Bishojo game character analyses

 Asuka Tooyama

This blue-haired wunderfrau may play tennis, but she is not self-made. She plays tennis and can swim all because of the player character. She is obsessed with him and almost totally subservient except for when she gets flustered. Then she might put her foot down. Also has a dysfunctional relationship with her mother.

The way she reacts to being harassed gives young men the wrong idea about consent, and despite not having been spied on in the school nurse's office, the player decides to impregnate her, an underage girl. 

Kaoru Saionji

A character who would be dismissed as "frigid". The player character spies on her while she's changing for an inspection from the school nurse and decides to impregnate her and twenty other girls, and yet she confides in him.

Like Asuka, Kaoru has a dysfuntional relationship with her parents.

Ren Kagami

A beautifully-designed character with wavy golden bunches. Fits into the "dependent" fantasy. Written with an older brother complex. Father is barely around, and her mother's affair with the player character, also her childhood friend, risks tearing apart her family. And they say her game has no plot.

Ai Ogitsu

Scruffy blue-haired bike-riding tomboy. Does obscene things to the player character and is brainwashed into sex. Is a punishment fantasy towards girls who disrupt the established order.

Irina Putina

Is part of the "taming the Amazon" fetish, deludes the player into believing any strong girl is "playing hard to get".

Ai Rohan

Like Irina, Rohan is characterised as a conquest, a "tamed Amazon". The most I can say about her is that she's definitely smarter than the Girls Book Maker version of Arsène Lupin.

Miyako Andou

Another punishment fantasy, this time for a girl characterised as a know-it-all loudmouth percieved as stepping out of line.

Touko Shiranui

Like Kaoru, Touko is a character who would be dismissed by a real life man as "frigid". The real twist in her character is that for some reason she wants to be trapped in that cabin in the woods. Or was it a temple in the mountains? This sends the player mixed messages "No means yes" messages. Furthermore, like Ai Ogitsu, she is subjected to magical brainwashing.

Nanako Kugayama

Same as Touko, but Nanako has the strange side job of doing voice acting for dirty cartoons, adding to the "asking for it" delusion. So much emphasis in the dialogue is put on her alleged "playing hard to get" personality that she's as much of a stereotype as the rest of them. She is also a victim of surprise harassments as part of the gameplay.

Girls Book Maker- inspired experimental comics

I even included Rohan in one.

 

Conceptual illustration

 This shows visual novel characters meeting in the real world and having a discussion. I like the dynamic way I drew "Miya".

Lucis Imperatrices

 I've been working on this concept for a long time. I have only now been inspired to put a name to it. Right now I am working to build on it.

Pictured here are the silhouettes of eleven girls from visual novels, "erotic games" and "masturbation games", all reimagined in a feminist, empowered manner.

The pictures are inspired by the Diamonds' murals from Steven Universe because I like the ethereal, mysterious quality.

After all, these characters, with their diverged hair colors, are designed to have an ethereal quality. And since a number of these characters are forgotten about once their games are sold, they are mysterious.

A brief word on Jewish and antisemitic coding in cartoons

 We know how some movies and TV shows have latent antisemitic stereotypes. The Disney villains of today sing in a minor key, or have dark hair (a topic I might get to later). Then there was the unintentional blood libel metaphor of Jim Henson's 'The Dark Crystal'.

I would like to opine on something I've noticed: characters with big noses.

The coded Jewishness in portrayals of villains and jerks, no matter what their actual religion is or if they have one, is not intentional in some cartoons.

I noticed it with the antihero Squidward Tentacles from 'SpongeBob SquarePants'. His large nose singles him out as a naysayer. Then there are other Jewish and antisemitic elements (for a one-time mason) ; the large nose, the association with minor-key music, the fact that he plays the clarinet* and the fact that he's an octopus (a motif used in antisemitic cartoons). He's a great character, very funny and witty, but is based on latent, unconscious biases related to or conflated with negativity. 

Then there is Sting-o, the naysayer of Fifi and the rest of the Flowertots. A wasp with a hooked nose, again singled out like some Nibelung.

Not all cartoon characters with big noses are Jewish-coded, latently or otherwise; Benson Dunwoody from 'Regular Show' is an obvious Gentile compared to his Jewish employee Muscle Man. But there are times where this feature is used to signify negativity.

* The clarinet is a staple of klezmer music.

Bishojo Game Characters are Sexist, So Why Do I Draw Them?

Not all visual novel characters are bishojo games, dating sims or porn games, but there are a lot of them.

