Yiling Hu (KU Leuven)
Abstract
This article examines how Slay the Princess (Black Tabby Games, 2023) reconfigures the bishōjo as a binding force that wounds, rather than reassures, the player. Drawing on Patrick Galbraith’s account of bishōjo “techno-intimacy” and Donna Haraway’s writings on companion species, I argue that the game mobilises the affective architecture of the dating sim—paratextual framing as a “love story,” scripted availability, and shōjo-sei—only in order to turn it against the player. Instead of delivering a reassuring fantasy of inward, cyborgian “becoming,” Slay the Princess builds a relationship in which unconditional love is compulsory and injurious. Building on Vella & Gualeni’s notion of the “attitude of virtuality” and LARP theory’s concepts of en-roling, de-roling, and bleed, the article first contrasts the smooth avatar identification of mainstream videogames such as Fallout 4 with Slay the Princess’s delayed, unstable en-roling into a monstrous protagonist. The game withholds a coherent avatar, distributes identification across conflicting voices and an unreliable narrator, and ultimately reveals an alien god-form too late to function as an inhabitable self. At the same time, the Princess weaponises bishōjo affect: she loops, returns, insists on an inexplicable “relationship,” and refuses to be known by the player. I propose that the resulting wound is not the familiar “realist” loss, but a fourth, relational wound in Haraway’s sense: an ongoing entanglement with a nonhuman partner. In Slay the Princess, bleed names the impossibility of clear-cut de-roling, through which the virtual bishōjo no longer saves or reflects the human, but binds them.
1. Introduction
Dating simulators have long promised intimacy without risk (Galbraith, 2011). Romance systems and companion mechanics offer attachment structured by choice, repetition, and reversibility. Even when loss is staged, it unfolds within the safety of virtuality: failure can be rewound, rejection retried, and death undone. Scholarship on romance in games has often focused on the representational politics of desire and the procedural structuring of affection (e.g., Krzywinska, 2012; Ensslin, 2014), as well as on player agency and incorporation (Calleja, 2011; Vella & Gualeni, 2020). Intimacy, in this account, appears as something navigable and optimisable—almost like a skill to be mastered and rewarded.
This article approaches Slay the Princess as a disturbance within the safety of virtuality. The game inherits the affective architecture of the dating simulator—paratextual framing as a “love story,” a singular female figure awaiting encounter, the promise of relational exclusivity—only to turn it against the player throughout the game. Rather than consolidating subjectivity through an inward, narcissistic becoming, it constructs a prolonged, compulsory, and injurious relation. I argue that the wound at stake is not the familiar wound of loss grounded in “realistic” temporal irreversibility, but a relational wound: an ongoing entanglement with a nonhuman partner who refuses to remain either projection or consumable object.
To articulate this shift, I bring together three conceptual strands already implicit in debates on bishōjo and virtual subjectivity. First, Galbraith’s account of techno-intimacy clarifies how bishōjo figures operate as binding forces rather than mere objects of desire. Second, Donna Haraway’s writings on cyborgs and companion species foreground virtual intimacy as co-constitution (an “ontological choreography”, Haraway, 2003, p. 98) with nonhuman others, where attachment entails wound rather than possession. Third, Vella & Gualeni’s formulation of the “attitude of virtuality,” alongside LARP theory’s concepts of en-roling, de-roling, and bleed, provides a vocabulary for analyzing how subject positions are entered, destabilized, and fail to be cleanly exited. Methodologically, this article develops an autobiographical and interpretative close reading of Slay the Princess, attending to its loops, mirrors, voices, and shifting embodiments as mechanisms that reorganize intimacy.
The discussion proceeds in four movements. First, I situate bishōjo within the affective architecture of the dating simulator, examining how techno-intimacy and blind trust stabilize the player’s subjectivity under the “attitude of virtuality.” Second, I revisit loss-centred “gamic realism,” distinguishing temporal and spatial models of virtual disturbance from the relational wound I propose. Third, I examine how Slay the Princess disrupts en-roling by withholding a coherent avatar and distributing identification across unstable voices and monstrous forms. Finally, I analyze the failure of de-roling, where bleed names the impossibility of restoring a clear division between player and the avatar they once ambiguously inhabited.
2. “I Would Rather be a Bishōjo Than a Goddess.”
2.1 Dating Sims
Slay the Princess begins with a lie that is also a promise: “This is a love story.” Before I met her, I was told that she is chained in a basement, that my task is to kill her, and that failure would mean the end of the world. A narrow forest path, a cabin, a staircase, a girl—the whole setting feels like the prelude to a familiar fairy tale. The opening is minimalistic yet saturated with intimacy: a one-on-one encounter in a locked room, a body rendered vulnerable and dangerous at once.
