Everything I love is somehow Gothic.
Have you ever noticed the Gothic themes in Otome games? An innocent maiden heroine with two options on her path of love and romance: she can either maintain her purity or be tempted into immoral decay. The characters around the heroine either defend her innocence or drag her down into a twisted morality of their own. This has been present in both Otome and Gothic literature for as long as they have both existed.
In most Otome games, there is a male character who is slightly more twisted than the others. His story is not a pure, healing romance, but a romance born of a crumbling moral environment. Caleb is this character in Love and Deepspace.
All the male characters in LADS have distinct archetypes: Xavier is the Hero, Zayne is the Caregiver, Rafayel is the Artist, and Sylus the Ruler. I would classify Caleb as the Lover, but in the Gothic sense. He's also considered the Yandere, a Japanese term referring to characters who start sweet but become more possessive and obsessive as time goes on.
If you know me, you know that Yandere characters are my favorite characters. I love a good negative character arc. (I also enjoy watching a character lose their dang mind. It's cathartic for some reason.) And Yanderes generally have a Gothic feel to them.
There is a lot of negative buzz around Caleb's new card, Imperial Thronesong, in which he and the MC are not only brother and sister by blood, but also greedy lovers. This has sent a lot of online comments into conspicuous moral outrage.
I find this outrage both unnecessary and boring. Two reasons. One, I believe people have made outrage their useless hobby in recent years, and it's pretty exhausting at this point. But two, the outrage proves a failure in symbolic literacy.
In classic Gothic literature, this twisted relational trope is common. In fact, good luck trying to find Gothic literature without some kind of twisted relationship trope. The settings are usually crumbling castles and estates, symbolizing the decayed morality of the environment the characters live in. What grows out of this rotting environment are warped relations, the characters pursuing pleasure and hedonism to avoid facing crushing immorality.
In Imperial Thronesong, Caleb and MC are royals born in a crumbling war environment, both of them having personalities of insatiable greed. It makes logical sense that in this corrupted wasteland with insatiable personalities, they eventually become possessive over each other in the most destructive and sinful sense.
This is not, however, an encouragement for immorality. Even though the player has agency, the story is not telling the player to do these actions in real life, any more than Grand Theft Auto is encouraging the player to steal cars and shoot pedestrians. Games are explorations of alternate realities, not moral manuals.
And if you notice the ending to Imperial Thronesong, Caleb and the MC are still unsatisfied. The bottomless pit of greed is still begging to be fed. Their relationship is feral and passionate, but always has a lingering sense of emptiness.
This is Gothic symbolism in pixelated form.
I think this story is absolutely fantastic for this reason. It's a Gothic tragedy wrapped up in sci-fi Otome. All of the symbolism is there, including the bittersweet and hollow resolution.
If you read this story as a Gothic piece, it's much more enjoyable and understandable. If you aren't familiar with the symbolism or tropes of Gothic literature or Otome, this type of storyline will frazzle you, most likely. If you can't get past the trope, Otome will be painful for you. Seriously. Like, I can't think of Otome games that don't have a disturbing relationship route. I don't recommend the genre to the morally outraged.
Remember that Otome and Gothic literature are genres that contain unhinged symbolic storytelling meant for story complexity. It's not there for moral encouragement. No one is telling you to fall in love with your brother, you weirdos. To take the story so literally is to miss out on its brilliance.
So pipe down on the faux outrage and go read some classic literature.
Preview of Caleb's card, Imperial Thronesong: