Consigning Meaning to the Void
There’s a cynical undertone throughout the Lovely Lady RPG’s (hereafter LLRPG) narration, when the author doesn’t insert themselves, that expresses the nihilism of Anglia and its jaded post-war society. The city is personified as a beast that’s slowly digesting Ghost and everyone else. The Sinner, who comes from another town which was destroyed by over-extraction of natural resources, yearns for a personal apocalypse and wants to draw Ghost too into oblivion. The Orb in Ghost’s chest is a piece of the greater cosmos, an ethereal presence who she feels “a distant affinity to” and shares a conscience with it. Ghost herself is a paradox of a being–someone created from a random act of destruction. But she is also someone who is on a precipice of realizing her core identity.
As Grace points out in her essay, the protagonist is multifaceted, yet two-dimensional in spite of that because of how archetypal each of her aspects are. While this expression of Ghost’s character fails in some regards to be dynamic, it’s successful in another way—which is expressing what it’s like to live with metastability. This goal is undercut by a mismatch of tones throughout the game’s narrative. One tone, as Grace explores in her piece, is that of resonant empathy. The other, which I want to identify, is supposed to illustrate the awkwardness of trying to hush one’s insecurities and fears about metastability with humour. Yet instead this second tone cheapens the first–describing why and how it does so is my aim.
I refer to metastability as media critic Lily Alexandre does in her video essay, “Girls Own the Void: Trans Women, Alienation, and Metastability”, as a familiarity and catharsis in knowing that your whole life could be ruined at any given moment. Metastability is a term from quantum field theory about how our universe exists in either a false vacuum or a true one. If it’s the former, an event called “false vacuum decay” could lead to everything ceasing to exist. Alexandre uses the term in relation to transfeminity. Like the Audrey Wollen meme, Alexandre understands representations of the void and emptiness themselves as belonging to femmes, whom the patriarchy defines by lack and objectification. Furthermore, femmes also “own the void” because they experience the dynamics of gender in a unique way from cis women.
Wollen also holds that feminism need not be toxically positive in order to be valid. In an interview with Dazed, they state: “...our pain doesn’t need to be discarded in the name of empowerment. It can be used as a material, a weight, a wedge, to jam in machinery and change those [patriarchal] patterns.” In other words, metastability is cathartic because it acknowledges the gaps and cracks in society’s formation that people can fall through, but also suggests that there’s other possibilities (however uncertain) for the marginalized as well.
Ghost’s life is metastable in a similar sense. She is described by Orb, after it crashes into her chest and replaces her heart, as “the twitch of a dying bug’s leg.” Ghost is also a trans woman who is due for her next expensive dose of HRT, at the mercy of the hostile doctor at the private clinic in town and on the verge of unemployment and being unhoused by a classist landlady who assumes she is to blame for the hole in her rental’s roof. The only thing that is somewhat certain about Ghost’s life are the tenuous connections she makes with her community. That is if she can balance the extremes of housing an all-knowing entity that is hampered by sharing Ghost’s angst, Lovely Lady and Nasty Girl’s bickering, and the Nightmare’s dysphoric cruelty within her psyche.
Ghost’s companions aren’t wholly reliable either. All of them are dealing with a personal existential crisis of their own, often intertwined with the turbulent political climate or the fallout of the Great War. The game portrays companionship as a coping mechanism rather than a cure-all and situations suggesting there is a cure-all are suspect. A case in point is The Sinner, a companion who wishes to pull Ghost into their orbit and take advantage of or encourage her to help them find absolution from their guilt by joining a suicidal cult. In one part of The Sinner’s path, has her luring Ghost into her pity party over being complicit in the environmental destruction of her former home. While you can find some solace in each other’s company and shared kinks, The Sinner never truly gives up on the idea of becoming ‘purified’ alongside Ghost. All of the encounters with The Sinner revolve around helping her find the cult or obsessing over the symbolism of the latter’s fall from grace (in the church, in her flat, even in a civic archive). The Sinner’s chief loyalty is to the spiritual absolution she might find in oblivion.
