter Two do not know the specific content of Kimika’s desire. Their gaze enters the same blind spot as Takuji’s. Confronted by this unconventional girl who clearly does not worship him, we cannot help asking: “What does she actually want?” The question initiates not only Takuji’s transference but the player’s too. The key to the savior’s falling in love with Kimika and discovering his human side is that even an omniscient, omnipotent savior like him cannot grasp the signifier of her desire.
At the end of the route, Tachibana Kimika finally confesses to Takuji that she is consumed by remorse for having caused Zakuro’s death. She wants revenge not only on the people who bullied them, but also on the self who stood by unmoved as Zakuro was persecuted. Having said this, she gets up and jumps from the roof. Takuji the savior instantly throws his arms around her, and they fall toward the ground together. The final image pauses at a moment when they are suspended in the air. Kimika smiles, tears running down her face. Is she relieved because she has successfully atoned, or moved because someone loves her? We cannot know. We cannot distill a single meaning from this expressive sign; it is as though the sign itself were an irreducible structure of the character. The gaze in pursuit of meaning meets an obstruction here, which in turn demands the subject’s own offering of self. Takuji does not know whether Kimika loves him; the player does not know whether she loves them either. Her desire becomes a question, and in doing so establishes her as a subject who cannot be explained.
Zakuro and Kimika
By Chapter Three, as I explained in my first Subahibi essay, players finally discover what lies at the heart of Kimika’s self-reproach: her loyalty to the unforgettable history of suffering she shares with Zakuro. Chapter Three’s alternate route is also the stage on which both girls grow.
For now, let us set aside their yuri love, since it is a complex form of transference, and explore their shared experience as women instead. Zakuro and Kimika both occupy the position of the bullied. Both are persecuted by the same subjects—Megu, Satoko, Shiroyama, and the others. At the bottom of the food chain, they are subjected to hostility and exclusion as others within discourse. It is precisely this antagonistic relation that allows Kimika and Zakuro to sustain one another in their weakness, opening the possibility of resistance through joint action. Of course, the boundaries of this opposition are not naturally clear or absolute. The decisive factor governing it is the player’s choice. In the first essay, I discussed the option in which “Zakuro does not think about Kimika.” In that route, the two fail to form an alliance. The player’s choice retroactively shapes Zakuro’s insufficient concern for Kimika. It also means that she actually misses the scene in which Kimika, stripped of her clothes, grieves alone in a corner of the classroom. That one move prevents their encounter: Zakuro is ultimately persecuted, while Kimika proceeds toward the tragedy of atonement.
With the other choice, Zakuro thinks carefully about Kimika, enabling her to take further action to care for her. She discovers the bullied Kimika in the corner of the classroom, and they begin talking. Zakuro’s innocence and worldly inexperience leave Kimika both moved and exasperated. During their conversation, Kimika reveals the real reason she does not want Zakuro near her and mentions guilt for the first time, confirming for players what underlies her actions in Chapter Two. Later, as they interact, she also tells Zakuro why Megu and the others bully them: Megu’s boyfriend Shiroyama once told her that Kimika and Zakuro were very cute, making her jealous. Kindhearted Kimika would rather be bullied herself than have someone else implicated for caring about her—especially with such innocent concern. Throughout this route, she initially rejects Zakuro’s pure goodwill over and over, but their interactions gradually turn these rebuffs into fond, comforting jokes. By the middle of the story, Kimika can no longer abandon this girl who truly cares about her. During the restaurant incident, Zakuro finally erupts and escapes with Kimika, formally establishing a bond of mutual support against a common enemy.
This moment marks both the beginning of Kimika’s transference onto Zakuro and Zakuro’s break with her former childishness. The brief hysterical symptom at the restaurant punctures the fantasy Zakuro has held within her. For a girl absorbed in literary imagination, nothing could be more subversive than making an impassioned declaration and putting up stubborn resistance in reality. What we see is not merely the weak rising up, but a girl growing beyond narcissism. This growth restores her connection with reality, lets her recognize her position under oppression, and demands that she constitute herself through active engagement as a subject. The aim of this action is not an imaginary heterosexual relationship. It rests on the shared experience of women who are bullied. At the level of content, it appears as resistance to Megu and the others; structurally, its core is resistance to the narrative of heterosexual hegemony embodied by Megu and Shiroyama.
Only through this practical action does their “yuri” truly take shape. Unlike the yuri of the game’s prologue or other slice-of-life works, this yuri is born amid danger and imperfection, blossoming in defiance of stigma. It sacrifices innocence and freedom from care, emphasizing the real difficulties yuri faces. Although these difficulties do not take the form of institutional exclusion, Megu’s and Satoko’s words and actions convey an intense hostility toward those who are “different.” Quite apart from Shiroyama’s compliments, Megu’s initial aversion to the two girls arises from her submissive relation of trying to please her boyfriend. Behind this citation of power, Kimika’s and Zakuro’s distinctive personalities may also be at issue—Zakuro’s innocence, for example, or Kimika’s impish inventiveness. In the prologue, Zakuro creates a complete female utopia from which men are excluded; her innocence is therefore also the order of the entire world. The school violence in Chapter Three, however, reminds us that this is no utopia that respects innocence. If they are to be happy, they must resist.
