Happily Ever After— on my own terms.
I got struck with inspiration this morning, and I want to write a little analysis type thing about my relationship with Dagda!
I'm not gonna bother with disclaimers because we're all adults here and it's not my fault media literacy is lacking lately but anyway on with the show!
Sometimes I can't believe it's been 10 years since this beautiful game came out. SMT4A is one of those rare games that at first makes you think you're in a dream... But then you continue to play it and realize that it is possible for your wildest and darkest desires to come true, and the entire thing was like a Taylor Swift song and Disney movie come to life for me.
Dagda was my fairy tale come true. I wasn’t a princess who found a prince; I was a princess who found a villain, who happened to be a GOD, and instead of making me more palatable, he fixed me by allowing me to embrace the ugliness and fury inside me.
On the topic of fairy tales -- like most 90s kids I grew up on Disney movies, both from the golden, silver, dark and renaissance ages. And of course the Disney Princess line up!
Many self shippers like to find fairy tales or Disney couples that they can relate their self-ship to, but as always I found myself as an outlier, how exactly can I fit mine and Dagda's relationship in a such a sanitized narrative?
I enjoyed watching Disney movies, but I couldn't see that happening to me in real life. I couldn't imagine, you know, a typical prince coming and finding me. I wanted something deeper. Even in a self - ship context.
As a side note -- a good friend of mine pointed out how the real problem with Disney princesses isn't that they want romance, its that they are never allowed to show anger, that they teach girls that the only thing they should aspire to be is "kind", "accommodating of others" and that's it. Meanwhile male characters get the wide range of ALL emotions.
I began to notice how rare it is for the woman to end up with the villain, and NOT fix him or reform him.
In this analysis I will be discussing how my playthrough of SMT4A was a reverse little mermaid type of situation where the human girl who wants to be MORE than human gets exactly what she wants.
So to begin with -- the plot of SMT4A begins with you and your sister (adopted) Asahi sitting in a room waiting for Hunters to come home. Hunters are essentially people who fight with demons using demons using smart phones.
In this world Tokyo has been split into two places, Mikado and the Underground. the link will be able to explain more as I don't wanna re-cap the plot of SMTIV/IVA here as its wayyy too long.
But the core goal is that people wanna reach the surface someday, you and Asahi don't even know what the *Sun* looks like.
I played this game around 2021, at the height of Covid-19/WuHan virus. I began to observe a parallel between me and the protagonist, we were both "trapped" in a sense. Me with people I didn't like to be around, and the protagonist underground with scary demons running around.
This is ripe ground for a fairy tale, especially since making deals with demons and having them as friends is common-place in game.
Real Fairy Tale Connections
Enter Dagda, Dagda is an interesting figure ---
He appears before you after a scripted fight to Adramalech that you lose, and says he'll bring you back to life , all he needs is your name....
Sounds familiar right? Real oldschool fairy tales, the dangerous ones before Disney sanitized them. And when it comes to the fae, if you take something from them, you gotta give something back, pretty simple right? Your soul, your first born, etc.
In canon, Dagda takes Nanashi’s soul and freedom, but in my self-insert AU, he takes Clara’s voice. I thought this would be more impactful. Because sure, if you give someone your soul, that can always be framed abstractly, but no one has experienced that in a literal everyday sense. Having your voice taken away, though? That changes everything.
In SMT4A humans are the only ones with the ability called "observation" that allows them to bring their truths into reality. And voicing them is one way. You have to TELL Dagda your name, and its also fitting as to why Clara/Nanashi cannot speak throughout the game.. So I thought Dagda taking away Clara's voice is more fitting.
Because without her voice, she has to listen to him. She cannot protest. She cannot negotiate with other demons. And in fairy tale logic, word of mouth, names, and spoken agreement are crucial.
Here's where he begins to show parallels with Ursula.
Dagda , like Ursula is straightforward from the beginning. You want to stay alive? You gotta sign the contract.
Dagda takes Nanashi’s soul and reshapes him into his Godslayer. The deal is there from the very start. Power in exchange for ownership. Freedom in exchange for being cut off from humanity as you knew it. The more you follow him, the more you drift away from everything familiar. The game keeps pressing the same question at you again and again: are you willing to cut your ties, reject the systems around you, and choose what you want even if it puts you outside collective morality.