Alexandre posits that strong interpersonal networks, especially networks between trans and other marginalized women, are what create lasting stability. Ghost is denied even this reprieve in some ways, society having broken down the various women she encounters in Anglia. There’s another discordant undertone employed throughout the game, however, which is one that can be boiled down to the already-tired sentiment of “I am cringe, but I am free.” This undertone is unsuccessful at emphasizing the more complex aspects of the game because it focuses on another kind of emptiness that’s incompatible with metastability. More on that shortly. But suffice to say, this issue of tone is one that undermines important themes of capitalistic dissolution, how this dissolution seeks to erode queer identity, and the revitalizing force of loving one’s community warts and all. This is likely because the game is at odds, tonally, from the renowned source text it’s inspired by.
LLRPG caused some friction when it was released on itch.io last year, billing itself as “a visual novel inspired by Disco Elysium”. Alongside Red Dead Redemption, Metal Gear Solid, Dark Souls, and The Last of Us series, to name just a few, Disco Elysium is a hotspot for the more toxic side of games fandom and its discourse. While the latter is considered more of a AA than the AAA series aforementioned, the game has become a phenomenon for narrative-driven games on the same scale. To claim that your game is even inspired by such a touchstone impels misguided analysis of design features and comparisons between narratives.
In this regard, I have a counter-intuitive but hopefully useful perspective for reflecting on LLRPG. Due to timing, access, and complicated feelings towards ZA/UM’s ongoing controversies—I have never had a chance to play Disco Elysium. The most I know about the gameplay (drawing from memory without cribbing from its description on games marketplaces) is that it’s riffing off noir detective and cosmic horror genres and that your choices count towards several different personas your protagonist contains within their psyche. I also know it has strong roots in communist politics. And although I could’ve attempted to play the game before engaging with LLRPG, I decided not to. I wanted to see if Das Kunstkollektiv’s visual novel could stand on its own and not have the potential stylistic millstone of Disco Elysium’s inspiration around its neck.
This might seem ill-advised, not to seek out and familiarize myself with this game’s source text, but I have an additional purpose. To refer to a term conceived of in a recent video essay by Tom van der Linden a.k.a. Like Stories of Old, I want to see if LLRPG is subject to “Storytelling Entropy”. The term explains how, with the Marvelization of media franchises (that of creating cinematic universes that heavily employ a certain snarky and self-aware tone), scriptwriters are often prone to making many meta-references that point to nowhere. The proliferation of such circular intertextuality I find shallow, and often functions as Evan Puschak (Nerdwriter) asserts, a weaponized technique used to produce instant emotional responses. Such emotional manipulation is what ultimately made me abandon most things akin to the Marvel universe decades ago. The theory behind Storytelling Entropy, of which weaponized intertextuality is an aspect of, helps distinguish between what metaphors in such franchises are thematically unifying or “Anti-Entropic” and those that exacerbate the hollowness of disordered yet highly marketable metaphors or story beats.
Storytelling entropy can happen within a single franchise or across several different franchises. We see this typified in Marvel’s Avengers canon, where scriptwriters recycle old in-jokes and rely on characters being self-aware of tropes and other trappings at the macro level of genre. The antithesis of such meta-references van der Linden offers is that of Star Wars’ lightsaber. The weapon, at least in the original trilogy, distills the Jedi Order and its beliefs into one prismatic signifier. At its worst, entropic references and their weaponized nostalgia reduce media to hollow marketing vessels, more capable of displaying what van der Linden calls corporate passion than it is capable of displaying a creator’s playful yet idiosyncratic drive. This phenomenon, van der Linden argues, is why a billion-dollar production like Rings of Power falls short of Peter Jackson’s original trilogy.
