Ren'Py Power Vacuum [Ch. 12 Official] [What? Why? Games]

[jamiehmcw91]

Only time will tell. WWG has to prove his game doesn't contain incest and it doesn't. It only comes in when you install the fan made patch. So how does he prove something that doesn't exist? He would need to convince patreon that F95 isn't in his control and what happens here has nothing to do with him.

One of the best games out. How long does it take too prove?

 

[dartred]

Only time will tell. WWG has to talk to them and they have to follow up.

 

[SuddenReal]

it’s clear that this dude is secretly sitting forum and leaking information for Patreon.

Hey, look, in this economy, I need every paycheck I can get, okay?

 

[Satou Pendragon]

Hey, look, in this economy, I need every paycheck I can get, okay?

You gonna get a visit from these People then Kris...

 

[zazaW]

any news about update?

 

[dartred]

any news about update?

check my sig.

 

[JjJ5]

Since i shared it with discord, i may as well share it here. I don't consider this a leak. Here's a comparison of Ophelia's breast and then the bigger size WWG replaced them with when he edited the post.
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yeah, but unlike other devs that abandon their games, I actually WANT to work on my game more, but i had to sell my PC. If I could get a GPU to work on the game, i'd start back up in a heartbeat.

is this the first change hes made to a character?

 

[dartred]

is this the first change hes made to a character?

Proportion wise? I think Cath's breast are slightly getting bigger and her baby bump is starting to show. Both cases I think are because of the pregnancy.

 

[Fayn Arawn]

is this the first change hes made to a character?

Sterling got huge, Rebecca got a new haircut, and Kevin lost weight.

 

[dartred]

oh yeah, Sterling being the obvious one lol.

 

[ShadowTower456]

Let's hope the latest update isn't deleted because of this stupid justification from the supervisor

 

[Badjourasmix]

Oh and some terrible news. WWG patreon is under review and currently suspended. It's being reviewed by the same guy who suspended the game, My Dorm. This doesn't mean his patreon is closed, but they are linking to this thread as the main culprit for the review.

WWG has washed his hands of this thread and doesn't come to this site anymore. Why he's being reviewed because a pirating site has a fan patch in it, doesn't make any sense. Hopefully they can understand that anyone can mod his game and not his fault.

View attachment 3904930

Dude 99% of the games on patreon have incest patches here. Are they going to ban all games from their platform? It's so dumb to go out of their way to browse a pirate forum and punish devs for shit they don't have control over. Anyone can create an incest patch for any renpy game it's not really that hard.

Edit: Also at this point it would be a good idea for wwg to create a subscribestar page or something similar just in case something happens. Hopefully we will just get his patreon page back but at this point it's kind of dumb to not have any backup.

 

[dartred]

He's already thought about it and the reason he hasn't gone to SS is because most devs lose about 70% of their revenue when they make the switch. People just don't like to sign up for SS since they don't take paypal. You can only pledge with your credit card info. It's probably a last resort kind of deal.

If they don't open his page back up, it's better than nothing.

 

[Badjourasmix]

He's already thought about it and the reason he hasn't gone to SS is because most devs lose about 70% of their revenue when they make the switch. People just don't like to sign up for SS since they don't take paypal. You can only pledge with your credit card info. It's probably a last resort kind of deal.

If they don't open his page back up, it's better than nothing.

I am not saying for him to make the switch completely. Just to have a page already setup just in case things go wrong. It's easier to make a SS page if you already have a following, so he probably can get one approved pretty fast. Hopefully he will get his patreon back but it's still better to have something as a backup.

 

[dartred]

I am not saying for him to make the switch completely. Just to have a page already setup just in case things go wrong. It's easier to make a SS page if you already have a following, so he probably can get one approved pretty fast. Hopefully he will get his patreon back but it's still better to have something as a backup.

He did have one. He had a patreon and SS page running side by side when PV first came out. No one was using SS so he closed it. I imagine so he wouldn't have to do maintenance on a page no one was bothering with. He even had a buymeacoffee page and i think it was just me and 2 other guys who ever donated on that one.

but like i said, if Patreon closes his account, he'll probably make the move to SS. He won't have any other option.

