This is third of ten essays contained within the second issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology, an experimental collection of longform writing that seeks to expand the breadth of critical discourse around adult games and adult game culture. I will be re-publishing the web versions of all essays from the first two issues of the anthology to this blog over the course of the next few months, but if you’d like to support the creation of more high-quality writing about adult games the full anthology is available for purchase on Itch! Anthology logo by Pillow!

Written By: Lynn “wintermute” Robinson

I enjoy playing Tales of Androgyny. It is a well illustrated porn game with Visual-Novel-style dialogue and a surprisingly deep combat system that leads into evocative sex scenes. The majority of fuckable NPCs within the game are large, voluptuous women sporting equally large penises. The outcomes of the dialogue and combat systems determine whether they end up fucking your player character (“PC”) or being fucked by them, as well as who is “leading the action”. As a trans woman who is sexually interested in other women, these characters are unsurprisingly appealing to me. I enjoy the sex scenes, although what keeps me coming back to the game as it continues development are the engaging systems and the fantasy of inhabiting the world. The game allows some level of character customization, and so I tend to play Tales of Androgyny the same way I do Corruption of Champions (“CoC”), or games like Fallout or Skyrim: I make my character into a facsimile of myself, and role-play as if I were inhabiting that world.Though not particularly fine-grained, the character customization does facilitate this style of play through renaming the PC, picking their facial characteristics, skin tone, hair color, and the sizes of body parts. You cannot pick your gender, notably, nor can you pick your genitals like you can in CoC. Though I am unbothered by the mandatory penis and solitary hole, the lack of gender selection is where I begin to experience friction in my desired role-play.

Though the game tracks a number of metrics about your character (the amount of times you’ve topped, or been fucked in various holes, or your current level of cum inflation), there’s no variable shown to the player for gender category. A PC with “Fun” sized boobs and a “Girly” face is treated the same as a PC with a “Flat” chest and “Masculine” looks: they are both Androgynous, hence the name of the game. What this means is that, to other characters, you are always seen as effeminate and therefore fuckable, but if another character reads you as a woman, then they simply must not have witnessed the counterevidence of your penis. As a trans woman trying to inhabit my player character, this confounds me in two ways. The first is simply that this is not how I want to be seen or treated. For myself and my loved ones, as well as implicitly for anyone who sees me truly as a trans woman, the technical existence of my penis does not negate or revoke my womanhood. To roleplay the opposite scenario is not particularly pleasant.

The second way that this orientation towards the player character confounds me is that the same does not hold true for the other characters in the game! As mentioned earlier, most encounters in the game are with undoubted women with evident penises. If the gender of one of these characters is ever challenged, it might only be through the observation that she is “a woman with a manhood.” The penis, in her case, might still be treated as masculine, as a sign of dominance, but not as evidence of maleness. It’s a double standard! My player character is allowed to have boobs and hips as large as theirs, and a face just as feminine, but those characters are treated as women with penises, and my PC is treated as something else.

That something else, I’d argue, is a “sissy,” or a “femboy.” Both terms are used to refer to an overlapping set of subjects: a person or character with purposeful markers of femininity such as attire and demeanor, as well as indications of what may have once been referred to as “a male body,” such as a penis, sometimes a flat chest or broad shoulders. “Femboy” is a term I first heard used to refer to characters, often in anime. Anime femboys are characterized by skirts and “cute” clothes, often long hair, faces so pretty they don’t need makeup, and “effeminate” or “unmasculine” voices that mark them as not quite women, but perhaps better at feminine pursuits or stronger in feminine wiles than their female compatriots. Anime femboys are not women, but are distinguished from anime girls more by that technical fact alone than by significant differences in archetype. Anime femboys aren’t men either, not because they aren’t male, but because they’re an archetype of their own, practically their own gender category. A femboy, then, is someone whose gender matters, either because it is up for debate, because it is a matter of deception, or because their most appropriate gender category simply is “femboy” itself.

“Sissy”, on the other hand, is a term I first heard in real porn. “Real porn” here meaning “porn composed of depictions of the real, of photographs or video,” as opposed to cartoons or hentai, which I’d call “illustrated porn.” A sissy, in my experience, is a feminized subject. As stated before, sissies and femboys both share purposeful markers of femininity and indicators of masculinity. Whereas a femboy’s attire is a declaration or rejection of archetype, category, gender, a sissy tends to wear their markers of femininity as a history. A sissy done up in full makeup has been done to, has been feminized either by herself or by a dominant party. Sissy fetishism in my experience is a fetish of submission, of being acted upon and changed or remade. The feminine markers on the masculine body are evidence of transformation, of either forced feminization, or of willing adoption of femininity-as-submission, ready for a dominant partner.

