A doujin game caught my eye last year: 慰愛の詩. The one thing that drew me in: it’s a BL game told from a heroine’s first-person perspective… And no, I’m not gay. I played it because it’s not just BL — there’s BG in there too. Putting GL in a BL game sounds like a huge joke, but the joke actually happened, became real, and landed in front of me as a game. It’s a doujin work, but unusually it has full voice acting. Unfortunately, there are no character sprites. First, credit where it’s due: the voice acting is spot on, especially the heroine’s portrayal — deep and captivating. The two male leads I couldn’t care less about; they’re serviceable at best. But no sprites really hurts. Maybe they couldn’t find an artist. The backgrounds are just real photos run through Photoshop, so yeah, the budget was clearly tight. Let’s get into the story.

I once saw some otaku girls who play otome games complaining: “In most galgames the heroine kicks the bucket at the drop of a hat, and in otome games the heroine also kicks the bucket at the drop of a hat. Man, male-oriented or female-oriented, the heroine always has it rough. You get used to it.” Thinking about it, that’s pretty much true. In a lot of stories women are painted as fragile things that need a man to protect them. Even the “senpai” type in galgames tends to get a later scene revealing she’s not actually that strong and is secretly fragile inside. It feels like something baked into the gender roles themselves. But every so often a game tries to change that. Sure, seeing the heroine carry the hero the whole way through in a male-oriented game is unrealistic. Everyone knows the protagonist is “the weakest” by default, and, well, by the end he’s always some broken-ass cheat character anyway. So all we can do is look at female-oriented games and see if any of them dare to make the heroine the strongest. So 断罪のマリア (Maria of Condemnation) might be one of those games. Not entirely, but it’s close — at the very least, the heroine’s combat power is the strongest in the game.

When we were little, we all read fairy tales. The funny thing is, in fairy tales the protagonist is almost always a little girl. And the story is almost always about a frail girl and the prince who protects her. Boys read them and want to be the prince, protecting their princess. Girls read them and want to be the princess, finding a prince who’ll protect them. I tried to recall the fairy tales I knew as a kid, and was surprised to find they don’t really skew by gender. Boys and girls read the same tales — explorations of strange worlds, the same prince-and-princess stories passed down for generations. But time passes, boys and girls grow up, and maybe they’ve all quietly accepted that the fairy tales they heard were lies. Most boys no longer believe in a princess worth protecting, and most girls don’t really dream of a prince coming to save them anymore. Thinking back on those old tales brings a wry smile. I can’t tell if it’s nostalgia, or the feeling that the kid who believed this stuff was kind of ridiculous. Still, the fairy tales never stopped. They keep telling the story of prince and princess, for whoever’s willing to listen.