von Andrea Tallarita (Copyright)

How stupidly it all began, how senselessly, as if to prove that there is no sense to anything else, as if to tell me that everything else of that whole story was equally pointless, and in a way it was, after all who’s ever fallen in love with a computer character? And is it even possible to love an artificial image of something that does not exist? The female protagonist of a game, her aesthetics probably thought out with no other intention than to satisfy a few twelve-year olds’ need for a beautiful icon over which to masturbate in their bathrooms. And what a fool I was to think of myself as something different from all those twelve-year old kids, to think that I was in some way purer, or more noble, to think that I was something special. But what is love? What does it really mean, after all, this overly abused word?
And how did it all begin? Oh, that makes for a laugh. Here. Let me tell you.
With a game called Petals of Darkness, some kind of a mix between a survival horror and an adventure type. It even had a subtitle in Latin so that the kids could go “Oooooh, look, this is culture!” and claim that their pastimes were art. I didn’t buy it back then because it came out for a console and I didn’t own a console – nor did I give a toss about buying one, to be honest. So I let it slip. In the meantime, the game received a surprising amount of critical acclaim. Game of the century! – Best game ever made! – 98% on Gamesmania! and so on so forth, more or less the kind of stuff you get every month or two if you’re somewhat up to date with videogame journalism.
However, a little later, and as so often happens, they converted the game to PC. Out of curiosity more than anything else, and having waited a few months for the prices to go down, I purchased the game.
It was a pretty good thing, no one could deny that. The whole story went that there was one of those undergods that tend to lay asleep for thousands of years and only wake up when every chance for survival lie in the hand of one person alone (and, you know, it’s you!). The bloke in question is awoken by the particular disposition of stars that occurs at a certain time. His name is Deimos. So Deimos returns, he begins taking over the earth, blah blah blah, but (surprise surprise) it turns out that there’s one person who can save the day: Beatrix, the daughter of Deimos himself. The mother was a mortal woman, obviously very fascinating and very blind if she’s seduced a guy with scales and horns on him.
Beatrix’s very name was a reference to the Divine Comedy. There was a whole mythology they’d made up to give some background to the otherwise shabby plot. That, together with some amazingly well-written and well-directed cutscenes, as well as some beautiful settings, made for the magnificent atmosphere that pervaded the game and that made it, as it was, a very good piece of work.
The whole thing consisted in going down to the depths of hell and eating the heart of Deimos, passing in the meantime through seven hellish worlds where each represented one of Beatrix’s nightmares. Ok, not very original perhaps, but then my brutal summary really doesn’t do justice to a game so heavy, dark and vivid in almost every aspect of its atmosphere. Beatrix, for a start, was a remarkably well-achieved blend of the bad-ass bitch and the sad, sensitive, innocent girl. At times she was using a devil’s blood to paint her face, at others she was crying over the grave of her sister.
A fabulous character, all in all. I was hardly ten per cent through the game and already I found myself praising its virtues on the net. And yet even then, looking back on it, I see that I wasn’t praising the game. The game was nothing. It was Beatrix; that character had fascinated me beyond belief. I finished the whole game playing with an intensity seldom known before. I would rush through the shoot ‘em up areas just to get to the bosses, because I perfectly well knew that the prize was going to be another fantastic cutscene. Shoot this monster, torch this other one, behead the third one, all of it just to see her stand before Thulax Sovereign of the Despair Chamber and shout “wipe that grin off your face or you’ll have to wipe the blood off the bricks.”
There, that was it! Wipe that grin off your face or you’ll have to wipe the blood off the bricks! That was all I wanted from the game. That was all I desired at all. I didn’t care for the dark, gloomy corridors, I didn’t care for the 60.000 polygons graphics; the only thing that made me play that game was Beatrix.
And the girl was attractive. All fictional heroines are, but she happened to possess precisely that kind of beauty that appealed to me. There’s no way I could deny it, from the very first time I saw her I immediately thought “wow.” She had smooth, black hair combed backwards like Trinity’s in The Matrix, with huge green eyes and black lips. Her body, like that of all computer-generated heroines, was spectacular. Perfect, one could easily say, with that typically absurd coupling of anorexic limbs with breasts like soccer-balls, all strapped under a black cloak which half-allowed and half-denied vision of that ridiculously tight, black leather outfit she wore. But it wasn’t vulgar. Ok, that might sound a little hard to believe after my description, but if you just saw her. I swear she was a symphony.
