You should not be reading this if you are under the age of 18. Minors please skip this one!!

EXTREME CAUTION CONTENT NOTICE: Discussion of Transphobia and Queerphobia, Criticisms of Feminism, Non-Consensual Fantasies, Bestiality, Child Molestation, Objectification of Women, Exhibitionism, NSFW, Discussion of Autopsies, Critical Literary Theory, Cringey Hypotheticals, Morality Speculations, Also Really Dry

Est. Reading Time: 34 Minutes

I want to hope this is worth reading to somebody, because I feel like I paved a way to talk about porn games that goes beyond just kink shaming or pop feminist argumentation, if that sounds useful to you then good luck to you.

For a long while now I've been longing to write about Adult Games, because quite honestly I have a bone to pick with a majority of the people who discuss erotic art. Even when the targets of the ire seem reasonable, I tend to notice there is quite a lot of kink shaming and puritarianism in this space. For example in the lambasting of Nekopara, a peer I respect ConeCvltist (note I'm not trying to 'call them out', many people including me have been complicit in this behaviour, the fact nobody could articulate what im about to say is more damning of all of us really) goes on to say the following

"What this means is that Nekopara's catgirls are the "idealized woman" for the target audience: a walking fleshlight in the shape of an girl, who has an innate attraction to the self-insert main character and will basically never reject them. A mirage of a character who only exists for pleasure."

This is point blank just kinkshaming, because it implicates that the idea that petplay and catgirl aesthetic is infantilizing to women. I doubt ConeCvltist had any reason to be considerate of this, but a logical conclusion could be drawn that petplay kinks turn people into fleshlights that are only 'idealized women' for men. This echoes the opinion of the radical feminist, which which the feminist reading of a text is usually articulated with. The further implication that radical feminists tend to draw from this is that if this is an 'ideal' archetype for men, then women should strive to be the opposite and avoid playing into male pleasures entirely, thus women must unshackle themselves from kink, and never look back, essentially to put the collars and flogs down. I wouldn't blame you if you were reading what I just said and had all sorts of alarm bells ringing off, in fact I want to dare argue this is exactly part of the problem. While its usually taken as a given that Radical Feminists are transphobic, anybody who makes a criticism of feminism is immediately categorized as a calling card for 'antifeminism' (AKA: meninism, mens rights advocacy, conservatism, sexism, etc.) but let me just show you that this is the case with a short quote:

"Our enemy is the Establishment-its laws and institutions. S/M not only does not share a common enemy with us but longs to be recognized as part of the essence of the power structure that is our enemy." - Ti-Grace Atkinson

The book I pulled this from is an 80s text called 'against sadomasochism' which is a collected manuscript of radical feminists throwing their two cents on why BDSM is oppressive and constraining, and really reflects a desire at the end of the day to reasset liberal power under a slightly changed framework. Thus this ideal of the 'catgirl', one that even billionaire aparthaid sexist Elon Musk has been meming about needing to exist, the stereotype in anime that needs to be seen to life, must just be a reassertion of male fantasies.

The rub, though, is that fantasies and sex based characteristics have very little actually in common, besides the genetalia you are sensually familiar with, and in fact a lot of people who play eroge games or dating games (a similarly maligned genre) could and often are women. The only reason they may not be moreso is due to systemic repression of sexual or romantic preferences. I hope you can see where I'm going with this so that we don't to spend all of our time stunlocked on why its important to go beyond just kinkshaming shit: if trans women are women and they are, then their sexuality does not reflect some 'essential masculine' (ie 'predatorial') urge. If we can admit that most of the population of romance shlock like 50 Shades of Grey is ciswomen, then Trans women having more 'hardcore' versions of BDSM fetishes is if anything more liberatory of repressive valves on sexuality, not less. Or at the very least, you would have to admit that both fantasies are on an equal playing field and not really to blame or repress at all. 50 Shades of Grey at least to me seems like a repressive work that can't fully complete what its trying to articulate, at least to my way of seeing it, I don't know about you.

—--

To be against Sadomasochism and the intensity of it is not to be simply against what's happening inside the San Franciso Armory, its to be against Marquis de Sade, and Sacher-Masoch.

