Thinking about Villain Love Interests in Dating Sims

[alias_sqbr]

I've been thinking recently about the narratives created when a romantic visual novel has a route for a villainous character, because in many ways "love interest" and "villain" fulfil opposing narrative roles and I find the solutions writers come up with to solve this contradiction interesting.

I am not just talking about love interests who do objectively bad things, but a very specific combination of factors:
1) The story contains distinct branches/paths, where each path is a happy romance between the game's protagonist and one of a number of love interests.
2) the plot of one or more of these paths has a villainous antagonist who is presented fairly unsympathetically by the narrative and needs to be overcome to achieve a happy ending.
3) There is a path where this villainous character is the love interest of that path.

And so taken together, we see multiple versions of the same story, where in at least one version the villain love interest is portrayed as a Villain Who Must Be Stopped, but another they are romantic hero who we are happy to see get together with the protagonist.

So! Here's all the examples I can think of and how they work. I'd be very curious to hear about others. I haven't played some of these in a while so my memory is unreliable. These are all games with female protagonists and all but one of the villain love interests is a man.

** Spoilers for: Magical Diary, Hakuoki, Hatoful Boyfriend, Seduce Me, Amnesia: Memories **

Magical Diary:
Damon: a Sexy Bad Boy Demon Everyone Warns You About. If you choose to date him anyway he is very charming right up until the point where he attempts to steal the protagonist's soul and it turns out to have all been a trick. At this point either the protagonist dies, she treats him as her Evil Ex Boyfriend, or she angrily tracks him down and he apologises and they manage to mostly work things out. He turns out to have a tragic backstory that means he had to steal someone's soul to live.

Hakuoki:
Sanan: A mad scientist vampire who is anything from a bit morally ambiguous to unrepentant serial killer on the other paths. He has a tragic backstory where he is being affected by the bloodlust of becoming a vampire, but is always at least partly in control of his own actions. To get onto his path the player has to consistently choose the "trust him and be emotionally supportive" choices, even though he is still sending off a bunch of red flags. There's an indication that having this emotional support helps him push back against his murderous vampire instincts. Halfway through he seems to utterly betray the protagonist, and she finally loses her faith in him, but then she decides she loves him anyway. Then it turns out it was all a trick to stop the real bad guys and he was a good person all along, even though this contradicts his characterisation in other paths.

Kazama: a human-hating demon who repeatedly tries to kidnap the protagonist to be his wife because she is a Rare Full Blooded Demon Woman, and also sadistically wounds and murders several sympathetic human characters on other paths. His mildly tragic backstory is that humans have historically mistreated demons and so he doesn't see them as people. On his path the protagonist pushes back against him constantly and initially doesn't like him. But they end up teaming up to defeat another worse villain, and despite saying a lot of arrogant things about how she will eventually marry him he's quite respectful and helpful in practice. After that villain is defeated he just tags along helping her try to catch up with her friends (who he had previously despised and tried to murder) and eventually admits they're actually worthwhile people. The protagonist slowly comes to connect with him during their adventures together, and so at the end when he's once again all "So we are getting married right?", while actually giving her space to reject him, she grumpily admits that fine, yes, they are.

Hatoful Boyfriend:
(Ok this stretches the definition of "romantic" a bit)
Shuu: A mad scientist serial killer who attempts to murder several other love interests, sometimes successfully. Getting onto his path requires the protagonist to consistently ignore all the obvious red flags and try to hang out with him. Eventually things escalate to the point where he kills her. It ends with her as a head in the jar and him saying "Do you love me?", with all the options being "yes".

Seduce Me:
Diana: She's a secondary villain, and I don't think defeating her is ever the primary arc. She turns out to have a tragic backstory for why she's opposed to the heroes. I can't remember exactly what happens but I think the protagonist ends up tagging along with her while she does morally ambiguous succubus things, and they slowly both realise the other has more good to them than they thought.

Amnesia: Memories
Ukyo: He only ambiguously fulfils the role of villain: On most paths he shows up and mysteriously murders the protagonist for unknown reasons, and I think some happy endings involve him dying and thus no longer being a threat. On his path you learn his tragic and somewhat sympathetic backstory that explains why he keeps murdering her.

Seven Kingdoms: The Princess Problem: This is still in production, and I've only played the early demo which stops just at the point where the protagonist can form the beginnings of a bond with the various villainous love interests but it's not clear how the overall narrative will play out. I'm very curious!

Diabolik Lovers: OK SO APPARENTLY I WAS WRONG ABOUT THIS GAME (see comments). But here's what I thought it was like: all the love interests are unrepentant serial killing vampires, and the line between "love interest behaviour" and "villain behaviour" is sufficiently thin that it's easy for them to act as antagonists on each other's paths. It's presumably easier to switch between "I hope he dies" and "I hope he and the protagonist live happily ever" when the happy endings involve so much of the "hero" murdering innocent people.

