セミラミスの天秤 (The Scales of Semiramis): How to Lose Friends and Manipulate People [Repost]
cw: bullying, rape, and a whole load of misanthropy because that's what we all want in a bishoujo-ge
You Know It's a Memorable Game if You Ask Yourself How Did This Game Get Made
I've been thinking about セミラミスの天秤 (The Scales of Semiramis), a Caramel BOX title created by writer Takaya Aya and artist Norita. To be more specific, my thoughts are squarely focused on the people who bought this eroge without knowing what the game's about. There must've been a few who became its unwitting victims.
Caramel BOX and their staff were after all famous for the 処女はお姉さまに恋してる (Otome wa Boku ni Koishiteru) series. This not only spawned a franchise full of light novel spinoffs, anime adaptations, and drama CDs but also pioneered an entire genre where a guy crossdressed in order to attend an ojousama school. In an interview conducted by the venerable Mochizuki Himari, Takaya Aya recounted his love for the マリア様がみてる (Maria-sama ga Miteru) series -- a highly popular modern retelling of Class S yuri stories -- and thought about how he could turn that fantasy into an eroge for guys. He came up with this premise as his superior told him that the fate of the company depended on this selling well. Else, they're going to sign some bankruptcy papers.
It's a good thing that didn't happen.
In fact, the wild success of OtoBoku allowed Takaya Aya and the others to explore different genres and works. In 2006, for example, the company published 終末少女幻想アリスマチック (Shuumatsu Shoujo Gensou Alicematic) which transferred the visuals of Utena to a dansei-muke eroge with Lovecraftian themes. 木洩れ陽のノスタルジーカ (Komorebi no Nostalgica) came out in 2013 and that explored a science fiction future nostalgic for movies of the past. These titles, while not perfect, showcased his ability to research hard and fast while writing, directing, and planning visual novels. He's someone who one could rely on to write and direct something interesting, even if they don't pan out to be great critical success.
But The Scales of Semiramis is quite different. What looks to be another inconspicuous title by the OtoBoku duo is actually one of the most baffling works I've ever read. This isn't a chide on the work being bad; it's anything but. Instead, I personally found it difficult to fathom how it was financed by sponsors, advertised to the public, sold in stores, and -- perhaps, most incredible of all -- the title somehow didn't kill anyone's career. The game did garner some controversy, but it wasn't like big. At all. This game should've been Caramel BOX's Kakyuusei 2.
Like I mean, Semiramis begins with a girl blackmailing the protagonist by snapping a photo of her doing a blowjob on him and threatening to release it to the public if she's not allowed to live in his place for the time being.
Welcome to the Devil's Hand-woven Dungeon of Kindness
But let's backtrack a bit: the game starts with a voiced exposition by Anou Touko, both a heroine and original planner/creator (原案/原作) of the title, about Gottfried Leibniz's theory of pre-established harmony found in Monadology.
On the question of causality especially in the mind-body problem (i.e. ontological and epistemological questions that ask whether we can really surmise there is a causal connection/relationship between X and Y), Leibniz essentially argues the way the world works is akin to a conductor managing an orchestra: we may be playing our own instruments, but we are all guided harmoniously by the conductor's hand. Replace "we" with "monads (the simplest of mind-substances)" and "conductor" with "god" and this is the basic gist. What might appear as us exercising our agency to kick a ball, a pendulum swinging left and right, and different monads interacting with each other actually comes from God's own handiwork. God regulates everything. While Leibniz recognizes there's possibilities of randomness and free will in the world, he stresses that God's such a galaxy brain planner who has already thought far ahead what His subjects would do. Our actions from free will are sourced from God, the ultimate monad, and therefore: He must've come up with the best of all possible worlds, this version of 2022 where so many good things had already happened!
(If you glossed over the above passage and understood nothing, I sympathize. Philosophy is mendou and it's not like I'm a trained philosopher. Hopefully, I'll be able to explain how pre-established harmony and other concepts matter in the story later.)
After this incredible infodump with unique assets, we finally see our chad protag Hayami Reiji. He fell down the stairs while playing with his kouhai and started to hear voices in the head. Reiji goes back to school and becomes quite the popular subject because of his disability(?).
