Hungover00
Engaged Member
- Apr 29, 2023
- 2,626
- 3,243
Well said.My personal view is that for some reason EvaKiss just wanted to write fetishy "guilt-ridden" content for Lena. Her male LIs outside of Ian are an exploration of a different "dark" facets of her character. Robert is her wanting to just use other people for sex without caring about them, Mike is her vengefully wanting to feel like a woman other men would cheat on their SOs for, Axel and Seymour are her just wanting to give up and accept being given a subservient and abused role.
Ian's LIs feel so much better because their relationships are written like relationships, if you pursue them then the writing shows why their characters are desirable, why Ian wants to be in a relationship with them and engage with them as people. Lena's relationships with her male LIs on the other hand are written purely as a way of furthering some angle of the "corruption" of Lena's character, the writing is purely about how being with these men makes Lena feel about herself (usually conflicted feelings), rarely any personal details about their characters and about their lives is given any focus, much less is it ever used to develop a positive thing about them.
Idk why EK went with that direction for the general design of Lena's story, like some people said maybe it was to push people towards the "canon" IanxLena stuff, but I kinda get the feeling this is just a type of fetish narrative EK just likes to write for her female characters because she thinks it is more erotic than different flavors of more healthy and functional relationships.
I've never felt like I was the main intended audience for EK, as that seems to be the cloud of cheating fetish content you succinctly described, but a lot of the other content is good enough to ignore all those paths until I've played my preferred paths.
I feel like EK wrote the Ian/Lena romance well, and had that as the platonic core of the story. But their real interest was in how many different ways it could go wrong, or be twisted and poisoned by the actions, choices, and internal weaknesses of the two MCs. And that's the juice and squeeze EK is really here for. Which leads to all the fetish cheating and betrayals and cuck content. But by pursuing both aspects it makes balancing the whole difficult.
That said, it's still one of the best games on the site, and GGGB was also a seminal game in the history of AVNs. (Even if we didn't really need the 'fuck your own mom and Anderson Cooper in extreme fetish club' plotline.)