Paratext frames this encounter long before the first line of dialogue. On Steam, Slay the Princess is tagged as a “dating sim.” That single tag immediately reorients my expectations: I anticipate multiple routes, affection meters, CG unlocks, and, above all, a central “her” carefully moulded to sustain my interest. As Vella & Gualeni remind us, genre and platform paratexts are not neutral descriptors but “scripts” that orient how players “en-rol” themselves into a gameworld (2020, p. 41). To call Slay the Princess a dating sim means that the Princess is not just an enemy to be slain but a potential love interest, an object of care, an affective investment.
Dating sims (dating simulators) are a very specific kind of intimacy machine. They are cheap to produce—often built from still images and simple scripts—yet designed for replayability, so that players can traverse multiple storylines and “clear” all available characters. They are structurally passive—auto-scrolling text, branched choices—but emotionally demanding, requiring the player to cultivate affection, remember past conversations, and choose their words carefully. At their centre stand the bishōjo (美少女): cute anime girls with a general sense of innocence. They are designed to bond with a particular market, namely, the otaku.
Game studies have frequently approached such configurations through the lens of attachment and identification, emphasizing how repetition, branching choice, and calibrated feedback foster affective investment in virtual characters (see, for instance, Allison, 2006; Taylor, 2007). Choice-based design has been read as foregrounding player agency, situating intimacy within what Vella & Gualeni call the “attitude of virtuality”, where emotional investment unfolds under the presumption of reversibility (Vella & Gualeni, 2020). Within this framework, the dating sim becomes exemplary of intimacy as negotiable and optimisable: desire is structured, replayed, and ultimately brought under interpretive control.
It is precisely this structure that Galbraith seeks to complicate. In his account, bishōjo games do not simply reduce intimacy to mechanical accumulation of affection points or “mechanical sex”, but stage a form of “techno-intimacy (see also Allison, 2006)” in which boundaries between male and machine, self and other, begin to blur (Galbraith, 2011), reminiscent of Donna Haraway’s “transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities” (Haraway, 1985, p. 14). As Galbraith argues, melodramatic plots allow players to “lose control and become emotional”; “nurturing games” collapse “male and female roles”; empathy is often centred on bishōjos whom the player is encouraged to identify with, and all pleasures, especially the sexual one, are “projected onto the female characters”; players thus do not desire a certain bishōjo per se, but rather the spectral nature of abstract sum of all bishōjos, the “girl-ness” (shōjo-sei), unpossessable desire in the Lacanian sense, the “soulful bodies”, the skin without flesh and bone, the breast without excrement and viscera (for bishōjo as otaku’s “absolutely unattainable object of desire”, see also Azuma, 2009). Such “techno-intimacy” renders players’ desire inward, not as an impulse to possess an object, but as a process of “becoming” with a non-human partner, “becoming cyborg”. Paraphrasing Haraway, he points Bishōjos to be “new gods” delivering salvation because they “experience technology as a condition”, promising the “becoming women” of man in the sense that “men tend to be ‘feminised’” (ibid). Although Galbraith’s reading leans heavily on Haraway, he unfortunately skirts some of her sharpest refusals: for instance, the cyborg’s refusal of salvation history (Haraway, 1985, p. 7), or her insistence that “femininity” is an instance of “misplaced concreteness” (Haraway, 2003, p. 6).
It is from within this tension between genre expectation and theoretical rescue that I approach Slay the Princess. The game’s paratext positions it as a dating sim; its opening lines declare it a love story; its central figure is a Princess who is, in many ways, bishōjo-like. And yet what unfolds is not a comforting fantasy of techno-intimacy, but something far more dangerous: a love that wounds, a relationship that dissolves the player’s very own subjectivity.
2.2 Blind Trust
If Galbraith invokes Haraway to describe techno-intimacy as salvific becoming, what remains underexamined is Haraway’s more demanding account of co-constitution. Bishōjo figures are already techno-organic constructions: animated bodies whose affective force depends on the entanglement of code, image, and projected interiority. If bishōjo operate as sites where player desire meets the machine, then Haraway’s refusal of clear boundaries between human and nonhuman offers more than a metaphor. Her account of relationship as “ontological choreography”, that is, co-constitution—rather than identification or possession—provides a way to take virtual intimacy seriously without reducing it to narcissistic self-reflection. In this sense, cyborg and companion species theory ground the claim that intimacy with a bishōjo is a structurally real relation with a nonhuman partner. (see also Hao, 2022, for a parallel application in digital companion species).
