- Oct 24, 2018
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- Thread starter AVNSnax
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No, but you don't see the actual act. Just the events leading up to it and the consequences later. FWIW.
- Mar 10, 2024
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Fair enough! I didn't question the existence of people who'd behave like this, though. They sure do exist and it's a sad reality. I only prefer a bit more nuance in fictional characters and their conflicts. I appreciate that you use these flashbacks to let us understand Elliott's motivation at least, and I'm intrigued about her further development. I guess you do so with Kevin as well in that scene with his father. Again, it's a bit too on the nose for me, but that's just my preference.
Thanks for elaborating on this! I have to say that I have no experience at all in either Daz or Blender, but I had to do 3D modelling as part of my job training an eternity ago and I appreciate that it's a tough craft. And, yes, I did notice that your models look original! (Most games on this site I don't bother with when I see the faces of overused models in the screenshots.) You sure have gotten better at it - I'd say that Alex in her current form is hands down the best-looking transwoman model in any AVN I've played. So, keep up the good work!This is my first VN. I had to learn Daz, Blender, Ren'Py, and python all at once and get much better with my Adobe app skills (which I've dropped now due to, well, Adobe). One of my original design goals was to avoid using stock models for the main characters, and I honestly should have taken more time at the beginning to flesh them out. Except for Zoey, who is a very minor alteration of Ziggie, the rest of the models are not ones you'd find for purchase. How many times have you seen VNs with Michael or Victoria slapped in main roles? One VN I saw recently had Michael in two different roles, where the only difference was their hair and clothing. I'm still a work-in-progress...I think I've gotten better in later chapters, but still appreciate the feedback. Thanks!
* I guess I was bugged by the models because this game drew my attention to it mainly because of them! Maybe it's some of the angles that you use with the camera that are a bit unfortunate. And I really do have an extreme distaste of the Habsburg jaw... ;-)
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- Jul 16, 2018
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I'm currently at chapter 5, and I have to say, dehumanizing people who don't agree with transgenders is just as bad as people dehumanizing transgenders. The way you portray both Kevin and his father is well beyond caricatures. I would greatly urge you to make them look like normal/average people. As they are currently portrayed, it is incredibly detrimental to the strength and seriousness of the story.
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- Feb 23, 2020
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The sad thing is they are normal people. Kevin might be obsessed. But is father is not, he simply play a smaller role. We are told the story through Alex's perspective even if we don't only follow her around. As such what transpire of Kevin and his father are the aspects of their personality that are the most important to Alex and how those two act with her. Kevin likes to train and be on top, he likes the idea of being an alpha male. It might be something his father transmitted him. something he himself got from his father etc. They might like go fishing or hunting or even simply going on
Find someone that hate you and I mean really hate you. Try and see how you interact with them.
By the way I learned not long ago how shockingly short and basic is cop training in the US. That is not points in favor of the cops in this game.
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- Apr 26, 2017
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Don't agree? The moron literally attacks Alex and her sister and much worse later on. His portrayal is on par with this new real life wave of fascists and their hatred over transgender people. Kevin is the average transphobic out there.
- Feb 25, 2024
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I understand your perspective and acknowledge that my viewpoint is limited. Since I don't have much interaction with transgender individuals, I'm approaching this game with an open mindset, viewing it as something outside my personal experience. Because of that, I accept behaviors that might otherwise seem unusual to me, as I don't have enough experience to evaluate them critically. This approach helps me build more empathy as I expand my understanding.
- Jul 16, 2018
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To clarify, the models of Kevin and his father are downright terrible. I assume this was done on purpose. It's like movies with gangsters being played by foreigners on purpose made to look ugly and unfriendly, or Nazis being played as 100% evil people.
Impact comes with story telling where the characters are people you can identify with... or worse, where you feel like you yourself could be in the position of being a bad person.
As it currently stands, it doesn't lead to introspection or awareness in the players whether they themselves might also harbour negative feelings against certain (groups of) people, in this case transgenders.
Impact comes with story telling where the characters are people you can identify with... or worse, where you feel like you yourself could be in the position of being a bad person.
As it currently stands, it doesn't lead to introspection or awareness in the players whether they themselves might also harbour negative feelings against certain (groups of) people, in this case transgenders.
- Feb 23, 2020
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It is a good thing if you can't identify with Kevin & Co but I can assure you some people do. I could go ahead and give you an example from the ongoing political campaign in the US, but it would inevitably derail the thread and would be against forum rules. If you want said example feel free to DM me.