Examples from the comments: Love and Legends, Sweet Fuse, Nameless

So, some repeated tropes:

• Massive red flags early on signalling to player and protagonist that This Is A Bad Guy.
  
• Either the protagonist Believes In Them Despite Everything, or they are Feisty and Refuse To Be Pushed Around.
  
• The "good" love interests are still treated sympathetically, even though they generally don't like or trust the villain.
  
• (sometimes very dark) humour at the contrast between romantic lead tropes and villain tropes.
  
• The villain learns to be a better person through the protagonist's influence, generally emotional support and/or constructive criticism.
  
• A tragic backstory that forces the villain to behave this way, often combined with a somewhat selfish, defensive personality that makes them not want to admit they're a victim or have sympathy for the people they hurt.
  
• Even in the end they're at least a little morally ambiguous, but the protagonist accepts it because they make each other happy.
  
• Their motivation/behaviour is not as bad as it seems.
  
• There is an Even Worse Villain that makes this one not seem so bad and works as an antagonist for their path.
  

I have no big conclusion to work towards, I just found it interesting to think about :) I'd be curious to know if there are any love interests like this in games with male protagonists (Doki Doki Literature Club doesn't count because it only pretends to be a dating sim)

Also: I'm not really interested in discussing here why these sorts of love interests are found appealing. That topic has been done to death and is separate to the challenge of how to write them.

Comments

[ember_keelty]

Voltage/Lovestruck has done this more than once, though I predictably only have firsthand familiarity on how it functions with the one game (Love and Legends) where there's female love interests on both the hero and villain sides. And I'm way behind even on that one, because I really dislike Lovestruck's business model and spitefully insist on F2Ping my way through all the extra scenes.

Anyway, Helena! Believes in her in spite of everything, check. Narrative sympathy for the heroes, check. Dark humor, check. Moral improvement through emotional support, check. Tragic backstory and too proud to admit it, check and check. Even Worse Villain, BIG MULTIPLE CHECKS.

The red flags aren't a thing because you select your route before you start the story, so if you interact with her prior to playing her route, it will be on someone else's (most notably Altea's, where she's the primary antagonist for the first few acts). Also, since the routes are played separately and the extra content in each of them is paid for separately, her appearances are more designed to entice you to check out her route than warn you away from it. She even got a semi-redemption subplot in Altea's route, complete with shipteasing her with the protag, at around the time Voltage was getting ready to announce her own route, lol.

Her motivation and behavior is pretty much exactly what it seems to be in Altea's route, just with some extra tragic backstory rounding out the motivation.

As for continued moral ambiguity... well, we'll see, I guess!

[alias_sqbr]

Oh, interesting, thank you!

And yeah, I keep being tempted by Voltage games, even though they make my ancient phone crash, but the business model pushes it over into "too much effort". This sounds pretty appealing though :)

[caramarie]

I think Diabolik Lovers is a bit different -- the other LIs don't fill the villain role (at least in the first game routes I'm familiar with). They're more just rival characters, who might menace you occasionally and that's about it. And your LI will be doing *way* more menacing than that.

Also Subaru at least is a beautiful angsty flower and not at all an unrepentant serial killer ;-; He just does a lot of property damage...

The secret route in Sweet Fuse is the villain, but I never played enough to unlock it. I think Nameless might be the same? I did find it interesting in Nameless that if you get bad ends on other routes, a certain character comes across a lot worse than if you had only seen the good ends. And the bad endings are more revealing in that way.

[alias_sqbr]

Ah, ok! edits post And aw, I didn't know any of them weren't serial killers! One day I am going to play this game and it will all be your fault.

That's interesting! I found the bad endings of Amnesia a bit like that too.

[caramarie]

I am quite fond of Diabolik Lovers! Although, um, a lot of it is really just iddy smut, but with blood-drinking instead of sex. Or sometimes sex as well as blood-drinking, but the blood-drinking is explicit and the sex isn't ... anyway ...

I haven't played a lot of Amnesia, but what that and Nameless have taught me is that you should never trust a guy who makes you cups of tea. Only trust guys who make you make your own tea. It's a big red flag otherwise.

[alias_sqbr]

Yesterday a friend asked me for feedback on a dating sim WIP, and I said one of the seemingly nice characters pinged me as a secretly scary yandere which baffled my friend, and the only explanation I could give was that the character said she's into teaparties. TEA IS SCARY STUFF.

I sadly have a suspicion that Diabolik Lovers would cross the line for me from Fun Tropey Dubcon to Bad Triggery Dubcon, which is why I keep poking at it then backing off. How rapey is the sex? (blood drinking is fine, hooray for metaphors)

[caramarie]

Yeah, it's fairly rapey :-/ Even if the sex is ultimately consensual, it comes on the back of a whole lot of stockholm syndrome, so ...

[alias_sqbr]

nods sadly thank you!

[deborah_judge]

I like this analysis, I don't have anything to add but it makes a lot of sense.

[alias_sqbr]

Thank you!