VN Ren'Py Pale Carnations [Ch.4 Up.6 Public] [Mutt & Jeff]

[ffive]

I really don't think anyone will do anything bad to her because all the owners have a reputation to uphold out of the club and I don't think going after everyone who gets close would help with their cover and eventually bring heat to the club.

On the other hand, arranging situations which can then serve as source of blackmail to keep people quiet can also be seen as a way to uphold reputation.

 

[Turret]

Even if Mina goes to the club I don't think she'll learn the whole truth. After Hana had her friends over I can see August coming up with a cover. She'll go there she'll see that it's a gentleman's club or something similar.

Agree on this. But I think the cover is already in place for all kinds of official visit. The Visit by Hana and friends was different in that it was at a time nearly everyone working at the Club was home and not there. Besides even Hana kept something of a deniability up. Jess and Spider clearly believe that the Club is a hangout for the stuffy megarich in the city.

 

[Vortex_Master]

not on my save ain't sharing her, even though I love Mina too. But I like Hana better. So I guess it's just happening on the fuckboi path for me.

My first playthrough when I got to the choice I said "Fuck it, we ball. You're the one for me." and then was a good boy the rest of the game. The second playthrough is a different story however...

 

[GokutheG]

On the other hand, arranging situations which can then serve as source of blackmail to keep people quiet can also be seen as a way to uphold reputation.

Blackmail just doesn't feel their style for some reason. If anything they'd try to get someone to fall to their vices and have the club be the only place to indulge.

 

[Alfred the Fallen]

I'm sorry, but I cannot agree with this at all. If you thought the MC would be calling the shots once he joined the Club, I don't think you were paying attention.

I'm not saying he should be able to run the show, just that he has the ability to refuse to do stuff that isn't his job. Which he very clearly can do, because we see him do so at a later date. At the absolute very least he should be able to say that he never agreed to do anything like that, and then have her chastise him for being naive enough to think that he would get paid so much for so little. Then either her or Chuck or Killian could convince him to go through with the work.

The game just doesn't set up this scene properly. The conversation she mentions is something that never happened. The main character suddenly deciding to throw all his very reasonable concerns away the second they offer him money that he doesn't desperately need, is quite lame. It's not like he lost a bursary that was helping him pay for schooling and had his rent suddenly go up and is now desperate for money. His only complaint was that he didn't like tutoring and wouldn't do it if the pay wasn't so good.

Sure, he can choose to do it if he wants to, but you'd think that he'd be a bit more cautious about it what with how his mother's previous sex work has come back to haunt her all these years later.

Like TD said, the MC sold out his conscience the moment he learned Rose was sent to have sex with him purely as part of her interviewing process... and still took the job.

Imagine you get an office job working as an accountant for a mining company, and one day the boss comes in and tells you that you need to go down into the mines and dig coal with the other workers. You refuse because it's not your job, and he says the it is because you tacitly agreed to do it because you didn't object on moral grounds to all the other people work do the dirty work down there so you must therefore be also willing to do it too. You'd say that was bullshit too, because it is.

They tell you what your job description is, then after you reluctantly agree to it, they change the terms of the agreement and then the main character just pretends that they're not lying when they were told that they agreed to do it in a previous conversation that never happened.

Plus, on the specific topic of the MC objecting to whipping it out at Kathleen's command, it feels like a preposterously hypocritical take.

Why? What's hypocritical about it? Has he ever said that the other girls there shouldn't be allowed to refuse to do things that they never agreed to do? There's tons of jobs out there that people would never want to do in a million years, but are fine with other people doing them. If you hate the sea and can't stand the smell of fish, is it hypocritical for you to think that other people should be allowed to become fisherman if they want to?

 

[Garen]

Even if Mina goes to the club I don't think she'll learn the whole truth. After Hana had her friends over I can see August coming up with a cover. She'll go there she'll see that it's a gentleman's club or something similar.

