Over fifteen years after its 2003 release by the Japanese game company Nitroplus, the cosmic body-horror visual novel Saya no uta (The Song of Saya)[1] remains a crucial example of queer antisociality in videogames. In fact, it may be more relevant than ever in light of a burgeoning body of scholarship on what Bonnie Ruberg calls “play beyond fun,” i.e., games fostering “negative emotions that challenge how we imagine playing videogames can, does, and should feel.”[2] The rise and current momentum of Queer Game Studies as a disciplinary field provides a timely opportunity to reevaluate challenging works like Saya no uta that fall outside the struggle for better LGBT+ representation and identity politics sensu stricto,[3] but merit attention from alternative conceptual frameworks. One such approach is the antisocial queer theory, a discordant snag in the history of queer theorizations with roots in the 1970s work of the French philosopher Guy Hocquenghem. This current of thought was energized by Leo Bersani’s Is the Rectum a Grave? in 1987 and Homos in 1995. In 2004, Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive became widely discussed for its “polemic against increasingly popular forms of lesbian and gay normativity such as marriage, parenting, and military service.”[4] For Edelman, the “queer” as a class stands for “ontological exclusion,”[5] as the supreme embodiment of anti-futurity, negativity, and abjection.

Regardless of the criticisms that Edelman’s antisocial thesis has received since it was first published (coincidently, less than a year after Saya no uta’s release),[6] antisocial queer theory remains operative for resisting the notion that the endgame of queerness is its full assimilation into society’s orthodoxy. Bersani’s (in)famous query, “should a homosexual be a good citizen?”[7] also resonates with the troubled history of videogames themselves concerning “respectability” and “civic service,” as they are oft-scapegoated by society in the wake of traumatic events like mass shootings.[8] In Bersanian terms, this article investigates the ways in which Saya no uta prompts us to ask, “should a videogame be a good citizen?” In answering this question, it weaves together narratological and ludological elements to challenge both the social teleology toward the legitimation of videogames and the technological teleology toward player sovereignty. In this regard, Saya no uta’s reputation precedes it, as eloquently expressed by Kotaku reviewer Richard Eisenbeis, who notes that it is “often called the single most fucked-up game ever released—and with good reason.”[9] He writes that “The Song of Saya is a game with murder, filicide, kidnapping, cannibalism, rape, possible pedophilia, sex slavery, extreme body mutilation, and scores of gut-churning eldritch sights. To put it another way, The Song of Saya is not a happy story and is in no way, shape, or form, a game for everyone.”[10]

With artwork by Higashiguchi Chûô and a haunting soundtrack by ZIZZ STUDIO, Saya no uta (Figure 1) is a short, adult visual novel written and directed by Urobuchi Gen, an author who specializes in deconstruction, tragedy, and dark themes. Urobuchi had previously worked with Nitroplus on several visual novels, but Saya no uta raised him to cult status, earning him the moniker “Urobutcher” for making characters suffer gruesome deaths or other horrible fates. Even though Saya no uta enjoyed a significant resurge in popularity and sales in the 2010s, after Urobuchi wrote the widely acclaimed anime series Puella Magi Madoka Magica (Mahô shôjo Madoka magika, 2011),[11] the game has slipped under the radar of scholarship up to this point, apart from blog posts and reviews. One reason for this is that visual novels, in general, remain an overlooked subject in the study of Japanese pop culture and videogames alike. Another possibility is that Saya no uta, as Eisenbeis’s review suggests, is virtually unredeemable. From the very first scene, the game assaults players with levels of disgust rivaling William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, its story and visuals relying on Lovecraftian cosmic horror—focused mainly on Saya’s enigma: who, or what, is she?—as much as on Cronenbergian gore. Moreover, because Saya no uta follows in the tradition of “depressing games” (utsuge), with no happy endings and few interactive choices, it is unconducive to players’ feeling “properly” rewarded at the end of the game. Again, as Eisenbeis puts it: “I can’t say I had fun playing The Song of Saya—I’m not sure you can really ‘enjoy’ playing it—but I am glad I played it.”[12]

Set in modern Japan, Saya no uta tells the story of a neurodivergent male protagonist, Sakisaka Fuminori (voiced by Midorikawa Hikaru), forced to undergo an experimental brain surgery to save his life after a road crash. On waking up, Fuminori is plunged into a hellish reality: he sees the world covered in foul-smelling viscera and other humans as horrible monsters (Figures 2 & 3). One night, at the hospital, Fuminori is visited by a little girl in a white dress, the only one who appears “normal” to his senses. The girl, named Saya (voiced by Takano Naoko), is surprised that Fuminori does not fear her and agrees to meet him every night. When Saya reveals that she is looking for her missing father, the medical scientist Doctor Ôgai, Fuminori offers to help in exchange for her moving in with him. From this point on, Fuminori and Saya enter a co-dependent relationship and become lovers. To other humans, however, Saya is an eldritch abomination, of the kind that H. P. Lovecraft popularized in his seminal short story The Call of Cthulhu (1928). While the story is narrated primarily from Fuminori’s viewpoint, every supporting character in the game gets a sequence from their point of view except for Saya, a fact that reinforces her externality to the diegetic world.

The first decision point in Saya no uta, i.e., when players are given options that alter the course of events (in this case, two choices at a time), happens almost two hours into the game, after Saya decides to investigate Fuminori’s condition by experimenting on his neighbor, Suzumi Yôsuke. Yôsuke, a middle-aged amateur artist and obsessive cleaner who lives next door with his wife and daughter, goes mad after Saya alters his brain to emulate Fuminori’s. He slaughters his family and rapes Saya, until Fuminori shows up and kills him. Saya then confesses that she has the power to alter organisms and offers to change Fuminori’s brain back to its neurotypical state. If Fuminori accepts, he is locked for life in a psychiatric hospital. Saya refuses to meet him in “person” and leaves to search for her father, never to return. Despite having the lowest casualty rate, the Back to Normal ending is essentially a game over, the undesirable result of a wrong choice with a swift conclusion.

If Fuminori refuses Saya’s offer, he leaps over the “moral event horizon”—the point of no return, after which a character is irredeemably evil.[13] For Saya’s sake, he knowingly engages in a vast array of abhorrent actions, including murder, rape, torture, cannibalism, and betrayal. The second and final decision point in the game is not Fuminori’s, but his best friend Kôji’s, whom Fuminori (in a previous sequence) had pushed down a well to avoid Kôji's prying into his affairs. Ryôko, Fuminori’s doctor at the hospital, rescues Kôji, and the latter breaks into Fuminori’s house, only to find his girlfriend Ômi’s remains in the fridge. Horrified, Kôji pulls out his phone to make a call, leading to two possible outcomes. If Kôji calls Ryôko, they face off against Fuminori and Saya. The confrontation results in the violent deaths of everyone but Kôji, who survives but is scarred by the horrors he witnessed (it is implied that he will kill himself). Despite the tragic outcome, they stop Saya and save the world. Therefore, the Humanity Wins ending is a bad ending with a story, distinct from the Back to Normal game over. If Kôji, instead, decides to call Fuminori, he faces off against him alone. He is killed and devoured by Saya, after which she collapses before Fuminori, revealing that she is pregnant and about to give birth to their “children.” Saya blossoms ecstatically in her lover’s embrace, releasing her final gift to Fuminori before she dies: an airborne mutagen that will infect every person on Earth, “cthulhuifying” humanity. Saya Wins is Saya no uta’s One True End, the “best” possible ending in the game.

One of the most singular aspects of Saya no uta is that it draws together two trends apparently at odds: antisocial queer theory and moé. The latter is closely associated, within the Japanese otaku (“geek,” “nerd”) culture industry, with “cute girls doing cute things” and iyashikei (“healing” or “soothing”) anime and manga, primarily targeted at an audience of adult men craving a sneak peek into the idealized innocence of girlhood. Rather than “merely” a human, Saya, seen from Fuminori’s viewpoint, fits moé’s character type par excellence, the loli, a shorter and cuter version of the traditional “beautiful girl” (bishôjo), for whom one cheers as if for a little sister or daughter (Figure 4). At first glance, the moé phenomenon seems to blend into the Edelmanian Child as a symbol of the family, life, and the future—what he terms “reproductive futurism” (more on this later)—in contrast to the death drive associated with queerness.

On closer inspection, however, it bears the marks of an antisocial genealogy. Namely, moé is often regarded as the evolution into a more palatable form of lolicon (“Lolita complex”), a genre of pornographic anime, manga, and videogames where underage-looking female characters engage in sexual acts. In this regard, one may point out that the popularization of the fandom slang waifu (a Japanese transliteration of the English word “wife”), meaning a character to which one is attracted and considers to be one’s significant other, coincided with the rise of moé in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The fact that the waifu, in the pop-cultural imagination, is typically a loli, imbues moé’s “pure” nonsexual affection with dubious undertones, in which sibling or filial love overlaps with marital eroticism and possessiveness.

As a personal anecdote regarding such ambivalences, I once reblogged an image macro of Saya with the caption “SHE’S NOT YOUR WAIFU, SHE’S AN ELDRITCH ABOMINATION” (Figure 5), to which someone replied: “Nothing’s stopping her from being both.” This stunningly accurate comeback summarizes not only the main plot point in Saya no uta—that Saya is both waifu and an eldritch abomination—but problematizes the queer indeterminacy concealed by fixed identities, and, as I argue in the following sections, the role these perform in Saya no uta’s play-beyond-fun.

Queerness in Saya no uta

While according to Bonnie Ruberg’s “taxonomy of no-fun games,”[14] Saya no uta classifies as a game “that players experience as alarming, unsettling, or otherwise too uncomfortable to play,”[15] it differs from games like Custer’s Revenge (Mystique, 1982), the Grand Theft Auto series (Rockstar Games, 1997), or RapeLay (Illusion, 2006), mainly because in these games, the objectionable content is disembodied from the game’s imagery. As Ruberg points out, “after players overcome the initial ethical hurdle . . . they quickly lose sight of the game’s problematic content.[16] On the contrary, in Saya no uta, the moral disgust that players feel toward Fuminori and Saya’s actions reiterates the physical disgust triggered by the game’s visuals and narration, including Fuminori’s vivid descriptions of the “exposed interior of the body”[17] and the disgusting tastes, smells, and sounds that he experiences. This consonance contributes significantly to the artistic merit of play-beyond-fun in Saya no uta.

Saya no uta also does not present players with the structure of “dialogue-trees-to-pursue-romance”[18] that is typical of Japanese eroge (“erotic games”) and dating simulators. What is more, Fuminori and Saya have sex before the game’s first decision point, removing the teleological goal of the erotic visual novel from the player’s control. Rather, Saya no uta constructs the romance in relation to Fuminori’s neurodivergent condition. The game gives players just enough to grasp who Fuminori was before the accident, and the role he played within his friend group. He was a medical student, a man of reason. Compared to his extroverted best friend Kôji, Fuminori appeared to be more diligent and sober. He was also, due to Kôji and his girlfriend Ômi’s matchmaking, on track to date Yoh, a modest beauty who had long pinned after him. In short, he was utterly straight, in a position of hegemonic normalcy. After the accident, Fuminori suffers from the feelings of estrangement that, throughout history, have often afflicted gender and sexual minorities and people with disabilities in society. He is isolated, emotionally traumatized, and lives in fear of his secret being found out by friends and doctors.[19] Thus, Saya becomes Fuminori’s living emotional crutch and their home a “safe space” from both the medicalization of neurodivergence at the hospital (Fuminori believes that should the doctors learn of his condition, he will spend his life as a guinea pig) and the pretense of ordinariness that Fuminori is forced to maintain on the outside world. Empathizing with Fuminori’s marginalization, despite his villainy, is one of the more powerful experiences in Saya no uta.

Still, Saya no uta complicates the victimization of Fuminori. For instance, the game’s opening sequence throws players in media res into a rendezvous between Fuminori and his friends, who are making plans for a skiing trip. From Fuminori’s perspective, it is a conversation among monsters (Figure 6). This sequence conveys that Fuminori is the one who cannot tolerate his friends, despite their well-intentioned efforts to act normal around him and integrate Fuminori into their activities—except Ômi, who thinks that Fuminori should have gotten over his trauma already and is increasingly impatient toward him. Tellingly, Ômi and Yôsuke, the characters who are intolerant toward Fuminori, are the ones that die in all three endings in the game: outraged by Fuminori’s brutal rejection of a love confession from Yoh, Ômi invades the Sakisaka household to confront Fuminori, but loses her sanity at sighting Saya’s true form seconds before she is killed; while Yôsuke fakes his concern and sympathy for Fuminori, only to imply that his unkempt yard is an eyesore for the neighbors. Fuminori’s visceral disgust toward his friends-turned-abominations disavows the possibility of an assimilationist identity for him. To avoid the game over, the return to normalcy in which Fuminori accepts to be disciplined, pathologized, and punished into place as a citizen, Fuminori must embrace the antisocial position. In his words, he must not be terrified of them, but be the one to strike fear into them. Or, to borrow Leo Bersani’s formulation, he must become an “outlaw”[10] on a Bonnie and Clyde journey with Saya, loving nothing but the Unassimilable itself.