 

[Badjourasmix]

I feel like even if no one is subbing at the moment it's probably better to have one just in case. Patreon is fucking dumb with all their rules and they seem to get more strict with each passing year. If they are at the point where they will suspend your page for stuff posted on pirate forums then no one is safe.

 

[FoolishFool0]

I've been saying something like this for a while, but you articulated it much more eloquently. Some people are just enjoying the fantasy and that's okay, but there are larger themes and deeper meanings if one takes the time to appreciate them.

One of those themes seems to be that women's romantic feelings will follow after their physical needs are met, and so whomever can meet those needs is who they will love. This could be controversial because it almost sounds like women are just whores, which is disillusioning to men with more innocent ideas about romantic love, but I think the reality of "love" is more complicated.

Not to detract from the very worrying news, but If I can add to this a second.

I obviously do not know the author and won't presume shit about him, nor put thoughts in his head or anything, but from how I, personally, myself, again this is all me I might be high on black mold and gas leaks or something for all I know, read it:

I don't think we should read Power Vacuum very... utilitarian messaging, so to speak, about relationships as genuine. I think this is, again, probably satire. I do think multiple house games follow, if subconsciously, that same message, and this game is simply putting into words that very recurring theme, exposing the Metanarrative of these sort of games, and the inherent societal desires and hang-ups they come from.

Let's put it this way:

Stop me if you heard this one before: Once upon a time, there is an American Nuclear Family, one of the pillars of American Society, with ONE Hard Working, Bread Winning Father, his devout and nurturing and a lot of other motherly adjective wife who does not work, and their 2-3 children, the classic number to go for, an older sister, a middle brother, and a younger sister.

The details of the family might change, some masks might be missing, others might be present, but this is the gist of it: Something happens. Maybe the father is dead, or maybe he had to leave for a business trip, or maybe he's in prison, be as it may, the family is left with a vacuum in the main father figure, a vacuum the Middle Brother will have to fulfil, to protect his family from external threats, thus assuming, again, the role of Patriarchal Protector and Breadwinner of the family.

The threat is usually economic in nature, and the Middle Brother always resolves it by pulling himself up by his bootstraps and becoming a entrepreneur, usually by selling the sexual labour of his families. He is the Pater Familias of Latin Time, who has right of life and death onto the members of the household in a way. Its his choice who can lead the people under his care to either thrive or lose everything, and he must be worthy of it, always tested at every angle to stop, again, the external threats from winning.

He has to win every single battle, while his enemies only need to win once.

Again, by its very nature the House Game Genre is rife with "problematic" content even if you take away the hidden cameras or the drugs. Hunter, even without all of that, still presents a very patriarchal, very Misogynistic view of the family and of society, with "predator-men" and "prey-women," and while the game doesn't really challenge that world view you can also say that the only reason why that world view isn't challenged is because Sterling is directly benefiting from it, and so are Drew and Futa Ophelia in What If 8 for that matter.

Like, the game having a villain with a gender essentialist view of the world while also having a major trans woman character is obviously trying to say SOMETHING. The way one of the ways for Hunter to defeat Sterling was by turning him into a Woman, the way AGAIN this story can be read as a perfect condensation of every single house game that came before it, a Commedia Dell'Arte- Commedia Del Porno I guess? A Commedia Del Porno with different actors who all wear all the same masks, and different stories that all follow the same Canovaccio...

Again, maybe I am reading too much into it, but I feel the disingenuous and again wrong messaging about the American nuclear family is, in a way, done on purpose, because a villain is professing these views, because he is literally mass drugging everyone to make these views real, and most importantly, because it's taking the piss to when other games also do it but from the protagonist.

Remember, one of the first meta gags you can do in the game is have Sterling call you a fucking psychopath for even suggesting he did anything to his sleeping mom.

 

[panzermaster]

Not having seen them, that could be some meta narrative thing in the next chapter.

How Hunter used to be a "Good" House Game protagonist before Illness and Age took away his young roguish scoundrel looks and turned him into a ugly bastard Archetype, and how that could be Sterling's future too.

