To Love & Protect: Heroine

no tea no shade but when are y’all going to get a MC that fails a brown bag test? i’m serious? why are you always making us play as white women or sometimes a super light skin ambiguously brown character at best? i want to keep supporting y’all as an indie developer w lgbt staff who cares about making quality lgbt content. I’m rooting for you!! i love your games. I buy the paid currency, I spread the word to anyone who will listen, I left reviews on the app store. but as a black queer woman i’m getting real tired of sitting on my hands and swallowing my disappointment over the lack of racial diversity with your protagonists and the twinge of sadness i feel when my decidedly ethnically named character shows up as blindingly white in CGs. i’m getting real tired of doing my small part to promote these games to friends because there’s such a dearth of quality lgbt content and constantly having to add the caveat, “though the MCs are not very diverse”

i would love to see a commitment to more racial diversity with the MCs the way y’all have about lgbt content. you do a decent enough job (sometimes) with diverse LIs but why not MCs? i shouldn’t have to be forced to choose between representation as a queer woman or as a black woman but that’s what y’all make me do every time you come out with another game? and it’s frustrating and hurtful. please accept this criticism in a spirit of love from someone who enjoys your content and wants to see more of it. 

I read a bunch of CLA before I kind of… tapered? Most of the stories I read had at least some good parts, but all of them also had big disappointments (including Serena’s, I believe the universe heard me rant about clean water). Arthur has some of that “superficially appears to have his shit together” thing that you like. I never finished his second season, though. Other than Serena, I felt Logan’s had the most satisfying emotional arc. Then again, I never actually did Clyde’s and I got bored of the new guy almost instantly. 

I also have Feelings about Serena’s S3 and how it ends. Given how short the third seasons are for CLA, I get the feeling that they probably won’t have a fourth? And also for other reasons. 

Right now I’m inhabiting a mental space that carves weird A/Us and crossovers and twisting things out of shape. Since I’m 90% sure that all their stories canonically take place in the same world (maybe not K&C tho) crossover territory is… almost too easy. Plus, Greek mythology. And re: that thing I said about Hera, the urge to cross it over with WW is almost overwhelming. 

Aw yeah, WW & HERA. <3

They’ve made it pretty explicit, rather than just strongly implied, that they’re all either in the same universe or at least surprisingly easily crossed between universes, with the crossover stories and the Pride Special this month hopping around between divergent POV’s, so yeah. I keep wanting to rearrange them all together too.

I haven’t read Serena’s S3 yet, both because I have to re-read to get back up to it, and also because I am ... concerned about the shorter seasons? In Astoria, Cerberus and Chimera both had shorter S2 and S3 in comparison (two sections rather than three), and you could tell, the stories did not work as well as any of the rest of them, the pacing was off, and the set-ups/resolutions ended up being oddly arbitrary in places, because they had to have them just happen without the necessary build up before or conclusion afterwards. I would have thought with the consistently shorter seasons they’re doing with Lovestruck that they would have planned better for how to tell their stories in a more compact format, but I am not feeling optimistic about the results so far. *sighs* 

I feel like, if I ever do get back into reading consistently rather than desultorily, both Arthur and Clyde have potential for the “superficially appears to have his shit together” thing that I like... but it really only works if they’re actually a disaster and also aware of and regretful in regards how much a disaster they are, even while they’re (initially) failing to mitigate it. But then they do legit have to do better by the end. 

It’s a very niche character trope, I realize, but it gets me where I live, apparently. *laughs*

(I’m hopeful of Reiner hitting that, honestly, but again the forced power dynamic in L&L means I haven’t bothered to read it yet. Same with anyone in GIL, though honestly they’re less appealing so I doubt I ever will, unlike L&L which at least has more sympathetic characters imo.)

I tried out the prologue for the new Voltage game.

I tried out the prologue for the new Voltage game. It’s technically a period piece, which is mildly interesting, and it’s prohibition-era, which under different circumstances would probably intrigue me more. Except that there’s already The Blind Griffin, and while it’s very short and has no female love interests, I enjoyed it tremendously the three or so times I played it through. Plus, the heroine of TBG is just fantastic. 

Anyway, the new game. Only the first few routes have made their appearance, but the prologue handily introduces all the many, many (many!) love interests. A little clumsily, but at least it’s super clear on what’s going on. There are about seven or eight male love interests, and one woman. 