The crucial moment occurs when Fuminori, who at first assumes that Saya does not trigger his cognitive disorder, realizes his mistake: “Everything is monstrous and loathsome in my eyes—everything but Saya. I thought that she was somehow unique. I was wrong. I see her just as I do everything else—as something other than what she really is. But why should that surprise me? Saya is part of my world, just as I am a part of hers. It doesn’t change what we are to each other” (emphasis added). This realization draws one’s attention, on the one hand, to the ways in which Fuminori’s extreme case of “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” highlights the relationality of desire, thus aligning with the “queer” as a term historically employed to emphasize the indeterminacy of gender and sexuality as spectrums beyond essentialized male and female, gay and lesbian identities. And, on the other hand, to the Jungian enantiodromia (the principle that extremes transmogrify into their shadow opposites)[21] underlying Saya’s “little sister” or “daughter” façade, i.e., to loli-Saya as the inverse proportion of eldritch-Saya.

It is most suggestive that, in the English-speaking fandom, characters who are devoid of any distinctive features beyond a high percentage of moé attributes are derogatorily called “moé blobs.”[22] The loli screens both Fuminori and the player from Saya’s unbearable meaninglessness and formlessness by embodying “the most stereotypical view of womanhood—little mothers who cook and clean and aren’t as scary as real adult women.”[23] To be sure, when players first encounter Saya in Saya no uta, it is as Fuminori’s child-bride, who cooks, helps him redecorate the rooms, washes his back and, despite her childlike looks and behavior, fulfils her role as a lover with copious amounts of sex (to the point of nymphomania) while insisting on bearing Fuminori’s children. Fuminori himself remarks: “Ever since Saya moved in, it’s been like having my own wife.” The taming of Cthulhu into a “little sister” attests to the remarkable ability of cute anthropomorphism (moé gijinka) to absorb the Other and anthropomorphize that which cannot be anthropomorphized. This transformative ability is not unlike Saya’s own, suggesting that cuteness, itself, is a form of horror. Or, as argued by philosopher Azuma Hiroki, that the adorable “little sister” is but a collage of atomized character attributes (e.g., green hair, cat ears), which can even be percentified for optimal capitalist commodification.[24]

Saya no uta is a consequence of this premise. As French author Michel Houellebecq wrote in his 1991 biographical essay, “H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life” (a subtitle that, although stemming from Lovecraft’s sexless universe, could well be the motto of antisocial queer theory), “Implacably, HPL destroys his characters without suggesting more than the dismemberment of a puppet.”[25] One could say the same thing about Saya’s effect on her diegetic world: every character in the game, at some point, ends up in literal pieces, as if the violence of moé’s processes of commodification was deconstructed and exposed before the player’s eyes. This shattering of bodies matches or is matched by the breaking of spirits. Like Lovecraft’s eldritch creations, a mere look at Saya is enough to drive most humans insane. Fuminori’s doctor, Ryôko, who is paranoid and obsessed with destroying Doctor Ôgai’s experiments, even mentions that before she learned of Saya, she was a law-abiding citizen who had never gotten a ticket. Only “mad scientist” Ôgai, occupying a liminal position between reason and insanity, is immune to Saya’s effect on “straight” people, setting the plot in motion by summoning her into our dimension. In Saya no uta, the Child is alien and inconceivable, breaking the “normative and normalizing logics of social legitimation and cultural intelligibility”[26] that other characters represent.

The Edelmanian idea that the Child’s “innocence, perversely, occasions its own perversion,”[27] is particularly present in the Saya Wins ending. Before, we had learned that Saya possesses superintelligence, breaking algorithms no human or machine can solve, and that she had gendered herself female, describing her purpose as “a lifeform that requires the seed of males” to reproduce. From that point on, she began acting like a stereotypical girl, and Doctor Ôgai and Saya called each other “father” and “daughter.” Players also learn from Ôgai’s writings that Saya was bored by mathematical exercises, and instead developed a passion for literature. Binge-reading novel after novel, she became obsessed with human romance, and her “pure maiden’s soul” (Ôgai’s words) wished to experience the emotion called love. As such, the “natural” state of a Child who “kills with an innocent exuberance, unconscious of what it does,”[28] which Saya displays during most of the game, is itself engineered from a massive database of life-affirming character archetypes and tropes in books and other human creations. As we will see shortly, the perversion of innocence is complete with Saya’s attack on Yoh—one of her few acts of pure malice, as opposed to self-preservation or quasi-scientific curiosity—perhaps motivated by the many tales of jealous women in literature and pop culture.

Lee Edelman’s concept of “reproductive futurism” can help us make sense of Saya no uta’s central narrative irony, namely, that humanity is ultimately destroyed by Saya’s entanglement with love, the very device designed to ensure its continuity. According to Edelman, reproductive futurism works like an ideological Möbius strip: whether you are on the political right or left, there is only a single side of futurity embodied by the Child,[29] which disavows the conceptual space of future-cancelling queerness by affirming life, i.e., reproduction, as an absolute value.[30] As Edelman puts it, “reproductive futurism” imposes “an ideological limit on political discourse as such, preserving in the process the absolute privilege of heteronormativity by rendering unthinkable, by casting outside the political domain, the possibility of a queer resistance to this organizing principle of communal relations.”[31] Saya no uta figures the inward collapse of reproductive futurism, for instance, in that as a doting “father,” Ôgai’s only wish is that his “daughter” finds love, at the expense of his own life—Ôgai kills himself to protect Saya’s secret existence—and, if necessary, the lives of the entire human race.