The real-world order of Chapter Three is expressed above all in its being a society where men exist. Although Zakuro and Kimika stand on the same side, Zakuro still loves Takuji in his Yuki personality. A male third party thus remains suspended within their yuri relationship—actually a woman, though those involved do not realize it. Zakuro’s changing feelings and the resolution of the school violence form two plotlines, one hidden and one visible. As her encounters with Takuji in his Tomosane personality become more frequent, she increasingly questions her love for him. Those doubts instead push her relationship with Kimika further forward.
Although both girls have prepared thoroughly to resist, their characterization still leaves them physically helpless. At the climax, thugs led by Shiroyama attack them. Just as they are subdued and have exhausted every option, Takuji (Tomosane) arrives at the opportune moment and uses immensely powerful traditional martial arts to knock down the bullies one by one. A “hero rescues the beauties,” in one of the most exhilarating moments of the whole game. Yet unlike a fairy-tale hero, Tomosane, kind though he is, is neither a courteous gentleman nor a knight devoted to his princess. He is simply a bloodthirsty brute. He says he came to the park only to find his “toys”—Zakuro and Kimika—and, while he was at it, someone to vent on. During the fight, he displays wildly exaggerated aggressivity and sadism; everything he says and does astonishes the girls. Confronted by this flamboyant male libido, Zakuro not only grows more suspicious of Takuji’s true identity; the chain of her transference onto him is broken. She finally realizes that the one she loves is not this violent, crude, aggressive A—Tomosane—but that courteous, intellectual A who loves literature and the arts—Yuki. What she seeks is neither a holy father combining law and violence nor a prince charming who conceals power beneath romance, but an androgynous person closer to what Woolf had in mind.
In terms of script construction, the scene is designed to provide a way out for the two captive girls. Someone strong enough to take on ten opponents must therefore come to the rescue, and that person must have a connection to Zakuro and Kimika. Only Yuki and Tomosane meet those requirements. Leaving aside the route’s earlier foreshadowing, choosing the male Tomosane as rescuer is indeed, in one respect, a disappointment for feminist narrative: the girls still rely on male strength to resolve their crisis. On the other hand, this is Tomosane’s last performance of violence in the world. It not only uses his strength to counter the Takuji personality and usher the mediating Yuki personality into possession of body A, but also prepares the way for Kimika’s and Zakuro’s affection to deepen. This violent scene is no fairy tale of a hero rescuing beauties. It is Tomosane’s “one-man show,” absorbed in the self that is about to depart. The astonished Kimika and Zakuro seem to stand outside it, gazing at the terrifying sadist before them. The player, following Zakuro’s perspective and poking fun at Tomosane, brings this out still more mischievously.
It is hardly surprising, then, that Zakuro is willing to become Takuji’s friend afterward, but can scarcely love him again. Kimika takes his place: the girl who has shared her hardships, the brilliant science whiz, the tsundere who says she hates her but cannot let her go. Zakuro has finally grown. She is no longer a passive subject immersed in her own imagined world, but a striving person who exists for herself and fights for the one she loves. With Shiroyama’s group and the Tomosane personality gone, the story’s final female utopia, a utopia in the true sense, comes into being. Compared with the completeness simply supplied by the prologue, this happiness is so hard-won. It always seems quietly to warn us: face the challenges that come next.
Zakuro’s resistance finally changes the story’s course. In this alternate route, she does not kill herself but lives in mutual dependence with Kimika. Takuji does not awaken as the savior. Tomosane completes his mission and disappears, taking the Takuji personality with him. Yuki controls body A and enjoys life in reality… The work’s hopeful force unfolds through this route. Yet the main route ultimately keeps reminding us that we remain attached to an appearance of comedy with a tragic core. Perhaps it is precisely the main route’s tragedy that makes us cherish this hard-won happiness all the more.
Conclusion
At this point, the first review in this column is more or less complete. The work has a particular significance for me, so I have spared no words in writing three essays about it. I must admit that this took a great deal of time and energy. I will never write this much for the later reviews. I have tried to present the whole story at as many levels and from as many angles as possible, using a gender perspective to analyze the culture behind it. But the limits of my abilities and energy have left some important aspects untouched: the nightmare-like presence of Otonashi Ayana, for instance. Or the work’s foremost protagonist, Minakami Yuki, an intellectual character with a very distinctive personality who carries half the story on her shoulders. Traces of her presence can be found in every chapter. In the end, though, I gave up on analyzing her. Perhaps I did not know where to focus; perhaps it was love. (Or so I tell myself.)
There is also much more to explore in the work’s “grotesque” and “sadistic” dimensions. The brutal scene of Kagami’s violation could lead into a radical cultural philosophy of “the abject” and “the monstrous.” To pursue that discussion, though, we could not confine ourselves to gender, nor rely solely on this game’s grotesque, sadistic scenes as our examples. There are simply too many accomplished “dark, deep, and brutal” works of anime, manga, and games out there. Several works by that old bastard Izumi alone could be discussed together. Analysis in this area may nevertheless have a particular importance for subculture. So I intend to return to it with you someday. You guess when.
And finally, thanks for the support, folks.