Not one post into my new mahō shōjo blog and I’m already technically off-topic! Ah well.

This week I’ve been fascinated with watching playthroughs of an indie game simply titled “Yandere Simulator”, which, at a glance, might be a Dating Sim, in which you play a generic protagonist, tasked with choosing and romancing one of a number of love interests. It’s effectively a choose your own adventure game, and can demand other gameplay elements with the story, or simply be a Visual Novel.

But "Yandere Simulator" is a tad different. The word yandere roughly means 'a girl so in love, she'd kill for him'. In "Yandere Simulator" you play a teenage girl who must dispatch each and every one of her romantic rivals, by any means necessary, in order to have a chance with her beloved senpai.

There are a few things to note before analysing YanSim too hard, the first being that the game is still in its pre-Alpha infancy. The second fact is that YandereDev is American, not Japanese. So while YanSim emulates the look and feel of a slice-of-life anime, it is doing just that, emulating. YanSim is hardly the first story which subverts the sunny feel of the slice-of-life genre, but it is probably the first where just one American man is at the helm.

This is already a disconcerting fact from an objective standpoint, at least as far as panties are concerned. Yes, panties make up not one but TWO game mechanics. The first is panty customisation - choosing special underwear for Yandere-chan, to give unique stat boosts, the second is... well... Panty shots. Ah yes, everyone's favourite voyeuristic anime and manga trope. Let's get a good look up at them shimapan baby. 

These covert photos of fellow pupils are exchanged for favours from 'Info-chan', who... I don't know what she does with them, but she clearly profits by them, and these photos are not anonymous. YandereDev has explicitly stated that he does NOT consider this core gameplay mechanic to be at all sexual, after YouTube pulled a video demonstrating the Panty Shot mechanic for "nudity or sexual content". In the description of his video response he says "I think that panty shots are a silly, funny anime cliche. YouTube disagrees."

I think I disagree too, but just as well that these NPC's will probably be killed by Yandere-chan before this revenge porn starts to circulate. Silly anime cliche, sure, but when you snap an upskirt before shanking a girl, it goes from ambiguously funny to outright misogynist attack.

Effectively this is a narrative of shōjo on shōjo predation, where male attention is the prize, which is, well, a worry, but admittedly not all that remarkable in the grand scheme of comparable anime.

YandereDev has stated that the game is currently only 5% complete, given the fact that he is a freelance programmer on a day-to-day basis, and only time will tell if the progress of each update will bring more depth and fewer jailbait butts to this shōjo slasher. I fully intend to play every version of this game until it's final release, and hope to be able to support YandereDev via Patreon.