When someone is a threat to your life you stop interpreting and relating to them the same way as anyone else. The goal of the story here, I think, is to show the perspective from a trans person. It is not to make the jerks feel relatable because to Alex they really are not.
I have never read a story about a person seemingly normal slowly transforming in a transphobe zealot, but I bet such a story does exist somewhere and mustn't be pretty. The end result of said story would be Kevin. Sure if you take only the small part of Kevin's hypothetical story where he is the current him you won't find him relatable either anyways. To get to this point would take a whole book and here it is not his story.
Sometime people really are unrelatable. It's not even always the evil and violent ones either. It can be the anxious one, the funny one or the lofty one. They are simply not life threatening so your brain doesn't react the same way to them. You know that even if you don't find them realistic someone somewhere like that is bound to exist.
Edit: The people who made most of the (almost) modern WWII movies are either the kids of the generation that went to war or their grand kids so to them the Nazis behavior in their movies is pretty close to what they lived even if indirectly. They robed them of family members. To them the nazis truly where evil and even in caricature seeing what they did in their time those caricatures don't seem to be far from reality.
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- Jul 16, 2018
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But, this is what not only perpetuates rivalry and hostility, it in fact exacerbates it.
By demonizing 'the other' and attributing negative traits to them, it becomes increasingly difficult for people from different groups to empathize and understand one another.
You can see this clearly in many places in the world: Muslims vs Jews, Shiites vs Sunnis, and in the US republicans vs democrats. The result? People stay in their own bubbles and learn to hate 'the other group'. It's propaganda and indoctrination which prevents people from coming together.
It is very easy to hate a vague/unknown group of people, but it is a lot harder to hate an individual of 'the other group' after getting to know them. Even talking to someone for 5 minutes makes you notice they are in fact 90% the same as you, with the same problems, worries, and insecurities. We just have to allow ourselves to open up to the idea that 'the other' is not some irredeemable monster, but just another human being who disagrees with us on certain topics.
By demonizing 'the other' and attributing negative traits to them, it becomes increasingly difficult for people from different groups to empathize and understand one another.
You can see this clearly in many places in the world: Muslims vs Jews, Shiites vs Sunnis, and in the US republicans vs democrats. The result? People stay in their own bubbles and learn to hate 'the other group'. It's propaganda and indoctrination which prevents people from coming together.
It is very easy to hate a vague/unknown group of people, but it is a lot harder to hate an individual of 'the other group' after getting to know them. Even talking to someone for 5 minutes makes you notice they are in fact 90% the same as you, with the same problems, worries, and insecurities. We just have to allow ourselves to open up to the idea that 'the other' is not some irredeemable monster, but just another human being who disagrees with us on certain topics.
- Feb 23, 2020
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I agree with you, but if it was that simple all your examples would already be solved. Someone is benefiting from those rivalries. They have all the incentive to perpetuate them. Even if you wanted to sympathise with the other and do education and engage conversation if they are coming at you with a baseball bat you can't do that.
Alex here would be all to willing to just talk with Kevin and be on her way doing her thing. Kevin is the one interfering with that and it is only escalating. How would you deal with that? Present the other cheek? Yeah it's an option. You might find that it wont stop. He wont stop abusing and harassing Alex. The only way is to condemn him. Find someone else more willing to listen to your plea that the other side is also willing to talk to. Mediation is sometime the only way and even that doesn't always work. Justice is a hard to find and precious commodity.
If you want to talk about groups and representation of those groups. To Kevin Alex is the embodiment of the other group for him there is no conversation to be had. He himself is not willing to stop. At this point, it would be victim blaming to put the responsibility of engaging a conversation on Alex.
The more he got away with the bolder he got and the less respect he got for Alex and women in general. If you want a less extreme male character that did make bad choices but is mustering the courage to face the consequences look at Brad. He is stopping being a kid and becoming an adult by owning his actions. In your argument about groups that are facing each other you could say he is the one willing to talk, make peace and pay his toll. The difference between Kevin and Brad is something you can focus on to understand that the ugliness of Kevin is his own alone.
I understand that you would have liked a more nuanced character in Kevin, but Looking at him at the start of the story and at the current state, he did not start that extreme. He started out as a Jerk that liked to tower over others and bully them. Getting away with it he got more daring and bolder each time. He chose Alex as his victime since prejudice against Alex ment that the "right" people where dismissive of her. He could bully her without consequences and live his twisted, perverted desires. That is his vilain origin story. It is a simple and mundane one but that is the point. It is a story that happens all the time too often.