In the Back to Normal game over, Saya’s obsession with love saves humanity, as she gives up on her invasion plans due to heartbreak over Fuminori’s rejection, corroborating Ôgai’s belief, in his writings, that love hinders Saya’s natural and more efficient sexual instincts. Yet, the real horror in Saya no uta derives less from Saya’s original plot for alien world domination tout court, which is understandable as life’s general propensity for expansion, than from the suggestion that the game punishes any attempt at the normalization of love and desire. Kôji expresses this by stating that Fuminori and Saya must be eliminated, not out of revenge or justice (despite his girlfriend literally ending up in the refrigerator), but because they are an “anomaly” obstructing the world from functioning as it should.

This idea culminates in the Saya Wins ending, in which Saya becomes pregnant with Fuminori’s “children,” in the form of “cthulhuifying” spores targeted at humanity. These not only defy what human offspring should look like but undo the “human” itself as a viable category, figuring what Ryôko, in a very Edelmanian fashion, calls a “wedding to end all weddings.” Significantly, Doctor Ôgai writes in his research that “by witnessing Saya perform her operations on several rats, I have gained much confidence in my theory that her body is designed specifically to manipulate the biology of other organisms.” In other words, Saya is not just queer; she represents the operation of queering as an “attempt to undo . . . normative entanglements and fashion alternative imaginaries.”[32] Perhaps this is why Saya’s “childbirth” stands out in the game as a scene of sublime beauty, a refreshing approach compared to the vagina dentata and other “gynaehorrific”[33] imagery typically employed to represent female reproductive terrors within the horror genre (Figure 7).[34] Saya’s blossoming, anticipated as much by the game’s plant-shaped cursors (Figure 8) as by Saya comparing herself to a dandelion seed that “can turn even a desert into a garden,” forefronts the uncanny dimension of planthood present in the etymology of “moé”—a slang said to have originated from Japanese word processors mistakably substituting the verb 燃 え る (moeru), “to burn” or “to get fired up,” with the homophone 萌 え る (moeru), “to blossom” or “to sprout”[35]—while relating it to an (admittedly misanthropic) politics of “green” ecological restoration, in which human civilization ends and a humanless alternative begins.

The collapse of the social order is likewise present in Fuminori and Saya’s heterosexual domestic bliss, which is a “bizarro” version of marriage where everything is the same—“home, food, and family,” as Fuminori states at one point—but horribly, gruesomely different. For instance, despite Saya’s best efforts at the beginning of their cohabitation, the food she makes tastes disgusting to Fuminori. This is not because she is a cute clumsy girl (in moé terminology, a dojikko) who comically messes up her cooking, but because Saya overlooks her lover’s newfound taste for human flesh. The couple “fixes” this by resorting to cannibalism and storing their victims’ dismembered corpses in the fridge, e.g., Ômi and Yôsuke (Figure 9). On another occasion, Saya helps Fuminori make over the house to conceal the gore in his vision, but the walls and furniture end up covered in a disturbing array of paints, creating what is known in pop-cultural tropes as a “room full of crazy”[36] (Figure 10).

Moreover, Saya lures Yoh into their house, rapes her, and slowly and painfully “cthulhuifies” her as punishment for her lusting after Fuminori. When Saya offers Yoh up as a pet to Fuminori—who, thanks to Saya’s reshaping, now sees Yoh as the beautiful woman she was before his accident—they become, in Fuminori’s words, a family of three, composed of a madman, Cthulhu, and their broken sex slave abomination, making a grotesque mockery out of the “family as socially blessed, closed unit of reproductive intimacy.”[37] Under Saya’s influence, Yôsuke, too, turns into a family annihilator, going from a gatekeeper of reproductive futurism who (as the game tells us) proudly leads his life “leisurely and absent of want,” to raping the Child and eradicating the bourgeois nuclear household from Saya no uta’s world as soon as the Möbius strip is undone.

Finally, Saya no uta employs its monstrous pornography in ways akin to the anti-assimilationist “textual terrorism”[38] of authors like Bersani and Edelman, guaranteeing the game’s exclusion from the realm of good citizenship and the social legitimation that comes with it. As such, although the game’s original and subsequent releases provide a mature content filter, the sex and grotesque sequences in Saya no uta, which amount to approximately one-fourth of its special full-screen illustrations—called CGs or “computer graphics” in visual novels—are an important, if painful and uncomfortable, part of the experience. As Richard Eisenbeis points out, “While such scenes are pretty much par for the course in Japanese visual novels . . . the story’s implications as to who Saya is makes the sex anything but erotic despite its normal-seeming presentation.”[39] Saya herself may (outwardly) index the helpless “Child whose innocence solicits our defense,”[40] but she is no harbinger of futurity, committing unspeakable atrocities, including the gendered violence against Yoh. It is not a coincidence that the saving of Saya from Yôsuke’s rape, a dramatic damsel-in-distress sequence culminating in Saya crying in her savior’s arms, springs Fuminori beyond the moral event horizon. It highlights that Fuminori’s protective instincts toward his waifu do not result in the reinforcement of social structures. If Fuminori chooses “right” at the first decision point, he renounces his humanity, signaling the very implosion of reproductive futurism from the inside, within the game.

Queering the Game

Visual novels, or novel games, are a form of story-driven interactive fiction originating in Japan, typically involving branching storylines with different endings, lengthy scripts, and a passive “click-to-read” gameplay.[41] Compared to Western adventure games, visual novels do not usually rely on exploration and solving puzzles, as players only click the mouse to read texts and view illustrations, occasionally making choices at decision points. Visual novels co-evolved with pornographic eroge (“erotic games”) and dating simulators called bishôjo games or gyaruge (“girl games”), which often makes it difficult to establish clear-cut distinctions among these three types of videogames. The first eroge, Night Life (Koei, 1982), for NEC’s PC-9801, was a simple sex simulator, with schematic black and white drawings of a couple in different positions. Other companies followed in its footsteps, attempting to titillate audiences in the blossoming but competitive Japanese home computer market of the early 1980s,[42] and created eroge with anime-style graphics that fit the low capacity of displays and floppy disks.[43] Many early eroge were effectively rape games,[44] like 177 (Macadamia Soft, 1986), in which players stalked and raped a woman, either getting arrested or married to her depending on whether they satisfied the victim.