“Trust, Blind Trust,” the Princess says. In The Companion Species Manifesto, Haraway recounts the love between Ackerley and Tulip, a rescued dog who had an ex-partner. Their bond is always messy, filled with efforts, uncertainty, tension, and doubt, “waste, cruelty, indifference, ignorance, and loss as well as of joy, invention, labour, intelligence, and play.” Their love is conditional and earned. The difference is honored rather than bridged. Trust and respect simultaneously emerge, independent of fantasy (Haraway, 2003, pp. 33-38). Dogs and bishōjos share a similar capacity of giving the illusion of “unconditional love” too easily. While it was easier for Haraway to dismiss dog’s “unconditional love” as “abusive” and “pernicious” “caninophiliac narcissism” (p. 32), it is difficult to defend bishōjos against such claims. Bishōjos’ love is hard-coded in game scripts. My purchase of a game copy, my relentless progression through the repetitive narrative, and all my clicks and moves are grounded in and motivated by my infallible conviction of their unconditional love and our promised happy ending.
Let me further introduce her to those unfamiliar with her wonders. She is “diminutive, rounded, passive, tidy.” (Black, 2008). Large eyes and rounded face, her cuteness fits into the kind of infantile fragility that our genes compel us to adore (e.g., Ngai, 2015) but she is also sexually available. She is usually presented to players as perfect and ideal at first sight, the “being… so different from my own with all the awe-inspiring reality…” (Weisser, 2001, as cited in Haraway, 2003, p. 37). As the narrative progresses, it will be gradually revealed that the capable class president might be a terrible cook, and the wealthy heiress might have never tasted “commoner” snacks (but they are rarely feminist). Aoyagi, for instance, observes that Bishojos are typically designed as lacking exceptionality, in order to not “alienate or offend the audience” (2005, p. 67). So she descends from being sublime goddess to the approachable, appropriable sexual other, culminating in a blasphemous sex scene (unlike Galbraith’s observation, that “even in erotic images, female characters tend to be more or less clothed.” (2011)). Her harmless weaknesses, rather than adding depth to her character, become mere decorations hanging on her cute “shōjo-sei”, serving only to make her more accessible to the averagely inhabitable, blurred-face male protagonist. The essence of “damsel-in-distress” still lingered everywhere in such “mundane fiction[s] of Man and Woman” (Haraway, 1985, p. 65). She is born into a temporality of anticipation. Long before she “exists,” she is iterated through surveys, prototypes, and revisions designed to predict and accommodate the desires of an imagined average male player. When she finally appears, she arrives overdetermined: every gesture, flaw, and charm already scripted in advance, her otherness pre-formatted to be consumable. When the copy is readily installed on the console, every possibility has already been exhausted. Written in pre-scripted codes, her identity is still shaped by her relationship to the male desire, going through infinite lifecycles of being “animated” as the virtually real, then “worshipped” as a goddess, and finally “dominated” as the sexual other (p. 65). Even in more open-ended and well-intended games such as LovePlus (Konami, 2009), this pattern of “desacralized goddess” remains unchanged. Complexities of the significant-otherness-to-be are reduced to superficial contrast between her perfections and deficiencies, or to say the “gyappu-moe1”, synonymous with Frankenstein’s monster, “expect[ing] its father to save it” (p. 9). War and struggle simplified to stylus touch and branch choices that put nothing at stake except for emotional labour. No longer goddesses, but neither cyborgs nor dogs. In this context, the supposed “techno-intimacy” is merely a one-sided prey hunt, where the player voraciously learns everything about the bishōjo, “disturbingly lively”, while bishōjo remains passive, ignorant, “frighteningly inert” (p. 11); the player is immersed in the story, laughs and cries and plugs into the machine, while bishōjo remains unchanged. There is no coevolution, no co-independence, unless, if you say, what matters is the narcissism of humanity.
I am wary that such complaint will eventually lead me to dismiss bishōjos, but I am really on the same page as my fellow rescuers. I want to take our personal and specified relationships with bishōjos seriously and without making them “an alibi for other [anthropomorphic] themes (p. 21)”. The problem is not: what a bishōjo is, but rather, what a bishōjo can do? What a bishōjo can do to us, if she is virtually real, not merely wished to be so?
In an interview from August 2000, Haraway explicitly rejected that dogs are just tools for human self-reflection. “Self-figuration is not [her] task (p. 10).” Towards Wolfgang Schirmacher’s Heideggerian interpretation of her book, that “If you want to know about humanity, look away from humanity,” Haraway replied: “That’s all well and good, but I also want to know about the dogs (2000).” “They are not a projection nor the realization of an intention nor the telos of anything (2003, p. 10).” Dogs are not the absolute other that is only useful in delineating what oneself is. They are the significant other, messmates that share a piece of bread with us. We “colonize (p. 1)” each other’s cell, and compose together the “ontological choreography (p. 98)”. Dogs matter. Likely, bishōjos matter, and I want to know about them.
2.3. Real Wound
Blind trust in unconditional love is dangerous. Our blind trust in bishōjo’s love is built up on the unreality of bishōjo’s wonder, or rather, the unreality of the life-and-death struggle in videogames more generally: player’s attitude of virtuality in their prior “en-roling” into the virtual environment, where “failure is reversible and does not lead to permanent losses, injury, or death, and that the choices they make and the actions they take will not have any direct consequences upon the actual world (Vella & Gualeni, 2020, p. 39).”