By finishing the game you could earn a few more costumes the only purpose of which was, of course, to uncover a few more inches of polygonal legs, but that wasn’t the reward. No, the reward was seeing the final cutscene – oh, the dramatic intensity of it all! Beatrix confronting her father, Deimos, a twenty-foot tall monster of a devil ready to overtake all human souls and rip your lungs out in the process.
“Who are you?” asks the monster in a deep, rumbling voice that shakes the mountains, fire flaring from his eyes, black jaws drooling. “That dare wade knee-deep in hell and enter the lair where black reigns eternal?”
Beatrix’s cold-blood is heroic.
“Who wants to know?” she asks back, as if the Lord before her was just anyone, making you leap to your feet and cheer for her, making you laugh your heart out at that fuck-face Deimos who stands totally taken aback.
A brief conversation ensues, until the monster finds out that you’re his daughter.

“Ah, so you have returned to join me,” he says, and I couldn’t prevent myself from standing up like a little kid and shouting “fuck off” at the computer screen. And then a whole load of exchanges, Beatrix cries and laughs, she’s courageous and sensitive.
“So you have come to destroy me,” chuckles the monster.
“Yes,” she states, ice in her eyes.
“And you expect to survive, do you?”
“That really doesn’t matter.”
“Your sister and mother suffered, and you shall suffer more. I have been visiting you in your bloody dreams every night – as I have always done and now, eternally will.”
At this Beatrix looks up at him, and with all the delicate grief of a doleful heart, whispers:
“Why are you doing this to me?”
And on went the conversation, touching peaks of beauty rarely found in a videogame, and me there like an idiot, rooting for her like a child at a world cup final, until the conversation ended with Deimos hollering “Come and get it, bitch!,” and that’s when you regained control of her. At that point you had to defeat the final boss.
He was a nightmare. I can’t even remember how often I died. This was another strange thing – I hated dying. Death tends to be a normal fact in videogames, a parenthesis, a comma, a daily step in the journey, and yet here I was, doing my honest, human best to avoid dying as frequently as possible. Perhaps it was because I never personally identified with the character of the game – it wasn’t me going through the gates of hell, it was Beatrix. So I almost felt responsible for her, and seeing that game over cutscene with her crucified before Deimos’s face, tears of blood rolling down her cheeks… it made me feel guilty. I know it’s stupid, but I always ended up feeling guilty. And maybe even a little jealous, because let’s face it, like everything else in the game that cutscene was sexual in its allusions, in its movements, in Beatrix’s position, and there was a little nagging thought behind my mind whispering “And now what’s Deimos going to do with her?,” and yes, part of the discomfort that I felt when I died was that Deimos wasn’t me, that he was the one with Beatrix’s living body immobilised on a cross, not me. But of course I only came to admit that to myself a lot later. At the time, I didn’t have the slightest idea. I just thought it was compassion. And compassion is always a comfortable way out for anyone who gets possessive of other people’s lives.
Inevitably, I finally beat Deimos, and from there on it was just a matter of revisiting certain areas to find some kind of item that I might have missed or something – the game was full of them, fortunately. I immediately started the game one more time, striving to finish it all over again and see all the cutscenes again. All the while I was discussing on the Internet how great the game was and how fascinating a character Beatrix was and all the rest. I found the fan site of Petals of Darkness, registered and became an active member within the forums. Fortunately the game had been a great success, and there was a solid base of fans to ensure I didn’t feel alone. Most of them were thirteen year old idiots who talked about Beatrix’s tits, and the rest were way too mature to feel anything for a computer character.
Except for me. Me, that short, pimplish guy with the sweat in his hands and that one, single, overarching eyebrow on his forehead. Me, the lonely computer-freak whose free time in school was spent reading Spiderman and at uni going to nightclubs which I hated in the hope of finding someone drunk enough to get laid by me. I’ve never even kissed a girl on the lips, although when asked I’m always generously detailed in recounting the dozens of erotic adventures I had and the myriads of girls I say I’ve slept with. How pathetic is that? Not that anyone ever believes me, of course. But it’s my defence. By speaking about sex like an idiot, I don’t have to face any real discussions on the subject.