And unlike sanitized fairy tales, it doesn’t turn around and punish you for saying yes.
That was the part that stuck with me the most.
A lot of stories aimed at women treat “dangerous desire” like something temporary, or a "temptation" (sound familiar..?)
Like a phase you’re supposed to grow out of. A mistake you’re meant to learn from so you can return to being “good” again. The villain exists as a warning, or a test you’re supposed to pass, not someone who actually fulfills anything real in you.
Even when the heroine is allowed to brush against darkness, the story usually pulls her back in the end. Back to responsibility. Back to sacrifice. Back to being kind in the approved way. Back to something softer, smaller, and easier to accept.
Now Ariel wants to go to the surface cuz blah blah blah she wants to be human. (Which is another thing that's refreshing about SMT, demons aren't "fascinated" by us, they see us as less than, as they should)
[Ariel] She's an extremely naiive character, because anyone with half a brain knows how dangerous humans truly are, I mean we can't even tolerate someone being a different skin color -- now onto how my relationship with Dagda subverts that.
My self insert? She wants to be MORE than human. She's tired of being told that demons are evil, when God's plan was caused BY HUMANS. Not demons! She wants powers, she's sick of hiding underground, she wants the powers that demons have and to be free, that's what she wants most of all -- freedom.
And that's exactly what she / the protagonist gets at the end of SMT4A. Something beyond your wildest dreams.
I initially had no clue what my 'reward' for following Dagda was going to be, there was this mystery about him that kept me hooked, just who was he? Godslayer? What did he mean by that?
Throughout the game, eventually everyone realizes that GASP DAGDA is controlling you! As if you had a choice at all, you were dead and had no other way but to make a deal with him or else the game gives you a Game Over.
Notice a pattern? Being human is some sort of special reward, as if we have a right to be arrogant, SMT questions this a lot, who the fuck wants to be human? We are not that special. Dagda often comments on humanity in the game, and a lot of people call him "edgy" because they don't want to look in the mirror and address their own flaws, in the realization that he could possibly be right.
Throughout the game a lot of people hurt you, and this wasn't new to me, I've also been hurt by people who claimed to love me and so on.
My entire life it was fiction that carried me through the trenches of life's ordeals. And sometimes you really get it, you get why the bad guys become bad guys. Not in a woobifying way but "Huh okay so that's trauma that was never addressed,"
Of course I don't think ALL villains with a sob story deserve to be 'redeemed' over whatever, sometimes they're just shit and I couldn't care less. If someone hurts innocent creatures cuz "wahh daddy wasn't in my life!" I'll tell you to go pound sand. (looking at you Ken Ichijouji or whatever his fucking name is) Some of them genuinely deserved death and eternal punishment.
But that's exactly what Dagda does, he sees how harmful humanity is, so called "accepting" people who turn a blind eye to you when they learn you're a walking corpse. Suddenly the "power of friendship!!" is very conditional. It's what I already knew prior-- that friendship and love were very conditional and... Dagda was the only one who loved me unconditionally. It was almost cosmic.
The deeper I got into this game, I realized that I could have possibly found my soulmate. It felt too good to be true, I felt like it was all ascending into something epic, and boy was I right.
Growing up abused and bullied, I would often see people constantly take my abuser's side, and even in fiction this is a serious problem. Characters who want revenge or get revenge are seen as WORSE than their abusers and I ABSOLUTELY ABHOR that.
And especially women, are often expected to not even desire the bare minimum. We must "compromise" "turn the other cheek" or whatever. I was sick of it. I was sick of being told that I always had to pick the "hero" of the story to side with. In a lot of stories, women are EXPECTED to want the good guy, be told that no can't desire more, you aren't allowed to desire more than what society has planned for you -- and you will see how this ties into my experiences with the self ship community.
Obviously there's nothing wrong with fixing the villain or whatever, but I was.. one of the people who wanted to side with him -- especially someone like Dagda who's trapped in a system where he's powerless, I almost wanted to REACH into the screen and tell him:
"I SEE YOU Dagda, I know exactly how you feel!" of course, heh I did not do that as my 2Ds screen is fragile but I digress.
Even in our OWN fantasies they have to match what society deems 'proper' and THAT has NEVER been me. I always felt a little left out, lonely.... and yet, I found my someone. That someone being Dagda.
