​I’ll state right at the top that a significant motivator for the writing of this post is simply to push Tourney of Tyranny Part 1​ back into visibility for my audience. I’ll admit that here and now: this is a marketing exercise. As much as Tourney of Tyranny​ is a labour of love, it’s also a product that cost money for me to create, and the more money I make back from the sales of said product, the easier it is for me to justify continuing to make products like it. 

However, I’d also like to take this opportunity to write a little bit about WHY I’m bothering to perform this kind of exercise, when in the past I’ve tended to let our releases speak for themselves. The short answer: Tourney of Tyranny, due to the Payment-Processor-Unfriendly nature of its sexual content, needs extra conscious support in order to receive the same visibility our other projects enjoy.

You might have noticed this in Tourney of Tyranny’s page copy, but I’m even being coy about the nature of said sexual content (hereafter referred to as “The Kink”) because there are many documented instances of crowdfunding platforms like Patreon stalking the social feeds of people using their services and denying them said services for off-platform violations. Our Patreon income is pretty insignificant at the moment, but with things as dire as they are at the moment in terms of ways you can make money from pornography, it pays to be circumspect. Suffice it to say that The Kink is frequently characterized by glowing eyes, swirly pupils, and characters being compelled by some mixture of fantastical powers, weird science, or made-up pheromones into performing acts that they might not otherwise have performed. We all know what’s being referred to now, yes?

The Kink is a favorite boogeyman of payment processors, which makes it a frequent target of purges from just about every platform it’s hosted on. I’ve mentioned that it’s not uncommon for Patreon to nuke entire accounts not merely for uploading content related to it, but even for posting content related to it on non-Patreon platforms like Twitter. Roleplay based on The Kink is disallowed on sites like OnlyFans and Fansly, and creators who post content implying that they might be under the malign influence of a wizard or warlock risk having their accounts shuttered. It’s even risky on Pornhub, where sexual ASMR roleplayers have had audio files purged because they were based on The Kink. This has been going on for years, well before this summer’s acceleration on this front.

What makes The Kink the target of such animus for the moneyed puritans currently attempting to strangle all noncomformist artistic expression from the face of the Earth? Well, what makes it ATTRACTIVE as a target is that it’s a relatively-niche kink that bonks up against ideas of consent, which makes it kind of icky to defend if you don’t know how to set your feet. But as for the WHY: it’s because that there are a non-zero number of people who believe that The Kink is something that exists in real life – that it is literally possible to override a person’s free will via demonic powers or government brainwashing – and there is a higher-than-average concentration of those people in the groups that control the majority of western money and media. I know this sounds ridiculous, because it IS ridiculous, but these are ridiculous times. There’s a dang Cheeto in the White House for Pete’s sake!!!!

One more quick digression before moving on: I said in the last paragraph that The Kink is “relatively-niche”, and while I think that’s TECHNICALLY true in that I think the pool of people who would whole-heartedly identify as enjoying The Kink by name is relatively small, I think it’s also true that most romance and erotica employs language and ideas core to the central appeal of The Kink. Don’t believe me? Consider this sampler platter of tropes and tell me if any of them look familiar:

  • A character has a piercing gaze that’s difficult to look away from
  • A character’s presence is described as being ‘intoxicating’, or ‘like a drug’
  • A character laments that she ‘just can’t stay away’ from another character she knows intellectually is bad for her
  • Characters have two glasses of wine and suddenly their secret desires race to the fore
  • Something a character does with their body – dancing, massage, fucking, etc – is described as being inappropriate but too pleasurable/captivating to resist

​Gee whillikers! It sure seems like abdication/revokation of full consent under some vague, supernatural expression of charisma is actually pretty common and widely-enjoyed! It sure seems like that kind of fictional move only becomes Bad & Evil through the magic spell of identifying it under the specific title of The Kink! Weird! Strange!

Itch, The Kink, And BP Games

Work on Tourney of Tyranny actually began in late 2023, when I first got in touch with Blueparikeet​ about banging out a bunch of quick character concept sketches for a silly idea I couldn’t get out of my head. This wasn’t even an official BP Games Project at this point, so I paid for the sketches out of my own pocket (rather than from the company account). I then sat on said sketches for over a year, until Monstrous Liberation launched in the springtime and I found myself desperate for a different creative outlet. I banged out the first part of ToT, sent it to Blueparikeet, he liked it, and we were rolling. Although the original concept for ToT had been as some kind of webcomic, I had been inspired by Taylor Titmouse​’s success in the erotic illustrated light novel format, particularly as Taylor was someone who came to light novels from comics. My experience making Tits Detective was that comics are VERY difficult to write for (you’ve got absurdly limited space to work with) and are VERY expensive if you aren’t also an artist yourself. Making ToT as an illustrated light novel would let me write as much as I liked while also saving money on art costs, as the art budget could be devoted to illustrating just a few key moments. This move really paid off – despite being a much longer product, ToTP1 cost significantly less to produce than Tits Detective #1.

The Kink is something I’ve enjoyed personally for a while, but I think you can also see ideas related to The Kink through the entirety of the BP Games body of work. As Above/So Below contained several dreamlike sequences in which the main character envisioned herself having sex with multiple people she’d just met, with the implication that these visions were the result of some outside influence. Opportunity: A Sugar Baby Story has multiple instances wherein the main character feels as though she’s surrendering control of herself during periods of intense, overwhelming lust. And, of course, Monstrous Liberation is a story that interfaces VERY directly with the idea of magical control of character actions, although it should be pointed out that MonLib’s brand of magical control is an extremely knowing INVERSION of The Kink. In Monstrous Liberation, the Threads of Compulsion (besides being a fairly on-the-nose visual metaphor for overt authoritarianism) are very frequently depicted as IMPEDING a character’s ability to express themselves sexually, or to even access their sexuality at all. The main character of Monstrous Liberation’s mission is literally to dispel the signifiers of The Kink so that sex can happen unobstructed.