Despite efforts to merge the eroge with more sophisticated genres like the sword and sorcery, as the novelty effect dwindled, the plotless pornography became less appealing to consumers who could get similar content in cheaper media.[45] In 1992, the point-and-click adventure game, Dôkyûsei (“Classmates”), released by Elf, introduced a solution to develop in-game relationships without sacrificing the number of sex scenes: the bishôjo game with “routes,” where players choose one heroine from a pool of available girls, and after completing her story, go back to the beginning to pursue a different girl, and so on.[46] Each “route” is a dialogue-tree, creating a sense of progression as players make the correct choices to win over each girl, unlocking CGs that turn erotic or pornographic as a reward for growing intimacy.[47] The dialogue-tree model, especially in games marketed as “dating” or “life simulation,” has been criticized for its problematic view of relationships. As Mitu Khandaker-Kokoris points out, “to pursue a romance with a non-player character, the process effectively becomes ‘press the correct sequence of buttons in order to get them to sleep with you.’”[48] Nevertheless, Dôkyûsei upped the quality of character designs, backgrounds, storylines, and music, setting it apart from previous ventures.

While novelesque videogames continued to develop with mature and complex storylines, such as C’s Ware’s Xenon (1994) and Eve Burst Error (1995), only in 1996 did the company Leaf coin the term “visual novel” with two horror eroge, Shizuku (“Drip”) and Kizuato (“Scar”), which appropriated the “sound novel” format pioneered by the mystery-horror adventure game Otogirisô (Chunsoft, 1992).[49] Shizuku and Kizuato had novel-like text narration superimposed on stationary, full-screen backgrounds and character sprites that rotated to create different expressions. Shizuku also popularized the denpa (“electromagnetic wave”) horror subgenre in visual novels, i.e., stories where ordinary people act strangely under the influence of outside forces like radio waves, demons, or others,[50] a tradition of neurodivergent representation in which Saya no uta fits loosely. In 1997, Leaf’s heart-warming high school romance To Heart was an unprecedented hit,[51] with the supporting heroine HMX-12 Multi, a green-haired robot maid with mechanical ears and an earnest, hard-working personality, becoming “one of the founding principles of moé.”[52] (Figure 11) Saya shares certain similarities with Multi in appearance and character, as both are nonhuman “little wives” with green hair and a pet-like look—reinforced by Doctor Ôgai naming his “daughter” after a beloved childhood cat, as players learn during the Saya Wins ending—who, as the former candidly puts it about her plan for “cthulhuifying” humanity, simply want to “do their best.”

To Heart inspired others to invest in visual novels with moving love stories and moé visuals.[53] In 1998, Maeda Jun, a versatile scenario writer and composer working for the company Tactics,[54] developed ONE: Kagayaku kisetsu e (“One: To the radiant season”), a visual novel with branching storylines that introduced the effective formula of the nakige (“crying game”): “comedic first half + heart-warming romantic middle + tragic separation + emotional get together.”[55] In the wake of ONE’s success, Key, the company co-founded by Maeda after leaving Tactics, released Kanon (1999), Air (2000), and Clannad (2004), considered by many to be the visual novel’s “holy trinity,”[56] and most influential among scenario writers like Tanaka Romeo, Ryukishi, and Saya no uta’s Urobuchi Gen. Key’s visual novels continued the legacy of Elf’s landmark YU-NO, a point-and-click time-travel adventure released in 1996, that encouraged players to play all routes to understand the overarching narrative, and even provided a “map” of the game’s multiple narrative branches.[57]

Azuma Hiroki argues that the “melodramatic turn” in visual novels compensated for the technical limitations of 1990s home computers: because most PCs could not process complex animations and sounds, visual novels sought alternative means of conveying dramatic intensity. As the name suggests, sadness became the central affect of “crying games,” featuring sentimental stories and illustrations with which players could readily empathize. To save time and space on CD-ROMs and floppy discs, elements like backgrounds, character sprites, text boxes, voice-overs, and soundtracks were also “recycled” into new scenes, where the same files acquired different meanings (Figure 12 & 13). The use of clichéd scenarios and characters familiar to the otaku glued it all together, ensuring some degree of integrity despite the visual novels’ fragmented structure.[58]

Ironically, with the dissemination of the nakige, pornography, which was the primary “fun” factor in bishôjo games, became increasingly diluted in the melodrama of stories,[59] corrupting the typical “route” or “tree” model of escalating titillation. The importation of visual novels to consoles like Sega Saturn or Sony PlayStation, where explicit content is severely restricted, accentuated this trend.[60] Nakige also spawned another variation, the utsuge (“depressing game”), that seeks to depress players with “no happy end, no help, no hope” scenarios.[61] Nitroplus, the company behind Saya no uta, specializes in utsuge containing body horror, gore, rape, and depression—in short, as scholar Clarisse Thorn puts it, games that are “not ‘fun’ in the way most people think about ‘fun,’ that’s for sure.”[62]

Nevertheless, the most “depressing” aspect of all may be that, as a result of the gradual demise of point-and-click models, the “player of novel games, unlike players of other kinds of games, is overwhelmingly passive.”[63] Considering that visual novels are not a form of retrogaming, it is hard to account for the persistence of their gameplay in the age of open worlds, 3D, and virtual reality. While some contemporary visual novels feature novelties like multiple opening or ending movies, or even animated sequences, their core mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics[64] remain mostly unaltered since the term was coined, even in releases by the best-known companies like Key, Type-Moon, or Nitroplus. The reasonable conclusion is that these limitations are self-imposed to satisfy a desire shaped by the medium’s technohistory. It is legitimate to ask, then, if visual novels should be considered games at all.

For Richard Eisenbeis, the answer is “yes”: “When it comes down to it, the only thing needed to make either a movie or novel into a game is a single interactive element—a single point where you, a person outside the game’s creation, can alter how it plays out.”[65] Still, he falters in Saya no uta’s review. “The number of interactive choices in the game is limited to only two, with only two possible options for each of these choices,” Eisenbeis writes. “While I have long advocated that even a single interactive choice is all you need for a game to be a ‘game,’ I understand that many may not agree.”[66] But as scholar and game designer Naomi Clark points out, questioning “the norms and conventions about how games, or specific game genres, are expected to function”[67] is increasingly a concern of queer game creators (e.g., Anna Anthropy’s Mighty Jill Off and dys4ia), as well as an integral part of the media-theoretical perspectives in Queer Game Studies.[68] Although hailing from a very different, more mainstream context, the visual novel medium in general does seem to “destabilize one of the rarely questioned tenets of what a game must have to be considered a game,”[69] and, in doing this, encourages players to ask themselves what a videogame is and is not in the first place—or, perhaps more importantly, to bump into the limits of such exclusionary definitions. Visual novels are no strangers to even more “radical” experiences in non-interaction, in the form of kinetic novels, i.e., visual novels with only one route in which players do not interact with the story (e.g., Key’s Planetarian). Of course, the “radicalism” of kinetic novels is only so in relation to the videogame medium, as it essentially turns them back into “books.”

