Queer Reorientations in Visual Novels: Our Life: Beginnings & Always' Meaningful Choices

Hong Thi Nguyen-Sears

Authors

Hong Nguyen-Sears Carleton University

Keywords:

Visual novel, queer, affect, embodiment, otome, Our Life: Beginnings & Always

Abstract

This paper explores the queer potential of visual novels by proposing a felt, affective space between player, interface, and game world. With attention to Our Life: Beginnings & Always (GB Patch, 2020) and its intentional and reorienting choices which demand a player reflect on their experience of both their and their player character’s gender, I highlight the way queer visual novels like Our Life use this felt space to reach for and compellingly touch the player. This is made possible due to the adaptation of formal qualities of visual novels out of Japan played by modern English-language developers, and players’ critical engagement with the gendered tropes and norms of visual novels. I offer an analysis of scenes in Our Life which actively refuse a cisheteronormative default for the player character, making use of the game world’s summertime utopia to create an anxiously soothing narrative that is excitingly queer.

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