Earlier today, I caught a glimpse of a video on YouTube. “VTubers React to THAT SCENE in Andy and Leyley,” it said. I wasn’t sure what it was, but I was intrigued. So I watched it.
Long story short, it was, as the name suggests, a series of VTubers reacting to a scene from the indie horror game The Coffin of Andy and Leyley in which the eponymous pair, who are brother and sister, appear to have just had incestuous sex with one another. (Mild spoiler, but they hadn’t; for one reason or another, it was a “vision” they saw.)
Naturally, this has caused The Coffin of Andy and Leyley to become known as “the incest game”, despite that just being one scene out of a story that deals with much more broadly horrific subject matter. And it’s just one of many examples of games that I feel are treated unfairly because of one usually morally questionable aspect that becomes more famous than anything else. Let’s talk about that.
Some NSFW imagery and subject matter after the jump!
I haven’t yet played The Coffin of Andy and Leyley, but the discussion over it makes me intrigued to. I’m always fascinated by games that don’t shy away from taboo subject matter, because I feel video games are a medium that is uniquely placed to explore this sort of thing particularly effectively. And it’s all down to that interactivity.
The interactive nature of games means that any time you explore taboo subject matter, you’re making a specific choice to do so. And this applies whether you’re playing a decision-free kinetic novel — in which you make a choice to keep reading or switch off when you encounter material that makes you uncomfortable — or a game in which you have more agency.
Where a lot of people fall down is in equating the choice to explore a morally questionable narrative thread with endorsing the subject matter under discussion. Those things are emphatically not the same, and the assumption that they are does a lot of damage to meaningful discussion of ambitious, brave narratives. Rather, the ability to explore taboo subject matter through interactive entertainment should be celebrated, because it provides the opportunity for people to understand certain topics — or even fantasies — in a safe environment without hurting anyone else.
There are a few examples where I’ve run into this issue with games that I’ve personally found fascinating, but which other people are remarkably resistant to talking about due to assumptions about the “one bad thing” they have in their subject matter.
Kana Little Sister is the first. For the unfamiliar, this is an incredible visual novel about love and loss. Central to the story is the title character Kana, who is dying — indeed, in the vast majority of the routes through the story, she does die, and the narrative concerns the way in which both Kana and the participant narrator-protagonist Taka, Kana’s step-brother, deal with this. Different routes see the pair of them exploring their feelings in markedly different ways — some of them considerably healthier than others. It is an uncompromising game that shows how sometimes people can power through a tragic loss and become stronger as a result, and sometimes it can utterly crush them.
And yet, as you can probably surmise from the title, Kana Little Sister is not known outside the visual novel enthusiast community for its sensitive exploration of matters relating to terminal illness and loss, but rather it is another example of something being branded “the incest game”.
This is not to say that there isn’t incest in the game, but pushing it aside simply because it contains incest does the narrative a disservice. The incestuous scenes in the game come about as a consequence of the desperation that both Kana and Taka feel; Kana out of a desire to feel like someone who has known the love of another person before she dies, and Taka out of, among some rather complicated feelings, wanting to fulfil Kana’s dreams before she passes on.
Should you shun Kana Little Sister because it has incestuous scenes? Absolutely not. The game is not saying “incest is good, actually”, but rather, among a variety of other topics, it is exploring how the desperation of knowing you are going to lose a loved one can lead to irrational, unreasonable or immoral behaviour — behaviour that often hurts those you had no intention of hurting. The subject matter is explored in depth and detail and is far from just being fetish or fantasy content, and the game is all the better for not shying away from material that is, to most people, taboo.
Coming at things from a different perspective, we have the Rance series, which a not-insignificant number of people refuse to even acknowledge because it features rape. More specifically, the people who refuse to acknowledge Rance appear to assume that the games are wall-to-wall rape fantasy with nothing whatsoever to redeem them — which is a shame, because the Rance series has been around as long as Final Fantasy and is one of the most historically significant series in Japanese computer gaming, and has some of the most astonishingly deep lore you’ll ever encounter, integrated beautifully into the games as a whole.
Sexuality in Rance is a lot more nuanced than these people seem to assume. For starters, sex in the world of Rance is positioned as a lot more “transactional” than it is in our world. Sex is no big deal for a lot of people; it’s just something that people do, and it doesn’t have to involve romantic feelings. This is especially apparent in Rance 02, where the eponymous hero has consensual sex with several characters who just think it’s something fun for them to do together.
Secondly, it is important to distinguish the way Rance treats his non-consensual partners, and those who are sexually mistreated by the “villains” of the piece. In the latter case, there is zero desire for “pleasure” on the part of the perpetrators; all they wish to do is cause pain, suffering and humiliation, and the way in which they choose to achieve those things is through sexual torture.
In the former case, meanwhile, there is no denying that Rance forces himself on some people who have not consented to a sexual encounter, but even in those circumstances he has no desire whatsoever to abuse them in the same way as the “sexual horror” scenes carried out by the villains. In fact, it’s quite the opposite; more often than not, Rance prefers his partner to have as good a time as possible under the circumstances, because he finds that more enjoyable.
