This is fifth of nine essays contained within the first issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology, an experimental collection of longform writing that seeks to expand the breadth of critical discourse around adult games and adult game culture. We will be posting a new essay every Wednesday from now until March, but if you would like to read all the essays early and support the creation of more high-quality writing about adult games the full anthology is available for purchase on Itch! Anthology logo by @pillowkisser!
By: @bearington
TW: Mention of sexual assault as a game mechanic and consequence for mechanical failure, sexual horror, and transphobia and racism, untintential or otherwise. Stylized capitalization and improper punctuation for emphasis is also a thing here. I maintain a conversational, meandering tone that really is just the voice I speak with.
I’m gonna be real with these Trigger Warnings, I mean every word of them. Turn back now if you can’t handle those topics, and I do not think less of you. Sit down and help yourself to a nice cup of your favorite beverage, and just have a day for yourself. We could all use a little bit more of that. You’re one hundred and ten percent valid, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
I think that Mainstream fantasy worldbuilding sucks. Full stop. It’s so… sterile. Every big author talks about removing yourself from the writing and letting the fiction speak for itself. It leads to the worlds themselves feeling very sterile and the story mostly ending up character focused. For example, The Stormlight Archive is one of my favorite series of all time.
But the world doesn’t feel alive. Sanderson removed himself from it as much as possible, by his own admission, and it feels very sterile until something pertinent comes up and there’s a lore dump. I think mainstream fantasy could take some really valuable lessons from porn games. Specifically the “Literary Porn RPG” genre. I know nothing about the people involved with Corruption of Champions 1 and 2 and Trials in Tainted Space. I am not a part of their communities and I have not spoken to their authors and writing contributors once in my life.
But goddamn, when you’re writing characters based around specific fetishes it’s hard to get more honest about yourself than that. The worlds of CoC2 and TiTs especially feel incredibly gross a lot of the time, and honestly they’re probably pretty sticky, but they are fundamentally, utterly and completely their author’s work. A work of fetish is by definition going to be a peek into the author’s soul, yeah?
Corruption of Champions 2 is a mostly text based RPG, with frequent character art for dialogue. You click north west east or south, explore, fight monsters, and have a lot of sex. The battle system is a really solid turn based affair, especially for the medium. The game opens on Cait, a priestess of Mallach, the god of love, lust, art and passion sexual and nonsexual, stumbling into an inn called the Frosthound in the middle of an out of season blizzard, concussed, bleeding, and calling for help. A cult knocked her over the head and grabbed her sister and ran for the ruins of a nearby temple.
You can admonish those around you as cowards, simply spring to action, or get a game over by declaring it not your problem. The Innkeeper, a retired Warrior and Thief named Garth, gives you equipment that used to be his wife’s, happy that someone stepped up, and off you go. You fight you way to the temple and just barely fail to save Calla, Cait’s sister, as she’s zapped off through a portal to gods know where, and the temple explodes, knocking you silly as Cait either chases after the the cultists or returns to the inn in tears.
Then you wake up to a demon having protected you from the blast. Towering over you, buck naked, with a massive axe, an exaggerated “Muscle titty succubus” body type, and two feet of horse dick. And she propositions you to take care of that for her. Kassyra is a surprisingly complex antagonist, and you’ll optionally get to know her… intimately.
If you skip the tutorial, it appears to be canon that you refuse her and she takes that as a challenge, and it plants the seed of obsession in her mind. More on her later on, but she’s a genuinely terrifying villain in the genre of Sexual Horror.
Before I go any further I’m gonna say this: You cannot have an “unproblematic” work of kink. Especially when you’re shoving it all into a fantasy setting. There’s going to be a lot of implicit Fantasy Bias in general, combined with Kinks that would be Harmful in Real Life.
Fiction is a safe space to practice those kinks, but writing a story around them is always gonna bring out weird shit. This isn’t condoning a lot of what’s in CoC2, societal structure wise, on a moral level. I really don’t have to to find it interesting. It’s definitely not a world I’d want to live in, but it’s one I’ll inhabit for hours a day if I get bored and feel like reading an interactive fantasy novel.
There is rape in the game. The protagonist can commit acts of rape and have a Corruption meter rise when they do so, and the protagonist can be raped. However, most of the combat-encounter based sex between sapient individuals operates under the societal expectations of “Winner tops, loser bottoms” consent.
