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She's Not Your <em>Waifu</em>; She's an Eldritch Abomination: <em>Saya no uta</em> and Queer Antisociality in Japanese Visual Novels

2020; University of Minnesota Press; Volume: 13; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5749/mech.13.1.0072

2152-6648

Ana Matilde Sousa,

Asian Culture and Media Studies

She's Not Your Waifu; She's an Eldritch AbominationSaya no uta and Queer Antisociality in Japanese Visual Novels Ana Matilde Sousa (bio) More than 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) remains a crucial example of queer antisociality in videogames.1 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 antifuturity, 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 [End Page 72] 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 Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Box art of Saya no uta's English-language edition by JAST USA. On the back cover, the cast from left to right: Ōmi, Kōji, Saya, Fuminori, Yoh, and Ryōko. With artwork by Higashiguchi Chūō 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 [End Page 73] anime series Puella Magi Madoka Magica (Mahō shōjo 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...