The love that older men share together is so desirable to me. I’ve always longed to grow older with another man, with our storgic, companionate love maturing with age. I wish I could say Dream Daddy fits a niche that would appeal greatly to me, but the extremely tacky humor and manufactured conflicts straight out of a family sitcom destroy any genuineness that could be gleamed from this depiction of love. Yes, it’s done on purpose, but ironic shitposting is still shitposting and this desperate effort to create a “safe space” game works against it to feel like some sort of cynical joke with queer men at the butt of it. I know the writers (a straight man and a queer woman) claimed they wanted to avoid writing about experiences they didn’t know, but I honestly would have much preferred they did consult queer men and gave it their best shot instead of this neutered garbage designed to be as straight-ally-friendly as possible at our own expense.

I want to talk about Joseph’s route because it’s the only one that attempts to confront any sort of complicated relationship dynamic, and even its best ending is intentionally dissatisfying. There’s actually a sense of artistic ambition to it in theory, even if it still suffers from horribly stilted writing like the rest of the VN. Yet, the route was torn to shreds even by many fans: it was cruel, it was homophobic, it was bad representation, et cetera. On one hand, I can’t entirely fault people for being unable to recognize this as a commentary on a specific sub-set of queer men that exist when the rest of the game does so much to distance itself from any sense of reality. But, it’s also just so disheartening when people use a fixation on optics and surface-level representation analysis to shout down any story that so much as gestures towards uniquely queer pain.

mascotizing, de-eroticized, de-humanizing wooby doo-doo that started out as a low key homophobic ~sooo randim~ joke about how funny gay cultural nomenclature is to its straight creators but then got agonizingly retconned into game grumps' (ugh) flailing attempt at a self-serious inclusivity project. Too ignorant and afraid of offending anyone to portray anything resembling adult human intimacy or eroticism, and reeks with the no homo!!!! creator's fears of depicting anything messy, hot, or specific about icky degenerate gay sexuality. Never overtly cruel and clearly interested in playacting safeness and inclusivity, but the placid smoothness of everything feels like its own form of erasure--and it's a smug, self congratulatory one. This is clearly not really trying to provide anything meaningful or substantive for gay audiences: it's for obnoxious straight "allies" to play and have fuzzy wuzzies about how great they are for wubbing the cutesy wootsie daddy poos--they're smol pastel beans just like us!!! Heinous. I dont want to yuck anyones yum too hard or whatever but if you're a queer adult and love this game I kind of think you're a fucking idiot

I'm reading some of the negative reviews on here and I feel like I played a completely different game than y'all? I went through two routes on here, Mat and Brian, and intend to go back and do more later. I found the writing to be very charming and funny, and the core gimmick of everyone being a single parent to be an interesting dynamic between the characters.

I really like how all the different characters explore their own theme, such as Brian's toxic competitiveness or Mat's social anxiety. If you're going to play this game I would go in expecting to deal with things more along these lines, rather than expecting the game to tackle the myriad of ways homophobia effects gay men in the real world. The game sets itself in a sort of unrealistic but optimistic fantasy, in which you can be gay or trans and find love free of discrimination, and it's one of the things I liked about it.

I think taking the extra step from "this game doesn't portray anything too specific to gay culture" to "this is actively one of the most homophobic games I've played" is an extremely exaggerative critique. I do see the argument that it could be viewed as erasure, and I'm not trying to invalidate anyone for whom that's a deal breaker. However, due to how well I thought it did at dealing with the things it did choose to focus on, as well as laughing out loud at multiple points during my playthroughs, I loved this game overall. I look forward to playing more of this in the future.

Mat is the dreamiest daddy, and I have a band called the Skammunist Manifesto!