By the time I was getting through the third journey through hell, having finished the second one and having stuck a giant Beatrix poster in my room, I was almost growing aware of what I felt. I fought through levels which I knew by heart, it was boring, and yet every time I saw her in one of the cutscenes I would smile and wink an eye at her, or send her a kiss. I’d given up painting as soon as my GCSE-Level art was over, but I took it up again so that I could make my own posters and pictures of Beatrix. At first my paintings sucked, and I threw them all away, but with a little time and practice and a few of those Do-It-Yourself books on how to paint, I somewhat improved.
I liked to use Beatrix as my model – I’d paint her in classical kind of images, as one of the Greek goddesses or as an angel descending from the clouds, the sun gleaming behind her. I really liked to imagine her in those relaxed, abandoned poses that you always see painted women in. She was never naked of course – I wouldn’t dare do this to her. On the contrary, she was always an emblem of purity. I had even started writing fan-fiction stories for the site – I was one of the most active users there. The stories were all about glorifying the girl and presenting her as an incredibly noble and wonderful character. I wrote a story which was about her life before the events in the game, and one which occurred in-between the events. Both contained ample descriptions of her personality and of her physique, which I somehow managed to present as even more perfect than the original.
And yet I was in denial. In love with a computer character? In love with Beatrix? Of course not! It never even crossed my mind. It was just sexual attraction, right? I just thought she was very pretty, much in the same way you think a film-star is very pretty, or a pop-star or whatever, didn’t I?
But if that was true, why was it always so… different? Why had I never had sexual fantasies about Beatrix? Of course, I would fantasise about kissing her, hugging her and simply speaking with her, but I never went beyond that. I never tried to imagine her naked. The sole idea of sexual fantasies involving Beatrix gave me the creeps.

If it was simple sexual attraction, then why didn’t I ever masturbate about her? Of course, I had no qualms in imagining me and Anna Faris shagging in eighteenth century France, or working as a cook in Gwyneth Paltrow’s house and being asked to feed her the biggest sausage in the kitchen, indeed I was comfortably ready to choke my chicken for almost any attractive girl I knew – damn, even the teacher I’d had through primaries wasn’t spared – except for the one I found the most attractive of all, Beatrix.
Why?
With time, my fanfiction grew more and more centred on absurd love-stories that Beatrix might have had in some indefinite time that could have occurred. With less of the blood and the guts, other people on the site began to protest, but I didn’t really care. After a little, I began to write stories exclusively for my own reading – stories which were, again, relatively stupid love stories, their only interesting aspect being their protagonist. I went on every possible internet site and downloaded images and frames of her. Then I printed them and stuck them on my wall. It cost me a fortune to print them in colour. I began writing down her cutscene lines, so as to put down a “script” of what she said – that was the way I justified the fact that for the seventh time now I was playing through the same game.
The male protagonists of her love stories were always half-demons or handsome humans, all with exotic names and with muscles straight out of a cement-house. But it was me that I was writing about. Behind all those muscles, behind that fictional charisma, behind those models of men that were, aesthetically speaking, the male equivalent of Beatrix herself, behind all that was me. The post-modern Quasimodo. Silly, little and pathetic, picturing experiences that he would never live. And so it was that she took me by the hand and brought me flying above the clouds to see the constellations, so it was that we sat together and threw pebbles inside a stream, and we held hands on the back of a dragon and plucked flowers growing on other worlds; we sat together and told each other about our fears, we comforted each other; we had conversations with the dolphins, we sang love songs inside Cathedrals, and we kissed under a rainbow. The dialogues between my characters and her became dialogues between me and her, outlets of my daily frustration that I self-answered impersonating her myself.