What is interesting about Saya no uta is the limitation, not elimination, of the player’s choice points, drawing our attention to the intersectional nature of videogames—the “shared boundary where the user wanting to fulfil a certain task meets the artefact or product enabling them to perform that task; that is, where the player meets the game.” [70] That “shared boundary” is not limited to choices, but results from the “vacillation between a surrender to the optical illusion produced by the machine and an awareness of the technology’s materiality.”[71] Thus, in visual novels, and especially nakige and utsuge, the player experiences two seemingly contradictory types of “fun.” On the one hand, the experience of being moved by the melodrama, pornography, or horror, of “being manipulated, victimized, deprived of critical distance,”[72] translating into an accordingly passive gameplay. On the other, the experience of moving and manipulating, which can be achieved by cracking or reverse-engineering the software. As Azuma describes, the computer-savvy otaku consumers of visual novels have been known to mine the games for encrypted files, remediating the assets to create derivative works (e.g., game music videos),[73] transplanting games from operating systems, creating translation patches, and so on. These operations, which do not conform to normal or intended “play,” resonate (in-world) with Saya’s tinkering and modification of other organisms, reimagining the specter of the game’s technical hackability as a biological hackability, for instance, in Saya’s “queering” of Yôsuke’s brain and Yoh’s body. In a similar vein, Fuminori describes his condition “as if an insane architect took the blueprints of my life and rebuilt it out of blood and gore.”

However, the moving and manipulating already happen vicariously, requiring no actual software cracking to take place. Besides choice points, in visual novels, the narrative itself is propelled forward by the minimal, repetitive, rhythmic brush of the player’s fingers against the computer.[74] Clicking the button of a mouse or keyboard, or pressing a touchscreen, in the case of tablets, is what prompts each new sentence to appear within the text box or character sprites and backgrounds to rotate. The requirement that the player must do almost nothing, but do it, nonetheless, is of the utmost importance. It is the reason why, despite their supposedly passive gameplay, the experience of playing visual novels is not interchangeable with that of watching a recorded walkthrough, as one watches a movie. One must feel up the boundary between the bodily and the mechanical if one is to fully enjoy the spectacle on the screen, advancing click after click: characters mortified into stationary sprites and CGs, moans atomized into separate sound clips. Conversely, the player’s necessary engagement with a novelesque structure (e.g., beginning, middle, conclusion) and intensity (e.g., crying) keeps the visual novel squarely out of the realm of idle or clicker games, whose restrictions over player agency combine with an incremental and, thus, open-ended, logic.[75]

Unlike other games, Saya no uta’s ludonarrative apparatus exposes what Anne Friedberg calls the “awkwardness” of such human-computer interaction. As she puts it, “computer interfaces may have been designed to become dyadic partners in a metaphysical relationship, but complaints about the awkwardness of this liaison have targeted the interface.”[76] Saya no uta echoes such complaints by having Fuminori act like a broken interface—like the exploding television in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983)—that can no longer symbolize the formless entrails of meaning, and whose excessive embodiment is inversely proportional to the lack of bodily interactivity in visual novels. It is as if the game’s “weird materiality,”[77] which contradicts the dematerialization often expected from digital media (however mythical that dematerialization may be),[78] has leaked from its inorganic netherworld into a state of disordered, unbound organicity. Philosopher Aurel Kolnai would call this the disgust-inducing phenomenology of “life in the wrong place.”[79] Or, by extension, of play-beyond-fun, of “fun that takes its pleasure in all the wrong places.”[80]

The paradox at the heart of visual novels is then made apparent, or perceptualized, in Saya no uta. Inserted within the otaku culture industry, “crying” and “depressing games” are often conservative on the level of stories and sex-gender roles. Even Saya, beneath all the eldritch horror, is just a girl looking for true love. However, the fact that, in Azuma’s words, these games abide by a “formula, without a worldview or a message, that effectively manipulates emotion,”[81] is a technohistorical feature gnawing at the very integrity of those conventional categories. Fuminori, too, mirroring the visual novel’s player, accepts that he sees loli-Saya (the Child) “as something completely different than what she really is,” i.e., a token of the “anonymous/ statistical/ collective”[82] attributes of moé. In this light, the videogame takes on a threatening inhumanity that excites our death drive and “disarticulates the narrativity of desire”[83] found, at face value, in Fuminori and Saya’s tale of love that conquers all. This inhumanity is most evident in the case of pornographic visual novels (or eroge, or bishôjo games), whose toonophilia—the paraphilic attraction to cartoon characters—defies the “normative understanding of sexuality [that] insists that it must have an object in the real world.”[84] In fact, Fuminori’s only choice in Saya no uta (the second decision point is Kôji’s) is to acknowledge that Saya, and the pleasure that she brings him, come at the expense of uncovering the seams of our life-sustaining fantasies and, therefore, renouncing other people’s society.

Also, crucially, Saya no uta disavows the “limitless elasticity”[85] that videogames, as an interactive medium, have come to symbolize within our arts and culture. It insists on a single player reduced to repeatedly clicking, an action that, as the story progresses toward the end(s), feels increasingly like a series of “catastrophic returns to injury.”[86] Saya no uta taps into what psychoanalyst Gavriel Reisner calls a “dark Eros,”[87] the surrender to a “repetitive destructive intimacy”[88] which is central to the strangeness, the queerness, of our relationship with computers as viewers-turned-users—and whose pervasiveness in postindustrial societies takes a toll on the body, the mind, and the environment: from muscle and joint pain to depression and insomnia, from eyestrain and headaches to electronic waste, to name a few.

Further, Saya no uta negates the “equating [of] the pleasures of sexual transgression with the expansion of democratic freedom,”[89] present in many a celebration of Sadean literature.[90] Even Fuminori’s cruelty is not exactly predatory, nor is he a libertine; for the most part, he acts out of a desire to protect and satisfy Saya, and he takes pleasure from being relieved of interaction with his fellow human beings for whom he feels nothing but contempt and disgust, more than in the act of torturing per se. It is significant that Saya no uta’s final sex sequence is a threesome with Yoh, Saya, and Fuminori of the chôkyô (“training” or “breaking animals”) variety, in which Yoh, wearing a pet collar and a leash, plays along enthusiastically only because she is “cthulhuified” beyond consent. The player’s own masochistic submission to the game much resembles this treatment, as they give in to the unrelenting bouts of physical and moral disgust inflicted upon them. Both Fuminori and Saya no uta’s player “succeed through suffering,”[91] advancing toward their exclusion from Earth’s future, and canceling the very possibility, or necessity, of an emancipatory project for players and humans alike.