This is the story of a brash and outgoing girl of indeterminate age (if I had to guess I’d say no older than twenty) whose overprotective mother was worried about her hard-partying ways. So she sent her to live with her stern uncle. In Chicago. Which is clearly the best place in which to protect a young girl from the seedier aspects of life, such a good place that they even named a musical after it. 

The MC is full of vim, and is meant to be quite clever and qualified. She doesn’t super sell it, though. It takes her the entire prologue to figure out what was immediately obvious to me as a reader, which is that her temperance campaigner uncle is secretly running a speakeasy under his shop. But anyway, she’s a lively and strong-willed girl, and that has its appeal. Runs a little close to “feisty” for my tastes but it’s hard to tell from such a short sample. 

Verdict: I don’t know if I’ll get into it. Then again, it’s definitely better than L&L and I read almost a dozen episodes of that before I gave up. The background art is beautiful. The sprites are nice also, a style much more favorable I think than L&L’s had. It also remains to be seen whether there’s an overarching story to the different routes. Bottom line is, Astoria is still the best. If you can’t get more of that, fanfic is the only way to go. 

Crossposted to Dreamwidth. 

Yeah, I made it … over half way through one of the available season 1 routes for Speakeasy Tonight and there’s this repeated disconnect between how the characters are described and how they act. Sort of like the “clever lead can’t tell it’s her Uncle’s Speakeasy” but in terms of her being able to deal with what a criminal enterprise really entails, and her supposed allies not really telling her what’s going on most of the time. It’s not an unreasonable conflict to have based on the premise, that they’re not sure how much she can handle and she’s not sure how much she wants to know, but everyone keeps saying they’re all handling everything just fine and it’s … very uncomfortable.

I’m thinking the routes with the musicians might bypass some of that, since they’re not front-line bootleggers they’re, you know, musicians, (which as a bonus is where the lady route is) and I do like the friend-character (Voltage is consistently good with the background friendships) but I’m not sure how far I’ll get into it either?

I mean, honestly, The Blind Griffin did it better, you’re right, and Astoria is by far the most well done Lovestruck title so far, even with some of the inconsistencies between routes and some weird pacing/development issues in a couple of them. It felt the most like an entire world with people in it, plus it really had very well-done character-specific conflicts.

I’m somewhat looking forward to the singer lady’s route. I will probably try playing it, although whether I make it through depends on how thick they lay on the period slang, if L&L is anything to go by. L&L wasn’t super interesting, but what irritated me about it was 85% the lack of contractions and other clumsy attempts at fantasy language conventions. Then again, it bothered me with Morrigan too, and somehow I still managed to play origins about four times, with each PT lasting at least sixty hours. So. I’m fickle.

About the friendships, IDK. May is my light and life, and I love Melanie from K&C (which is another subsidiary of the same company, I think, or something like that). And I guess the non-romanced paths in CLA made a pretty good friend group, which I can appreciate. But both the CLA and especially the GIL characters were dropped so abruptly into an alien environment, they always seemed super detached from their lives at home.

Like, the GIL girl doesn’t seem to have any family besides her neglectful parents, no friends, no neighbors, no apartment or roommates of job or boss… She disappears out of nowhere and no one really notices. It makes for a very low-stakes story. And the CLA protag makes noises about missing home, but we never really learn anything about her except that she lives in SF (I think) and writes clickbait listicles for a BuzzFeed clone.

So actually… Well, this is an older game that they’re bringing back, AFAICT, so I won’t say that it’s a creative move so much as a business decision. I think the changes in creative, though, are pretty obvious, not just to me. So, I’m not super anticipating their next games right now. Which is sad for me, because I feel like I fell into and out of the hype machine equally quickly, and the whole fandom experience was a sort of rollercoaster, but not in a fun way. Only fanfic can save us, is what I’m saying.

so we should just all keep playing Astoria seems to be the conclusion here? Because I tried Sofia’s route in ST and just. It ought to be good? I can’t quite put my finger on why it’s not, but it just. Lacks the je ne sais quoi required of romance I guess? *shrugs*

Or, honestly, I think half of my problem is the ticket system. I can’t just set aside an afternoon and read the whole thing, which is basically how I read things now. The in and out required of the timing just kills it dead.