I would fight the last level of the game over and over again, and then reach the final cutscene and listen to her speak. And when Deimos was going to say his lines, when he was going to say “So you have come to destroy me,” I would send the volume counter to zero and myself ask the screen “You know I love you, don’t you?” Then I’d send the volume counter up again and she’d say “Yes.” And I sent it down again when Deimos was going to say “And you expect to survive,” and I said “I’m afraid I don’t deserve you. I’m terribly ugly.” And I would let her speak, and she would say “That really doesn’t matter.” And finally I would tell her how much I loved her and how much I’d have loved to be with her, but I’d also tell her that I was too ugly and too stupid and too base for her, and that she deserved someone better, someone that could truly make her happy, and that for this reason I would leave and disappear. And her face crumpled in delicate grief – oh, how beautiful she was when she cried! – and she would say “Why are you doing this to me?”
I was forced to face my feelings, I think, the day I wrote Beatrix a love letter. I had managed to deny myself all I felt until then, but that time I really overdid it. I don’t know what was going through my head. It just happened. I was sitting at the computer thinking “What would I write if I had to declare her my love?” And I started writing, I wrote Darling; there are no words that I could use, and then I went on and on and wrote three pages one after the other. And when I stopped and re-read everything that I had written, when I saw myself begging the skies for death for having placed before me a love so unattainable, when I compared her cheeks with spring and her eyes with winter, when I listened to my very own words – at that point, I could not lie myself anymore. I loved her. I was in love with her, and she was a computer character.
It is an arbitrary thing, love. I suppose the reason for which I never wanted to accept it myself was that it was shameful. And yet why? Because I was meant to get a real girl? But why should I have? What was there of good in those self-consciously attractive women, made of vulgar flesh, speckled with imperfections and wasting what little youth they had in hiding them, when self-denial is the greatest imperfection of them all? Yes, what good was there in these girls, that looked down upon me as inconsiderable? Why was it that if my gaze crossed an attractive girl’s in the metro, her eyes would turn to scorn? And I’m meant to drool after one of those girls, when Beatrix, by not existing, never asked anything of me and always respected me for what I was.
Why is there this emphasis, in people, to follow only that which pertains to the so-called real world, this gray and meaningless place full of indifferent people? What is there in this monotonous passing of day after day, this reaching of a high point in one’s twenties and then the slow, inevitable decay of the mind and of the body, that seems so worthy of merit? And why glorify it?
And love, is it not about perfection? Do we love people or what we want to see in people? Is my love for a perfect woman just another form of loving what we find beautiful, the only difference being that Beatrix was incapable of interacting with me, and thus incapable of insulting me, humiliating me, treading on me like every other girl had done? Who, of those that claim to love, can claim to love a human being purely and solely for what that person is like inside – for that person’s personality, the thoughts, and for that part which is as real as all that’s good, the faults? Do we love the stupidity, the vulgarity, the ignorance, the arrogance, the selfishness that are part of all of us, or do we simply try to ignore them? And can anyone present me a woman, or a man, that is never vain, never arrogant, never selfish, fickle, or whatever else it takes to bring one from the pedestal of divinity? No, we love not people. We love beauty, and that alone, and in loving beauty, we love ourselves – we love those things in the universe which we see as beautiful, and nothing more. People – they’re strangers.Beatrix was, the more I think about it, just my view of perfection. She was intelligent, attractive, honest, and brave. Ok, so she wasn’t real, but so what? Does that make my feelings less intense? How do you think I felt about not being able to interact with her? About speaking with her and writing to her without answer, knowing that every single thing I said was going to be absolutely wasted and that in no way she was ever going to hear it? As if I never wept.
I tried to speak about all this with a guy I knew through msn. He thought I was pulling his leg. I couldn’t convince him otherwise, and after a little frustrating talk, decided to leave it at that. (I can’t blame him, I guess – the very fact that I’d speak about my problems with a guy I knew through msn instead of someone real would seem unlikely to the most).
Ah, yes, and in the meantime there was sexuality. Because in all of this, at a certain point, I had begun masturbating about Beatrix, too. At first it was simply my fantasies; they shifted from mere kissing to something a little bit more “osée” concerning her breasts. Gradually, I began imagining her with less and less clothes on. Then, one night, I was happily masturbating thinking about whichever girl it was, when I visualised Beatrix and all of a sudden, it was her that I was humping. I don’t know why. It just happened. At first I could sort of justify myself by saying that when I thought about her, I never thought about oral or anal sex, but that too didn’t last, as five days later I was thinking about her dressed as a cavewoman and blowing me on the beach. What I’d originally considered disgusting to even think about had suddenly turned pleasant. So there, hasta la vista to all the illusions about morality, dignity or purity – in the end, she’d become to me no different than every other girl: An object of sexual desire.