Game studies has long examined how such virtual identification is inhabited and stabilized. Calleja’s account of incorporation (2011), for instance, describes the gradual alignment of player and avatar across affective and kinaesthetic dimensions, while Aarseth (1997) has emphasized the structural positioning of the player within ergodic systems. These approaches share with Vella & Gualeni’s formulation a presumption of a coherent identification, the presumption that the virtual subject can be entered, sustained, and withdrawn from without remainder. The attitude of virtuality names this presumption of reversibility and limited consequence. The economy of blind trust relies on this protective attitude of virtuality: so that affection is a risk-free catharsis and resistance is ultimately inconsequential. Some games, however, attempt to breach this wall – the so-called fourth wall. They seek to give virtual characters a different kind of presence—one that forces the player to confront a “wound” that feels, if not real, then at least irrevocable. Such strategies rely on a spatial metaphor: the crossing of the monitor screen (the fourth wall) between game and “reality”.
To understand what kind of wound Slay the Princess produces, however, it is necessary to distinguish it from the loss-centred “realistic” wound so commonly seen in fourth-wall-breaking-games that they almost feel like a cliché. “The issue with ‘Gamic realism’ lies in ‘making characters bleed, thereby making the players bleed’ (Azuma, 2015, p. 81, my translation).” Azuma analyzes the case of All You Need is Kill (Sakurazaka, 2004), a futuristic military science fiction novel told in first-person by its protagonist, Kiriya Keiji, who was caught in a time loop during his fight against the mysterious and relentless alien race “the Mimic”. After dying in battle, he wakes up to relive the same day repeatedly. In this setting, Azuma parallels Kiriya’s experience with the player’s respawning in videogame. Kiriya, therefore, takes up the attitude of virtuality and becomes a player during his looping. Kiriya met another time-looper Rita Vrataski (a bishōjo), who became his friend and mentor. In order to end the time loop and defeat the Mimics once and for all, however, one of them must die. Facing the dying Rita, Kiriya suggested entering the loop again so that the two could always be together. Rita rejected, for the unique Rita who Kiriya met in the 159th loop and all the loops before it would not come back to life. Azuma remarked:
[At this moment, Kiriya] has completely forgotten that only he is the player, and the Rita in front of him is a character that gets reset every thirty hours. Regardless of whether Kiriya returns to the loop or, conversely, whether he breaks it, the fact that the Rita who fell in love with Kiriya will disappear after these thirty hours is unchangeable (p. 83).
Azuma’s reading locates “gamic realism” in a refusal of temporal reversibility: Rita’s uniqueness cannot be restored by looping, and her disappearance marks a limit to the player’s invulnerability. A similar reconfiguration of time underpins bishōjo narratives that challenge the player’s reliance on the Save/Load function: in Kimi to Kanojo to Kanojo no Koi (Nitroplus, 2013), Miyuki persists through multiple replays as if she and the player share the same temporality in “real world”. Like Rita, she insists on being unique. She breaks the “fourth wall”, talking directly to the player, forcing them to give up on their Save/Load power.
The contentious “magic circle” metaphor in games studies traditionally frames virtuality as a spatial separation: game spaces—court houses or churches—are bounded “people places” with their own rules (Salen & Zimmerman, 2004, p. 95). All You and Kimi to Kanojo’s, however, disrupt virtuality not by spatial transgression, but by temporal interference. Their realism hinges on the idea that time cannot simply be rewound—that characters may remember, persist, or vanish in ways that resist the player’s attempts to reset. What these works expose is a temporal wound: the irreversibility of loss in a “real” temporal space the game character and the player now share.
In a blog review of Love is All Around (intiny, 2023), Wu extends Azuma’s thesis, interpreting the loss of the hidden “true” heroine Yunsi in every replay as the game’s “realistic core”, and the eventual happiness-ever-after “true ending” as a healing of the players’ real-life wound (Wu, 2023). In this view, the realism of games is measured by the kind of loss they demand—whether revocable or irrevocable—the latter being more painful and therefore more “real”: “an exploration of the player’s pain, and through such pain, conveys a message to the reader, turning it into something extremely ‘realistic’” (Azuma, 2015, p. 83).
Azuma’s conception is closer to my “rescue scheme”, but it is also limited by a familiar rhetoric of realism— “once again, the point is that choices have heavy consequences [i.e. realism] and you should be man enough to be able to live with them (emphasis mine).” Redditor Garejei’s off-hand summary captures this perfectly (2015). The “wound”, still formulated as the “loss” of an object, a failure of appropriation, or simply the frustration of unpaid emotional labour, that teaches us a lesson about being “man enough” to endure the Freudian trauma of frustrated narcissism (Derrida, 2003, p. 139; Haraway, 2008). It promises maturity (which presupposes immaturity). It leaves the player intact.
