This is an extraordinarily high quality visual novel with a large number of branching paths, and almost every major route is nearly complete with only a few missing options at release.
Before beginning an overly complicated critique that most people won't be interested in, I will give one note to help players decide if this visual novel is for them:
This VN is written by a woman, and it shows. It is deeply erotic, but the eroticism for the most part comes from the story, the dynamics of the characters, their relationship and its power dynamics, rather than from overtly sexual activity. The far extreme of "sex" in this story is nudity, and even that is framed as a power play rather than being done explicitly for sexual excitement. In this way it is very feminine in its sexuality. It's sexually stimulating in an emotional/intellectual way, rather than a physical way. It's more like a romance novel than porn, but without the romance because the main female character is very explicitly aromantic at the time and implied to be asexual as well.
If you're looking for porn, this is not the VN for you. If you're looking for an interactive romance novel, this is the VN for you. Even as a man, I definitely enjoyed this, I found it very stimulating breath of fresh air, but it's not going to be everyone's cup of tea.
Anyway, my pretentious intellectual critique:
The story takes a deconstructionist approach to traditional mind control fantasies, with every non-consensual route having a bad end. The protagonist ends up either growing board with his slave(s), seemingly buying into the delusions he instills in them, and/or flying too close to the sun.
This theme seems to reduce itself ad absurdum, however, in the true consent path. Even if the protagonist does everything right, and respect her wishes not just to the letter but to their spirit, they still reach a point where they feel it has become problematic because:
- The line of consent may have been blurred in a way that is confirmed in other routes, but since the protagonist has not crossed even that blurred line in this route, there is no evidence of that
- Things have moved too fast and she has consented to giving him total control in little more than a week of talking to him, not because he has overstepped his bounds, but because she was driven by a desire to fulfill her fetishistic fantasies
- Because she has so rapidly pursued these fantasies and grown comfortable with him in doing so, she has pushed her own boundaries-- at her own initiative, without any push from him at all
The situation they find themselves in is
certainly problematic. An 18 year old girl should not be committing to a total power exchange a week after opening up to an 18 year old boy and having a sexual awakening. But the issue is framed more of one of consent and seems to give at least some blame to the boy for not taking responsibility in slowing down her own pursuit of sexuality. It is not
his responsibility to
not consent to
her advances. The story would be different if it were an adult taking advantage of her confusion, but they're both kids and he's just as confused as she is. Unless there is a clear power imbalance, and in this case there did not appear to be other than the one she consented to, no one has a responsibility not to consent any more than they do to consent. It would of course be a good thing if he ahd put the brakes on more, but he does not have a duty to do so, nor are we given the option to have him do so.
There is also the issue that consent is fluid. It is totally valid for boundaries to be rewritten, especially as people become more comfortable with eachother. People aren't bound by the rules the establish at the beginning of the relationship, they can renegotiate as time goes on, which is what happened here. Obviously, going from the very restrictive experimenting of their first "date" to total power exchange in a week, especially for kids that are just discovering their sexuality and having their first experiences is problematically fast. But like before, the issue isn't that the boundaries changed, which seems to be brought up as evidence that their relationship as it stands is toxic, but simply the speed at which those boundaries changed.
In fact, I find the idea that anything other than the unhealthy speed at which the relationship advances being problematic is reductive to real-life BDSM. There are a lot of people in healthy TPE relationships, and as long as these are entered into in a healthful way, not by teenagers rushing into it due to excitement in discovering themselves, there is nothing wrong with that.
By shoehorning the theme of consent into a story route in which it is not really a relevant issue, a sort of horseshoe effect has been created whereby the emphasis on consent taken to a toxic extreme has undermined the idea of consent itself, which unfortunately is a common theme in much political thought these days.
I would definitely appreciate this VN more if a few lines where changed to reframe this conversation during the pure consent route to the fundamental problem being the speed at which the relationship is entered into, and not plant the seeds of ideas like "He should not have consented to her" or "the boundaries of their relationship should not have changed even by her own initiative."
The route does, however, have a
very good ending in which they take a step back, become friends, get to know eachother, and then reestablish their relationship in a more healthy way. This is
absolutely the correct conclusion to the situation. Exploring this idea of the relationship moving too fast, and correcting it in this way is definitely a good thing and I don't want that to change, it's just that some of the framing introduces some problematic ideas that undermine the theme itself.