I quickly developed a sense of guilt. Which was ridiculous, of course. How the hell do you develop a sense of guilt for someone who doesn’t exist? How much sense does it make? And why on earth was I feeling guilty? Since when had I deluded myself about being some pure, self-righteous, noble guy? I was a perverted little creep bursting with ugly sexual fantasies – I had always been one – and I knew it. And yet there I was, feeling sorry for myself because suddenly I was masturbating about the computer character I thought I loved. A computer character which had been designed precisely to possess that kind of impossible, unattainable beauty which stimulates lust, not love.
By now the solitude of my relationship was beginning to get at me. I wanted to speak about this with someone, to scream my whole story to the world, but how the hell do you do it? Bob, sit down. I have a story to tell you, and I need some advice. See, I’ve just fallen in love with a character from this computer game, and I… they’d be laughing their heads off in the space of a minute, even if they were your friends – and given the amount of friends that I had, it sure didn’t make things easier.
I was so desperately in need of an excuse to talk about her – to have someone, anyone speak with me and tell me something, that I’m not an idiot perhaps, maybe even console me – that I opened a topic on a forum in Game-Zone.com, in which I asked advice on what to do when you’re in love with a girl that you can’t reach. The first to answer was a Thai guy, some Silver_Dragon or other (people in the net have strange nicks – mine, for example, was Jonesy_the_Cat). His advice was to try and make friends with the girl. Ooohhh, thank you Silver_Dragon, thank you, what wonderful advice you give! Of course when I say “a girl that you can’t reach” I really mean “a girl a couple of blocks down!” Of course!
Then there were other idiots, all with dumbfuck advice. And then there was Mystic_Lemons, a guy who must have been a psychologist or other, with an absolutely terrifying intelligence, God knows what he was doing on a videogame forum amidst a bunch of kids like the rest of us were, sending his message with the self-assured voice of an unreachably confident son of a bitch: “Not exactly, Jonesy_the_Cat, you’re obviously feeling guilty about your desire for some reason…” and on, and on, and on. All useless.
Even though he was right. There were people who fucked with pigs out there. There were people who needed to see women eating shit to get aroused. Why did I, of all people, have to feel guilty? And what for? Who was I doing any harm to?
A little later, while I was exploring a site of Japanese pornography, I fell on Petals of Darkness Hentai. That is, pornographic comics with characters from Petals of Darkness, drawn in that Japanese style with big eyes and V-shaped faces.
I blushed immediately. The first comic involved Beatrix being captured and raped by Deimos together with three other demon bosses. The second one was about Beatrix being put under a spell by Deimos and forced to reach a, uh, super-orgasm-energy-portal-something with a giant tentacled monster. The next ones were even worse.
They were disgusting, as simple as that. I felt revolted. The idea that they could use my angel for such disgusting exploits was enough to make me sick.
And yet little more than a week later, to my dismay, I found myself going back to the site again. And reading through those comics again. And still telling myself how disgusting it was and how shameful it was and how sacrilegious it was, but in the meantime, distinctly feeling myself aroused.
Within other two weeks, I became a regular reader of Petals of Darkness Hentai. I could hardly masturbate without them. So not only was I masturbating about Beatrix, I was doing so before comics which were by all standards revolting. I, that had painted her as an angel with the sun behind her head, I, that had written about us kissing under the rainbow – that had confessed to her my fears and comforted her through hers. Where was I now? There, wanking like an animal in front of a computer screen. By then, there was just no getting round it. I had forced myself to admit that I was in love with a computer character. I had been forced to admit that even when in love, I was incapable of respecting the subject of my affection as something more than a sexual object. And I had been forced to admit that there was no limit to desire – that no matter how deep my beliefs in morality, love, or integrity, that no matter how much guilt or self-sacrifice or suffering I went through, I was always going to be bent, I was always going to give in, my desire and my nature would always come first. And my nature had proved itself to be revolting.
