Roman

Being far and away the most visible of the story’s two straight male characters, and the only one who gets any presence in sex scenes (sorry, Clayton), Roman bears a lot of responsibility across his broad shoulders.

A lot of things about Roman as a character were approached from the angle of specifically considering a type of frustrated-straight-Millennial-woman wish fulfillment. Roman is older than Jacqueline (44 to her 32), old enough to convey a sense of maturity and wisdom, but not so old as to put him far beyond the age range that women identifying with Jacqueline might consider dating (and not so old as to make his sexual stamina feel unbelievable). He’s wealthy, but not to an absurd, unimaginable degree, and his wealth came to him at least partially via his own ability (all of which soothes the conscience of anyone dating him). He’s gentle, kind, and respectful of Jacqueline’s boundaries – but can be assertive when it’s hot for him to be so. Despite his fabulous wealth, Roman isn’t a sleazy playboy or weird grindset hustler or an anti-aging-mumbo-jumbo freak – he’s sort of a dorky homebody whose primary hobby is fixing up old transistor radios (while also being tall and muscular with a great head of hair). A lot of what makes Roman Roman has been fine-tuned to make him into the sort of sugar daddy where someone could look at him and say “well… if it were HIM, I suppose I wouldn’t mind…”

(Reminder: significant plot spoilers to follow below the cut!)

The wish-fulfillment works from another angle, of course. All of the traits that make Roman an attractive partner for younger straight women also serve to make him into a very flattering representation of a wealthy middle-aged man who employs sex workers. This was less intentional on my part, but once it was pointed out to me, I immediately saw it. The fact that the story is told from Jacqueline’s perspective works to enhance this flattery, too – we can tell that her attraction to Roman is genuine, as is her enjoyment of his company and her consideration of his feelings. As much as the relationship might be understood as being transactional, I don’t think there’s a sex work client on the planet who hasn’t fantasized about the notion that they might be SO charming that their provider might conceivably fuck them for free.

Unsurprisingly for a game with “sugar baby” in the title, Jacqueline’s interactions with Roman form the narrative backbone of the story (for the first four chapters, at least) – each chapter takes place over roughly a week of time, during which Jacqueline’s activities tend to be structured around their scheduled encounters. However, I was careful to keep Jacqueline’s “Roman time” pretty carefully separated from the time she spent with any of the other characters (excluding Kate). The primary reason for this is that (like Jacqueline in chapter 4), I wanted there to be both explicit AND implicit reinforcement that their relationship is that of a service provider and client, not as boyfriend/girlfriend. I was ESPECIALLY careful about making sure Roman never interacted with Jacqueline’s kids – I didn’t wait the audience to come under the impression that I was setting him up to swoop in as a replacement father figure for them. He’s also never introduced to Olive or Juniper for similar reasons.

A sentiment I’ve seen expressed in multiple reviews of Opportunity is disappointment/confusion that Jacqueline don’t “end up” together, which on a certain level I understand (it’s a romance! The main guy should GET the main girl!) but am also a little bit frustrated by. I think there’s a feeling that because Roman is handsome, sexually proficient, smart, nice, and pays Jacqueline large amounts of money, he somehow has all the boxes checked that say he “deserves” her as a prize at the end of the story. And, like, I’m certain Roman WOULD be a good boyfriend or husband to Jacqueline (his reticence concerning children notwithstanding). But there are several major problems I have with that as a resolution to Opportunity‘s story:

• First of all, it is a boring story to tell, and that’s coming from someone who acknowledges that Opportunity‘s story  COULD fairly be called “boring” as it stands. “A single woman gets a new partner who’s rich and nice and good-looking” simply doesn’t have very much to it in terms of narrative complexity.
• I feel it’s more than a little disrespectful to Jacqueline to act as though the best solution for getting her out of the bad situation a man left her in is to attach herself with all possible speed to a different man who happens to be nicer than the first man.
• I further feel that it would also pretty disrespectful to real-world sex workers to write a story that implies that the best-case scenario for people in their line of work is to give up said career and marry someone rich. While it’s certainly true that sometimes sex workers do begin conventional relationships with long-time clients, there are lots of good reasons to be skeptical of the idea. Just one being: if you have a job where you get paid to have sex with someone, how attractive does it sound to keep having sex with that same person but not get paid for it any more?
• Finally, it’s important to me that I be true to the fiction I established above. Jacqueline is portrayed as taking her new job as a sex worker seriously in how she seeks to keep her work and personal lives separate and in her eagerness to learn from Kate, a more experienced sex worker – the Jacqueline who is just dipping her toes into sex work to tide her over until she can snare a rich husband would be a much different character from the Jacqueline I’m trying to render.