Storytelling Entropy is not exclusive to the film industry, as many games are seeking to be the “-likes” of the most iconic series in hopes of cannibalizing existing audiences. This concept is also related, emotionally, to Grace’s discussion of the importance of imbuing your overall narrative with sincerity and not reducing vulnerable moments with a steady stream of ironic punchlines and the like. As aforementioned, LLRPG has some great themes of conservatism and socialism, like how authority figures have carte blanche to denigrate and rigidly define (in the public archive, at least) individual’s identities, and how intimacy is about more than mere sexual expression. Intimacy can be platonic, familial (by both blood or spiritual relation), religious, or intellectual. When Ghost shares tea with The Weapon or appreciates the sublime beauty of a comet with Orb, intimacy resounds throughout the scene and coexists with Ghost’s tactless nature. To constantly lean on queer brainrot memes and internet slang, however, cheapens all the inherent nuance of the above.
What’s worse, by relying on many anachronistic and shallow references, the visual novel sells itself short for the sake of instant and trendy relatability amongst a specific demographic. Instead of allowing space for the creative take on trans femininity and the void to breathe, Digital Poppy’s self-aware humour often sucks the air out of the proverbial room. We live in an era where corporate passion takes precedence. Whether we’re talking about how generative AI is employed to replace human-made creativity, or how popular multimedia franchises are engineered to convert attention into an endless profit stream, a Marvelized self-aware tone is the last thing LLRPG needs. Such an irreverent tone risks atomizing this narrative into an entropic state that takes these stakes too lightly.
And to be quite clear, I like that this game is uncomfortable to play. LLRPG is not here to offer sanitized answers or to be anyone’s empathy simulator. No game should be striving to be that(nor is it possible to create a successful one). But that being said, LLRPG had an important balance to strike regarding tone, somewhere between Urban Dictionary snark and graphic memoir earnesty. Instead it struck out and presented itself, to me at least, as a narrative that feels allergic to sustained sincerity. Whenever I would try to focus on the present text of Ghost’s world and experience, I kept getting jettisoned out to (seemingly) meaningless references elsewhere and often for the sake of a snarky joke.
Although you play as a blank slate character who’s also not meant to be a one-to-one POV for the player, I believe that creators shouldn’t assume that the blanks will inevitably be filled in by your references to subcultural memes and other games’ systems. Not every player will have those references in their knowledge base. I count myself as one of them. There will always be too many household names to play in this industry than there is time to do so. And proliferating weaponized references won’t always equate to instant gratification even for the intended audience, leading to storytelling entropy leaching what meaning there is to be had.
This visual novel is not meant to be an easily accessible experience for a broad audience—in fact it's explicitly speaking to a specific subculture. This is likely the reason that Disco Elysium fans bristle at even the mention of this niche and unapologetically queer and kinky (not to mention furry) visual novel being inspired by it. And regarding the references to a specific queer subculture? Players should put in the work to learn what they can about the community and its subculture being portrayed in this narrative, in the same way that white readers of a novel centering a different perspective shouldn’t expect instant relatability or to be taught how to relate.
LLRPG was at its strongest in its final scenes, where its slow-burn existential dread hits just as the devs leave you on a note of bittersweet ambiguity. Things will continue on until they don’t–the only certainty any of us really have. I wish this game had foregone a lot of its jokes in favour of moments like the forest walk at the end or the penultimate day’s comet watching session. These moments capture that cathartic feeling of metastability Alexandre gets at, or the significance of being a Sad Girl at heart who persists in spite of a cruel society that wants to forcibly categorize their lives. I also wish that players would learn to resist their immediate reactions to ludic references, as it’s quite frankly unfair that players should expect a game “inspired” (the keyword here) by Disco Elysium to deliver a thoroughly Elysium-like experience.
Ultimately a tone of self-awareness is what erodes, ironically, the sincerity one does encounter throughout LLRPG. To be clear, I agree with Wollen and by extension Alexandre that authenticity can be a rigid trap for those seeking a more nuanced and intersectional gender theory and worldview. But in order to avoid employing a more commercial sense of hollowness, the kind that Storytelling Entropy and Weaponized Nostalgia are critiquing, Das Kunstkollektiv’s game would have benefitted from owning its melancholy entirely. The collective metastability of its cast and how their interactions create potential frissons of intimacy between them is, for me, the core of this unique visual novel. That core deserves a chance to exist in its own true vacuum.
