You make some very good points here! I suppose there is a certain amount of misogyny in any AVN from certain perspectives, because the plot requires the LIs to actually be, yknow, LIs, and it's pretty unrealistic and fantasy-fulfilling that multiple women would fall for some random schlub of a protagonist, especially as quickly as most of these games have it happen. But that's part of the fantasy fulfillment, right? So while I am positive that some people would see misogyny there, I personally don't find that fantasy misogynistic in and of itself. Lack of realism, in my opinion, is not problematic on it's own. That's the whole point of escapism, after all.I think in an ideal world we are equals and there's mutual respect, but I feel wherever sex work is involved there's always some exploitation, basically what MC says to Hana. I don't think such an establishment could really work completely fairly, and a lot of that is due to the nature of the patrons - there's a lot of assholes out there, way too many, and even if it's all saints in management if you're a business you can't just do business with respectful, nice guys and people will regularly get hurt. People are individuals, there's various motivations and I'm sure there's all kinds of ways people justify selling their bodies (literally or figuratively) and some of those are more sound than others. However I believe equality and mutual respect can only really happen when there's no valuable money (or favour) exchanged, otherwise it's hard to avoid some level of subordination.
About misogyny, the most unrealistic, and unfair part for me is the one that makes these things work - there's this big dick individual that performs outstanding in everything basically, and literally all women fall for him. There's a progression just to make it feel more natural but it's just more or less a linear and predictable progression. It does kind of portrey women as pretty simple individuals, you do what you do and they will fall for youthere's often some level of resistance but it basically always is superficial and/or temporary, just a mask you need to get through and it doesn't feel hard, maybe somewhat time consuming (well.. realistically.. a week or two, that's very little?).
Secondly I'm not sure and I would be curious what women think - the seemingly logical motivations and explanations these women have to explain why they are there willingly seem very convenient, feels like to soothe our conscience. Can't help but think in RL a lot of prostitues have similar motivations (povery, and/or manipulated by some asshole) and that can be kind of off-putting to me. Staying at the RL example, looking just at the ethnicities seems to confirm this largely nd there's a lot that you don't see at first sight.
These stories are made for men, probably by men. Was just thinking the other day how one-sided this point of view is and I'm fairly sure it's VERY. I would genuinely be curious if some teams would include a considerable woman influence in writing (50% or more), how different the story would be. Sure if guys are target audience we have to get our gratification, but how different the stories, characters, dialogues, reactions, the whole path to it would be?
Not that I say this to disagree with anything you said. I feel like we're probably more or less on the same page here.
To your last point, there are definitely AVNs out there that are made by women. Come Home is the first example that comes into my head, but there are a ton of others as well. Some of them turn the expected tropes on their heads and become about humiliating their protagonists or "punishing" the player for seeking out an AVN by giving "bad" endings or plot results for the player's choices, but all in all I have found that the biggest difference in the ones that I've played is that many of the games written by women have more diverse casts of LIs and sometimes non-straight romance options. But they still know their audience, so there usually isn't any forced non-straight or non-cis content. Except, of course, for the games designed around that content, but that's a whole other genre IMO.
I agree with all of this! In fact, my post originally started out as a reply to the comment you mention, and I didn't post it in the Ripples thread for exactly the reasons you mention. Then I was going to send it to Pax Draconis as a PM, but I decided against that also because it felt extra weird to send such a long wall of text in rsponse to a single casually dropped sentence, lol. So I ended up coming to post it here, because this is probably a better place to get the discussion I wanted in the first place
As for your answers to my questions, I think I agree with you pretty closely (but not completely) on all points. I wasn't so much asking those questions myself as pointing out that the story of PC forces the player to think about those things. Or at least, it does if one cares to look at all beyond the surface-level "fap material + story" that makes up any AVN. And I just think it's really cool and interesting how much deeper one can dive and how thought-provoking the game is, if we only look.
Any idiot (okay, not ANY idiot, but humor me) can make a porn game. Better creators can make games with compelling stories and fleshed-out characters that make the player care. But to have a game that forces us to feel a certain way or to think about certain things and ask questions of ourselves... IMO that's the mark of a great game, regardless of genre, and truly great writing, regardless of the form it takes. It sounds pretentious af for me to say, but I'm gonna say it anyway: Pale Carnations is just another example that games can be Actual Art in the highbrow sense usually reserved for film, theater, etc.
Oh crap, did I accidentally blow the lid off a sneaky subversive plot to humanize the manosphere types? Um. Shit. Uhhhhhhh, let's all pretend I didn't say anything and maybe they won't notice.I agree. I read PC as anti-misogynist, among many other things.
And now that you mention it, perhaps it's a sneaky attempt to instill some empathetic perspectives into readers who may have anti-feminist proclivities.
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