What I am seeking is something quite different. I do not wish to elevate gamic reality to the status of “our” reality, nor do I find the metaphor of the “fourth wall” particularly helpful—it presupposes a rigid division between “virtual” and “real”, and risks overdetermination. Real power dynamics are lacking, and nothing is “really” at stake. In “face-to-face” companion relationships, the risk is far more demanding. Death permeates in the form of loss as well as in a myriad of many other ways, as Haraway said. Her dogs would be euthanized if they bit her human child during the most ordinary martial training (2011); similarly, once my cat became my companion, the smallest traces of chocolate, onions, or coffee suddenly appeared lethal. This is not blind trust but fragile trust that needs to be carefully sustained and attachment that can easily injure.
This is the dimension I want to restore to bishōjo: not humanity, but unreality with stakes. Here is my “rescue”, or rather, restoration scheme: I want to share with them real power dynamics, to accept how my cat and bishōjo can turn down my unconditional love and invert it into something that hurts me and kills me. Something that not only intrudes into my temporality but also alters the conspicuousness of my spatial surroundings. This is not the third Freudian wound but a fourth: “the relationalities of us with that which isn’t human”, the fourth wound that “forces us to acknowledge that our machines are lively too (Gane & Haraway, 2006).” A wound not from a negative “loss” but from a pointing “blade”, not to be endured but to be lived with. Slay the Princess can be read as one possible implementation of this restoration scheme: it inherits the bishōjo’s affective architecture only in order to turn it against the player.
Now, the conventional bishōjo games stabilise two sides of a relationship at once – granting the player a coherent, safely human point of view (essentially as themselves, perhaps maturing, but ultimately intact) while presenting the bishōjo as a predictable object of care. Slay the Princess disrupts both. It unsettles the player’s own position no less than it transforms the bishōjo. It does so through two simultaneous progressions in its narrative: On one side, the game refuses the smooth identification and safe embodiment that most dating sims provide; on the other, it withholds the reassuring legibility and consumability of the bishōjo figure.
3. En-Roling and De-Roling in Slay The Princess
3.1 En-roling as a monster
If a wound is to be more than a metaphor, it must intervene in the very process through which players become someone in a game. The “attitude of virtuality” is not only about reversible failure and lack of consequences; it is also about how smoothly players slide into a ready-made subject position and just as smoothly slide back out of it. Before turning to Slay the Princess as a site where this smoothness is interrupted, I want to briefly recall how classical videogame design—Fallout 4 being a paradigmatic case—organizes identification with an avatar as a stable, continuous, and ultimately safe way of being in the virtual world.
In Fallout 4 (Bethesda Game Studios, 2015), the player immediately confronts their in-game subjectivity in a mirror after the introductory cutscene. As Vella & Gualeni argued, this is the moment when the player identifies with the character, looking at the gameworld through the character’s eye while at the same time taking the mirror reflection as the object of their perception. A smooth identification through the seemingly paradoxical Sartrean “indication of the subject to himself”, thereby “framing some representation of ourselves to ourselves (2020)”. An objectified self-representation and subjective consciousness coexist, but such a paradox was subsequently downplayed and integrated into the immersive gameplay that follows. In Fallout 4, immediately after the mirror scene, the player is instructed to perform several parental/maternal tasks integral to their chosen role as male/female (partner and parent), “readily made and socially established”. The player then witnesses his/her partner being killed and child kidnapped. From here, the identification solidifies, as the goal of the player and the character becomes one and consistent: to avenge the partner and rescue the child. The player is then offered a set of input-output mechanics as multitudes of possibilities and capabilities they could perform through the protagonist, and thus further internalised the avatar as their extended embodiment in the gameworld (pp. 46-50). The identification could be more nuancedly reached in less articulated plots and goals through input-output alone, as in the case of Mario, as long as player’s inputs (such as press X) and avatar’s outputs (jump) remain relatively consistent (Vella, 2012). At this stage, the player’s en-roling (role-taking), a term borrowed from LARP (Live Action Role-Play), is completed.
In Slay the Princess, the identification process is far more ambiguous and prolonged. Initially, the protagonist “woke up in the woods” instructed by the Narrator to kill the Princess. The scene is set up in a first-person perspective, and the avatar remains unknown until its first encounter with the mirror, where they confront their own hand holding the blade with long claws covered in reptile skin. A coincidentally literal depiction of Haraway’s “regrown limb”, “where the human arm cut off where the monster’s arm holding the knife begins” (1985, p. 67). The old triangle of Hero-Monster-Princess is recalled, but this time the Hero is confused with the Monster. At this moment, the decision has already been made, and the Princess appears to be doomed to death. The game’s objective was then reframed: it is no longer between the Hero and The Princess/Monster (monstrous, to be slayed, or innocent, to be saved), but rather the Player/Monster and The Princess/Monster. Fallout 4 uses consistent and rational objectives to glue together player’s identification with the character, but Slay the Princess complicates the validity of the initial objective. Identification is thus destabilized.