The biggest gripe I have with the idea that Roman and Jackie should end up together is that, to the fullest extent that their provider-client relationship allows, they DO end up together. Roman is still Jackie’s primary client! They’re good friends, and have a lot of good times and good sex together! He just isn’t going to marry her or get her pregnant or get introduced to her parents. Does Roman love Jacqueline? Yes, of course he does, but I have long held that the truest kind of love is the love that persists despite the object of your affection being unable to fully return your feelings. Roman loves Jacqueline and wants her to be as happy as possible, and by the end of Opportunity he’s accepted that she’s happier with her freedom than she would be as his wife. For what it’s worth, Jacqueline also loves Roman – she just understands the same thing about her own happiness, and loves him for understanding her. Love looks like a lot of things, and has a lot of different outcomes!

One more subtle thing I tried to get across from chapter 3 onward is the effect that fashion-conscious Jacqueline is having on Roman’s own wardrobe. In chapters 1 and 2, Roman’s fashions are pretty basic – a drab sweater for casual wear, and a pretty safe dress-shirt-plus-vest ensemble for date night. By chapter 3, however, we can see Jacqueline’s love of vintage fashion has begun to rub off on him in his warm orange sweater, and in chapter 4 he’s looking great with his breezy springtime layers. You also have to appreciate what a whore he looks like in his clubwear in chapter 5. The silk pyjamas seen in the image above never actually made it into the game, which is a shame (in any scene where Roman might conceivably have been wearing pyjamas it simply made more sense for him to be fully nude), which is a shame because I think he looks great in them.

Olive

Characters have a way of sneaking up on you. In thinking about the evolution of the relationship between Jacqueline and Olive, I’m reminded of one of my favorite bits from romantic comedy anime Monthly Girl’s Nozaki-kun, in which young mangaka Nozaki and his assistant Mikoshiba play through a fluffy dating sim together and realize that their favorite character is not any of the romanceable young women, but is in fact the player character’s devoted best friend. Feeling it unfair that said best friend character doesn’t get a romance of his own, the two spontaneously decide to make a fan comic in order to give him one, quickly realizing that the only possible character they could pair him with… is the player character himself.

Olive is Jacqueline’s best friend and, hand to God, when I was first outlining Opportunity‘s story, that was where it stopped. Although I expected the two to fool around at some point (this being a porn game, after all), I saw her role being primarily that of validation and emotional support. Which, to be fair, Olive provides Jacqueline in spades – however, when someone provides you lots of validation and emotional support and you spend a lot of time together and you cook for her and your kids are already friends and you have a lot of the same interests and a deep level of emotional closeness and she’s exploring her sexuality at the same time that you’re exploring hers, well… when it came time for the much-awaited Utena-flavored hookup scene, I realized that there simply wasn’t any way that I could have Jackie and Olive go back to being “just good friends” while remaining honest to their respective characters. Like, genuinely, before I actually started writing that scene, I didn’t think that Jackie/Olive would be the endgame that it was, but the moment the idea entered my mind it was impossible to see things shaking out any other way.

This is also a continuation of the theme of love looking like a lot of things, of how there are a lot of different ways to love someone. Olive loves Jacqueline in a number of different ways, with different kinds of love coming to the fore as their relationship changes. At the start of the story, Olive treats Jacqueline with a love that is distinctly maternal – a shoulder to lean on, someone who can be depended on to pick up the slack with childcare and other errands. She’s thrilled when, after Jacqueline accepts Roman’s offer, she can return to expressing her love as a friend, as a peer with whom she can share experiences and anxieties and food and laughter, which likely isn’t a mode she’s been fully able to adopt ever since Rufus ran out. And then, in the middle of chapter 4, Olive gets her opportunity to fully express her love for Jacqueline as a lover, as someone who she wants to fuck and be fucked by and date and possibly even live with or marry someday. What’s important to recognize is that Olive WASN’T just biding her time until Jacqueline finally became available – she says as much in the afterglow:

J – I mean, I’m just so used to thinking of you as my best friend, you know? You’ve been my best friend FOREVER. It never occurred to me that you might want more.