To keep an english lesson short, de Sade was known for using extreme sexual scenes in order to criticize power but also fulfill urges. Most of de Sade's depictions are actually quite metal. For example 120 Days of Sodom, which was written in a prison cell, depicts all of the jailers as fucking hideous and unclean people. It's a nasty text, and some of the degradation certainly was there to titilate but on the meanwhile there were more simple pleasant BDSM threesomes in works like Julliette. De Sade used it to criticize power, but also peer into the degrading pleasure that can come from objectification. This is a tension quite literally at the core of fiction as fiction is in itself the 'mirage of conciousnesses' but mechanically pressed to respond in specific ways to specific inputs. Fiction objectifies humanity itself, and the Sadist sees a continuing immersion to be found from that objectification rather than being taken out by it. The Sadist lives in the paradox.

The masochist lives typically for the pleasure that comes from others seeing them and taking that 'paradox' out on them. That's where sacher masoch comes in, the one that wrote Venus in Furs and desires to be stepped on by his mistress. It'is worth mentioning that eroticization is primarily all found within being desired anyway. Sadomachoism doesn't really work unless the 2 groups get satisfaction from each other. The Sadist isn't getting pleasure from being anonymous or perceiving, thats what the Voyeur is for, those who like seeing things happen in front of them with little personal ability to interface. The Sadist is getting pleasure from being percieved as the dominatrix humiliating the other person. Sacher Masoch and Marquis de Sade did not know each other or have a sexual relationship, so when we talk about this we are talking more about sexual perceptions and the subjectivity of the focalized character. To expand on this point, let's spend a paragraph meditating on the Voyeur.

—-

In all of my years of playing games the only game where I felt so effectively powerless in order to be registered as voyeurous is the game Presentable Liberty, you can read more about that here if you want but the simplified version is that its a game where you are not allowed to do anything but witness as everything falls apart around you, locked in a 4x4 cell with passionate letters from characters you never meet pouring in to console or persuade you. What's important here is that this feeling of voyeurism is actually intended in this particular work. Contrast this to the typical use of Voyueristic as a dismissive or derogatory term, like in dating sims for example. In that the voyeurism usually comes out of literal peeping tom attitudes of the character your piloting, but also a feeling that most of the decisions are happening without your desire or permission. That it's something happening on behalf of a protagonist you typically don't care about. For example if you found out the player character was a peeping tom then its likely that you would have a lot less sympathy for them as anything but an avatar that occasionally acts outside your locus of control for the purposes of continuing the story. This is usually not that big a deal in gaming immersion, for example in the Half Life series there's a player character that handles the action and then a Gordon Freeman who handles the protagonist's motives and the ability to digest information from the right people during those interactive cutscenes. People are able to juggle this cognitive dissonance comfortably until it comes to 'taboo' art like, dating games, eroge, etc.

—--

I think this can be used as a way to understand both kinkshaming and the certain puritanical political censorship its connected to. People feel uncomfortable when the character they are behind does something immoral and so they explain it away by demonizing the supposed demographical ingroup that it belongs to and trying to not see that such art ever sees the light of day. The other reason people act like this is because their own sense of boundaries of what is and isn't fictional start to feel dissolved and they start getting very scared about what is allowed to be depicted.

Originally when I started writing this, I thought my argument was going to be one of obvious blunt Libertineism. Such that, "Lolita, 100 Days of Sodom, etc. should have already solved this moral panic conundrum" that we should know that depictions of rape, pedophilia, necrophilia, beastiality, tourture, and all the other fucked up shit under the sun can happen in fiction because we already had it 100s of years ago and nothing came of it and such gross texts like Lolita were not really intended to be gotten off to anyway. In actuality though there is a shred of truth in this consideration that is actually worth taking pause to think about.