But the real beginning of the story (after you read about how the cast played Age of Empires) is when he finally meets Kamio Ami. She blackmails him by snapping a pic of her doing a blowjob on him in order to get a place to stay. Indeed, the entire title depends on how much you're interested and willing to put up with her, the red-haired heroine who could ruin the life of the protagonist Hayami Reiji with one single tap.
Ami grew up in a household replete with domestic violence and had learned a trick or two to divert violence away from her. As a reward, she's infatuated with what her mother had called her: the devil. But unfortunately for her, her parents had passed away in a strange accident and her uncle's gotten guardianship of her; he threatened to rape her and Ami, having no choice but to run away from this shitty situation, decided to seduce Reiji and lose her virginity to him. She would rather have her first time be with a random guy than her terrible uncle. That said, she felt she had to blackmail because she recognized that Reiji could've met with the authorities to get things sorted out. She wanted a safe place to plan her revenge out, not let the police fumble the case.
The reader gets dumped this information early on in the game, so they can have a very accurate first impression of the visual novel: it explores the inherent manipulation in everyday communication through tackling social issues that could not be solved with ideals and authorities. No one can live happily in this world without a little twist of manipulation. We readers, like Reiji, are getting sucked into the world of Ami.
Agreeing to continue Semiramis after this point is very much a Faustian contract with the devil.
What Would the Devil Do in This Situation?
Let's then explore what Ami's bizarro world actually entails: the game is split into chapters that act like a Social Issue of the Week. These social issues include class hierarchies, rape, blackmail, and bullying. What feels like an otherwise typical eroge high school setting is host to these real social issues that still afflict current-day Japan. There's two grand ideologies that try to make sense of these issues and figure out possible solutions: Law and Chaos.
These Shin Megami Tensei ideologies are represented by the two most important characters in the fortune-telling club (and Semiramis): Akibe Eru and Ami.
Eru is the daughter of a Christian pastor and she believes we should let society's well-crafted laws decide and judge the actions of sinners. Repentance and learning what constituted the harm are part of the healing process. Meanwhile, Ami has experienced the worsts of society and is extremely blackpilled by the world around her. She prefers underhanded and "realistic" means to get the job done.
Like the never-ending battle between Good and Evil in Zoroasterianism, these two characters stand at opposite ends when they try to debate about the ethical implications of taking one stance or another. They may share similar understandings on the injustice of a situation and even have the same goals, but their ideologies are so different that their approaches are antithetical of each other. A good chunk of the game thus involves them discussing differing interpretations of law, psychology, and so on.
A key concept in the game is willful negligence/misconduct, which gets its own explainer tooltip. When Ami manipulates people, she doesn't do it in an overt way. Rather, she prefers to influence people through more subliminal means. In a remarkable chapter where she tries to subvert the class hierarchy to bend to her, she notices how Reiji and his homies are playing Monster Hunter (yes, there's an entire chapter dedicated to this game and how to play it). She decides to use the game to get everyone to FOMO and actually talk about the game instead of whatever the class queen decides as the subject matter. This leads to the class queen that she's trying to manipulate to lose control over the class and be won over by Ami's charisma. While we the reader can see how Ami has intentionally manipulated the class into playing a game, it's very hard to prove that this is actually her fault. People actually picked the game up in their own accord and she was just being a salesperson; it's not like this would directly cause people to just pick up the game and lead to the results she wants. This makes her actions considerably difficult to "judge" and "punish". Is she even "responsible"? Eru can't find actual fault with her. All she can do is let it be. That's the kind of game Semiramis actually is.
Where There are Devils, I Slay Them; Where There are Saints, I Slay Them
This ideological battle between ideals later takes on some really yabai social issues. One of the endgame social issues involves handling a rape case where the survivor could have a more miserable life if this gets handled poorly. Ami sympathizes with the survivor and wants to take a more active case by revenging on the perpetrators while Eri puts society and law before the feelings of the survivor. This is quite the dilemma for the reader and Reiji to have and whatever Reiji decides on is based entirely on the choices he's made throughout the game.