O – Well, there’s wanting, and then there’s WANTING.

O – Like, sure, I wanted you all this time, but it’s not like I was crying myself to sleep every night without you.

O – This is more like… like winning the lottery!

O – Could I have lived out the rest of my life in perfect contentment without this happening? You bet! But now that it HAS happened, my life is even cooler!

I feel as though I ought to defang all of this high-minded talk about love by saying that I’m pretty sure another reason Olive wound up getting a far bigger role in the story than I initially planned was because I find her devastatingly attractive. As much as I’d like to say that I love all of Opportunity‘s characters equally, I personally think Olive is the hottest and it’s not even close. Pacha pretty much nailed her look right off the bat, with basically no need for any revisions, and she looks amazing in every single outfit we gave her. Is it any wonder I was looking for more ways to have her appear on-screen and in sex scenes?

For better or worse, Olive tends to factor heavily in reviews of Opportunity, getting brought up by name or description easily as much as Jackie or Roman, and typically in terms of her fatness. Mentions of her fatness tend to take one of three forms: either they’re from someone who is happy to see a prominent fat character in a romantic VN (you’re welcome!), or they’re from someone who finds the idea of fat people in any context disgusting (fuck off!), or they’re from someone who straddles the line by being shocked that they found a fat character sexually appealing (uh, great?). I’m honestly a little uncomfortable accepting any kind of accolades for Good Fat Representation just because the cast includes several people with bodies that aren’t either Skinny, Average, or Muscular. It’s just such a pathetically low bar to clear in terms of representing observable reality. None of Opportunity’s fat characters – Olive, Yasmin, and Shruthi – are larger than what’s considered “skinny fat”, meaning that although they’re visibly fat, they can still do most if not all of the things that people with smaller bodies can, like finding clothes that fit or fitting into seats on buses or airplanes. None of Opportunity‘s characters look the way they look due to any kind of forced diversity initiative, I was just genuinely putting in people who look like the people I see in my everyday life. It is, frankly, WEIRD that this is remarkable to anyone for any reason.

If there’s a silver lining to all the focus on Olive’s fatness, it’s that her Asian-ness seems to pass largely unremarked-upon. While I accept that this represents a failure on my part to bring that aspect of her character to the fore, at the end of the day I’d rather people be neutral on that subject than overtly racist about it. Perhaps it’s that she doesn’t have a particularly Asian-sounding name, although it’s not exactly uncommon for people born into Asian families and given Asian names to adopt second English-friendly names that they use in English-speaking contexts (Olive is third-generation Chinese-Vietnamese, if you’re curious). The fact that none of the characters in Opportunity have last names also definitely worked against me here, since someone’s family name can tell you a lot about their heritage. I think I lacked confidence that I could explicitly convey Olive’s racialized status without slipping into making said status feel either tokenized or fetishized (which is a constant concern with ANY non-white racial representation in a porn game). Olive’s look and fashion sensibilities were influenced heavily by fashion blogger and model Allison Teng.

If I were to do another game set in Opportunity‘s continuity, I would want it to focus on Olive. She’s a delight to write scenes for, with a sharp and impish sense of humor, a tremendously generous nature, and a backbone like a steel bar. I think she’d make a great Agatha-Christie-type consulting detective.

Clayton

Clayton owes his existence to televised cooking competitions. While I knew from the get-go that I wanted Olive to be married with a son Luca’s age, what her husband was like never factored in very heavily to my initial planning. He would simply always be coincidentally absent – away on business or something – with no plans to flesh him out beyond that. Luckily for Clayton, during the early stages of Opportunity‘s development I happened to binge all three currently-available seasons of The Great Canadian Baking Show with my best friend. (It’s an extraordinarily restful show – a wonderful counterpoint to more chaotic, cutthroat culinary competitions like Masterchef or Chopped, where everyone is generally very quaint and pleasant and all their creations look so nice.) In the third season, a biographical interlude about contestant Jodi Robson revealed that her husband worked as a professional wrestler, which immediately set my neurons aflame about how that was a GREAT career for keeping an otherwise-unobjectionable husband out of the way for months at a stretch.

