MICHAEL'S IN THE BAND

@windyripply94

Also known as War Anvil

He/Him
system-sixteen.tumblr.com/

29 (may 4) ° Autistic ° Bisexual ° Should really stick to art or music, we swear

MICHAEL'S IN THE BAND @windyripply945/6/2023, 4:03 PM

Keeg @armormodekeeg

Thew @Thew5/2/2023, 5:26 AM

i picked a really specifically weird time to be born

basically I grew up Mega Turbo Christian and it took, like, nearly 30 years to [mostly] extricate my actual personality from the grooves that dug into my brain. One result of this was I spent an enormous chunk of my life working through a lot of really repressive ideas about sex + gender + attraction + art.

ultimately, I made it out the other side, basically arriving at "not only is sex and general Horniness in art acceptable, it's a genuinely Good Thing and everyone would be a lot happier if more art was allowed to be just unabashedly horny"

but then

being born as one of the accursed millennials, the timing means I reached this conclusion at the exact moment that

Disney consumed the entire film and TV industries and converted everything into Chaste Family Friendly Violence for Christian Tweens
The western games industry saw their longstanding Actually Genuinely Fucking Horrifying tradition of workplace misogyny exposed to public scrutiny
Instead of fixing literally any of those problems (half those dudes in the blizzard lawsuits just work at riot now), AAA just reoriented itself around disney's sexless weightless violence aesthetic and now you'll just never see so much as an exposed collarbone on your playstation five
Weird confluence of conservative/economic/monopolistic forces drives a massive crackdown on porn+nsfw artists online (imo this one's just getting started and will get a WHOLE lot worse over the next few years)

Basically, it feels like I spent most of my life locked in the christian-conservative sex-negative mind prison, and then at the very moment I escaped, those same forces rose up and just obliterated the entire concept of erotic art from the public consciousness

this sucks man

idk it's not like I want to capital-V RETVRN to mainstream videogames being shit like The Guy Game and kratos murdering random topless women because david jaffe thinks it's bad ass.¹ I just wish, like, our media was getting MORE expressive and mature in its handling of sex and eroticism, instead of basically going "actually the christians are right, getting turned on is a Sin, this is progressive somehow btw"

also it doesn't help that the loudest voices advocating horny games are weird discord gamers/nazis/gamernazis shrieking about vagina bone censorship. Titillation isn't inherently misogynistic but boy some people sure WANT it to be

#longposting #if you are making a videogame, consider adding Nudity

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in reply to @Thew's post:

CaptDedEyes @CaptDedEyes5/2/2023, 2:23 PM

facts™ 😎 I wasn't born in a Turbo Christian setting (Methodists are generally pretty chill afaik) but I did grow up feeling like I have to repress myself in some way. Must be a big picture societal issue. Therefore, I have taken it upon myself to develop a short comic about sexual repression!

Thew @Thew5/3/2023, 4:42 AM

Yeah there's like... no easy answer to why america is Like This but for a lot of historical reasons it's sort of a uniquely calvinist country (like, going all the way back to the puritans and slave traders). It's a kind of inescapable background radiation permeating the entire culture. Like even people who weren't raised christian are effectively fighting against the current if they want to be even slightly normal about sex lol

CaptDedEyes @CaptDedEyes5/3/2023, 3:16 PM

Yea, it's fucking crazy! It's only in places like the US that take sexual repression seriosuly. And it took me a while to realize that I like sexual content better when it's done in a creative or totally normal context, or basically anything that's not meant to be hardcore porn or insultingly crude, ya know?

Rose @MewMus5/6/2023, 9:07 AM

God this whole post is such a mood

A huge part of why I became an artist/game dev myself is specifically to create content to combat all this. But it feels like a constant uphill battle.

MICHAEL'S IN THE BAND @windyripply945/6/2023, 4:02 PM

Having a healthy view on sexuality and gender is such an uphill battle in an increasingly conservative/far-right leaning environment such as Wide gesture at least 50% of America.

Roman Catholic or non-denomination is my Christianity of choice, and the above has become even more of a reckoning for me now that I've learned for four or so years that I'm bisexual (Pansexual? Omnisexual? Any of the three works, I guess). I am aware, though, of how privileged I otherwise am.