Let's leave aside the obvious hot button version of this for a moment, that of Lolita, and consider a fictional depiction of beastiality. I'm not trying to be edgy but these depictions already exist called the The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife, in which an octopus covers itself all over a women, and is meant to be one of the first points of reference for the slow popularization of tentacle rape. Now you have a lot of others, bugs, horses, dogs etc. all drawn taking a person in dojinshi now. But the anxiety, and one that I can almost sort of understand, is that you genuinely dont know if this came out of a dark copy. Which is to say was the Dream of the Fisherman's Wife made from a clear enough insight into what a woman fucking an octopus looks like? Do we know for sure that a living or dead octopus was thrown over a naked women in order to try and get a sense? Nevermind if people getting off to these drawings are really using it as a valve for their real life sexual desires for the creatures, but is the original drawing something that was constructed from the blueprint morally? If the octopus was dead first would that make a difference, it would surely, but would it then be moral? If it was just taking a real octopus fucking another octopus, is that moral. Going off of that idea, is animal planet showing sex moral? Is that not the exploitation of animal sexuality which has supposedly a chance to scar children anyway?

Maybe we can get closer via exaggeration. Is it any more moral if they artist never saw a naked woman, or a real octopus, but saw 2 of them as paintings elsewhere? Is it moral then? Surely thats moral but that drawing of a woman and that octopus have original inspirative reference copies somewhere. But then I can still not guarantee that this art was made within those reasonable moral bounds. I can be fairly sure, but I can't prove it a shadow without a doubt…

This I believe is one way in which the moral heart of censorship probably exists, not so much as a worry of consequence but a worry of origins and their knock-on imitation effects. But I find the standards deeply bullshit, because in order for art to maintain a perfect moral cycle the origin versions would have to have been stopped. If you don't want depictions of mass shootings in art, or animated, etc. You should have seen to it that mass shootings never happened. If you didn't want to worry about animal exploitation then you should have prevented animals from getting hurt. Because none of us individually can change the wounds of the past that caused this stuff we take our anger out on art instead and hold it to this extreme standard. Of course this doesn't prevent art from never being stopped due to obvious immorality, like for example if somebody were to dox a private address in a game, that game should not be allowed to be seen or distributed and should be stopped at all costs, and the origin of such a 'mistake' would be obvious. But for fictional art the attitude is guilty until proven innocent by a moral mob who thinks they are more concerned with potential consequences than actual origin. This matters a lot because we actually don't know if Marquis de Sade engaged in non consentual BDSM or not. Allegedly he took a maid and dripped hot wax on her against her will and that was part of his conviction but we dont know if that actually happened or if it did how much his being able to see and partake in that played into a scene. And the last and perhaps most important reason its bullshit: None of us on earth can be held to concrete morality. We all leak things we shouldn't and do things we shouldn't. For example speaking ill of family members we don't like which could cause them to be traced I think something we shouldn't do but in a world with such low levels of privacy we don't think twice about venting about that on social media half the time.

—--

So now that we have some theory and speculations about censorship and Libertineism, I can actually talk about the fucking game and its problems and use this essay as a launch point for talking about erotic games in general with no compulsion to self defend against charges of particularly 'predatorial' sexual drives. One last thing first: If you thought this was exhausting to read, you've started to understand the issue we are dealing with. This extreme necessity to defend against accusations of fictional sex drives and the objectification of women by Petplay and BDSM is quite literally the power imbalance Transphobia and Queerphobia thrive on. Cis people do not have to explain and defend missionary, 50 shades of Gray, or their exalting literary classics with erotic influence.

—--
Now onto the game proper, do you remember those archetyped terms I brought up earlier, the idea of tying Masochism, Voyeurism, and Sadism to character subjectivities? I can sort of talk about where this game is becomes awkward.

Princess Trainer is part of the "Trainer" genre in which your goal is to basically pimp out a person or group of people into being more slutty by sending them to work increasingly Frivilous jobs and wear skimpier clothing, degrading them from their initial abilities into a public humiliated sex objects. Princess Trainer in particular has you doing this for Jafar from Aladdin, in which you pimp out Jasmine into a reviled whore that Jafar can marry and have as a personal concubine, with you being able to enjoy her plenty as well as she gets corrupted into this other person. Importantly then none of the issues with the game are to do with 'ruining childhoods' or 'objectifying a woman' because within the fantasy this is more or less the goal. To corrupt from the high chair and watch her come to desire you and everyone else on the way down. What better a subject to choose than a disney princess, who is both voiced by and depicted as a 'chaste' yet oddly sexualized adult for family friendly entertainment. If there's any neutral subject for corruption a disney princess is honestly not a bad choice, this is one point that game has in its favor.

