Butterfly Soup: Queer Romance, Geek Humour, and the Authentic Teen Experience

Did you know during metamorphosis, inside the chrysalis, the caterpillar turns into soup? […] If you want to be a butterfly, you have to be butterfly soup first.

The more I think about it, the more “butterfly soup” is the perfect analogy for the type of coming-of-age story I’m interested in: that messy in-between stage of life when the characters are figuring themselves out and becoming something new, though they’re not entirely sure what yet. It will be strange and at times awful, but they will come out the other side transformed by what they’ve been through, whether that’s an epic adventure or just the plain ol’ forging fires of high school.

Butterfly Soup is a game about growing up, a little snippet of four girls’ lives during this pivotal, clumsy chrysalis phase. It’s about falling in love, about figuring yourself out, about dealing with crappy parents, and also about baseball and anime and not being straight. It’s a sweet and moving little visual novel that speaks from the heart and tells a very real-feeling tale of teenaged existence, and provides a hearty mix of both comedy and drama all the while feeling like a smooth ride rather than an emotional rollercoaster.

The Great Carraway: Marvels of the ‘Pants’ Character

Story worlds are cool. Writers all over the world and throughout history have created an endless parade of fascinating and wondrous fictional realms that we as an audience adore to visit, and characters we love and love to hate. Wouldn’t it be the greatest epitome of awesome if we could really get into these places and meet them?

Well luckily, with a certain character type at the wheel, you can! Slip into their shell and walk around the story land as you please. It’s as easy as pulling on a pair of pants.

The blonde looks cool, but who’s that weedy kid in front of her?

I’m trying something new these days: I’ve started playing Fate/Stay Night, delving into an adventure of magic, mythology and mayhem, and touching down into the visual novel medium for the first time. A visual novel is, in plainest terms, a complex Choose Your Own Adventure story, with graphics, voiceovers, and a lot of pages—basically you click through the story and are occasionally presented with different options that transform you from reader into player. What will you do in this situation? Every decision could affect the overall outcome of the story. There are different routes you can venture down, making the medium very interesting in terms of its virtually unlimited storytelling capacities.

But before we digress into that territory, let me tell you something I discovered while playing. I’m not very far in since the game is enormous, and that’s not even counting the alternate routes and storylines, so I haven’t been faced with many options yet. If they have come up, they’ve been menial things that aren’t directly involved with the big magical war going on in the shadows the protagonist has not yet stumbled into. For example, the first one you get is in the morning when Our Hero, Shirou, wakes up: does he go and do his normal morning routine, or go and help his friend make breakfast?

Super simple stuff, and I picked the breakfast one (because I harbour a sneaking suspicion that the character involved was placed to fulfil some sort of adorable docile housewife fantasy and it makes me itch. Go and assist your lady friend, Shirou. Look after your ladies. No ladies no life). My reasoning was that I’d hate to be the lazy-ass in that scenario, and you ought to help your friends out, especially if they’re being lovely enough to cook your meals. But then I backtracked and went “Hang on. Was I making that decision as me, or was I making it as Shirou?”