Romancing the Night Away: Queering Animate Hierarchies in Hatoful Boyfriend and Tusks
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Published:April 2024
Miyoko Conley, 2024. "Romancing the Night Away: Queering Animate Hierarchies in Hatoful Boyfriend and Tusks", Made in Asia/America: Why Video Games Were Never (Really) about Us, Christopher B. Patterson, Tara Fickle
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Chapter 11 examines the queering of animate hierarchies in Hatoful Boyfriend (2013) and Tusks: The Orc Dating Sim (2017), two independent dating games with nonhuman love interests that deal with the intersection of nonhuman animals, Asian popular culture, and biopolitics. Through an analysis of their datable characters and mechanics, the author argues that the games illustrate how tightly woven race, nationality, sexuality, and animality are in determining which lives are considered more valuable. Specifically, they expand on notions of contamination and toxicity in relation to Asianness, particularly around the weaponization of so-called Asian diseases and imperial logics that view Asians as invading hordes. While Hatoful Boyfriend and Tusks highlight different ways Asianness traverses animate hierarchies, including to reinforce them, they ultimately destabilize them and take pleasure in reforming non-normative intimacies to resist imperial legacies and imagine future worlds.