I’ve watched the game go from transphobic to trying to be trans inclusive, even if it fumbles. I don’t know the details, but a kink-game with One Entire Straight Person in it and a detailed transformative alchemy system that lets you change your gender identity and presentation at will attracting a large trans audience despite mild transphobia in terminology might have contributed to that. As an example of a large scale language clean up still being sub par, several “Femboy” characters used to be constantly referred to as “Trappy” as a shortform descriptor, which has since changed to “Femmy” or other such terms that still make me roll my eyes.
Somehow, this literary erotica game managed to build a more believable functioning world than most fantasy anything I’ve played, read, or watched in decades. It builds a believable post-apocalyptic-war world, broken, and with tangible consequences for what amounts to a war with beings that are comprised of pure nothingness and spite trying so hard to exist that they break mortal beings within a hundred feet of them. There’s also the demon from another realm that’s trying to goad you into getting stronger so she can fuck your soul out and use it to redeem herself into being a human again.
- Kassyra. The plot hinges on her and how… she isn’t really the biggest problem the world is facing, so the Gods are fine leaving her to you, even if you’ve got a lot you need to grow before you even hold a candle to her. And she knows it. Her plan is to make you strong enough to stop her and then fuck your soul out. And she’ll tease you and taunt you and tempt you and stop just before she wins because your soul isn’t ripe yet. She’s the core of a really effective brand of “Excess” based sexual horror, unlike the Gore Porn based horror of something like Hellraiser. You’ll drown in agonizing ecstasy, become a demon, become hers if she has her way. Her toxic love for the protagonist is honestly bone chilling sometimes.
- Her character is probably the most convincing sexual horror I’ve ever seen that was written explicitly for titilation’s sake. Wanton lust falling into depravity as an entire Kingdom’s upper class falls into supernatural lust fueled orgies in ways that sound genuinely horrifying instead of sexy, if you stop to think about it.
- Savara feels alive, you can see how the Frost Marches function if you read enough of the fluff, and walking around and having various world encounters and walking the roads that the game implies that trade will start back up on if/when you take care of whatever problems are stopping things up.
- The sex part is incredibly important, even if it’s telling a “Full story” and not just a “Porn story”. It’s a cornerstone of the writing. And that keeps the writing honest, because it was written because the author is very into the subject matter. If you get the innkeeper’s daughter pregnant, he takes you aside, pours you a drink and tells you he trusts you. It would’ve been nice if the two of you had talked to him first or something, but he knows you’re not a terrible person, and your get’s going to be paid for… and if you break her heart her idiot brother will trek across heaven and earth to drag you back to make it right.
- Garrett, the innkeeper’s son, is a minor but important character. Brash, impetuous, fucking stupid, but well meaning. He’s also the only straight character I have found in the entire game, and I thought it was worth mentioning. As for two other interesting things…
- The orcs? Well, they’re an ethnic caricature. But not the one you’ll think when I say that. Where D&D used literal anti-black segregationist propaganda word for word in 5th Edition, CoC2’s orcs are…. Norse style Raiders? Right down to keeping Thralls (slaves) after a raid. They’re weird, aggressive, and horny and the gateway into the content is by beating up a woman with a giant cock and making her bottom for you, but… she would’ve done the same to you and actively enjoys it to the point where if you bottom or top her enough she falls for you. That’s just how they do. They fight, they feast, they fuck, and if you can get past that they’re charmingly straightforward.
- Then there’s the Kitsune. They’re… basically ancient Japan transposed verbatim-in-weebovision into Savara, but also fox people and life-force vampires to sustain themselves due to Long Complicated Plot Reasons. They’re some of the most compelling content in the game, but they come off much like a well read weeb was way too into Japan. Straight to including Gunboat Diplomacy as being the reason they opened their country to outsiders. The “Life force vampire” thing is not lethal, and in fact the person they call their “Benefactor” will usually be fine after a few hours rest. Their entire culture is built around reciprocity over this, and despite that most of the world who even knows about them sees them as monsters.
I’ve been incredibly sparse in detail, concerning the orcs and Kitsune , but the game is free to play with the caveat of updates getting pushed to backers a little sooner. Despite several elements being problematic, despite a lot of well meaning waffling that still veers into fetishization, the writing is inherently, wonderfully, terribly honest. The separation between artist and art doesn’t exist here because you can’t separate yourself from what gets you off, and while I’m not advocating for outright fetish content in mainstream fantasy works, I want the same honesty that CoC2 has.
Bud Bear/LeatherJacketBear is a pansexual polyamorous Vtuber with a passion for Fantasy stories and worldbuilding.