Tourney of Tyranny is a much more straightforward exploration of The Kink, though it’s not without its own twist. Namely: Lilith Lacrimosa, main character of Tourney of Tyranny, does not know that she has the powers that she does. Fictionally, Lilith has been injected with an alien implant that, whenever she gets especially horny, causes anyone she makes eye contact with to become insatiably, uncontrollably horny for her. Lilith does not know that this is the case – in much the same way that her sexual partners give themselves post-facto justifications for their uncharacteristic behaviour, so too does Lilith. For me, this is the secret sauce to having a character who IS fundamentally circumventing the ability of her sexual partners to fully consent but who you still want to come across as sympathetic and likeable. In so many other works concerning The Kink, the main characters are aware of their powers, which tends to limit the ways in which they can be characterized – either they don’t care at all about the people they exercise their powers upon (making them sociopaths) or they DO care but have convinced themselves that they know what’s best for everyone (still making them sociopaths, but also naive and condescending). You CAN tell interesting stories with these characters, but the market is pretty saturated and things get boring quick.

My plan for distribution of ToTP1 had been to offer it directly via Itch, but obviously following the content crackdown that’s no longer feasible. Even if content that directly advertises itself as being related to The Kink wasn’t very likely to get banned, the ongoing delisting of paid adult products would still severely limit its ability to find new audiences. And so, after checking with a friend who works on Itch’s support staff, I arrived at the admittedly-not-ideal compromise of offering an unpaid preview version here that would direct people to the full, paid version available on Subscribestar. More on how that’s worked out below.

It’s Worked Out Bad (So Far)

​As you can see, so far sales of our first-ever illustrated light novel have not exactly been popping off. Despite my worried little avatar in the corner there, this was somewhat expected. There are a number of factors at play here:

  • Most of our audience on Itch​ and Bluesky​ (which is where I’ve been doing all the promo for ToTP1) follows us for games, not light novels. There’s a certain number of followers who ARE interested in writing (having followed us for reasons related to the Adult Analysis Anthology), but there’s no guarantee of those people converting into sales for a fictional offering.
  • As mentioned, The Kink is somewhat niche. This means that there’s a smaller pool of people who are definitely into what’s being offered, and a large number of people who might balk at The Kink because they aren’t into it for any number of valid reasons.
  • This is the big one: due to the nature of The Kink, I cannot clearly market ToTP1 as being a work of The Kink without risking any number of crackdown actions. This means that people who ARE interested in The Kink cannot find it.
  • Although the current free-version-linking-to-paid-version compromise works to get us SOME visibility on ToTP1, there’s no getting around the fact that the more discrete steps a potential customer has to take in order to purchase something, the lower the likelihood of them actually completing the purchase becomes.
  • ToTP1 launched in the holiday season, when people have a lot of demands on their money (and during an economic recession, when money is tight all round).

All of this is on top of the fact that I was always expecting this to be something I’d need to slowly build an audience for in the first place. That’s why there’s that second bar on the graph​ – as nice as it would have been to have our first-ever light novel do 50 Shades Of Grey numbers, I’d be happy with a few dozen, just enough to show that there’s interest that can be built upon. One thing I’ve learned after almost a decade of making art independently is that your ability to succeed is very strongly tied to your ability to stubbornly stick around and keep putting out work you’re proud of until enough people discover it. Very literally: if you build it, they will come.

I also see Tourney of Tyranny (and BP Games’s entire body of work really, but especially ToT) as a bet on a better world manifesting in the not-so-distant future. I firmly believe that the institutions of puritan fascism are far more rickety than their adherents would like us to believe, and that they are overdue a collapse. As stressful and frightening as the back half of 2025 has been as a porn creator, I also have to say that I have never in my life seen porn, sexual expression, and free speech being so widely understood, championed, and defended as I have in the past few months. I do think it’s very possible that in the next few years we might see payment processors relent in their quiet campaigns against jacking off, allowing platforms to once again let people sell material that people want to buy, including and exceeding material related to The Kink. And when that happens, we’ll have a bunch of stuff ready to launch.

However, until the day that better world manifests, I would like to very earnestly ask that you give Tourney of Tyranny a try​ and to please consider purchasing the full 34-page version from Subscribestar​. I understand that not everybody is into The Kink, and that’s fine, but if you like my writing (and, given that you’ve read this far into this post, you probably do, please believe me that it’s got some of my favorite writing I’ve ever done. I actually just last week finished writing the rough draft of Part 2, and it’s even longer and better than Part 1. As much as it is very much a pornographic work, I think it’s also really funny. I really enjoy writing for Lilith. Blueparikeet’s art is phenomenal, and I can’t wait for him to get to illustrate some of the stuff that’s in Part 2. It costs eight dollars, which is not very much money at all. 40 sales, the number I’d like to hit for this first part, is the same as just 1% of our combined total followers on Itch and Bluesky. That feels achievable to me!

Again, I understand that money’s tight all around, and that I’m fundamentally not any more deserving of your hard-earned cash than anyone else. However, if you enjoy the work we do here and would like to support the creation of a project that I’m personally very fond of, please consider purchasing it! I’m going to keep working on it regardless, but it would make MY holiday season quite a bit brighter to see it get some more love!

Thank you for reading! Happy holidays!

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