Difference Is Resonance

Lovely Lady RPG is drenched in archetypes and identity markers. Each of its cast of characters are either passing clichés—a fussy "Karen" landlady, a pervert chaser—or else defined by a singular mood or idea. The Sinner is preoccupied with her own complicity with imperial power. The Weapon is haunted by the ever-present possibility of nuclear war. The Raven is a war veteran still wandering in the accoutrements of army life. Even Ghost, our multifaceted protagonist, is composed, not just of aspects, but of full blown archetypal personalities. Orb, a cosmic meteor containing all knowledge, smashed into her and the book she was holding, a tacky Buzzfeed quiz in print. Lovely Lady (beautiful femme) and Nasty Girl (disgusting butch) have lodged themselves in Ghost's mind and provide running commentary. The fourth remaining voice is The Nightmare, dysphoria and self-hatred personified. These are two-dimensional characters, or at least ones in development, in process of becoming something new.

However, these are not wholesome people that opine in slogans for our collective enlightenment. Lovely Lady RPG has a sheer and exhilarating disgust for prim and proper queerness. Its cast all hold contradictory and sometimes vile beliefs. They want to fuck, bite, tear, grope, draw blood, and spit (or be spat on). There is a lot of smelling: cigarette smoke, oil slick, sweat, salt, moss. Nature smells. Animal smells. Despite, or maybe even because of, its furry cast, Lovely Lady RPG has a base level ambition to dig itself into the real texture of human lives.

But even when it strains toward complexity, it cannot leave its clichés behind. Phrases like "a gay little wave" or "a transexual voice" or, bizarrely, "the left collarbone, the most WLW of bones" dot the script. The intention is a winking nod, a gesture at a real subculture shared with the reader. Beyond being cringe or silly, these moments are imprecise and awkward. What does it mean to do a "gay little wave" and can you describe it without sounding homophobic? As for the subcultural element, Lovely Lady RPG takes place in a very different world from ours, an alternate 1920s England called Anglia. Geopolitics have just emerged from a world war, nuclear holocaust threatens (though Orb makes it clear it will never occur), and a volcano in the Soviet republics spews smoke that might damn the world. 

Yet, both rhetorically and culturally, Anglia's queer culture has much in common with our own. There are pride parades, private gender clinics, even all the same slurs. Which is not a problem in and of itself. There was plenty about Hirschfeld's gender clinic in Munich and the surrounding subculture that would resonate today, for example. But, for a game full of lavish elaborations on its world, there is little about how gender works materially. The corporate-sponsored, cop-patrolled pride parade that is celebrated across the world today is the long tail of arbitrary, cruel, and wondrous historical circumstance. Lovely Lady RPG plops that into a very different world and it can't help but feel out of place. The game is laced with these kinds of japes and idiosyncrasies which can be funny or piercing, but mostly land as glib or cheap. There is a constant gesturing off-screen. Whatever reality the game presents must be shadowed with the internet you accessed it on.

This comes out of what feels like a sincere desire to represent reality. For how shallow I can find Lovely Lady RPG's characters, they are definitely recognizable. People do say things like "gay little wave." But they didn't back then. This is a small idiosyncrasy, but it underlines the game's interest in relatability. However, the game’s constant, internet-poisoned tics makes its characters feel alien. Difference is the engine of resonance in sci-fi and fantasy, not an obstacle. Relating to something or someone is a recognition of the gap and the bridge. I share both with any other person.

Fittingly then, Lovely Lady RPG is at its most cutting in its intimacies. This is in no small part due to Mia Cain's expressive illustrations, wherein Lovely Lady RPG's animal characters get a vivid, human life. When The Pulp Writer, a disaffected communist novelist, describes her bout of rabies, the game briefly gains the resonance to which it aspires. She tells of a few days of animal fear, before the doctors busted her door down and gave her a shot. Her body is still frail and constantly in pain. She turns to smoking to put up with it. Though it cost her so much, she looks back on that time of illness with something like nostalgia. She says, "Sometimes I wish they'd never inoculated me. That I'd turned completely. That I'd ceased to be, and was reborn free from all the barbed wire tying me to this pitiful little body and this pitiful little life."

