Hi friends! Today is High School Lolita - my crushing love story's official launch and I wanted to share my thoughts with you about this new (and completed!) project of mine!

NaNoRenO… ONCE AGAIN????

It must be the fourth time I’m trying to write a devlog for this game. But how to summarise everything I’ve been through while developing this project which was supposed to be small in the first place?

This is the best advice I can give for anyone trying NaNoRenO for the first time: see small! Last year, I boasted about following this very good piece of advice for The Life I Lost: I made a kinetic novel with only one sprite I didn’t draw and straight-to-the-point programming, with a simple GUI (go play it, this is a good game, I’m proud of it!!!).

And since it worked so well last year, I did what was reasonable this time: make a bigger project with more assets, more endings, more complex GUI, and do the character art myself. How brilliant an idea!

So, as you can guess, this time, I really had to work extra-fast. The game was written in ten days, during which I prepared the assets, and coded in two weeks and a half. So, yeah… it’s been hard, but at last: it’s done!!! The game is done!!!! Hurray!!!!!

(*someone at the back yells “We don’t care!!!! Just talk about the game and stop boasting about having developed that much content in a month!!”*)

THIS WAS HARD TO MAKE, OKAY????

Fine… I suppose I’ll have to listen to my imaginary haters, after all (don’t worry, I’m fine, hahaha).

So, this game was my hardest to write up to this date. Not that my previous NaNoRenO project was an easy one: Jasper was a complicated character to tackle because his selfishness had to be relatable; and I had to challenge my perspective on the main topic of the game because I realised while writing it that I could never totally understand it (it might be vague, but I wouldn’t spoil you, haha).

After, I’ve started working (and am still working on!) The Stories of the Boys I Loved (which prologue you should definitely play if you like otomes AND gays… unless you’re homophobic or/and misogynistic???? *holds you hostage*) and it had its own difficulties: trying to make the characters “teenagers-like” while taking in consideration the “honne” and “tatemae” aspect of Japanese culture and keeping everything relatively “anime”. Also, this project was developed through years by mixing and correcting different instances of games, so… it’s had its own difficulty, but I have to admit that “people having problems in their daily life and the game treats it as drama” is quite my comfort zone.

But OH MY! High School Lolita was A NIGHTMARE to write, especially in ten days!!! Never has a game been harder for me. Even as I’m writing these Shakespearean lines, I’m SHAKING with anxiety!! I’m terrified that I conveyed my message poorly and that people think this game is a glamorisation of the student-teacher relationship trope!!! I swear not, I HATE THIS TROPE WITH ALL MY HEART (and even Kiss Him Not Me!, which has the worst take on sexual assaults I have ever seen in a shojo anime (i.e. “boys can be frightening, but we can always count on them” WHAT THE HECK IS THIS MORAL?????????) shows that these relationships aren’t healthy!!!!)

And now, I suppose you’re going to analyse the trope instead of talking about your game?

You got it right, although I reserve further analysis for my tumblr!!!

So, this trope is particular and, while my corpus analysis I did before the game jam, I realised it was generally tackled in three ways:

First: What problem?

If you ignore the problem, it stops existing, right? That way, you can depict a lovely relationship between a sixteen-year-old (sometimes younger) and their teacher! And as much as I love Card Captor Sakura… her parents’ relationship is HIGHLY problematic, Toya and Kaho’s relationship is too, and don’t even get me started on Rika and Yoshiyuki (COME ON, AN ENGAGEMENT RING, KILL ME!!!!!). So, obviously, this is to me one of the worst ways to tackle the issue: by just blantly ignoring it, as if it didn't exist and hiding behind excuses such as wanting to portray spiritual relationships, because, in the end, in reality, such situations must be identified as abuse and not as the expression of unworldly love so that teenagers (and children in Rika and Yoshiyuki's case) can protect themselves from grooming.

Second: The thrill of a secret romance… tasty!!!!!

If you’re a teacher wanting to date their student, you’d rather keep it secret, right? And now, bam: your game has the flavour of secretive and forbidden romance, and it is supposedly HOT (i’m ace don’t ask me). More seriously, I think that’s where the fantasy comes from: love incarnates itself outside our world or our laws, and even when it seems immoral… when it calls to us, we have to follow it, right? I’d answer a subtle and nuanced “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO” but hey, that’s where this treatment stems from I think. That’s how the relationship between Candy and Rayan is (extremely poorly) treated in My Candy Love: University Life. But at least, hey, they’re both adults this time around (??????). Regarding what I think of this trope: I mean, if both characters are all grown up and if the relationship is portrayed in a media made for adults (who can make a distinction between their fantasies and what's actually healthy for them), frankly, why not? Not my thing, but you do you. But when it comes to media directed at teenagers, or when the fantasised relationship is between an adult and a teenager (even when your medium is created for mature audiences), I have to disapprove.