Maybe Hunter didn't just clone his wife but himself too 19 years ago, maybe he switched his brain with his younger self clone, and now that he's actually attractive and young he's "culturally" more acceptable as a "house game protagonist" than he was before as a ugly old man, how despite his personality being a lie and trash it wouldn't matter because

A) Most House Game Protagonists except for, like, this one Sexbot and a couple others do do the same shit Hunter does with Impunity between the drugs the molesting and the hidden cameras (What If 8 even makes fun of it during one of the crossovers) but since they are the self inserts people don't really care, and most importantly

B) The ultimate messaging these sort of Harem stories ultimately rely on is that the protagonist is the, as the name of the game implies, is the ultimate male authority figure within the predominantly female household, therefore provider and protector, father and worker and nurturer and business associate, and that therefore anyone could fulfil that role regardless of who they even are, as long as, again, they are acceptable to the audience as such.

The Kevin and the Drew Good Endings even push for that very notion, when is Drew getting a good ending? When he's conventionally attractive and slimmed down, and Drew herself is already a pretty inoffensive character to the eyes, she's an extremely attractive trans woman who passes, and to top that she also seems to genuinely love her daughter and her daughter's mom.

The Amber Family Orgy is ALSO part of that, since the main character is essentially using drugs in order to destroy an household and fuck every woman in it, but we cheer for it because he's the protagonist and the dad is a old rich British man who is into Cuckold porn. It's all coming together, it's all converging into one final confrontation, I can see the threads, I can see the parallels, I can see forever, I know how this story is structured and I know how this whole thing is set up to be.

Anyway sorry for the rambling I'm just constantly amazed by the probably all in my head metanarrative analysis of this game and its role as a perfect satire of the House Game Harem Genre. Like I sincerely wish for some real Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead Shenanigans this final chapter to, like, tie off all the metanarratives.

Yeah that make sense, you just made an excellent analysis.

you see I am writing a potential what-if for this game or at least a summary of one (It's already longer than 15 pages long) where Sterling gets NTR and I love to deconstruct the genre and the setting itself by reminding the viewer how this situation is completely fucked up and Sterling losing his harem to someone else is not the "bad ending" he thinks it is, it's only a bad ending FOR HIM.

Like the moment we see any of the girl having sex with another person with a penis (Drew, kevin, hunter or Futa Ophelia), the game tells us that the girls are being "taken away" from Sterling... but there is never a moment when Sterling have sex with women outside of his family, the girl consider that Sterling is taken away from them...

Like Sterling has the right to have sex with any sexy woman he sees and it's a victory but when the opposite happens, the girls are lost forever.

But to be fair to Sterling, he at least is not angry at any women who have sex with other people that are not him. His anger his targeted only at Hunter. Even when Futa Ophelia is breeding every girl she can found, Sterling is only upset about his current girlfriend and does not argue that Futa Ophelia has the right to have sex with them.

Like I don't even dislike Sterling, in fact I like him as he is totally functionnal as a porn protagonist of such games, but it does not mean I won't make him suffer...

I yearns for the day I will finish my what-if, it's been so long but I hope it will follow the themes of this game well enough and I will happily publish it here.

 

[panzermaster]

I feel like this was talked about another time, but here's Brenna during Chapter 9 mentioning she's dated two guys:

Brenna: "So...this isn't an act. You really are a generous...caring guy..."
Sterling: "Is there a reason why you keep expecting a grand reveal that I'm an evil sinister person?"
Brenna: "Maybe...well...not maybe...I know why...because out of the two guys I've dated...both ended up being narcissistic scumbags...but I was too naive to see it."
Sterling: "Is that what this is? Are you vetting me to be your new boyfriend?"
Brenna: "Shut up! You're not my boyfriend...frankly...you may be too nice."

Sorry, another question that suddenly comes, this one is about Aliza.

Duriing the reading club, do you remember what books were brought. I remember the Manchurian candidate was used because there is a story of incest between a mother and son so used for foreshadowing but otherwise, is there a mentions of other book.

 

[MiltonPowers]

Oh and some terrible news. WWG patreon is under review and currently suspended. It's being reviewed by the same guy who suspended the game, My Dorm. This doesn't mean his patreon is closed, but they are linking to this thread as the main culprit for the review.

WWG has washed his hands of this thread and doesn't come to this site anymore. Why he's being reviewed because a pirating site has a fan patch in it, doesn't make any sense. Hopefully they can understand that anyone can mod his game and not his fault.

Hey Kris,