By Your Hands and the Art of Subversion
Edit (3/17/2023): A VN developer contacted me in private to ask to remove the name of his VN from this blog due to his disapproval of how I described it. I have edited out the name of his VN and I apologize for not asking for his approval first before publishing this blog.
Hello everyone! It's been commonplace for people to talk about "subversive narratives" and how their favorite shows subvert tropes often considered dated and tired. But what does that mean? Why are people obsessed with "subversive media"? The TV Tropes definition of a "subversion" is when the story sets up a well-known trope the audience would expect in that work's genre and then goes in a different direction, going against the audience's assumptions of what would happen. At least that's the intention. Subversion has been used in many different ways from Doki Doki Literature Club pretending to be a romance novel before revealing itself to being a horror VN to the tutorial in Undertale turning out to try to kill you. And it's been used as a storytelling tool since Shakespeare. Used effectively, subversion can be used to make a good story more enthralling and exciting. But subversion can also fall apart. It depends a lot on the context surrounding the time the work was released in, so if you don't know the context, it becomes meaningless. For example, it was shocking to see Samus Aran from the original Metroid turn out to be a sexy woman if you beat the game fast enough since female protagonists were a rare sight in 80s video games. But if the game was released today, the reaction wouldn't be nearly as strong because it wouldn't be unusual for a modern audience.
So where does By Your Hands come in? I touched on this in my "The Making of By Your Hands" but BYH was created as a response to other FVNs. It takes the audience's expectations of certain FVNs and their tropes and subverts them to (hopefully) create something unique. This game was created with the intention that the audience is well-versed with FVNs beforehand. Now unfortunately I can't tell you the full extent of how the game uses subversion because that would spoil things that aren't in the game. I'll just talk about the non-spoiler stuff. By Your Hands is specifically a subversion of the contemporary college-setting furry dating sim that's seen in VNs like Extracurricular Activities and After Class. It also takes some cues from Psychological Horror FVNs that could be read as a response to those tropes, although in a very subtle manner that won't be apparent until we reach the end of the game. It was envisioned so that the intended audience of the game (avid FVN readers) would be caught off guard by how the plot and characters played with the tropes that were made standard in other FVNs of its genre.
To go in-depth, you'd expect Tucker to be this dumb, himbo-y character who likes sports a lot based on other tiger characters from these types of FVNs. I mean the two tiger FVN characters I think of first are Torahiko from Morenatsu and Lin Hu from Nekojishi, both of them are these nice, muscular, kinda ditzy, childhood sweethearts to the MC. Then he starts to speak. And it becomes obvious that he's not your typical FVN tiger character. The protagonist doesn't have preferences or hobbies because he's always been in a controlled environment before he goes to college. The childhood friend confesses that he's in love with you as soon as he can and gets rejected if you aren't on his route. The athletic best friend is more submissive and doesn't go head-first into every situation. The hot teacher constantly reminds you of the boundaries that a teacher and student should maintain and he's also a History teacher instead of an English teacher. The dark, brooding love interest isn't a muscular, macho dude in a tank top but a goth twunk who loves drag. And the characters who are a tiger, wolf, and lion respectively do not have their own routes. In fact, the tiger dies at the game's inciting incident. And so on and so forth. The game uses subversion of common FVN tropes in order to make a setting that's wholly unique.
Now initially I was hesitant about making this game a "subversion" of these slice-of-life dating sims. The first is that I didn't want to create a "slice of life game for people who don't like slice of life" and have people think that I hate slice of life. Indeed, By Your Hands is mostly a Mystery but it's also slice of life as well. I didn't want to gain an audience who'd diss slice of life and not consider it a worthwhile genre. It's one reason why there's a group of people who really hate DDLC, because it uses the dating sim aspect as a framing device for the actual plot rather than as a way to do interesting things with the genre and that's not at all what I wanted to do. A more ideal work that subverts genre expectations would be Invincible. It subverts superhero tropes and archetypes but it never outright disrespects the genre and it manages to take the genre to places it wouldn't have if it stuck with all the genre conventions. So even though BYH does subvert and commentate on tropes common to furry slice of life dating sims, it doesn't say that they're stupid and you're an idiot for liking them. I love slice of life and I wouldn't mind seeing more of them. It just showcases what a slice-of-life FVN would be like if that story beats and characters went a little differently.
I also didn't want to call it a subversion because when people see a work call themselves a "subversive story", they think they don't know what they're talking about and that they're only using those words because it makes the work sound really cool. Marketing-wise, having your hook be "A subversion of the slice of life FVN" sounds really stupid, so I'm not doing that. However, I think calling BYH a "subversion" in devlogs, discord servers, and basically anything that's not trying to market the game would be fine. My audience knows I believe that's what BYH is and if they disagree, it's no big deal. And I didn't want to show a lack of understanding of the genre by subverting a trope…that's not common in any FVN, slice of life or not.
But why a subversion of this specific genre? What prompted this idea? Well, when you have a community of people who are making and reading a particular thing, tropes and archetypes start to form. Soon people in the community will get attached to using those same tropes and archetypes and that's when things start to stagnate. When this happens, you can do two things. You can create something completely new with the genre, but then you risk of alienating the existing audience, going back to the "slice of life for those who don't like slice of life" concept I mentioned and most people aren't awesome enough to achieve that. The other thing you can do is make a response to those tropes and the works that helped cement them in the form of a story. You can use those same cliches but spin them around to explore something new. That's how we got works like Watchmen, Neon Genesis Evangelion, South Park, and Nier: Automata (as well as the rest of the Drakenguard series). I'm not saying that By Your Hands is as good as those works in general. I’m not even saying that subversion is always good, as too much reliance on subversion can lead to people brushing it off as just another straightforward take of the genre it’s trying to subvert. Or the work coming across as trying too hard to commentate on something people didn’t want commentary on. But what I'm saying is that I feel we need FVNs that are responses to the conventions of the genre they're in. We're seeing responses to Echo with VNs coming out recently. With By Your Hands, the goal here is to show the flaws of a typical slice-of-life furry dating sim and see how the genre can do better in regard to character arcs and the setting. I'd like for the general FVN community to make better and more refreshing VNs. It would kinda suck if this scene stagnated to death. You can still enjoy your standard fare of FVNs but it's overall better if individual genres were able to expand their horizons. That's why By Your Hands and other VNs use subversion in their narrative, so they can push the limits of the genre and see its full potential.
I hope you enjoyed reading this. One last thing before I go. My goal for this year is to get By Your Hands into the top 50 rated VNs on itch.io. In order for me to reach that goal, I need a lot of people to rate BYH five stars for it to get there. If you think that this VN deserves a five-star rating, please rate the game over here. It means a lot if you do this. But that’s up to you to decide in the end.
Have a good day and see you later!