This is a classic science-fictional move, a speculative rabies which does not condemn its host to death after it changes thought processes and behavior. But it also has resonances beyond its bounds. The most obvious is the isolation of COVID, but it also reflects a deeper loneliness, a wish to get away from the suffering of sapience. It is simpler to fear as a creature might, rather than fear as a human does. Both Ghost and The Pulp Writer express this desire, but they approach it from different angles. The Pulp Writer is older, fraying, sick of life. Ghost is aching with the new voices in her head, Orb is even newly sapient. Perhaps it would be easier to be free from all this. It is haunting and specific, a real moment of connection and distance. But even here, the game cannot resist undercutting itself. The Pulp Writer describes this longing as "being scrungly," "going sickos," reducing a complex idea to a meme. Lovely Lady RPG almost never curbs this impulse. Every emotion must be made fun of, must be made cheap. Nothing can hang in the air.

This brings us to Ghost herself, who is perhaps the most pointed example of this. Her inner world consists of two jokes, a talking encyclopedia, and transphobia incarnate. Her amnesia is never explored and thereby she has no past. She is constructed in collage, disparate objects without relation. This stands in serious contrast to Lovely Lady RPG's obvious inspiration, Disco Elysium. Both games’ protagonists are made up of fragments of self, which also act as RPG-style skills. Both are burdened with a kind of super-sentience, something represented by Orb in Lovely Lady RPG, but which is never fully explained in the case of Disco’s protagonist, Harry Du Bois. 

But Lovely Lady RPG’s borrowing of this form is shallow. Unlike its inspiration, you cannot allocate points into Ghost’s different personalities or equip clothes to change your skills. This makes Lovely Lady RPG’s skill checks totally arbitrary rolls, over which the player has no explicit control. The game’s short runtime and plentiful paths encourage repeat playthroughs, but outside of the occasional meaningful dialogue choice and choosing what to do with Ghost’s limited time, there are few means within the player’s reach of defining their Ghost. This makes the remnants of Disco's design feel vestigial. The very systems of Disco Elysium encourage you to interpret Du Bois, to make something of him. Ghost remains out of reach, a set of signs and symbols without direct means of interpretation. To be fair, Disco is a much bigger game. Harry Du Bois, is a more complex character almost by sheer scale. However, he has a past and present to which he is subject and which the player can thoroughly interpret. Ghost is all present, and little of it feels truly ambiguous. She is thin. Flickers of depth cannot overcome a flat approach.

In the Lovely Lady RPG art book, writer Digital Poppy describes how the original intent of the game was to make something about archetypes. Lovely Lady and Nasty Girl would discover the ways their two dimensions limited them and begin to crack through to a deeper sense of self. In the version of the game we have, this shows up only in flickers, but the approach this idea engendered is felt everywhere. Without the subversion we are left only with the clichés. In its effort, Lovely Lady RPG ignores a fundamental truth: people can only resemble clichés, they cannot be them. You cannot create depth by working from the cliché in, you have to work from the reality out.

Lovely Lady RPG ends with a little walk, whatever friends she's made will accompany Ghost and, through it all, they make each other smile. The ending reflects the game's easygoing tenderness, as well as its sense of humor. Any of the characters Ghost spends significant time with are good people who have made serious mistakes, whom the world has harmed in deep ways. The walk is a moment of grace, of lightness, in an often cruel world. That joy and good humor are life-sustaining. However, the depth of that joy, even the punch of an inside joke, comes from the weight of a life. It is a burden that Lovely Lady RPG cannot bring itself to lift, though it has the muscles and knows how to shore up its knees. The strain is embarrassing or revealing so it dances around it instead. But the weight remains, waiting to be raised up.