However, ever since animation companies in the 1970s started producing animated series for adults, such as Lupin III and Cutie Honey, there has been more permissiveness in objectifying women and even girls.

Why have I drawn and painted such characters for over a decade?

1. The concept of porn games is disturbing. Underage girls objectified or dressed like showgirls. This has been a trend since the genre's inception in 1982. The Girls Book Maker version of Tigger is dressed obscenely and has the appearance of a preteen. It's bad enough that the fictional women are subjected to the male gaze, but the girls are as well, despite the flimsy "Over 18" disclaimer tacked onto the games. Nobody is convinced that Ren Kagami is college age.

Animations such as Sailor Moon and Totally Spies are also guilty of sexualising minors and passing it off as glamor. Children become desensitized to it early or are made to think there's nothing wrong.

The way most of these characters are written is as a fantasy of male attention and female manipulation.

2. They are so obscure that AI will fail to recognize them and confuse them with a different character. For example, it would confuse Ren Kagami with Len Kagamine.

3. Because I do it to emphasise the fact that today's culture is fractured.

5. Because people are relying more on AI, it's remarkable that these characters are a product of human imagination. Especially the Girls Book Maker ones.

6. Companies are training AI by stealing artists' work, but in general things like dating sims and bishojo games are a line they won't cross except for popular characters such as Asuka Tooyama, Nao Iihara, Mitsugu Tsukushino, Irina Vladimirovna Putina and Nanako Kugayama.

Angel's Afternoon (1985)

Irina Vladimirovna Putina from 'My Girlfriend is the President' (2009)

Translating Girls Book Maker

 The Girls Book Maker roleplaying games are such an insane and dumb idea that they're endlessly fascinating. A visual novel can try and be as weird as possible, but it'll never top this. This is the weirdest visual novel idea I have ever seen.

The best way to describe the premise is Duck Pimples meets Coco meets Time Squad. The games take place in an otherworldly library that stores every classic story in history, but the characters are cheesecake versions of the authors and characters, they wear more outlandish outfits than what you'd find at the Met Gala, and they battle giant bookworms that look more like emoticons printed on balloons. And one character is a gender-flipped version of Arsène Lupin and has a voice like Kathy Ireland.

So they inspired me to do a series of experimental comics.

Gender-flipping is nothing new (just ask Hildy Johnson from 'The Front Page'). That's what these characters purely are. But in their particular context their roles recall anthropomorphic personifications, nymphs, muses, graces, caryatids, etc. 

In actual fact, they're more like sexualised magical girls and anime stereotypes: the cute megalomaniac, the nudist, the sexy nun, the princessy schoolgirl, the emotionless lolita, the bubbly idol type, the animal-eared woman and so on.

The character designs have to be seen to be believed. The characters look as if their designers tried to incorporate a number of elements and then lost their train of thought.

Translating these, like with many visual novels, can be summed up with Homer Simpson's comment about Ricky Gervais: "You take forever to say nothing!"

Why do I persist with it despite its elevator music?

What has gotten me obsessed with scenes from these games is that sometimes, they just barely pass the Bechdel test. The female characters spend almost as much time talking to each other about the existential nature of their being as they do about the male player character. It's pretentious fake feminism, but it keeps the viewer interested. A work can pass the Bechdel test and still be sexist. Case in point: An Officer and a Gentleman. 

And half the dialogue does revolve around the characters going out of their way to please the first man they see. Some of these book characters have wives in the original stories, which makes this seem like a lesbian conversion fantasy.

Some characters have dialogue but are never seen. Some don't even feature in the game story, like the aforementioned wives of some of the characters like Sneeze, Sancho Panza and Ganimard.

I have been obsessed with videos of these games because the third one in particular, a gacha game called 'The Story You Write', though a combination of insulting sexism and po-faced melodrama, goes the extra mile. I am fascinated with the way it takes gender flipping fictional characters to an extreme, despite the fact that some of the characters don't wear outfits that match their roles (why does their gender-swapped Gepetto look exactly like Harley Quinn?).

And the characterizations even of characters you don't see are alarming. You have Galahad making Monty Python jokes, Gawain watching football and drinking beer and Tristan gambling. At the very least, they're not treated like children like other characters in this franchise. The point is, the more you find out about this game, the weirder it gets, even when you know it has a Lancelot who gets naked and drives a car.

These visual novels are a paradox: a world with too many rules and plot devices, but also literary crossover chaos.

With everyone relying on AI now, seeing these characters as a product of human imagination is strangely fascinating.