On every encounter, the Narrator denies knowledge of the mirror, which vanishes the moment the Hero tries to touch it. “It’s you”, the reflection of a barely visible face with a pair of glowing, hollow eyes staring back; the monstrous hand reaching out, the reflection quietly reaffirming that the protagonist’s body is not the player’s body at all. On every new encounter, the subtitle reads: “you’ve grown”, “you’ve withered”, “you’ve unraveled”, “you are nothing at all”. It was not until the fifth revelation that the supposed Sartrean distance between the objectified self-representation and subjective consciousness had been all along exposed, unavailable as a monster’s arm that belongs to an absolute other. The reflection is no longer “me at a distance,” but something other, something that refuses to fuse with the player into a coherent avatar. This estrangement resonates with Fiedler’s observation that “the strangely formed body has represented absolute Otherness in all times and places since human history began” (1996, p. xiii). Monster, Fiedler argues, unsettles us because they expose “our basic uncertainty about the limits of our bodies and our egos” (1993, p. 27). What Slay the Princess reveals is that the Hero has always already been close to monstrosity. The Heroes, even the most cliché ones, rest on traits that are themselves abnormal: “in greater strength, beauty, and invulnerability” (p. 308). Their extraordinariness is simply the socially sanctioned facet of the monstrous. Ordinarily, this slippage is masked by the ease with which players en-rol into the heroic role. The hero’s clarity of purpose resonates with our naïve desire for moral certainty, and their body yields obediently to our controller inputs. Identification becomes smooth because the avatar is built to be inhabited. Slay the Princess, however, interrupts this smoothness. By rendering the hero’s body monstrous, the game makes explicit the tension that most games keep hidden: that the player is never simply “identifying with a hero,” but always negotiating with an Otherness embedded in the avatar’s very form.
Ambiguity turns identification porous, but the “mimic impulse”2 still urges the player to latch onto someone within the fiction. The Narrator, who claims to have been objectively describing the very environment the player also sees through the screen, appears to offer a partial anchor, but he contradicts the player’s will even more often. More fatally, he was unable to share the temporality with the player. Each encounter in a loop was for him anew, and his forgetfulness forecloses any stable relational continuity. Other voices, seemingly emerging in accordance with player’s choices simultaneously lure identification, but they have their own agency to influence the narrative as if endowed with independent will. Their hyperbolic sincerity, so true to their names (the Smitten, the Paranoid…), becomes less an extension of the player and more a reminder that they are not the player at all. Even the environments begin to appear lively and entice identification. Firstly, the interior of the cabin, then the woods and the path and everything within the void, all transform in harmony with the player’s perception. Everything —voices, narrator, world—invites identification only partially, only provisionally, and ultimately refuses to hold it. All partial, all possible, all unavailable.
By the end of the fifth loop, the game finally offers what appears to be a full revelation of who the protagonist “is”. Is this the moment when the player is finally granted a stable representation to inhabit? In more conventional designs—Fallout 4 again being exemplary—representation anchors identification from the outset. There, the player first receives a visible avatar (the mirror scene), then a clear narrative goal, and finally an array of input-output capabilities that cement extended embodiment. Identity, purpose, and action unfold in a reassuring order: representation → goal → embodiment. Slay the Princess reverses this sequence entirely. The player begins only with mechanical embodiment (point-and-click), is quickly assigned a dubious goal (slay the Princess), and then spends the entire game navigating fragmented, unstable identifications. Only near the end does the game reveal the protagonist’s “true” form—at the moment when the mirror shows “nothing at all,” the Narrator sheds his mask as a bird-like humanoid, an “echo” of their Creator, and announces the player-protagonist as the Long Quiet, a nascent god. Yet this revelation still does not offer the comfort of dwelling. Instead, it forces players into an alien, monstrous body whose form and history were inaccessible until now. The player does not choose to occupy this form; they are coerced into it. What passes for a “final representation” is less a place to dwell than the culmination of a long process of estrangement—an identity delivered too late, too foreign, and too violent.
3.2 De-roling as Bleeding
In Slay the Princess, the player’s exit from the protagonist is just as fraught as how they enter in. This difficulty becomes clearest when we consider how games ordinarily allow players to leave a role behind. In LARP, as opposed to “en-roling”, there is also “de-roling”, or the process of player’s transitioning out of a character. As Vella & Gualeni observe, in LARP, deep emotional immersions and prolonged periods of adaptation to an alternative persona involve in them inherent risks, most prominently the “bleed”, in which “the line between the LARP situation and the player’s actual life becomes porous, allowing the flow of intense and potentially troubling emotions from one’s fictional role to one’s ordinary self (p. 35)”. In LARP, de-roling practices, such as sessions of debriefing or the symbolically taking off a piece of the character’s costume, are well-established and common. In videogames, due to the different “nature of engagement”, shorter play sessions, or less physical and emotional immersion compared to LARP, players presumably maintain a clearer separation between their real and virtual identities (p. 49). The de-roling occurs less emotionally in the form of either the player-character’s death signaled by a change from first-person to third-person perspective in Deus Ex (2000), high scores and trophies in arcade games, or the closure of narrative (ending cutscene, where the character suddenly turns autonomous) (pp. 50-53).
