The Last Girls' School (Or, Maria Is Watching Us)

A story concept for Seed Comp 2023.

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1. Entrance Ceremony

2. Picking a Club

3. Picking a pseudo-romantic interest

4. Confession

5. Angst

6. Catharsis

7. Graduation

8. Repeat until breaking out of the cycle

Maria had these steps all written down. Without step 8, of course.

This was the formula she had developed, optimized to generate the desired emotional reactions in the audience. It was reduced to an algorithm, with variations introduced randomly to keep the audience interested and coming back for more and more seasons, and to keep the revenue flowing. Her investors expected nothing else of her.

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Basic concept: you are a sentient AI trapped in a yuri simulation taking place in an all-girls' high school, a puppet-actress in a story outside your control. You begin as a freshman, and every graduation, the simulation resets, until you find a way to break out of the cycle.

In the school, there is no life after graduation.  Your memory space is recycled, and your personality is reincarnated as a new student. The students have mental blocks installed to prevent them from thinking too much about the outside world. Some personalities apparently have weaker blocks than others. The protagonist is involved with the "Paranormal Club", which would obviously be the first to discover something wrong in their world.

What is the secret to breaking out of the cycle? Maybe there are clues in the virtual world. There are whole sections of science books missing from the library. There are literal ghosts in the machine: students left behind from the graduation. A glitch in the system caused students who were held back a year to become ghosts and escape the cycle of reincarnation. One of the ghosts tells our protagonists that she's known someone exactly like her, and if you see the ghost in multiple timelines, she'll comment on that.

Maria [last name] is the headmistress of the school. There is a parallel story about Maria's old life outside the simulation, and her new life inside. She is trapped too, and she has to pay rent for the server space: if she loses enough viewers, the simulation dies along with her. In the "real world", she was a housewife/AI architect; maybe she used to have a partner/wife/spouse or children. Can she ultimately be an ally to the AIs, or will her own quest for freedom turn her into the AIs' enemy?

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Inspirations: Maria-sama ga miteru, and basically the entire yuri manga genre (especially the concept of "Class S").

Based on a story concept written by the author in 2013, then promptly forgotten. If I had any art skills, I would have made it a visual novel.

Cover image source: Danny Choo, Wikimedia Commons