I don't know, Mina being the way she is I can somehow imagine that she'll get into some trouble and discover something unexpectedly, and considering how fascinated she is now by sexual and fetishistic things I'm sure she won't pass up the opportunity to see a show like that.

Have you guys entertained the possibility that August just wanted to meet his daughter's sister-wife, aka his future daughter-in-law?

 

[Takkatakka]

Even if Mina goes to the club I don't think she'll learn the whole truth.

Pretty sure Hana would very much trying to prevent getting Mina anywhere near the club.

 

[Rozhok]

Can't wait to put Mina to work in the club

 

[ffive]

The main character suddenly deciding to throw all his very reasonable concerns away the second they offer him money that he doesn't desperately need, is quite lame.

She asks him to whip his dick out and jerk off for a bit. In a private setting with few sexy girls. You really think it's that unreasonable that a guy would figure "oh heck, why not" if it meant being paid five figures, even if technically he doesn't need this money desperately? Because i'm pretty sure quite a few would be happy to do that even without such incentive.

Works even better when you consider for some Edwins money can be their primary motivator and something they strongly desire.

 

[Dr. Mick]

She asks him to whip his dick out and jerk off for a bit. In a private setting with few sexy girls. You really think it's that unreasonable that a guy would figure out "oh heck, why not" if it meant being paid five figures, even if technically he doesn't need this money desperately? Because i'm pretty sure quite a few would be happy to do that even without such incentive.

Couple quick things:

• Kat doesn't ask. She tells people to do things, gives orders, and punishments when people don't do what she says.
• Doing something like that in front of an audience, even a small one, means it wasn't private.
• Regardless of the incentive, that should have been a red flag, especially that early into his time at the club.

Telling him to get his dick out in front of strangers should have been seen as unreasonable at that point. What he's been told is that he's there to make sure the prospective carnations are safe and taken care of. What does that have to do with him getting his dick out in front of them? Nothing. It's just part of the power trip for Kat; she gets off on making people feel humiliated and uncomfortable.

At that point, Edwin should have asked for a clear definition of what he would be expected to do while working at the club. He's supposed to be an intelligent med student, yet he goes into this whole situation without ever getting his expected role clearly defined, or with concessions beyond "if you don't like it you can leave".
Basically that whole scene is there to give the reader an introduction into Kat's personality, and the tamest of what kind of content they can expect should they choose to continue.
It's a preview. Testing the waters to see how uncomfortable Kat makes you, and to see if you are okay with Edwin simply accepting the situation in which he finds himself.
If not, you may have trouble going forward, and find it hard to enjoy what's coming. Or, you may decide to continue with the ambition of getting back at Kat for being a sadistic malicious bitch, hoping to be a buffer between her and the carnations, and searching for an opportunity to take her down (or out).

 

[TD1900]

Seriously, why you guys acting like a hag handy isn't a perk of the job?

 

[ffive]

• Kat doesn't ask. She tells people to do things, gives orders, and punishments when people don't do what she says.
• Doing something like that in front of an audience, even a small one, means it wasn't private.

Can we avoid jockeying over semantics? Private doesn't necessarily mean limited to only one person, and debating over exact tone Kat used for her request is similarly pointless.

Regardless of the incentive, that should have been a red flag, especially that early into his time at the club.

It certainly is, because it indicates Edwin's duties at the club may extend beyond what he originally thought. At the same time it is apparently not enough of a red flag for Edwin to protest it vigorously, and his, to put it plainly, greed, outweighs his concerns.

You seem mostly upset that Edwin decides this on his own without asking you, the player, for input. Your expectations of how "intelligent med student" should act simply evidently don't match exactly how Edwin acts, given his background, motivation and personality. But it's not really a reason to call his decision lame just because he behaves in a way you did not expect.

 

[ffive]

Seriously, why you guys acting like a hag handy isn't a perk of the job?

IKR. People play porn games and then are like "omg, they demand me to have sex".