By the way his desires could have been lived in a more wholesome and healthy way if the persons surrounding him did not reject those either, but that is an other conversation. Lets just say that he is as complex as he needs to be to represent the threat that he is and as simple as he needs to be to be identifiable in other people you can interact with in your life and maybe influence him to not become the monster that he is at the end.
I tried to convince myself not to wade into this, but here's my take. And I mean all of this respectfully.
I'm not quite sure what the motivation is for this debate. Much as I'd like to, I can't fit War and Peace in a 10GB adult visual novel, when it's spoonfed to the viewer a couple of sentences at a time. I shied away from giving the antagonists full background stories for a variety of reasons. I'm already accused daily of being "woke" and "pushing an agenda." This story was always meant to be a sympathetic introduction to the transgender experience for those who don't encounter it in their daily lives. Especially here, where the term "futa" has been misused so often that people now seem to think that it is the accepted synonym for "transgender." The only "preaching" I've done is to say "don't be a dick." I didn't spend any time at all exploring why the husband is the lying cheat that he is, especially since it's implied that he was a liberal activist in college. I didn't say why Izzy leads on Chris for so long for no apparent gain. I did offer some clues to the backgrounds of some characters like Elliott and Brad (and in chapter 10, Kevin and Zoey) but not for the purposes of explaining why they believe the way they do, only peripherally why they do what they do.
On top of all that, I'm not a celebrated author of fiction. And it's not like I can just turn on a dime and change the story, given it's taken me a little over two years to get this far. As much as you might think it's amateurish (which I'll cop to) or preachy (which I won't), in the end I'm an amateur writer. The story/script for this AVN was written over two years ago and I've been spending all of this time creating renders and spit-polishing the UI for a system that was brand new to me when I started. I'm sorry that the antagonists don't have the depth you think they deserve, but frankly, I disagree strongly that it was necessary. If I know that someone hates me to the core of their being, it ultimately doesn't matter why. I can't change their opinion, and knowing why they hate me doesn't, and won't, change anything. A brutish rapist doesn't deserve any sympathy in my eyes, and slapping a "they're just evil" label on them won't cause me to lose any sleep.
The confines of an AVN force you to cut corners in the story-telling process, much like movie adaptations don't have the depth of the books they represent. The bad guys are bad. Yes, cartoonishly so sometimes. I could have done a better job, but you can say that about anything. The point was not to justify their beliefs or ellicit sympathy for their characters, but to provide insuperable obstacles for the actual story: showing the evolution of a transgender woman coming into her own.
wit all my respect for you good work and efforts,....next game pls,pls.make the trans or futa mc dick bigger,...much bigger..
- Mar 10, 2024
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I think both arguments from Aurelius Ambrosius and AVNSnax are valid. My comment hinted in a similar direction as Aurelius', though I certainly didn't want to make this a "sine qua non" argument, but rather a personal statement of preference. In the end, I still enjoy the story for the most part and skip through the scenes I don't like.
What I will say is that the story in itself is told consistently in terms of its subjects and it aligns perfectly with the vision that AVNSnax outlined. It's hard to critize any piece of media for what it doesn't try to be, after all. I also don't perceive it as "preachy" or "woke"*. "Confusion" isn't a moral tale, it's a tale about survival in a hostile environment and whether that would lead the MC into doing good or evil herself - the game doesn't judge either path.
*Well, I guess for some people the mere existence of a transgender MC that is not primarily fetishized is grounds enough for calling it woke, but those folks could do with a reality check.
What I will say is that the story in itself is told consistently in terms of its subjects and it aligns perfectly with the vision that AVNSnax outlined. It's hard to critize any piece of media for what it doesn't try to be, after all. I also don't perceive it as "preachy" or "woke"*. "Confusion" isn't a moral tale, it's a tale about survival in a hostile environment and whether that would lead the MC into doing good or evil herself - the game doesn't judge either path.
*Well, I guess for some people the mere existence of a transgender MC that is not primarily fetishized is grounds enough for calling it woke, but those folks could do with a reality check.
- Mar 10, 2024
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NB
This has got to be the most wholesome comment I've read on this forum.
And this is a strong contender for the stupidest.
- Apr 26, 2020
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Developer please don't do this, because it will end up turning Alex into just another generic trans protagonist, like in other generic trans games
- Oct 24, 2018
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Re-read their comment, the request is for a big dicked futa in the dev's next game (which you can still think is a dumb request
)
- Oct 28, 2022
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honestly, this organ is big enough..any bigger and I think it'll be hard to identify with our heroine.