Regardless of the criticisms that Edelman's antisocial thesis has received since it was first published (coincidently, less than a year after Saya no uta's release), 6 antisocial queer theory remains operative for resisting the notion that the endgame of queerness is its full assimilation into society's orthodoxy.

In 2004, Lee Edelman's No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive became widely discussed for its 'polemic against increasingly popular forms of lesbian and gay normativity such as marriage, parenting, and military service.' 4 For Edelman, the 'queer' as a class stands for 'ontological exclusion,' 5 as the supreme embodiment of antifuturity, negativity, and abjection. This current of thought was energized by Leo Bersani's Is the Rectum a Grave? in 1987 and Homos in 1995. One such approach is the antisocial queer theory, a discordant snag in the history of queer theorizations with roots in the 1970s work of the French philosopher Guy Hocquenghem. 1 In fact, it may be more relevant than ever in light of a burgeoning body of scholarship on what Bonnie Ruberg calls 'play beyond fun,' i.e., games fostering 'negative emotions that challenge how we imagine playing videogames can, does, and should feel.' 2 The rise and current momentum of Queer Game Studies as a disciplinary field provides a timely opportunity to reevaluate challenging works like Saya no uta that fall outside the struggle for better LGBT+ representation and identity politics sensu stricto, 3 but merit attention from alternative conceptual frameworks. More than fifteen years after its 2003 release by the Japanese game company Nitroplus, the cosmic body-horror visual novel Saya no uta ( The Song of Saya) remains a crucial example of queer antisociality in videogames.

Saya no uta visual novel download