“Not Like Other Girls” and Other Lies: Magical Diary’s Exploration of Romance Writing
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The late 2000s saw a boom in western dating sims — now adults, developers who’d been influenced by Japanese visual novels, eroge, and dating sims began making their own forays into the genre. Given the explosive success of Dream Daddy and the romance elements of latter day Bioware games, it might be hard for younger gamers to imagine how niche the market was less than ten years ago. Barring a few translations by small companies like JAST USA (which started in 1996 and primarily focused on pornographic titles), the bulk of the VN genre was shared peer-to-peer or sold at convention booths.
Hanako Games (founded in 2003) was one of the oldest indie developers to take elements of this style, usually incorporating them with “raising game” (focusing on the development of the player character’s stats), RPG, or adventure game elements. They developed their first dating sim in 2008 with Summer Session and ventured into the otome game model with 2010’s Date Warp. The team continued to develop and experiment within their chosen genre, and 2011 saw the release of Magical Diary, one of the company’s most narratively thoughtful if visually unremarkable games.
The plot is simple: players take on the role of a transfer student at a school for magic and guide the player character through their freshman year of classes, taking classes to raise skills, completing exams, and forming relationships with other students. Magical Diary appears, on the surface, to be a somewhat lax Harry Potter simulator with the serial numbers filed off for legal safety, but the player shouldn’t be fooled. It’s a simple premise with a somewhat outdated art style, even for the time, which disguises the unexpectedly smart script.
The game’s diverse selection of love interests is a notable precursor to Dream Daddy and Hustle Cat, and its attempt to wrangle with problematic romance tropes in a smart, lighthearted manner stands alongside its contemporary Hatoful Boyfriend.
The Frontier of Inclusion
Even in the world of indie games, it’s been a long and uphill slog toward games that tell diverse, inclusive stories. The most popular dating sims and visual novels translated among fans and by professionals were predominately heterosexual and aimed toward (cis) men. Among western visual novel developers, Hanako Games was one of the first developers (alongside Winter Wolves) to include same-gender romance options — predominantly between women, as their games tended to star female protagonists. While the game also makes an attempt to be more responsible in its worldbuilding — the game’s magical populace is heavily entwined with Native American tribes, for example, though there are no Native characters — but I am quite unqualified to assess how successfully it executes those elements. Hence, we’ll be focusing on the relationship writing.
In keeping with the company’s previous games, Magical Diary also has a female protagonist and two female romance options alongside four male ones. These routes aren’t treated as jokes or flings, nor are they any shorter than the male romantic routes. While 2011 is still in very recent memory, it was nonetheless ahead of the curve in terms of breaking free of the boxes of narrowly defined “acceptable” romances (i.e. overwhelmingly cis, heterosexual, and white). The game also included several prominent Black characters (as well as the option to make the protagonist a POC), two of whom are romanceable.
Two of the game’s romance paths tell stories that are still rare to virtually nonexistent even in modern games. One route, Ellen Middleton, involves conversations around the character’s struggles with anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder (in a pleasantly understated fashion; for example, the player encounters Ellen compulsively cleaning their room after a stressful visit home), and the culmination of her route does not involve a magical (literal or figurative) cure for her mental illness.
The other route, Virginia Danson, is to date the only example I’ve ever encountered of a romanceable asexual character. Virginia’s route also deals with her desire to become a professional athlete, but the final event revolves around Virginia’s discomfort with and disinterest in physical intimacy. While clearly written from the perspective of a teen who’s still exploring her identity, the writing takes care not to portray Virginia as someone who is simply nervous about having her first partner. A crucial choice to completing the route is Virginia asking the player if they would still be interested in dating her, even if she never developed any interest in intimacy beyond hand-holding and kissing.
It’s a somewhat on-the-nose conversation, but believable for the character and handled with care to avoid invalidating ace identity. And while it would be ideal to be able to depict people’s lives without the need for a Very Special Conversation, the game proves it’s possible to discuss such concepts even among characters who aren’t aware of labels or terminology for their feelings (a concern expressed by David Gaider when asked about including ace relationships in Dragon Age — four years after Magical Diary’s release).
Other elements are more subtly included, playing with player expectations in order to provoke thought: a recurring male NPC, for example, will repeatedly ask the player for advice on how to win back a girl whom he thinks is losing interest, and the player’s roommates may remark on seeing his public romantic gestures; but depending on the player’s choices, they may also befriend a female NPC whose ex has been harassing and stalking her. The game takes its time in connecting these dots, forcing the player to realize that they’d been complicit in treating a woman like an unseen prize rather than a person with her own legitimate reasons for ending a relationship.
