This is sixth of nine essays contained within the first 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: Callisto Jupiter-Four
None of my favorite erotic games are really queer. Most of them have girls fucking each other. Some of them have trans people. But none of them actually talk about queer experiences or depict queer life. At best, they’re a sort of generic chose-your-own-gender Everyone Is Bi procgen fuckscape. Usually, they’re male-centric, male-dominant narratives where trans people don’t exist and women only fuck each other to appeal to a male audience. A lot of the games I’ve spent hours jerking off to express a worldview that is roundly misogynistic in a way I struggle to square with my enjoyment of them as a queer woman.
There’s erotic games that are explicitly queer. There’s Hardcoded. There’s a solid majority of itch.io VNs. People on Twitter keep telling me to read Coquette Dragoon. I know these games exist; I have played several of them. And yet somehow I did not like them. I don’t intend to put any of them in particular on trial, here, because I think the devs still deserve to have more money, but I have played them and they haven’t done it for me.