Update Two Hundred and Fifty-Nine: 11 December 2018

☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆

Mmmmmm, this is a tough one. I’ve always really liked Christine Love’s VNs—in fact, Analogue: A Hate Story is I think the first honest-to-god VN I’ve ever read. The issue is this: erotic content can be absolutely hit or miss purely on the fact that, how well-written or well-crafted it is aside, if the kinks explored therein are unappealing at best or triggering at worst, you’re not gonna have a good time. Because of that, despite how excited I was to read content by a queer woman for queer women, a lot of this VN was really hard to read. Kink content in general and BDSM stuff in particular are intriguing but ultimately alienating—what’s a fun turn on for other people is something that can really fuck with or harm somebody else, even if done right.. Funnily enough, the only thing I can compare it to, in some weird way that probably only makes sense in my brain, is my feelings toward cape comics, or metroidvanias—a lot of the ideas on the surfaces are interesting, and seem like something I’d like, but in actual practice most of it is just not done in a way I can enjoy.

And if you’re not here for the fuckin’, Ladykiller doesn’t have much for you. The framing narrative—you play a young woman forced to disguise herself as her twin brother on a cruise he orchestrated, and there’s some political things afoot—is really kind of barebones and is really just set dressing for the sex scenes. It was also difficult for me to relate to the main character very much—it is made clear from multiple sources she thinks primarily with her sex drive and not much else. The twin she’s pretending to be is a big douchebag, and to be frank she kind of is, too.

God, I dunno. The art is nice, though with how realistically drawn and proportioned the bodies are, having the faces be so standardly anime threw me for a loop a bit. The snappy writing sensibilities are there, it’s just… if I don’t like women being degraded and objectified and treated like shit when male writers do it, I’m not going to like it when a female writer does it, even if it’s to, I dunno, empower her to get off. The VN makes a big to-do about how ‘all power exchanges must be negotiated’—which is true!—but it comes off as lip service when you can’t actually do that in the game, either as the character or you yourself as a player (except, of course, by just turning the game off or skipping the scene entirely. That ‘my way or fuck you go home’ aspect of it, though, isn’t great). The game expects you to be into this and have bought into it already, and if you’re not, well… it’s not for you.

So it wasn’t for me! Not everything can be.

Next up:

See you soon!