One of The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy-‘s Queerest Storylines Comes From An Attempt At A Heterosexual One

This text contains full spoilers for branch 13B (Romance) of The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy-. Reader discretion is advised.

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The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy- is a crowning achievement of visual novels. Across 101 endings and several independent storylines, it breezes through every popular subgenre of the medium with ease, from a war epic to ominous slice-of-life to tongue-in-cheek shounen-manga-y stories to, yes, the elaborate mysteries its directors Kazutaka Kodaka (Danganronpa, Rain Code) and Kotaro Uchikoshi (Zero Escape, AI: The Somnium Files) are known for.

It stands to reason such a behemoth wouldn’t neglect to celebrate the romance adventure, one of the pillars around which VNs thrive. Getting there is a bit funny: you’re in the middle of the setup to the game’s most lore-heavy route when, all of a sudden, the girl gatekeeping all she knows demands that you kiss her. If you refuse her, you’re slapped with a plot lock that’s only lifted if you go through three other branches. If you accept… she gets so startled at how you actually listened to her that she pushes you off the roof you’re on and you lose all your memory.

So starts the Romance route. During his rooftop-death-induced coma (he’s fine now), protagonist Takumi Sumino has a dream where he kisses three different cast members, all his fellow soldiers in a war for Planet Earth: tomato-mask-wearing heiress Kurara Oosuzuki, ditzy samurai/ninja girl Kyoshika Magadori, and anxious but kind mechanic Tsubasa Kawana. The funny thing is that each of them also had the same dream about him, and now everyone’s feeling a little frazzled.

Under the stewardship of their lovely pro-wrestling mutual friend Moko Mojiro, Takumi is thus thrust into a “game of love”, The Bachelor-style. The three candidates have their own periods of time where they’re allowed to make their move; if he accepts their confession by then, the credits roll, and if not, the next girl starts her offense until it’s all done. The route is divided into each of their “chapters” in the set order of Kurara-Kyoshika-Tsubasa.

As such, everybody’s first taste of Romance has a tangy bite to it. Kurara, the witful tomato girl who thinks everyone is beneath her greatness, doesn’t even seem that interested in Takumi to begin with. Her chapter has her invite herself to his room over and over so they can watch movies together and she can decide on whether she likes him or not.

Her reasoning for putting up with all this, despite being an otherwise no-nonsense character who’d normally never agree to the game? Well… We need to talk about Kurara and Kyoshika.

A large part of Kurara’s character across all of Hundred Line is her dynamic with Kyoshika, her rival in love this time around. It’s pretty classic princess/knight stuff in context (which already has a profoundly queer history to begin with), but with a twist: Kyoshika is comically perverted, and Kurara adores teasing her for it.

In fact, she’s hardly the only person our dear tomato likes to embarrass over sexual things: in order to dissuade Takumi from pursuing his love interest Nozomi Kirifuji, Kurara, who is notably close with her, will often accuse him out loud of wanting to engage in scandalous acts with Nozomi… which she always describes in a suspicious amount of detail, such as when she seems to fawn over eating sushi off the girl’s naked, feverish body.

It’s abundantly clear Kurara enjoys projecting her own desires onto others, and it really shows in the sheer amount of jabs she makes at Kyoshika for supposedly pleasuring herself with her own samurai sword. Even her self-admitted favorite films are sexual in nature, which furthers this reading. When she tells Takumi she’s sizing him up because of Kyoshika, it’s definitely meant to come off as jealousy (“what if he’s a snack and I just let her have him?!”), but, keeping in mind all the baggage these two have, it really does just come off as “if you’re not good for her I’ll kill you, I swear”.

Of course, most of these are aspects you can glean from the other routes. What does Romance bring to the table in making Kurara uniquely queer, despite the inevitable endpoint where she falls in love with a man? The answer lies in those movie nights and the backstory kernels she occasionally provides Takumi with. This is the only route in the game where you get full access to Kurara’s inner world (it speaks to a general problem of how this game can only develop female characters when they’re in romantic settings, but that’s a whole separate rant).

Being the scion to a particularly wealthy family of weapons manufacturers, Kurara was shopped around as a child bride from the age of six. She hated her first suitor so much she set out on a smear campaign to get her family to give up on him, and the pattern continued the more candidates were brought to the table. “Just breathing the same air as them repulsed me”, she plainly states.

It’s meant to make Takumi – and, by extension, you, his puppet master – sound like someone special, the first man she’s willing to give a solid whack at. Usually, these things only happen in a more literal sense for her.

Except… do you want to know what movie they were watching, at her suggestion, when she said this?

I love this Goodbye, Eri-ass CG, by the way.

It should also be noted that the prior film was a heterosexual love story, one Kurara was extremely loud about not enjoying. The official reasoning is that she cares not for romances between lower-class people, and this is shattered when she turns out to actually love average-joe Takumi after all. (That said, she has no biting commentary of the sort about these similarly unwealthy lesbians…)

Regardless of a clear intention to convince the audience this girl is straight, the presented imagery is consistently at odds with the concept. To boot, she thinks the heroine of this movie looks like Nozomi – and continues to tease Takumi about wanting to have his way with her, as if she wants to shame her rival into desistance. Mhm, sure.

But the true cherry on top comes long past the end of the Kurara chapter. It’s not when she goes on a man-hating tirade, or when she puts herself in direct danger to save Nozomi from a flareup of her chronic illness, or even when the finale of her fated hetero tryst has her be the clearly dominant force; no, it’s what happens when you reject her. (I certainly did. As a lesbian, I recognize comphet when I see it.)

No; it happens after Kyoshika makes her move as someone equally as ill-fitting for a happy heteronormative ending (she yearns for one anyway, to the point of begging Moko for “bride lessons”, and suffering great losses for it). When she gets rejected just the same, the first one in line to console her is Kurara.

The two head to a makeshift bar Moko is running in the school cafeteria, where Kyoshika cries her guts out. Kurara commiserates, but not before singing her friend’s praises, something she readily claims she won’t ever do again: “You’re the dumbest, most clueless girl I’ve ever met, but you’re a good woman. Your presence is enough to light up the room! A woman like you would be the perfect life partner”.

From someone so averse to speaking her true mind, it’s as good as a love confession.

It comes full circle in the event that Tsubasa is also rejected. When Takumi casts aside all of his destined potential lovers, they all form a warrior’s bond of sorts, united in the grief of being unfit for that scenario each in their own ways. Kurara and Kyoshika vow to massage their comrade until all the tension of her own chapter is gone. The language our tomato friend uses, though…

I write about the queer coding of Kurara Oosuzuki with full knowledge that it’s more than likely not the takeaway the writers wanted me to hold. Her romance route is indubitably penned with the intent to portray a story where the tsundere tough girl shows her true self to you, a self that really, despite all her kicking and screaming, wants to be a wife to a man. Yet still I reject that narrative — I see the lust with which she talks of and to girls, and I see the fact that most relationships she holds to the male cast are purely antagonistic.

I wish Kurara good luck instead. She’d have to stop the world just to stop the feeling.

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Hiero de Lima is a Brazilian game journalist and critic obsessed with narrative analysis who will accept any amount of jank if the story’s good. You can find their games writing on Backloggd (short-form) and Medium (long-form), and their bilingual silliness is on Bluesky.