 

[Simpgor]

People really are just saying "Hana wants Mina in the club" when they mean to say "I want Mina in the club pls pls pls"

Hana would want Mina to know she works at a sex club but require August tell her because.........why?

I guess he leaves out the part where Hana is only working there because without that he wouldn't be paying for any of her sick moms medical stuff?

IKR. People play porn games and then are like "omg, they demand me to have sex".

I feel like that whenever you get the obligatory 1st release dream sex scene (to show off animations) IMO it being forced in universe is less annoying

 

[Ass prefer]

She asks him to whip his dick out and jerk off for a bit. In a private setting with few sexy girls. You really think it's that unreasonable that a guy would figure "oh heck, why not" if it meant being paid five figures, even if technically he doesn't need this money desperately? Because i'm pretty sure quite a few would be happy to do that even without such incentive.

Works even better when you consider for some Edwins money can be their primary motivator and something they strongly desire.

If you're talking about the opening scene where there's Edwin, Veronica, and that teacher, then I couldn't. I like to control the situation and not the other way around, so even a lot of money wouldn't force me to do it.

 

[Bill Temple]

If you're talking about the opening scene where there's Edwin, Veronica, and that teacher, then I couldn't. I like to control the situation and not the other way around, so even a lot of money wouldn't force me to do it.

It's a good thing we're not reading a story with you as the main character then.

 

[Ass prefer]

It's a good thing we're not reading a story with you as the main character then.

Everyone is the hero of their own story

 

[Bill Temple]

The thing that baffles me while I've been watching from the sidelines these past several days of complaints that this handjob is a rug pull, is that this is the prologue. This is where the setting, the tone, the expectations, some of the major antagonists of the story are established. Discovering reader/player incompatibility with the plot should happen at exactly this point. I can't tell you how many books I've put back on the shelf after chapter 1, but it's up to two this month already.
And the gripes about the terms of the deal with Chuck not explicitly including that Ed may need to get his dick wet in the line of his duties at a sex club, seem not naive, but rather deliberately obtuse.

More full details of the agreement are disclosed off-screen. We should infer from Edwin's thought "If I want to get paid, I have to do this." that the terms of the agreement did include some terms vague (or maybe specific) enough that led him (a 21 year old undergraduate student in an illegal and powerful sex club) to believe he should go with this. If we were to see a scene where Ian or Chuck explain that sometime they "have" to perform sexually for the job, would that change anything? I don't think it would.
I get not liking the scene, and it maybe making the game unplayable for some. I mean, I don't actually get it, but I understand intellectually that some people get triggered seeing hot, evil old bitches drugging and forcibly masturbating people. I'm not a fan of being sexually assaulted IRL either, but the guy that happened to on screen isn't me. Really it's the whining that readers were misled or that the writing is bad or inconsistent that seems more disingenuous than ignorant.
Arguments about player agency are as pointless as always. Games and VNs are limited in scope. The story is on rails, whether you like it or not. To give a player the choice to fully refuse the sadistic, narcissistic primary antagonist of the story at their first real interaction would significantly declaw her. We're learning that she's going to do crazy shit, push boundaries, make everyone under her control squirm with discomfort (or worse). If we get an alpha Chad option in this drugging/handjob scene in the prologue then much of the conflict of the rest of the game is going to be undercut and Edwin is going to be a really inconsistent character, or a totally different one than the author intends to write. The story changes and is shortened significantly if Edwin can at any moment just nope out of the tasks he's assigned.

The story is about the less privileged being used by the powerful, and how they'll struggle to get through that situation. It's not a wish fulfillment fantasy about how we become the greatest, most dominant, most beloved, and most respected slave master in the history of underground sex clubs of the rich and famous. If that's what you want, Red Sakura Mansion 2 just updated today.

 

[sunaboz]

(...)
That conversation with Kathleen where she suddenly demands that we whip out our dick because we had previously agreed to it was terrible writing because we never once agreed to anything of the sort. (...)