Where it begins to lose points, and is honestly why I wanted to talk about this in the first place, is both its game design and distraction away from an effective sadistic fantasy. For one, the course of the game happens over the span of several months and mostly happens through you choosing what job she has to pick and send her to the 'academy' to suppress her will to accept these jobs each day. However, large parts of the games content are locked behind poorly defined Quests. For example I was spending my first run monotonously pressing the same buttons for her to go to the fruit stand until I could buy her more clothes not recognizing that a Quest I had to fulfill would only have the prompt show up if I had 50 gold. Large progression of the game and its content was hidden behind these esoteric questlines and generally bad UI. As a result a lot of the game was spent fiddling around and monotonously pressing the same 3 buttons until I could notice a change somewhere on the map. Just so you understand how bad that is, that town I was fiddling with was 1 screen large with like 6 different single click single use buildings and I was still having these problems constantly.

There's a type of enticement that can be held through this monotony but this is where the immersion started to take a hit. Since there was no clear tutorial, I thought in order to degrade Jasmine I had to build her up into 1 act at a time. Holy mother of Moloch was I wrong XD

What ended up happening was I 'maxed out' total acceptance of an act causing serious tonal whiplash because Jasmine would start giving him flirtatious eyes and swooning during the handjob only to freakout and say 'you disgusting scum' for the first blowjob, she would still do it but the fact was that she hated it and so despite Jasmine having her 'obedience' meter maxed out she was still upset with me, from the standpoint of immersion this makes no sense and these scenes should have been skipped or parceled earlier on. But since there is no active indication that her meter for acceptance of an act was full, I was just getting this weird tsundere treatment the whole damn game. This didn't make me feel either sadistic from the perception of the player character or masochistic from the perspective of fantasizing that what was happening to Jasmine would happen to me, because I knew in both cases these inexplicable tonal variations were just the lulls of the narrative from a poor UI leering its head rather than any consistent explanation in the game of erratic attitude shifts.

To add on this is that there was a complete acceptance of being called and applying to herself any pet name like 'Bimbo' or 'Pet' etc. after a certain point in her training at the academy. In fact, you could put in your own. These inclusions were actually really hot because it allowed me to directly input the niche petnames I like, and allowed me to bring my own kink and roleplay into the confines of the story, but it only went on to striate this surrounding experience with the game when she totally accepted this name and role but out of character got feisty over the next thing she was told to do.

Then we come to the other issue, so Jafar demands 3 things from you that are supposed to happen, make Jasmine personally obedient, humiliate her to the public so everyone hates her, and have enough money to pay for her and Jafar's wedding. Apparently the public humiliation portion of the game unlocks from a tab at your home, which you're unlikely to check or remember much. It's only those bits of UI similar to checking the advanced options menu of a game, so I had to look up to find out about it again. When I did not only was I met with whiplash, but I was also met with a part of the game I no longer wanted to be involved in. The public humiliation, walking somebody on a leash, is hot and a huge exhibitionistic drive in queer communities, no problem there. The issue is that because I had no way to decide how much or little happens in a scene, I had to sit through and read about CHILDREN touching and handling her breasts while my character agreed along to it. Out of the 9 exhibitionist scenes these were 2 of them, and the primary 2 that led to her reputation as a princess being defiled since she was called a child molester. Mind you the kids were not drawn shown touching tits but the scene of it happening with dialogue went on for some 300 words a piece.

