Otome Games and Queerness
For those who don’t know, otome games, literally translated as “maiden game”, are story-based video games whose primary demographic are women. Or, to paraphrase one Reddit comment, they are our generation’s daytime soap opera. A lot of them act as dating sims, basically what you would get if you focused only on the romance subplots of games like Dragon Age. You typically play as a female character and can pick who you want to court and develop a romantic relationship with that character based on your dialogue choices.
Upon recently playing Voltage Inc.’s otome game, Court of Darkness, I was presented with a catalog of 13 love interests for me to romance. I was pleased and surprised to see one character in there, Dia, a person with long pink hair and full lips and an overall distinctly feminine design compared to the rest of the decidedly male options. My delight turned to disappointment when I learned Dia is in fact, another man. There are no female love interests.
This is in spite of the fact that there are two characters, Sherry Invidia, younger sister of one of the love interests, Roy Invidia, and Violet Muller, valet to another of the romance options, Fenn Luxure, who the protagonist is definitely attracted to.
And it’s not like there aren’t any interested fans. Plenty of people are clamoring for a route with these two women. The vibe I get is that plenty of players actually prefer Violet to her master, Fenn, the one you can actually romance, and his route often gets played just to get access to more of her. But even the character Fenn feels queer coded, with his constant flirtations towards pretty much everyone in the cast, no matter their gender. Unfortunately, otome games, in general, continue to lag behind in terms of queer representation.
Shall We Date’s Blood in Roses+ received some celebration for its inclusion of female love interests…even though they number only two out of a cast of about 32 options. And even those two were not always available. Like Court of Darkness, many of the male love options have distinctly feminine designs and even names, which feels almost like a way to circumvent strictly heteronormative romances without actually fully embracing any queerness.
Cheritz’ Mystic Messenger is probably one of the more well-known examples of an otome game that struggles with queer representation. Out of about seven routes, we get one female route option, Jaehee Kang, and your relationship with her is…ambiguous. In her main route, her feelings for the player character are relegated to subtext as she insists she is just looking for a friendship, not a romantic relationship, and when another character, 707, comments that the two seem to be dating, he quickly corrects himself. It is the only route that is not explicitly romantic, and after fans clamored for a more overt romantic storyline with her they got…the MC kissing Jaehee on the cheek and a scene with the two locked in a closet, hurr hurr. These weren’t even main routes, they were DLC’s.
The game’s attitude towards queerness is also reflected in its treatment of potentially queer characters. In the bad ending of the character V’s route, the player character can end up in a relationship with Rika, V’s former lover, that is more explicitly romantic than what is shown with the game’s canon female option, Jaehee. The problem is, Rika is also the main villain of the story, who is destructively obsessive and mentally unstable. So now we’re getting into depraved bisexual territory and all of that trope’s shitty implications. Also note, this is the bad ending, so it isn’t even supposed to be desirable.
Cheritz seems to try to rectify the issue by having one of its main love interests, 707, be revealed as pansexual. However, we only learn about this in supplementary material, not the game itself, and the only hint we get of this in-game is the occasional flirtatious joke towards the other men, similar to Fenn mentioned earlier. The problem with that is that 707 is very much a gadfly who likes to joke about just about anything. Fenn’s characterization in Court of Darkness isn’t too different in that regard, with the added issue of him being extremely promiscuous, lending itself to the all-queers-are-promiscuous trope. Even 707’s habit of crossdressing is primarily used to get a rise out of the other men. His queerness is a joke, used to make the other guys uncomfortable about their sexuality and their masculinity, rather than an actual facet of his character.
And when the game isn’t side-stepping or demonizing queerness, this is what it does with it, mock it. One of the running gags of the game is the “Does Jumin Han is Gay?” meme. It’s a joke, at the expense of another male love interest, Jumin Han, questioning if he’s well, gay because he doesn’t show interest in women. That’s it, that’s the punchline, being gay.
Voltage’s US subsidiary company, Voltage Entertainment USA has helped the company make some strides in regards to its queer representation, with the development of the app Lovestruck: Choose Your Romance, which featured a variety of characters of different genders and sexual orientations as love interests. Yet as far as the company’s treatment of actual LGBTQ folks, it’s telling that twenty-one contractors who worked on the writing of Lovestruck had to go on strike for 21 days for better pay and workplace transparency because Voltage had been drastically underpaying them while imposing difficult deadlines, and they initially refused to meet these demands until the workers organized.
Emma Kinema, lead of Campaign to Organize Digital Employees (CODE), an initiative part of the Communications Workers of America (CWA), noted that all of those involved in the strike were “either women, non-binary, LGBTQ, or people of color.” Meaning they were marginalized, which proves that even the otome game industry can’t escape many aspects of toxic video game culture. And who is working behind the scenes very much has an influence on the content being included in the games themselves.
I understand that a lot of the issue is a cultural thing; queerness is much more controversial in Korea than it is in a lot of the West. Still, like anything involving queer representation, it deserves discussion. Like a lot of works of the romance genre, otome games are targeted at women, but creators need to come to terms with the fact that not all women who want to romance hot men only want to romance hot men, and not all of the players who do want to romance hot men are women. And these consumers deserve the same respect as the players who demanded and got romance routes for the main villains of these games, like Mystic Messenger’s V and Saeran. This point has been made before but I’ll make it again, we do not deserve to be queer baited, our queerness is not a joke, it’s not a sign of deviance, and it is, we are, valid enough to warrant more inclusion.