Slay the Princess provides no apparent apparatus for de-roling: no cutscene of autonomous avatar, no stable identity to be relinquished, no shift in camera perspective, no scores or trophies to signal closure, and no ritualised moment of detachment. Without these structural cues, de-roling is already different from mainstream videogames, as the player remains bound to the Long Quiet—or its monstrous permutations—long after the narrative ought to have released them.
The Princess multiplies this failure of de-roling. From the very first encounter, she demands “blind trust,” insisting, “We have a relationship,” even while withholding any information that grounds such blindness. In bishōjo games discussed in previous sections, passion is scripted as a mutual choice. The player’s “knowing better” of a bishōjo provides a more relatable and enjoyable “having”. In Slay the Princess, passion is instead a trap with malice. All attempts to know her are rejected. In one scene, in the hope of rationalizing not-slaying through empathy, the player could choose to ask the Princess anything, but the princess offers no specifics in return. “So I could tell you that I’d lead a quiet life in the woods or that I’d open an orphanage or that I do any other number of ‘good’ things that I’m sure you think you want to hear… You don’t really know me, do you?” Later, the princess is revealed to be the Shifting Mound whose “shape” is moulded by the protagonist’s perception into “vessels”, and the player’s real objective is to collect different vessels and make her complete. She only becomes what the protagonist perceives her to be: a lover, a vulnerable care-seeker, a grotesque monster, or an invincible god; even when killed, she will be brought back to life by the protagonist’s uncertainty of her death. Reflective of the player’s choice, other voices emerge and compete with the Narrator: the Smitten, the Cold, the Paranoid… corresponding to each vessel of the Princess: the Damsel, the Spectre, the Nightmare… An evident reversal to all aforementioned dating sims: the Princess secures the side of “humanity”, knowing herself (vessels) and the player (voices) more and more, while the player only knows her as inhumane and abstract. The extreme passivity of the Princess, as a mound readily to be shaped into any vessel, turns into aggressivity. As this passivity lacks an articulate subject, she becomes all-consuming. If the player kills her, she returns. If the player escapes, she pursues. If the player loops, she loops with them. She continues to profess love, regardless of rejection, violence, or indifference. Her passion is not reciprocal but compulsory, something that the player cannot even negotiate. Bishōjo’s passion in dating sims, in contrast, is scripted to be her and the player’s mutual choices. Other male characters, sometimes the protagonist’s friends or romantic rivals, are presented to confirm bishōjo’s autonomy. The Princess’s passion for the player, however, is never specified, as the protagonist is the only entity she has ever known. Ahmed noted how “passion” and “passive” share the same root passio, meaning “suffering”. To receive passion is “to be passive”, “to be enacted upon, as a negation that is already felt as suffering” (2014, p. 2). In receiving the Princess’s void passion, the player becomes passive. This passivity does not stem from the loss of an object or from the irreversibility of time, but from the loss of agency, from being held within a relation that cannot be exited or resolved. The beloved one is thus softened by passivity, and through softness, harm. Slay the Princess thus inflicts the kind of wound that I am looking for: On my side, my humanity becomes imperceptible. On the Princess’s side, I become passive and receptive to this wound not from loss but from forced passion by an abstract entity, unable to negotiate and unable to be rationalised. The wound emerges not from what disappears, but from what persists. That’s how the Princess leaves a wound. A companion wound perhaps. From the wound, a “regrown limb” emerges, “…monstrous, duplicated, potent. We have all been injured, profoundly. We require regeneration, not rebirth, and the possibilities for our reconstitution include the utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous world without gender (Haraway, 1985, p. 67).”
What is at stake here is therefore not merely affective intensity, but the structural impossibility of concluding the relation. If bleeding in LARP names the accidental seepage of a fictional role into ordinary life, in Slay the Princess, this seepage follows from the way the game already troubles en-roling. Because the player never achieves a stable entry into a coherent avatar—never fully “becomes” the hero, the monster, or the Long Quiet—there is no clear role to step out of at the end. Conventional de-roling depends on the existence of such a role: one can only exit what one has first securely entered. Here, however, the player’s identification is fragmented from the start, distributed among competing voices, an unreliable narrator, and a body that is continually revealed too late and too strangely to serve as an anchor. When de-roling arrives, it finds nothing solid to detach from.