This is reallydisappointing. Because in my mind the game didn't even have children in its fantasy to worry about at all to begin with, that was a non-factor to me. On top of this if there were kids in the narrative my player character would probably shake his fist and tell them to fuck off not just limply stand there and go 'yeah go ahead'. And finally, I was not given an option, a warning, anything that would happen. The rest of the exhibitionist portion reflected this problem immensely because it distorted the course of the story from a sadistic pleasure into a supposed voyeuristic one of watching her get degraded without character input, it was awkward and stumbled on its feet. In the sex scenes you had ample dialogue options to choose how the scene would turn out but there were none here. I don't need to make no fine point of it, even without the kids involved this was already a boner killer portion of the game since I was made a voyeur, with the contingent hope being maybe the last few scenes of her being hatefucked by a mob would be hot. But with the kids involved it caused a negative boner, my stomach kinda wanted to hurl and I couldn't trust the text at all anymore because I was thinking of the fictional leering kids in the whole of the fiction now. Just why, why did you have to go there??? You literally didn't have to!!

If I were to speculate, the reason why relates to a larger macro problem with the story which is that the writer couldnt come up with many ways to degrade her from the point of being no longer regal since it would theoretically require writing a bunch of chivalric vows that were being broken. I don't think it would actually be that hard but it would require more legwork than the child molestation shock value way to degrade her, presumably the indie dev thought it wouldn't make a big difference. I was under the expectation she would be degraded to a town fuckdoll, not a fucking child predator like jesus fucking christ! >:C

You might be wondering then why I don't have this game at a 1, on my 4 point scale.

It comes from 2 places, I don't hold a moral resentment with this sort of inclusion in the way others might, it just wasn't the set of fantasies of degradation I was expecting and the UI didn't reflect the ones that were there very well. I also think it just renders and satirical potential of corruption mute. There was a chance here to do glib critiques of the monarchy or chivalric expectations of princesses, but that was just left on the cutting room floor which is just lame because the criticisms of power add a lot to the sexuality. Continuing along that political course of reasoning, obviously you should not involve kids in real life actively into exhibitionist kink as that is child molestation but this has also in a way aged extra poorly since the public displays of kink and the fact children could bear witness is a sore point that would be on everyone's mind anyway. People wont let us wear leashes in public over fear of supposedly 'grooming children' and narratives like this only feed those flames further. That's not to say its not allowed to be depicted regardless but its by design alienating and there was no content notice for its introduction.

On the positives, the cyclical and frugalistic result of currency is criticized, but not more than you would get in almost any management simulation.

I also thought the 1 screen management simulation visual design and simplicity allowed for a serene monotony, the response time for the buttons I had to click for the management portions were fast enough that I could get through the day in about 15 seconds meaning it was easy to appreciate the slow decay while not getting immediate tedium. That immersion was nice, the dialogue box also had a neat tattered parchment look to it that I thought looked really neat..

The customizable attire and pet name options were really hot, and Jasmine's obedience training was hot too. Some of the house sex scenes were hot and had servicable dialogue even though they were typically way too short. Also the game wasn't overtly raceplay oriented or involved in racist descriptions which considering the arabian race of the cast is worth lauding since its unfortunately rare to have a porn game have a black character that isn't racialized. I also just really like corruption as a fetish because it activates a desire in my brain as a trans woman of kind of wanting to be 'corrupted' into a girl and seeing girlhood more as a fetish rather than anything 'actual' so I'm much more forgiving of flubs anyway. There is something here, but its bottom of the barrel and I would just say skip the Town Exploit scenes if you do decide to try it. Don't stick around for more than an hour or 2. Otherwise I would recommend games like Third Crises or Corruption of Champions although both have a more masochistic subjectivity where you play as the characters being corrupted, those both have much more consistent and sexy descents into corruption than this.

Concluding Soapbox

I hope this can serve as an example for how you can criticize porn games without resorting to pedojacketing, kinkshaming, or moral panic. I really am so exhausted with the ways in which porn games are outright derided by stuffy puritarianism. There's always going to be something objectifying about art because all characters in themselves are just a mirage of word clouds we identify to a subject we all agreed to make up for the sake of the story. This is not to say that culture, art, morality shouldn't be criticized. But I just hope that I've provided enough tools to find more tactful and less potentially alienating ways to do so. It's likely I will talk about more porn games as well that I actually like in the near future if I have time, you know since I popped the bottle upon already with posting this.