Dark Nursery Rhymes and the Tragedy of the Robin

I’m an uncultured guy — before I ever heard the term “dark nursery rhyme,” I didn’t know the thing existed. My first encounter was The Monster Without a Name (名前のない怪物), and I only noticed it because of some anime ED. Honestly, reading it creeped me out a bit. The “monster” in there can stand in for all kinds of horrible things — desire, sin, filth. Plug those in and the rhyme gets a whole lot scarier.

“As expected of a dark nursery rhyme — the more you think about it, the more terrified you get.” A few lines, that much recoil. Dark nursery rhymes don’t mess around.

But one day I remembered the rhymes I chanted as a kid, and something felt off.

Childhood rhymes always revolve around the Big Bad Wolf, the eternal villain. The wolf’s always trying to eat the sheep, and the kids split into wolves and lambs — oh wait, I mean the Big Bad Wolf and the little sheep — and play all sorts of games. Whoever gets caught is “eaten” by the wolf, and another kid can rescue the eaten one by catching the wolf, pulling them back out of its belly.

Hold on… eaten? Pulled out of the belly? I’m picturing a wolf with a gaping bloody maw swallowing someone whole, then another person stabbing a sharp dagger into the wolf’s abdomen, blood spraying everywhere, slicing the belly open and pulling out a bloody little lamb, slick with stomach acid and not fully digested.

That’s gruesome!

But kids don’t think that way. They keep playing the game all relaxed, because in a child’s world there are no dark nursery rhymes. They don’t know the anatomy of a wolf, they don’t know about digestion — they just know that a sheep eaten by the wolf can be rescued from its belly by tagging the wolf. So if you ever made a realistic live-action Little Red Riding Hood, it would absolutely be a horror story. We look at nursery rhymes through adult eyes, and of course we find them terrifying.

Anyway, this time I came across another dark nursery rhyme: Who Killed Cock Robin (誰殺死了知更鳥). I won’t paste the whole thing again — it’s honestly closer to nonsense. The guy who killed the robin confesses his crime from the start, then a bunch of others chime in adding embellishments, and it ends right back at the killer’s trial.

Given what I understood about dark nursery rhymes before, this one feels more like something kids chant in rhythm while playing a game. To them, the robin got killed, the sparrow did it, the sparrow’s gonna be in trouble next time — that’s it.

Read it through adult eyes, though, and there’s a lot more in there.

The robin dies, and it dies as if it were the most natural thing in the world. The killer confesses cheerfully, without a shred of remorse. Bystanders line up to help the killer out and dispose of the body, and then, out of nowhere, they announce the killer’s about to be tried. Nobody’s sad. Nobody grieves the robin’s death. Everyone just thinks, “Oh, the robin’s dead, the killer’s caught — rest of it’s none of my business.”

By the end, all you feel is the coldness of the whole society, and how nobody cares about the weak.

So the question is: what happens when you make a game out of a rhyme like this? Well, I already summed it up — nothing good.

Search Who Killed Cock Robin on a search engine and you won’t necessarily get the nursery rhyme — more likely a certain visual novel. Yeah, I played that one. Frankly, it’s disgusting.

The game tells you the ending from the start: the heroine is assaulted to death, the people around her take it as normal, nobody cares. Straight out of the dark nursery rhyme, and then the game unfolds in reverse. There are three perspectives — the heroine Kotori, the teacher Ran, and the male lead Shou — cutting back and forth, which seems like it should build suspense and look classy. Sounds fancy. You can even start with the male lead’s route first, but in practice you can’t understand the plot at all if you don’t go in order. Plenty of places describe this game’s story as “heart-wrenching” and “true to life.”

Of course that’s not how it actually is. The only part worth reading is the heroine’s first chapter, which lays out her family problems, her entanglement with the male lead, and her struggle to survive under the advances of the predatory teacher.

Pretty dark, and the writing has a bit of realism to it. But soon I noticed something was off — right when the teacher’s chapter starts.

The teacher’s chapter immediately reveals she’s actually bisexual, that she was just toying with Kotori for fun, and then the teacher gets blackmailed by the stalker male lead and turns into a cum dumpster. And then the game shows its true face: a massive pile of H-scenes, every position and kink you can name, drugging X, group X, mind-break X, humiliation play, uniform play — and by the end the teacher has completely fallen and become a prostitute, which kicks off the male lead’s final chapter.

So I think I get what this game is now. The male lead’s chapter barely runs three minutes; aside from his physically impossible stalking of Kotori, the rest is just H-scenes, and a whole lot of them are him jerking off. I don’t know how you otaku out there manage to get hard watching a giant male lead dick on screen. In the end he abducts Kotori back home, runs a bunch of play on her, and finally loses his mind and strangles her to death. Game over, back to the opening.

So how do you evaluate this thing? At least 80% is H-play, the plot is a thin first chapter, and Kotori’s psychology isn’t fleshed out at all. Why does she suddenly turn lesbian? Why is she suddenly so devoted to the teacher? The teacher starts out bisexual and just wanting to play around with Kotori — how does she end up a violated woman of virtue? Why is the male lead such a stud yet still jerking off at the screen? Why does he hit every single shot when blackmailing the teacher? And even more absurdly, how does he control that many cameras — are you Tsukuyomi Sasami or something?

Okay, taking it seriously means I lose. You can’t take this game seriously. I’ll just say it: this is a nukige.

One-sentence plot: Kotori gets used by others, gang-Xed, and killed. Is everyone around her cold? Honest answer: there aren’t really any NPCs around, and where would a low-budget visual novel studio find the time to stuff in anything but H-scenes? It’s just a hardcore title with yuri, training, guro, and group X, wearing the name of a dark nursery rhyme and propped up by people’s imaginations, and suddenly it looks classy.

There’s a phrase for this: “exceeding expectations.” People just come to jerk off, and while jerking off they find a little dessert the game threw in on top, and suddenly it feels like it exceeded expectations and was deeply thought-provoking. There’s a game called euphoria that works the same way. Just like when we think about dark nursery rhymes — grab any random object, put your own brain on it, and you’ll always come up with plenty of hidden meanings. Those are our own extras, not really spin-offs of the game.

The tragedy of the robin keeps repeating all around us, but you can’t really call this game one of those cases… eh, fine, Kotori died, so I guess it counts.