The Princess’s forced passion intensifies this structural failure. Because she insists on the relationship regardless of the player’s choices, she prevents the relationship from closing in the way videogames ordinarily allow. Instead of the avatar becoming autonomous in an ending cutscene, it is the Princess who refuses autonomy to the player. The result is that the affect generated during play cannot be contained by the usual de-roling cues; it has no narrative or mechanical place to return to. In this sense, the “wound” and the “bleed” converge: the wound is the impossibility of completing either en-roling or de-roling, and bleeding is what it feels like to remain caught in that unfinished relationship with a fictional character.
4. Conclusions
4.1 Bishōjo as a Binding Force: The Princess Between Monster and Beloved
If Slay the Princess destabilizes the player’s subjectivity by withholding a coherent avatar, it equally destabilizes intimacy by staging the Princess as a distorted, volatile iteration of the bishōjo. She is not a simple parody of bishōjo tropes. Rather, she mobilizes the affective power of the bishōjo—the softness, vulnerability, and scripted relational availability that normally secure the player’s desire—while simultaneously undermining every narrative and mechanical structure that would make such desire reassured. In this sense, the Princess is a bishōjo not because she resembles the “cute girl” of dating sims, but because she weaponises the form’s capacity for soliciting affect. What she refuses is the corollary: to remain legible and possessable. This refusal reconfigures the process of en-roling and de-roling. In conventional dating sims, the bishōjo is the principal anchor for identification: she stabilizes the player’s entry into the romantic role, and because her affection is secure, predictable, and infinitely replayable, she also stabilizes the player’s exit from that role once the “route” ends. The bishōjo’s availability is what allows the player to project, inhabit, and eventually detach. Slay the Princess reverses this logic. The Princess retains the bishōjo’s affective invitation—her initial fragility, her apparent loneliness, even her insistence that “this is a love story”—but she rejects the legibility and predictability that make the bishōjo consumable. As she shifts through the Damsel, the Spectre, the Nightmare, the Razor, and finally the Shifting Mound, the relational script breaks, yet the affective pull remains. It becomes the one continuous thread in a world where every other aspect of identification dissolves, and thus the primary mechanism through which the player remains attached even as the game refuses to offer a coherent self to identify with.
This unstable combination—bishōjo’s affect and monstrosity—produces a relational asymmetry more binding than either could achieve alone. In ordinary bishōjo narratives, the player can desire safely because the bishōjo is already scripted to love them back; in ordinary monster narratives, the player can destroy safely because the monster is already scripted to be defeated. Here, neither script functions. The Princess is vulnerable enough that killing her feels like betrayal, yet powerful enough that sparing her invites disaster; she is intimate enough to claim the player as beloved, yet alien enough to provoke disgust and fear. Her bishōjo affect solicits empathy, but her monstrosity forecloses appropriation. The player cannot desire her without losing coherence, because to desire her is to risk the dissolution of their own subjectivity. They cannot reject her without becoming implicated in her return, because to refuse her only draws the player further into her recurring presence. The relationship offers no stable position from which the player can either safely desire or safely refuse, and is thus suspended in an unresolved state—one the player neither chose nor can withdraw from. This suspension is the wound: a form of attachment without identification, intimacy without mutuality, generated by a figure who inherits the emotional architecture of the bishōjo yet refuses to remain its object.
The force of this bind culminates in the ending where the Princess and the Long Quiet choose to reset the world together. This “fresh start” replicates the cyclical temporality of dating sims—the perpetual replay, the promise of beginning again—but stripped of the genre’s comfort. The reset is not a new route to be cleared, but rather a mutual agreement to continue a relationship. For the Princess, this is persistence; for the player, it is exposure. If bleed in LARP describes the accidental seepage of role into life, here bleed arises from an attachment forged through bishōjo affect and enforced through monstrosity. In Slay the Princess, the bishōjo does not offer salvation, projection, or techno-intimacy. She binds. And it is through this binding—this impossible, asymmetrical, monstrous affection—that she leaves the wound the player must carry—a small instance of that fourth, relational wound that names our entanglement with our nonhuman partners.
End notes
1. ギャップ萌え, combination of “gap” and “cute, lovable”. In anime subculture, it is used to describe characters who are cute because they act out of character. Reddit user IonicSquid (2018) explains: “Gap moe is about contrast. It’s based upon the idea that if a character who is usually not moe does something cute, the juxtaposition between their usual calm/aloof/whatever self and the brief moment of moe makes the moe even more delicious.”
2. “imitation … is at home in the playing, not in the plaything”, even when playing with inanimate toys such as trains and windmills, “compulsive mimetic identification” prevails (Banjamin, qf Ngai, 2015, p. 74-75).
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Authors’ Info
Yiling Hu
KU Leuven, Leuven, BELGIUM
yiling.hu@kuleuven.be
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.