Representation has always been important, but the ability to push for it in a visible and vocal way has grown considerably in the last five years. That on the one hand makes games like Magical Diary ahead of their time, and also means that they’re on their own in mapping out how these subjects can be presented in a new medium; likewise, Hanako’s status as an indie publisher, even an established one, meant gambling on their audience embracing these new elements. Games are both product and art, and the job of telling diverse stories was an even more thankless one back then, one whose importance was rejected by a community increasingly congealing itself around an (untrue) assumption that the player base consisted overwhelmingly of straight, cis, white young men.
The result is inevitably trial and error, resulting in more rote explanation of identities that the player isn’t assumed to have a previous frame of reference for. And so, in addition to mapping new territory, Hanako Games also returned to the well of narratives commonly explored in previous visual novels.
Grappling With Troubling Tropes
Magical Diary drew both from otome games and western romance conventions when creating its characters, including tropes like the “bad boy” and the teacher-student romance. The writers are clearly aware of the problematic elements entwined with these types of romance, which often implicitly or explicitly encourage the female protagonist/self-insert to ignore emotionally abusive or dangerous behavior from their partner in the hopes of “saving” them. Drawing from those influences, Magical Diary seemingly set itself a goal: attempting to write those storylines in a way that allowed for the fantasy while also addressing the harmful implications of those tropes responsibly.
This decision makes it somewhat unique among dating sims. Many fall either into replicating the expectations of the genre, problematic tropes and all, or decide to tell stories that eschew those narratives altogether. Dream Daddy’s Joseph route is the closest comparison, writing an unwinnable route around the privileged, manipulative serial adulterer, but even that is different from the “responsible fantasy” approach. Beyond showing the unconscious harm certain elements can cause, Magical Diary takes another step by attempting to see if the core appeal of those fantasies (the protagonist’s default name is the tongue-in-cheek “Mary Sue”) are conducive to more inclusive, feminist writing.
Take, for example, the arguable “true” route for the game — i.e. the narrative path with the most content and endings:the half-demon Damien Ramsey. He features prominently on the promotional art and title screen and is perhaps the most immediately obvious route in-game. As might be expected from the loner/bad boy archetype he conforms to, he teases and flirts with the protagonist and is mistrusted by other students at the school.
The early parts of the route are designed to foster a sense that the protagonist is special (and it’s later revealed Damien himself is playing to these expectations), and the only one who can get through to the moody, misunderstood outcast. While there are bits of prose written in as clear warning signs to anyone knowledgeable about abusive partners — i.e. that Damien’s temper is frightening — the protagonist is quick to brush it off.
Halfway through the route, Damien lures the protagonist into a blood ritual meant to make him a full demon; it doesn’t work, and she almost dies. At this point the game also triggers a conversation with Virginia’s older brother William, notable for not being a romance option despite falling into an archetype the player might expect to be able to pursue (the cool, caring older brother). Instead, he reveals that he also dated the half-demon and was dumped as soon as Damien lost interest.
Not only is this a way to interject a sympathetic queer male character into the narrative despite having a female-only protagonist, it also undermines the “specialness” element of the bad boy romance. Traditionally, any ex-partners of the chosen love interest were implicitly shallow or simply failed to understand him, but William appears throughout the game as a caring, if overprotective, figure. It complicates the narrative given by Damien and the culture at large.
From there, the player has the option to break off the route. Choosing to continue pursuing Damien will indeed reveal that he’s beginning to develop real feelings — which make him confused, angry, and frightened. It will also alienate the player character from her friends, and potentially result in her being expelled and losing her powers altogether.
The game gives the player full agency and, in a sense, delivers on the promise of the troubled loner who develops feelings for the “special” player. But it does so while constantly reinforcing that there are consequences for choosing this relationship. It delivers the fantasy while underlining the ramifications of pursuing it.
The other existing romance/otome trope the game attempts to address is far more inherently problematic, given that teacher/student romances generally involve an adult in a position of authority over a minor. Unlike the bad boy romance, whose uneven power dynamics generally exist within a comparable age/developmental range, student/teacher romances are intrinsically unequal and connected to predatory real-world examples. In other words, it’s debatable in this case whether the trope was worth attempting to rehabilitate in the first place, at least with a high-school rather than college-age student.
The decision to include the route might have to do with the clear influence of Harry Potter on the game’s aesthetic. Beyond famous and extreme examples like the “Snapewives,” there were no shortage of young readers thinking about the theoretical appeal of successfully romancing a teacher. While this is mere conjecture, that landscape among fans might have spurred the writers to challenge themselves with what the closest thing to an ethical version of the fantasy might look like.