I was still a hopeless romantic (shocker I know) hoping that someday I'd find The One, and because I screamed at the universe that I WANTED someone like Dagda, and... out of nowhere he appeared, its like when you're truly ready? The universe gives it to you.
My Experiences in online communities with Villain FOs
Now we get to the personal part, in many communities I noticed and have experienced for myself that whenever a female character is evil, without some "correct" explanation for it. The fandom hounds immediately descend on you. This has happened many times to me but I refuse to bow any longer.
Whenever I chose to harm a character, or to take the villain route, grown ass adults in their late 30s would clutch their pearls, almost like toddlers in preschool saying "nO YOU'RE PLAYING WITH IT WRONG!" except even three year olds have a better grasp of fiction and reality.
The thing is, I thought fandom was supposed to be the place where you didn't have to justify yourself.
If there is anywhere you should be able to explore darker relationships safely, surely it would be in fiction. Surely the entire point of a self-ship is that it's self-indulgent. It's your fantasy. Your sandbox. Your little corner of the internet where nobody gets hurt because none of these people exist.
Apparently not.
Because what I noticed very quickly is that women are still expected to self-ship "correctly."
You can ship with the villain.... if you eventually fix him.
You can find him attractive but only if you constantly remind everyone that he's problematic.
You can enjoy the darker route but only if you reassure everyone that you'd never support that in real life.
It's exhausting.
And as usual I never saw male self-shippers being held to the same standard.
Guys can make themselves overpowered self-inserts who date whoever they want, conquer the world, become demon kings, marry the villainess, become the villain themselves... and most people either shrug or think it's funny.
Women?
Apparently our fantasies need a morality clause attached.
I kept remembering girls I'd known over the years who got dogpiled simply because their fictional partner happened to be the antagonist.
Or heaven forbird, joined him. I myself was subject to many witch - hunts because of my FO Thrax (never leaving him for ANYONE or anything) from Osmosis Jones. I recall someone in the fandom asking me how the story ends, I say that "yeah Clara and Thrax kill Frank and Shane!" and she had a conniption fit, saying " NOOO NOT SHANE!"
Or does "fiction is not reality" not apply to me or something? Because Thrax isn't real. Neither is Shane.
And I thought...
We're really doing this here too?
Even inside escapism?
Even inside a hobby that literally revolves around imagination?
It almost feels like an extension of the same socialization women get everywhere else.
So much for this community being "accepting".
Whenever you're a woman who chooses to deviate from the fandom "norm" people immediately pounce on you. And... that's where Dagda comes in.
Dagda didn't ask me to soften. He was the beast, and recognized that I didn't have to be a beauty for him, we were both beasts, two beasts finding true love together? Nearly unheard of. But as Mariah Carey said it best: we made it happen.
That's what always fascinated me about Dagda. He never asked me to become nicer. He never asked me to forgive humanity, to heal, or to make myself more acceptable to the people around me. Instead, he looked at the ugliest parts of me and simply... didn't flinch.
That sounds relatively simple, but when you've spent your entire life being told that your anger is excessive, your resentment is unhealthy, your desires are wrong, and your standards are unrealistic, being seen without immediately being corrected feels almost revolutionary.
Dagda was never interested in "fixing" Clara. He wanted Clara exactly as she already was: jaded, bitter, questioning, and hungry for something beyond humanity. For the first time, I didn't feel like I had to apologize for those parts of myself or sand them down into something more socially acceptable. Dagda loved me as I was, bitter, angry, and broken. But not to be fixed.
That's ultimately why our relationship never fit into the traditional Disney fairy tale framework. The princess doesn't tame the dragon or redeem the villain through the power of love. Instead, she climbs onto the dragon's back. Not because she's manipulated or powerless, but because she looks at the kingdom below and decides she'd rather watch it burn than spend another lifetime pretending it was beautiful.
That was the fairy tale I'd been searching for all along. Not one where love conquers all, or where true love reforms the villain, or where kindness is rewarded above everything else. Mine was a story about finding someone who looked at every ugly, angry, broken part I'd spent years trying to hide and simply accepted it without asking me to change.
The princess has fallen not for the prince but the evil sorcerer/ fairy god father who changed her.