Rape is, of course, its own form of abuse, but Rance’s behaviour, particularly in the context of how sexuality is depicted in the series as a whole, is clearly different from how the villains do things. This is especially apparent in the very first Rance game, where the villain of the piece kidnaps and sexually abuses young women until they die, physically and mentally broken and humiliated long before their will to live leaves them. Rance himself believes this is an unforgivable sin, and yet his “punishment” for the “big bad” in the game is to rape her repeatedly in the middle of nowhere until he is completely and utterly satisfied, regardless of how she feels about things.
On the surface, these two things might seem almost identical, but that’s where the nuance comes in — and this is what people are afraid to talk about, because to a lot of folks, quite understandably, the subject of rape is not one where there should be any nuanced discussion. And yet there’s a clear difference, and ignoring that difference is simply being wilfully ignorant to what the game is doing.
When Rance rapes the villain of Rance 01, it’s not out of a desire to hurt, break or kill her; more than anything, he sees it as a reward for himself for cracking the case that spans the entirety of that game, and a means of dispensing his own particular form of justice. Rance 01’s villain killed a lot of young women through sexual abuse, so Rance dishes out what he sees to be an appropriate punishment — though it’s also important to note that once he’s done with her, he lets her go and doesn’t even report what she’s done to anyone. We’re not supposed to approve of what he did or how he did it, but we can understand how it fits his character.
It’s also important to note that rape is just one part of the way sexuality is treated in Rance. What is often far more interesting to explore in each game are the genuine relationships that Rance somehow manages to cultivate with important characters — not just with his slave Sill, whom it’s clear he holds with a great deal of affection but covers this up with harsh words and behaviour, but also with major characters in the narrative.
In Rance 5D, for example, an absolutely central part of the narrative is how he gets to know the titular “Lonely Girl” Rizna and help her overcome her struggles. In Rance VI, there are multiple close relationships that he develops with the female cast members, all of which show a variety of interesting sides to the characters involved. In Sengoku Rance, he develops a particularly close relationship with the kunoichi Suzume, with the pair of them pretty much competing to see who can “out-sex” the other; Rance sees Suzume’s kunoichi sexual assassination techniques as a challenge to be overcome rather than anything dangerous, and Suzume finds it enjoyable to be able to use her skills for pure pleasure rather than dealing death.
And this isn’t even getting into how each Rance game is significantly different from the last in gameplay terms, or how even when an entry in the series appears to, at first glance, be playing things in quite an orthodox manner, it takes an interesting and unconventional approach to things. It’s a fascinating series, and yet to a disappointing number of people out there — including a lot of folks whom I generally expect better of — Rance is nothing more than this one famous screenshot:
Games are about much more than just one thing, and have been for many years at this point. We’re long past the point where a game is just about “shooting aliens” or “shooting dudes”; examples of those still exist, sure, but to wilfully misinterpret or misrepresent something that clearly has some narrative depth to it by boiling it down to “the incest game” or “the rape game” is to do it a huge disservice, just as talking about games in no other terms than their “gameplay loop” does.
Video games have just as much right to explore controversial, taboo subject matter as any other medium. And, as previously noted, their interactive nature makes it an ideal means of exploring these topics, because you have to choose to engage with them. That can be uncomfortable at times, but that’s sort of the point. Making the choice to deliberately engage with difficult subject matter can be challenging, but in doing so you can come to understand something about yourself — and about others — in the process. It doesn’t mean you personally approve of or want to engage in the subject matter in question — it simply means you want to understand more about the characters and the situation in which they find themselves.
I kind of feel a bit sorry for people who can’t look past the “one thing” that makes a particular game controversial — because in many cases they’re missing out on excellent gaming experiences. And that’s why I make an effort to cover games like this; I believe they’re valuable contributions to the overall artistic landscape of the gaming medium, and just as worthy of exploration as anything else.
More about Rance
More about Kana Little Sister
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I agree completely about the reductionism that occurs in gaming communities. I always find it very sad when really good games get reduced to a common brief description and people avoid those games just because of that. Of the games you talk about, I’ve only played Kana (both the original and the Okaeri version). I had heard the description you list before I played it but the great review scores convinced me to try it. I thought it was a really well done game and I still hold it in high regard. I was pretty surprised how little the description I had heard actually mattered in the end because of everything else that was explored in the game.
I feel like games from Japan get reduced by the community descriptions more than games from other countries. I’ve heard of games being described as the one with too many characters, the impossibly difficult one, the Psycho one (with a similar twist), the Sixth Sense one (with a similar twist), the game about relationships with ______ (fill in the blank with any description of a person or creature), etc. And more often than not when I play those games, I find them to be rich storytelling experiences that explore topics in unique ways. There are certainly a lot of shallower games that don’t get reduced to nothingness by how people describe them. I don’t understand why it happens. I think in the long term, providing an unhelpful description that prevents other players from trying them out hurts the market. It reduces the number of game developers willing to take chances with their games in terms of topics or themes.