Sunday 20 September 2009

Aoi Shiro

Translation project for a shoujo-ai game completed! (That being, girl/girl romance, but not explicit.)

This is a translation patch for a commercial game which I don't yet own.

I have never played a full length purely shoujo-ai game and am interested to see how they handle the issue. Within anime, Marimite places the characters in an all-female religious school so that their only close bonds are to each other. At the same time, men clearly exist in the world, some angst relates to the knowledge that some of the characters WILL graduate and have to marry men, and most of the relationships aren't exactly lesbians, just Very Close Friends. The few that really are gay have their own special angst on top about whether or not it's wrong, even if they never get further than kissing.

Strawberry Panic takes it a bit further and never MENTIONS the existence of men, or any idea that the developing girl/girl relationships might be taboo. It's a Gay Universe, everyone is at least potentially that way and can be safely approached. (And the couples do clearly get up to SEX, not just angsty kissing)

I'm sure that somewhere there exists a series where everyone involved is already explicitly gay within a 'normal' world, but it's slightly hard to figure out why a group would only contain lesbians unless it were, say, a GLBT club (or a camp trying to 'cure' them!).

Knowing nothing about the game I vaguely expect them to lean more in the direction of Strawberry Panic, and simply say *nothing* about why all these girls are receptive to your advances.

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