The game has a morality meter that can swing either to Law or Chaos depending on the choices you make. Both Law and Chaos routes have their own specific heroines, with Eru being obviously in Law and Ami in Chaos for example. These choices in the beginning are small ("Does Reiji want to hang out with his friends or is he gonna be a lazy dude and sleep at the rooftop") but they are incremental and do make a difference on how his character develops. The Law and Chaos routes have two unique chapters to themselves and in those chapters, the endgame choices are actually decided immediately by the game -- what Reiji decides to do and agree on relies on the culmination of choices you've chosen for this current playthrough.
The morality meter isn't for show either. To reach Ami's and Eru's endings, you have to be very close to the border but you can't be at the extreme. Otherwise, your morality meter breaks to the extreme and you go straight to the legendary bad ends this game is known for. They're incredible because they take the logical extremes of what the ideologies of Law or Chaos stand for. The protagonist "breaks" because he adheres too closely to an ideology and Ami takes advantage of his narrow-minded beliefs to achieve her goals. These endings are unhinged and may be some of the best bad ends I've ever read. Japanese players seem to love the Law bad ending, but I'm a bigger fan of the Chaos bad ending because it features peak Ami manipulation. These endings are pretty extreme and seriously made me wonder how this game was produced and sold lol.
The ideal goal is to strike a balance between Law and Chaos however. It's only human to feel like we can't adhere too closely to one moral standard or the other, so we try to be an Enlightened Centrist of sorts. Touko who's credited as planning the game is the "neutral" heroine here and it's quite difficult to reach her ending without some epic walkthroughing. But once you read through her short route and every other route (a full completion, basically), you get treated to a dank true epilogue that cannot be reached again without a fresh install. Without spoiling too much, I can at least say the true epilogue feels like it comes from some Twilight Zone episode and I can almost hear the Rod Serling narration laugh at me for finishing the game. It's an intentionally manipulative note to end on and I think it's quite the perfect shitpost ending for a game like this.
We Live in the Worst Possible of Worlds
We thus return to the topics of pre-established harmony and the Zoroasterian battle between good and evil. As we live in a dog-eat-dog world, communication is inherently manipulative and we're always undercutting each other to attain our own goals, whether we side with law or chaos. This perpetual battle between good and evil is in our society. These disparate backstabs and alliances are what makes up the "harmonious balance" of the world.
So if Leibniz's premise is right, then he should've realized where he went wrong was placing a value-judgment on what this "harmonious balance" could've achieved in constructing the world: it can't be the best -- or for that matter, the worst -- of all worlds. It's just the world this pre-established harmony (or more accurately, the whims of the Creator) had decided to land on, i.e. the barest minimum of all continued existence. So, there may be possible divergences from the main path, but whoever designed The Scales of Semiramis had already set the choices up.
The reader is then left to clean up the mess that the harmonious balance of good and evil had created. Even neutrality seems prone to manipulation anyway. No matter how many paths we take and leave our old selves, we are just balancing the scales maintained by some cosmic force like fate or God.
Semiramis is therefore a very doomer title that examines the cracks inherent in the way we talk and approach things. It's not afraid of criticizing parents for treating their children as pets, how society neglects or even doubles down on the harm inflicted on sexual abuse survivors, or depicting the bystander effect in all its full glory. Empathy (and the lack of) can manifest in very different ways. Seen from afar, they are all tipping the scales to one extreme or the other. We are always manipulating in one way or another, even if we don't intend to. That's just how flawed and important the matter of communication is.
I don't expect people to pick up this title nor do I actually consider it good. The game has a lot of choices, which make skipping to the routes quite painful. The routes are also too short and anticlimactic for my tastes. However, the entire package is memorable -- it's a really provocative work that will teach you useful trivia about Class S and the early history of yuri, suddenly offer insights about how "realistic" characters in fiction are never at all representative of people in real life, and challenge readers of all morality types about what we should do regarding these social issues. Semiramis is one of the most exciting mid titles I've ever read that really claims that we live in the worst possible of worlds because we just suck that bad as humans and I kinda love it.
If you however found these thoughts on a cult title too extreme, then I shall recommend reading a review of Shuuen no Virche by my friend curry. That sounds like a fun otomege to read, which reminds me -- didn't I start this newsletter to talk about otomege? Why did I suddenly pivot to danseimuke eroge again? Ah, no matter. I understand myself as finely as economists do on the current inflation in the USA.