Conclusion

Fifteen years after its release, the adult visual novel Saya no uta remains a crucial instance of queer antisociality in videogames. Its Lovecraftian body-horror love story, written and directed by the cult author Urobuchi Gen, follows in the technohistorical tradition of Japanese eroge (“erotic games”) and utsuge (“depressing games”), with no happy ending and few interactive choices. While the portrayal of disability and queerness in Saya no uta is hardly flattering—Fuminori and Saya rape, torture, and slaughter the game’s other characters—its take on reproductive horror, however problematic, merits consideration beyond “good” or “bad” representation. Saya, both waifu and eldritch abomination, indexes the monstrous relationality outside the Möbius strip of “reproductive futurism,” perhaps envisioning what Lee Edelman and Lauren Berlant call “sex without optimism,”[92] i.e., sex beyond the typical life-preserving reparativity of love narratives, even LGBT+ ones. But Saya no uta is not just an eroge that is “anything but erotic.” Its challenge to normative “fun” in videogames is more extensive, mirroring eldritch-Saya’s own disregard for the laws of nature. By radically minimizing the dialogue tree within the visual novel, Saya no uta’s “terrorism” does not restrict itself to its story and artwork, whose extremeness disavows the game’s legitimation in the realm of good citizenship. It extends to the rejection of player sovereignty, as well as mimetic realism, as the teleological horizon of gaming, forefronting the repetition-compulsion of clicking as an interface for the game’s “weird materialities that do not . . . bend to human eyes and ears.”[93] Humanity’s love affair with the boundaries where the human comes undone is at the core of Saya no uta’s antisocial queerness, manifesting in narrative, aesthetics, and gameplay alike, and attesting to the visual novel’s potential as a tool for the creation and analysis of alternative imaginaries—however “fucked-up” these may be.

See in CUTENCYCLOPEDIA – CGDCT, Gakkōgurashi & Poison Girls.

[*] This paper has been accepted for publication in the peer-reviewed academic journal Mechademia: Second Arc (University of Minnesota Press), specializing in Japanese popular culture, with an anticipated publication date of Fall 2020.

[1] The CGs and script translations in this article refer to the remastered Steam version of Saya no Uta ~ The Song of Saya, developed by Nitroplus and published by JAST USA, released August 13, 2019.

[2] "No Fun: The Queer Potential of Video Games That Annoy, Anger, Disappoint, Sadden, and Hurt," QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 2, no. 2 (2 July 2015): 121–22. 

[3] Amanda Phillips and Bonnie Ruberg, "Not Gay as in Happy: Queer Resistance and Video Games (Introduction)," Game Studies 18, no. 3 (December 2018): paras. 1–2.

[4] Tavia Nyong’o, "Do You Want Queer Theory (or Do You Want the Truth)? Intersections of Punk and Queer in the 1970s," in The Routledge Queer Studies Reader, ed. Donald E. Hall and Annamarie Jagose (London: Routledge, 2012), 223–35.

[5] Lee Edelman, "Learning Nothing: Bad Education," Differences 28, no. 1 (May 2017): 126.

[6] Jose Esteban Munoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: NYU Press, 2009); Anca Parvulescu, "Reproduction and Queer Theory: Between Lee Edelman’s No Future and J. M. Coetzee’s Slow Man," PMLA 132, no. 1 (January 2017): 86–100; Benjamin Kahan, "Queer Sociality After the Antisocial Thesis," American Literary History 30, no. 4 (November 2018): 811–19.

[7] Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 113.

[8] Christopher J. Ferguson, “Stop Blaming Video Games for Mass Killings,” The Conversation, August 5, 2019.

[9] Richard Eisenbeis, “Saya No Uta—The Song of Saya: The Kotaku Review,” Kotaku, May 21, 2013, para. 1.

[10] Eisenbeis, “Saya No Uta," para. 10.

[11] Kajita Mafia, "Kikokugai kara Saya no uta, Mahô shôjo Madoka magica made Michiri shitsumonzeme!" (Michiri's question attack, from Kikokugai: The Cyber Slayer to Saya no uta, Puella Magi Madoka Magica!)  4Gamer, June 17, 2011.

[12] Eisenbeis, “Saya No Uta," para. 14.

[13]“Moral Event Horizon,” TV Tropes, accessed July 3, 2018.

[14] Ruberg, “No Fun,” 117.

[15] Ibid., 119.

[16] Ibid., 20.

[17] Aurel Kolnai, On Disgust, ed. Barry Smith and Carolyn Korsmeyer (Chicago: Open Court, 2003), 61.

[18] Mitu Khandaker-Kokori, “NPCs Need Love Too: Simulating Love and Romance, from a Game Design Perspective,” in Game Love: Essays on Play and Affection, ed. Jessica Enevold and Esther MacCallum-Stewart (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2015), loc. 1669.

[19] Mark Sherry, “Overlaps and Contradictions between Queer Theory and Disability Studies,” Disability & Society 19, no. 7 (December 2004): 771–74.

[20] Bersani, Homos, 113.

[21] Carl Jung, Aspects of the Masculine (Routledge, 2015), 294.

[22] “Types of Moe + Attributes, Relationships & Situations,” Japanese with Anime (blog), “Moeblob,” accessed April 27, 2018.

[23] Jason Thompson, “Moe: The Cult of the Child,” Comixology, July 9, 2009, para. 13.

[24] Hiroki Azuma, Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, trans. Jonathan E. Abel and Shion Kono (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 43–47.

[25] Michel Houellebecq, H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, trans. Robin Mackay, 5.

[26] Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2004), 103.

[27] Edelman, “Learning Nothing,” 127.

[28] Ibid.,  126.

[29] Edelman, No Future, 2.

[30] Ibid., 2, 26.

[31] Ibid., 2.

[32] Noreen Giffney and Myra J. Hird, Queering the Non/Human (London: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2008), 4.

[33] Erin Harrington, Women, Monstrosity and Horror Film: Gynaehorror (New York: Routledge, 2017).

[34] Harrington, Women, Monstrosity and Horror Film.

[35] Patrick W. Galbraith, “Introduction: Falling In Love With Japanese Characters,” in The Moe Manifesto: An Insider’s Look at the Worlds of Manga, Anime, and Gaming (North Clarendon, VT: Tuttle Publishing, 2014), 5.

[36] “Room Full of Crazy,” TV Tropes, accessed June 18, 2019.

[37] Lorenzo Bernini, Queer Apocalypses: Elements of Antisocial Theory, trans. Julia Heim (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 52.

[38] Bernini, Queer Apocalypses, 77.

[39] Eisenbeis, “Saya No Uta—The Song of Saya,” para. 11.

[40] Edelman, No Future, 2.

[41] Azuma, Otaku, 76.

[42] John Szczepaniak and Kobushi, “Retro Japanese Computers: Gaming's Final Frontier,” Hardcore Gaming 101, October 16, 2010, para. 4; Satoshi Todome, “A History of Eroge,” trans. kj1980, archive.is, n.d., “Chapter One” para. 4.

[43] Todome, “A History of Eroge,” “Chapter One,” para. 5.

[44] Todome, “Chapter One,” para. 6.

[45] Todome, “Chapter One,” para. 8.

[46] Todome, “Dokyusei,” para. 8.

[47] Todome, “Dokyusei,” para. 11.

[48] Khandaker-Kokori, “NPCs Need Love Too: Simulating Love and Romance, from a Game Design Perspective,” loc. 1672.

[49] Todome, “A History of Eroge,” “Chapter Two,” para. 16.

[50] Asceai, "Subarashiki Hibi ~Furenzoku Sonzai~, Wonderful Everyday" (blog), April 12, 2010, para. 27.

[51] Todome, “A History of Eroge,” “To Heart.”

[52] Carlos Santos, “To Heart DVD 3,” Anime News Network, November 2, 2007, para. 2.

[53] Todome, “A History of Eroge,” To Heart,” par. 5  and “Chapter 3” para. 3; Azuma, Otaku, 76.

[54] Alex Mui, “The Visual Novel Medium Proves Its Worth on the Battlefield of Narrative Arts,” The Johns Hopkins News-Letter, October 16, 2011, para. 6.

[55] Todome, “A History of Eroge,” “ONE ~kagayaku kisetsu e~ (1998)” (One: To the radiant season) para. 2.

[56] Mui, “The Visual Novel Medium Proves Its Worth on the Battlefield of Narrative Arts,” para. 10.

[57] “Yu-No: Kono Yo No Hate de Koi o Utau Shoujo (Game),” Giant Bomb, paras. 5–6, accessed June 30, 2019.

[58] Azuma, Otaku, 76 (reference for whole paragraph).

[59] Azuma, 78.

[60] Todome, “A History of Eroge,” “Chapter 4.”

[61] “Utsuge,” The Visual Novel Database, para. 2, accessed July 12, 2017.

[62] Clarisse Thorn and Julian Dibbell, eds., Violation: Rape In Gaming (Lexington, KY: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2012), 18.

[63] Azuma, Otaku, 76.

[64] Robin Hunicke, Marc Leblanc, and Robert Zubek, “MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research,” in Challenges in Games AI Workshop (19th National Conference of Artificial Intelligence, San Jose: The AAAI Press, 2004).

[65] Richard Eisenbeis, “All You Need Is a Single Choice to Make a Novel into a Game,” Kotaku, April 24, 2014, para. 4.

[66] Eisenbeis, “Saya No Uta—The Song of Saya,” para. 12.

[67] Naomi Clark, “What Is Queerness in Games, Anyways?” in Queer Game Studies, ed. Bonnie Ruberg and Adrienne Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 4.

[68] Bonnie Ruberg, “Queer Game Studies 101: An Introduction to the Field + Bibliography” Bonnie Ruberg, “Queer Game Studies 101: An Introduction to the Field + Bibliography,” Our Glass Lake, 2016.) Recent entries include, for instance, the books Queerness in Play (October 2018) edited by Todd Harper, Meghan Blythe Adams, and Nicholas Taylor, and Video Games Have Always Been Queer (Spring 2019) by Bonnie Ruberg, as well as special issues of journals, like Games Studies’ Queerness and Video Games (December 2018).

[69] Clark, “What Is Queerness in Games, Anyways?” 6.

[70] Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron, eds., The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies (London: Routledge, 2016), 68.

[71] Franklin Melendez, “Video Pornography, Visual Pleasure, and the Return of the Sublime,” in Porn Studies, ed. Linda Williams (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 414.

[72] Charles Affron, “Identifications,” in Imitations of Life: A Reader on Film & Television Melodrama (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 99.

[73] Azuma, Otaku, 83.

[74] Melendez, “Video Pornography, Visual Pleasure, and the Return of the Sublime,” 420.

[75] Alexander King, “Numbers Getting Bigger: What Are Incremental Games, and Why Are They Fun?” Game Development Envato Tuts+, paras. 1, 2, accessed November 10, 2019.

[76] Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2009), 231.

[77] Jussi Parikka, “New Materialism as Media Theory: Medianatures and Dirty Matter,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 9, no. 1 (March 2012): 99.

[78] Christiane Paul, “The Myth of Immateriality - Presenting New Media Art,” Technoetic Arts 10 (December 2012): 167–72.

[79] Kolnai, On Disgust, 62.

[80] Ruberg, “No Fun,” 109.

[81] Azuma, Otaku, 79.

[82] Ibid., 107.

[83] Edelman, No Future, 9.

[84] J. Keith Vincent, “Making It Real: Ficiton, Desire, and the Queerness of the Beautiful Fighting Girl,” in Beautiful Fighting Girl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), xviii.

[85] Edelman, No Future, 14.

[86] Gavriel Reisner, “Revisioning the Death-Drive: The Compulsion to Repeat as a Death-in-Life,” Psychoanalytic Review 101, no. 1 (February 2014): 48.

[87] Reisner, “Revisioning the Death-Drive.”

[88] Ibid.,  41.

[89] Abigail Bray, “Merciless Doctrines: Child Pornography, Censorship, and Late Capitalism,” Signs 37, no. 1 (2011): 136.

[90] Bray, “Merciless Doctrines,” 141.

[91] Ruberg, “No Fun,” 121.

[92] Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, Sex, or the Unbearable (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 1.

[93] Parikka, “Medianatures,” 97.