Their answer centers mainly around the concept of agency. The instigation of the arc comes not from advances by either party but the circumstances of an accidental marriage contract. Professor Grabiner (the most blatant Snape homage ever committed to code) makes no advances on the main character and seeks to avoid her entirely, while most dialogue options given to the protagonist involve fear over being committed to an adult relationship too early. The marriage has a strict one-year-out for any players who accidentally stumbled into the route as well.
Should the player choose to pursue the route, they are required to make every advance to move the relationship forward with the professor protesting at all points. This prevents replicating real-world dangers like adults preying on children by complimenting and seeking their attention, though it arguably also forwards a narrative that persistence in pursuing inappropriate relationships will ultimately be successful, and that the relationship that ensues afterward will be in the student’s control (a not only untrue but dangerous assumption).
The scene of Grabiner exerting his authority and threatening the protagonist is framed as frightening and completely unacceptable rather than erotic (and provides another point at which a player can exit the route if they choose; though choosing a dialogue option chastising Grabiner for scaring the protagonist won’t yield enough points to continue the route, which has its own troubling implications), and the kiss that closes the route is described not as passionate but “fond.”
The implications are clear that neither party will proceed until the protagonist is of legal age, and Grabiner is implied to be emotionally stunted, having had one tragic relationship as a teenager and nothing else prior to becoming engaged to the protagonist. This last point is by far the weakest justification in the framing — whether or not Grabiner is emotionally developed, he still holds legal rights above and beyond anything the protagonist has access to; and while he apologizes for the particularly threatening outburst, there’s no real addressing of the underlying behavioral issues.
And of course, there is the uncomfortable fact that the only other adult in the game (another teacher) is overtly pushing for the protagonist to stay with Grabiner, leaving no sense of an out or support from any substantive authority figures.
The success to failure ratio of the Grabiner route versus the Damien route is proof that attempting to reconfigure and reinvigorate certain tropes will always be more difficult, and some are so bound to harmful implications that they cannot be saved. The benefits of attempting to salvage some archetypes may prove to be outweighed by the potential damages perpetuated by even an improved version of the storyline. There is an equal measure of success and failure in this element of the game’s framing, and the price of failure is high: it means the romanticizing of an adult/child relationship carries on across another generation and medium, even if the intent was to reform that story into something responsibly handled.
Regardless, Magical Diary’s decision to grapple with existing archetypes is a bold one worth applauding. While aspirational media has an important place and should be applauded, media will continue to simultaneously produce works playing into unexamined, popular tropes even if they are ignored. Part of creating a new landscape of media is examining what about the old ones doesn’t work; and exploring that through the medium of storytelling provides a stepping stone for audiences who might be open to more conscientious storytelling but not have the tools to engage with the metatextual discussion.
There is value in wading into those stories — stories that have formed the unconscious biases of an entire generation in regards to expectations of fiction and, to varying extents, desires and expectations in society — and attempting to preserve the core of what made those stories appealing while addressing the harmful implications they’ve also historically perpetuated. This evolves the conversation on how stories are told without demonizing an entire group of historically female readers and players for their tastes; it dignifies those stories as having worth without accepting or papering over the harmful messages baked into them.
The appeal of the outsider, the thrill of being uniquely treated tenderly by someone who is frightening to everyone else, and the tendency toward rebellion against an uncaring social system are elements of a “bad boy” romance that can be told without glorifying the isolation, emotional and potentially physical abuse, and the added insinuation that a partner can be “changed” by loving them enough.
Magical Diary is reasonably successful at showing the consequences of blindly following after the traditional narrative without telling the prospective player that they are an idiot. Agency is placed at the forefront, giving the player all available information and also attempting to make the finale rewarding in light of that information. It’s a well-balanced approach to indulging and critiquing a trope.
Attempting to write a responsible fantasy about a high school student romancing her teacher may have proven that the trope is inherently unworkable — even with every extenuating circumstance, the power dynamics remain uncomfortably out of balance and the freshman protagonist young enough that it seems unclear she’ll have the chance to fully mature without the influence of her older partner.
Still, the examination feels worth doing as an examination of why that type of story is unsalvageable at its core even within a game otherwise dedicated to responsible, inclusive storytelling. Growing past troubling narratives is as much in breaking them down and analyzing why they don’t work as in writing stories that eschew them. Both, ultimately, are useful as bridging tools — a sentiment that describes this game, and its not inconsiderable accomplishments, all over.
Vrai Kaiser is a queer author and pop culture blogger; they’ve fully embraced their lifetime role as a lover of trash. You can read more essays and find out about their fiction at Fashionable Tinfoil Accessories, listen to them podcasting on Soundcloud, support their work via Patreon or PayPal, or remind them of the existence of Tweets.