Wrestling is a profession that demands frequent travel, all across (and often outside of) the country. It certainly CAN be well-paid at the upper echelons, but a lot of lesser-known talents make middle-class or even lower-middle-class wages (not to mention that many wrestling companies will nickel-and-dime their performers, sticking them with the bill for things like travel and accommodations). It’s also an athletic profession, meaning that it favors performers who are young and fit, and said performers’ careers could be cut interrupted at any moment by an injury, and at a certain level of athleticism injuries become inevitable. All in all, it’s a profession where if you’re lucky enough to attain some measure of genuine popularity and success it behooves you to ride it as far as you can, before the ride comes to a stop. I imagine Olive and Clayton likely had a lot of conversations about how long they would give Clayton’s career to start working, and likely even more conversations once said career DID start taking off.

I’m glad that Clayton managed to sneak in an actual appearance in chapter 5 – much as I was fastidious about keeping Jacqueline’s kids on-screen in order to reinforce that her relationship with them was an important thing that informed her character, I felt it was important to underscore that Olive, supportive and loving though she might be, does exist outside of her relationship with Jacqueline. It always strikes me as sad when “best friend” characters lack interests, history, or motivations beyond serving the needs of the protagonist, and getting to see Olive and Clayton acting like a happily-married couple is one of a few ways I tried to consciously work against that impression.

Clayton (wrestling under the name “Hurricane Clay”) had his appearance primarily based on real-life wrestling personality Xavier Woods, with a dash of Woods’ The New Day compatriots Big E and Kofi Kingston. I don’t actually follow professional wrestling, but a lot of my friends do, and The New Day’s trombone-driven antics were a frequent source of discussion. Also, Woods is an avid gamer, meaning that I had a slightly higher-than-average awareness of him due to how videos of him playing games would sometimes make their way onto sites like Polygon.

Sadly, we don’t get to learn much about Clayton outside of his career and his feelings towards Olive, which is a shame because from what little we do get to see of him, he seems like a pretty chill guy. If I were to ever return to do some kind of glossy HD remaster of Opportunity, I would definitely put some time into figuring out a lot more details about Clayton – his likes and dislikes, his sense of fashion, his passions outside of work, and definitely what his ring attire and persona were like. I felt bad that he’s never afforded the chance to fuck “on-camera” – he and Olive certainly had a lot of sex over the year that Opportunity takes place, but since Jacqueline is our point-of-view character and he can Olive weren’t in the habit of making sex tapes in the way that Juniper and Rose were, there was never any justification for Jackie to be privy to any of it. By way of consolation, I commissioned my dear friend Dieselbrain to create the above artwork of Clayton doing his utmost to give Olive a second son.

Theo

Finally, there’s Theo, Olive and Clayton’s son. I feel a little bad that Theo gets so little screentime, but when you come right down to it, Jacqueline is our point-of-view character and there’s very little reason in the story for her to spend a lot of time with her best friend’s seven-year-old son. Theo is sporty (he’s implied to be playing minor league hockey in a rep league, which is a league that demands tryouts and involves a lot of travelling for away games), and popular at school (he’s extroverted and has a moderately-famous pro wrestler for a father). Because Olive’s family has more disposable income than Jacqueline’s (prior to the start of the story, at least) Luka has to wait until going over to play with Luka in order to interact with any video game consoles. I like to imagine him being a good fit as a friend to Luka, although (like so many children forced to play together because their parents are friends) they likely had very little choice in the matter. Beyond this, I’m afraid Theo doesn’t get very much characterization. Sorry, little guy.

That does it for this portion of the Opportunity retrospective! Next time, we’ll move on to the rest of our major characters, focusing on Juniper, Rose, and Kate! Leave a comment if you have specific question about Opportunity or our approach to adult game development, and I’ll try to work it in! Thank you for reading! Please consider supporting my work by purchasing the game on Steam, Itch, or GOG! See you next time!

NEXT ESSAY IN THIS SERIES: Opportunity Retrospective Part 5: Juniper, Rose, and Kate

Subscribe to the RSS feed!