It's not terrible, you just don't like it because devs haven't implemented response you would like them to implement. It's a porn game first and foremost so not having sex when we can goes against the very essence of such games.

One of the things I hate the most about porn VNs is when we have binary choices of the "have sex"/"don't have sex" variety. Here it almost never happens (we can refuse sex on occasions but it's very rarely a binary choice and even when it is, like during Rosalind's "interview", it's never simple and there are consequences to our choices).

Anyway, here devs have clear vision where they want the story to go. Which is the best possible course of action IMO since devs can NEVER cater to everyone's tastes so they're making a game that makes their dicks hard, simple as that.

(...)
It's not like he lost a bursary that was helping him pay for schooling and had his rent suddenly go up and is now desperate for money. His only complaint was that he didn't like tutoring and wouldn't do it if the pay wasn't so good. (...)

At the very beginning (when we're choosing background and we take money trait) we learn that:
"However for the time being, you're broke-as-shit like most students. You live off campus subsisting on instant foods, your mother's cooking and the occasional takeout".

So not having to take a student loan and live like a rat while at the same time being around sexy ladies and having sex with them seems like a dream come true (especially since Edwin has a huge dick and balls but for porn-logic reasons not very much experience despite having very high libido).

(...)
Imagine you get an office job working as an accountant for a mining company, and one day the boss comes in and tells you that you need to go down into the mines and dig coal with the other workers. You refuse because it's not your job, and he says the it is because you tacitly agreed to do it because you didn't object on moral grounds to all the other people work do the dirty work down there so you must therefore be also willing to do it too. You'd say that was bullshit too, because it is. (...)

That's not good analogy at all because you're at the interview for the job stage, you're not an accountant yet. Up to the Kathleen telling Edwin to whip his dick out Edwin had only a vague sense of what to expect. During his second encounter with Kathleen she told him:
"I have something fun planned later this week that will give you a taste of what to expect."
which she did.

Besides, Kat telling Edwin about his mother doing porn, her giving him USB drive with filth (where Darius had sex during the exhibition and I could start and finish with just that), her being dressed like she was, flirting with Edwin openly and encouraging him even to look were pretty good indicators of what he might expect when Kathleen said that "WE will interview whores". How the fuck do you interview whores? I would imagine using the tool every man has at his disposal. I don't have to be Sherlock to know that, or do I?

tl;dr
Edwin saw exhibition footage so he knew exactly what might be expected of him when he agreed to work there so we either go along with it or Alt+F4.

 

[Simpgor]

I'm not a fan of being sexually assaulted IRL either, but the guy that happened to on screen isn't me.

For some (most) they do see themselves as the person on screen which explains why "them" getting "their" dick "wet" is more important than pathetic things like story or character setup. It also explains why a something that is forced by the narrative is only bad when it happens to "them" "personally". As well as why they feel the need for (any) MC to be "ULTRA MEGA GIGA CHAD" because clearly they (user with hundreds or thousands of posts on porn piracy form) are such chads. For example Why aren't they complaining about Rose not getting a choice if Edwin wants to take advantage?

The story is about the less privileged being used by the powerful, and how they'll struggle to get through that situation. It's not a wish fulfillment fantasy about how we become the greatest, most dominant, most beloved, and most respected slave master in the history of underground sex clubs of the rich and famous.

Clearly it's about becoming the greatest, most compassionate, most beloved, and most respected leader of a "workers first" sex club that despite catering to rich "abusive" men mostly somehow stops any of that, all while you have a harem featuring: goth girl who also owns the compassionate sex club, former wife of steel magnate, a silver medal Olympian, a rising model/actress, a gaggle of house girls who obviously love you, a borderline robotic (but really she's a good girl!) genius doctor, your male childhood friend who loves you more than the rest (also owns the club and is ricch), and a single mom i guess