Third: The teacher is evil.

The Kiss Him Not Me! treatment, and, in my opinion, the best of the three: the teacher is a seductive groomer whose only goal in life is having sex with underage students. Some might say it’s manichean and doesn’t reflect the complexity and the vices of these relationships in real life, to which I agree, but at least, the message it’s sending is clear: in those relationships, the adult is UP TO NO GOOD!!!!

(TW for the bonus: corrective rape)

Bonus: The student’s magical penis turns his lesbian teacher straight after he forced her into having sex with one of his female classmates.

Did I really have to go that far with my corpus study? No. Did this tickle my curiosity? Of course it did. But long story short: don’t do that. Let alone the rape and homophobic element, on which I could expand for hours because of how horrific it is, pretending the student is the one with power in this relationship is dangerous, and it’s innocenting the actual predators who feel comfortable to blame their teenage victims. So... as you guessed it, I can't approve that treatment either, but I guess it was obvious at this point lmao

And so, which of the three (four?) routes you took in the end?

…
None?

*is thrown tomatoes at*

WAIT, I HAVE AN EXPLANATION!!!!!

So, I saw these three ways to tackle the topic and I therefore wanted… to do something else. Something that sounded… right, fairly realistic (although the game doesn't aim as much at realism as The Life I Lost did last year), nuanced yet clear-enough in what it condemns.

Well, here is my point: in reality, groomers aren’t evil guys, rubbing their hands against each other, thinking of the best ways to groom children. Although such people exist, most of them are actually guys we’ve all met and known at some point: cheerful, shy, obstinate, melancholic, confident, sensitive… they come in all shapes and all forms, they aren’t monsters. And that was the point I wanted to make with this game: you don’t need to be a monster to do horrible things and not being a monster doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be held accountable or should be excused. And especially, not being a monster is not an excuse to bad actions since I do believe that a monster is not something you are, but something you become through your actions.

So, that’s why Matthieu is an 🔥 extremely 🔥 nuanced-character. To quote Jean Racine, in Phaedra’s preface (which is my favourite… anything of all time… please read that theatre work): “Indeed, Phadera is neither entirely guilty, nor entirely innocent: she is committed [...] in an illegitimate passion of which she was the first to abhor”. So, it’s not that Matthieu actually dreams of dating a teenager, and that his long-life dream is ephebophilia. But yet, by some sort of movement in him (rather than because of the gods who led Phaedra to fall in love with her step-son), he ends up dating one. He hates himself for that, and yet… he won’t stop. At this moment, he becomes guilty and a monster. To be honest, if I were to fully develop, Racine and I do not put the condemnation at the same moment: Racine is more severe than me, but let's keep that for a lengthy-tumblr post I'll certainly share in a devlog anyway.

Yet, you can notice that this game is from Chloé’s perspective because, plot twist: the game isn’t about Matthieu’s inner fight, it’s about Chloé engaging into a relationship with her literature teacher without realising the toxicity of it. She’s desperate for her teacher’s attention, especially considering he’s the only one who stood up for her when she was bullied: she feels like she owes him, that he’s a good person she needs to make happy. As a consequence, Chloé does things to keep dating Matthieu. Now, we may ask: is she guilty of nurturing this relationship? Well, answering yes is a mistake to me: it’s ignoring the tendency of victims to do everything they can to stay with their own tormentors in toxic relationships, because they are blinded by them, unable to see any future perspective without them (hence the presence of Lucie and Bastien in the game, but let’s keep that for the tumblr post once again, this devlog is already too long).

Well, here is the game’s answer: Chloé is by no means guilty, she is the teenager, she is influenced, and she is the victim.

Now, I know there can be a difference between what I intend to tell and what my game actually tells: I hope it matches, despite the ambiguity it is plunged in for a long time. But I also hope the very unsettling scenes (special thought to… the blood one, to avoid spoilers) manage to show Chloé’s discomfort in this relationship.

So, here it is for this devlog (but another one is arriving soon: a walkthrough to the two endings, although I don’t think they are that difficult to get)! I hope you guys enjoy the game, or find something valuable in it! And if you played it, don’t hesitate to give me your feedback, it’ll make my day! After all, as Matthieu would say:

And who’s better than him to give us life advice? <3<3<3