#cassie liveblogs: nukitashi

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cassie liveblogs: Nukitashi (final part)

so that game definitely did not like women as much as i was hoping it would! i said i'd talk about nanase last time, but i can barely stomach talking about the way the narrative treats her. she deserves better than junnosuke :/

[floral-sis]

Cassie Liveblogs: Nukitashi (part 1: a very good place to start)

So, here we are on Seiran Island: the game lays out its whole Deal pretty quickly. Fuck or die, rags to riches, etc etc. I'm mindful of the ways in which the game tries to have things both ways: are the nonstop background hentai moans and bare breasts meant for titillation, or are they Making A Point?

This is the same dilemma that anyone engaging critically with Kill la Kill is faced with: or if you want to be pretentious (which I always do), you could apply Truffaut's saying about war movies here as well. Is it possible to make an eroge that uses sex, or a war movie that uses violence, as a means of pointing to something higher than itself? Or are the writers merely using excess in place of an actually pointed satire? We'll soon find out...

Anyways, we're introduced to our main characters Junnosuke and Asane in pretty short order. He's a broad everyman protagonist whose one meaningful trait is "sex-repulsed", she's the comic-relief hikikomori who gets given most of the lines that include the word "poggers". It's their first day of school, but the game takes pains to show that this one isn't like all those OTHER first days of school you've seen, no sirree.

The worldbuilding gets fleshed out a little more here - the writers choose to engage with questions such as: how would an island where a blowjob is literally as banal as a handshake fit into modern-day society? What attitudes do they have towards consent? What would they do about STI's? What about non-normative sexuality?

The answer to all of those questions, as it turns out, is: enforcement of debauched but ultimately normative heterosexuality by a literal police/administrative state. The details of this setting's attitudes towards birth control, public health, and sexual mores are laid out in perfectly plain language, but the horror underneath is yet to come.

I'll confess, I was checking out of this game a little bit, until one line snapped me back to attention:

Just ignore the second blocked-out half of that line real quick, we'll get to that in a second.

So, not only is homosexuality officially discouraged here, it's officially forbidden. The game has managed to ask an actual follow-up question: "If you lived on Mandatory Sex Island, how would it feel to be actively repulsed and threatened by the kind of sex that's mandatory there?"

This might be a bit obvious, but CONTENT WARNING for SA, dubcon, sexual trauma, and a pretty unflinching discussion of consent in all its forms, dub- and non- included, for everything under the cut. To be honest, if you're sensitive to those themes, I'd advise reading the rest of this liveblog series with extreme caution, because they're going to come up A Lot.

Anyways, credit where it's due, I guess, for this game managing to actually have an idea of the consent and power dynamics surrounding sex that somebody not from Planet Hentai would recognize as being basically reasonable. I mean, it's understandable that most works that are aiming to evoke sexual titillation shy away from the genuine, visceral, no-way-to-sugarcoat-it horror that assault can bring up. In a sexually explicit work with these themes, though, there's no way around it. I've got a mixed level of trust in the writing team with regards to how they're going to handle these themes, but they've earned at least my curiosity as to how this story's going to end.

But in the meantime, we're about to be introduced to Nanase! More on her next time.

[floral-sis]

cassie liveblogs: Nukitashi (part 0: overview)

Nukitashi is not a game for everybody. Depending on your taste, you might find the premise absurd, hilarious, or offensive at first blush - it boils down to "fish-out-of-water comedy where the asexual protag is dropped into Nonstop Sex Island". Honestly, I found it a little hard to engage with the text as a work of art instead of straight-up porn at first! But as a wise man once said, the most interesting part of a dichotomy (male/female, art/porn, etc) is what lies outside it.

When an author asks the readers to suspend their disbelief, a dragon in a work of fantasy isn't too heavy of a lift at all. An alien or FTL spaceship in a sci-fi space opera won't break the average reader's immersion one bit. But a setting where background characters regularly speak in hentai dialogue, complete with little hearts and tildes at the end of each sentence? That's a bit tougher to take seriously - but credit to the team at Qruppo, they managed to genuinely get me emotionally invested in this story, this world, these characters.

Sex brings up visceral feelings in people, for better or worse. It's a fine line to walk - the parts of the brain that handle sexual desire and disgust are right next to each other, after all. A text that features sex in such exaggerated ways so often risks burning the audience out, not too dissimilar from a painter who splashes 80% of their canvas in bright neon green. The brain simply cannot handle a supernormal stimulus of that sort for too long without lapsing into apathy, exhaustion, or overwhelm.

These were my thoughts going in - fortunately, it turns out the protagonist thinks in the exact same way as I do.

(further parts coming soon, this is plenty long already!)