It was not my love for Beatrix in itself, that was the problem. And it was not the impossibility of having her. No, the problem was that Beatrix was forcing me to face who I was. She had taken me as a person and proved to me that I was not pure, I was not moral, I was not good in any way. I was myself and I had to face it, I had to face the extent of my imperfection, and I was no better than any other human being by virtue of being a human being. I was forced to face it, and I’m still forced to face it every time I see my stupid and ugly face in the mirror. Being a dirty, small, pathetic guy hadn’t been so bad until someone told me that I was one.
I did not realise all of this immediately, of course. For a while I simply tried to resist masturbation and pornography through will-power, much like I had tried to resist the notion of being in love with a computer character. But I could not. Inevitably, despite all the promises and the good intentions, at the end of the day I found myself sitting before a computer screen and going at it – going at it and feeling no kind of pleasure whatsoever, because the entire experience was bursting with guilt and self-disgust. It is paradoxical, but I couldn’t resist doing it and I couldn’t do it without feeling miserable.
And then I thought of myself walking out of the front-door every day, into the gray streets of my wasted life, towards my stupid little job that would never lead me anywhere, I thought of the scream of my brain resonating inside my skull, I thought of my chest brimming with angst, I thought of myself opening the gate of my garden and walking out, the grass green and the flowers violently red, but everything, everything gray. I thought about pain and misery and suffering. And I finally understood what Beatrix was doing to me. I watched her face in the posters, smiling so sweetly you’d think she was made of sugar, smiling as if she were trying to tell me that she loved me. I couldn’t keep living like that.
So I decided to kill her.
It was a decision which I took one night, in bed, as I stared at the ceiling. I had to kill her. It was the only way out. It was either me or her. I meant to do it the next day, but at first I couldn’t. I just didn’t have the strength. Then, the day after that, I went through all the material I had for the last time, I masturbated three times in a row, and finally set off to it.
I tore all the posters from the wall. All the pictures, all the paintings, all the sketches I had done of her were collected in a heap and I burnt them all. I searched my house thoroughly for any written material or any object that might have concerned her. I found a surprising amount of written pieces, some poems, as well as various toys and action figures. I threw them all in the garbage bin outside, and the written pieces I burnt.
Then I turned to the computer. I threw the game – CD, case and all – in the bin together with the toys, and disinstalled it from my computer. My mind was blank throughout the whole process. I opened a huge amount of desktop folders, and found all the fanfiction and letters I had written. I re-read them all one last time before sending them to the waste-basket. I opened them, and my eyes burning, my lips mouthing the words, I re-read each and every single one of them.
And so it was that once again she took me by the hand and brought me flying above the clouds to see the constellations, so it was that we sat together and threw pebbles inside a stream, that we held hands on the back of a dragon and plucked flowers growing on other worlds; we sat together and told each other about our fears, we comforted each other; we had conversations with the dolphins, we sang love songs in Cathedrals, and we kissed under a rainbow.
The fanfiction took me ages. After I finished, I immediately pressed on ‘empty wastebasket’ to make sure I couldn’t change idea. Next folder. This one contained a recording of every single sentence that Beatrix had uttered during the game. I listened to them all, one after the other, then threw them in the wastebasket. One of them was said in a tone of delicate, doleful grief: “Why are you doing this to me?” And for a minute I could not speak, I could not think, and I just sat there, looking into the light of the screen.
I threw it away and passed on. There were all the pictures I had saved from the net, all the screensavers. Then all of my love letters. All of the biographical information on her, and all of the work done in paint. I threw it all away.
By nightfall I had finished. After hours of work, I had finally finished. No more cutscenes. No more Petals of Darkness. No more Beatrix.
Never more.
I stood up and the room seemed incredibly empty. The walls were white all around me. The computer was empty in every sense, deprived of all its heaviest files.
It was dinner time and I hadn’t eaten all day, so I went into the kitchen and made myself some eggs. I spilt the salt and one of the eggs was a little burnt at the edges. I sat at my table and ate them in silence. Then I looked at the chair before me, empty, and I noticed that the room’s lamp needed some fixing. For some reason I wasn’t hungry anymore, so I went back into the kitchen and emptied my plate into the bin.
I fell on my knees, and quite stupidly, I wept.