The most recent visual novel I purchased off the Nintendo e-shop has 100 file save slots. People who aren’t accustomed to playing visual novels might ask, why so many save files? Answer: to save before a crucial, story-splitting decision. Not happy with the outcome? Reload the file for a different direction. Complete all the branches of a character’s route for the prize of a special CG of said character. Your decisions could cost you their love or in more mature stories, your life.
The visual novels I am talking about are otome games. Specifically the ones for a female audience. Yeah, yeah, insert ‘cringe but I am free’ meme here. I’m not a basement-dwelling virgin. I have a decent job. I’m almost 30. Hell, I even have a boyfriend now! Who I love! Yet, I spent nearly six years burrowed into my singletude and used my disinterest in dating as a shield from forming romantic attachments to men.
You have difficulty in allowing others to get to know you, my therapist notes during our hour-long sessions. You can’t let your parents’ failed marriage define you.
I have never downloaded a dating app or created an account on a dating website. Too much effort. Too much of me. I’m already so online that every aspect of my personality permeates the screen. What else can I project onto a system of binaries and code and algorithms? Every Instagram caption, every Tweet, every Facebook status is a shard of that person known as Hannah Cohen.
As a lonely woman in an increasingly lonely world, something two-dimensional makes sense. No real commitment. No one to get into fights with. No sunken costs. If I mess up, I can reload a save file and make the correct decision. I know what makes my pixelated romantic interest happy, and aim for the true ending. I’ll make it right this time, and I have so many more chances than the ones I’ve given to exes in the past.
There is no true ending when it comes to relationships. There’s only an end. Whether it’s good or bad is up for debate, but like any other human construct, they do end.
My parents were married for almost 25 years. Unbeknownst to my sibling and I, our father’s love was a mathematical ray: fixed at one point and endlessly going in an unseen direction. How many times do I wish I could have saved at that critical split in time? I wanted to jump back into my old body and demand more, ask more questions, do something. Should I have confronted my father as he stomped down the basement stairs, my mother standing off to the side like a stone watchman?
I said nothing, say nothing. We still say nothing of it.
I envy people whose parents divorced at a younger age. Not saying that it’s any better, but at least you learn to live with it. Despite growing up with an emotionally distant father, I assumed my parents would stay married forever. Until they didn’t.
Up until recently, I had a disjointed view when it came to romance and romantic love. For years, I resorted to otome games and video games with dating sim elements (Fire Emblem Three Houses, Stardew Valley, Persona) to cope with being a single, heterosexual woman. Truly a first-world problem, I know. Other otome games, like Nightshade and Collar Malice, included storylines of intrigue, murder, and steamy mature content that kept me entertained as I scrolled through text box after text box. I never encountered anything straight up X-rated (the Nintendo e-shop would not likely allow it), but some games definitely had a Harlequin book cover vibe in the illustrations or descriptions.
Otome games, despite their flaws, provided me the safety and comfort I craved. I could insert myself into the blank protagonist girl’s shoes and be fawned over without fear of being taken advantage of or hurt.
I’ve been cheated on and manipulated by men who wanted something I couldn’t give them. I’ve been heartbroken and the heartbreaker. With otome games, I could give and give and give without anything being taken from me. I had the autonomy to load a new save file or turn off my console if I wasn’t happy. Otome games gave me what I needed—to know what I really, actually wanted or didn’t want.
Do any of us deserve something less or more than what’s been given to us in a relationship? Aren’t we constantly accruing heart points from people we want a romance with, hoping that each step progresses to the next level? Otome games are (not) real, after all.
When the game ends, I only see myself reflected in the inky Nintendo Switch screen.