Typically, at least in real porn, this dominant partner is a man. If markers of femininity are standing as proxy for submissiveness, then it stands to reason that the sissy’s complement would be a masculine figure, where the signs of masculinity are a proxy for dominance. Returning to Tales of Androgyny, though, and abandoning the constraints of the real, we see this paradigm challenged, though not overthrown. Dominant partners in Tales of Androgyny are almost exclusively women, whose “signs of masculinity” are simply their “alpha” attitudes and their penises. The womanhood of these characters is practically never questioned within the text, outside unelaborated observation of their “manhoods.” These characters represent a third pornographic archetype, the “futanari,” who is in complement and opposition to the other two addressed.

“Futanari,” literally meaning “dual form” in Japanese¹, is a word with a centuries-old history, though its modern usage as the archetype we’re concerned with originates with the interplay of Japanese anime of the 90s and imports into English-speaking markets. The commonality between uses of the term in hentai from the 90s to today is that it always refers to a girl with a penis. One can find arguments online as to whether a “futanari” must necessarily have a vulva and vagina in addition to a penis, and whether it ought to be tucked under the balls, or whether the balls must also be present or not. In all cases, the futanari always has a penis, and she is always still a girl or woman either “except” her penis or “despite” it. Importantly, the futanari rarely has a history. If you ask her how she got her penis, the answer may be “magic” or it may be “I don’t know, I’ve always had it.” The question you never ask a futanari, though, is “how did you become a girl?” That would be missing the point. Just as she is unquestionably a woman, she may have as well always been one, or been a girl before she was a woman, and nothing else before that.

The ahistoricity of the futanari and her womanhood reproduce a framework of understanding gender as something that can be played with but not ultimately transformed. Though the futanari, in the totality of illustrated porn, has been paired with any number of partners in any number of configurations, the futanari archetype as deployed in Tales of Androgyny fills a very particular role. She is a sex object meant to appeal to those attracted to women, who has inscribed on her body a tool of dominance which hints at what she wants and denotes what she’s good for. She is very appealing to someone who wishes to explore the sexual space of being dominated, while remaining within their comfort zone of the gender of their partners. For a straight man, inscribed on the body of the dominant futanari is a very simple roadmap: she’s going to fuck you. If the notion of being fucked is destabilizing to your understanding of gender roles, don’t worry, she’s got wide hips and fat tits. If the futanari were allowed to have a history, if we could ask “how did you become a woman,” and if she could answer, then she loses this utility as a sex object and exploration tool.

Why then is the sissy allowed to have a history? Far from being contradictory, the archetype of the sissy actually reinforces this framework from the other side. The masculine signifiers inscribed on the body of the sissy are inescapable. As much as the sissy is able to forsake or abandon manhood, as much as she is able to become feminine-as-in-fuckable, she does not through her feminization become a woman. This is the style of sissy we see in Tales of Androgyny. Both recruitable NPC followers in the game are made of the same archetype as the PC. “Kylira” and “Trudy” are both referred to with “they” pronouns by the narrator for as long as their sex remains ambiguous. Once either of them spring an erection, though, they then ask your character if you knew they were “actually a man,” and the narrator begins to use “he” pronouns instead. Despite the narrator voice recognizing gender ambiguity, gender for these NPCs is never an independent metric, not an internal identity, but a subservient truth to be determined and revealed by genital characteristics.

By reinforcing the sissy’s penis as a disqualifier of womanhood, we assure the straight audience that they need not be scared of exploring “androgyny,” because they cannot “go over the deep end” as it were. Through the lens of a straight male subject, it’s okay to play the sissy, and it’s okay to be fucked by big dicked futanari, because they will never not be women, and you will never be. When this is our goal, to produce and reproduce this hard line, it Becomes acceptable or even necessary to hold true the contradiction that the sissy’s penis disqualifies her womanhood but the futanari’s penis does not.

The futanari’s womanhood is self-evident, proven by her feminine body, but even when my player character’s body is identically feminine, the role of woman that I’d like to play is inaccessible to me. The contradiction of Tales of Androgyny is that the game is both for me and not for me. As a trans woman who plays porn games, I know trans women who play porn games, and there’s no doubt in my mind that the option to give the PC huge boobs is there to cater to players like me, seeking t4t fantasy wish fulfillment. But at the same time, the writing throughout the game tells me my character is androgynous, a “he,” that the role of woman is to be played by non-player-characters, that the narrative ideology of the text needs my player character to be something else. I enjoy playing Tales of Androgyny. I don’t think it is intrinsically bad that it leans so heavily on well-worn character archetypes. I think that gives it its legibility, its spirit and its appeal. But it is a strange experience to play, as a trans woman, where I do believe the creators know I exist, but the writing of the game and the authorial voice inscribe a perfect circle around me, with rigid lines, needing to pretend that I do not.

Lynn “wintermute” Robinson is a Sex & Gender Studies scholar with an emphasis in Queer Studies, as well as a longtime enthusiast in games, porn and porn games. Her area of interest in both cases are the structures we create with the words we use to describe each other, and how we (re)create ourselves within those structures.

¹Leupp, Gary P. (1995). Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan

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