LATEX, LEATHER, LIPSTICK, LOVE, LUST

Note: quotes from the game are marked with a ">" because I can't be bothered to convert from markdown formatting to html!

I connected to this game’s protagonist, L, as soon as I started reading. Like him, I’m afab and trans. I’ve been through periods where my main social support was online communities. I have little experience with offline queer spaces. I am stricken with debilitating social anxiety. LLLLL’s first scene hits on all these things, capturing painful feelings that I have also had so sharply and perfectly that it had me tearing up. The self-loathing. The feeling that you don’t belong. That you aren’t right. That other people have a confidence you will never have. Longing for human connection but paralyzed by social anxiety. Feeling like I’m broken because I can’t just be chill like normal people.

>I can't sit down at the bar because I don't know how it works. I don't drink just because I didn't have friends back then and I was never introduced to it. Not even for a cool reason others have like religion or diet or personal growth. You're expected to just know what to do and how to order a drink and you can't ask how to do that in a place like this can you?

Feeling a step behind everyone else, lacking essential knowledge that everyone but you has. Having all this laid out, these exact feelings that seem so personal and shameful that they shouldn’t be spoken of, made me immediately invested in L and wherever this story would take him.

And one place where Act I takes him is the internet. While I’ve been lucky to never be in an online space as toxic as L’s Discord group, the personalities and the interactions certainly rang true based on people I’ve encountered and interactions I’ve seen play out online. The game’s antagonist, L’s online friend Gestirn, starts out as a chillingly familiar type. They’re possessive and controlling of L under the guise of caring about him. They act like they’re the arbiter of moral rightness and as if anyone who disagrees with them is committing a terrible infraction. They plaster the label “abusive” on other people while being incredibly abusive themself.

As soon as L meets a fellow trans man in person and strikes up a friendship with him, it becomes clear that there’s going to be a narrative arc of L forming offline connections and recognizing the toxicity of Gestirn and his online communities more generally. But sadly, the game started losing me with the way this arc was handled. I recognized Gestirn as a terrible friend (and person) pretty quickly; they have no positive qualities, and L talks to them not because he likes them as a person, but because he has no other friends. But it takes five acts (and about four hours, at my reading speed) for L to recognize Gestirn’s awfulness and drop them—if you get the good ending, anyway. The momentum of the game’s first half sputters out as the narrative becomes intent on hammering home the point that Gestirn is awful—something I recognized back in Act I. While I can understand why it would take L longer than me to recognize that (I’m 10 years older than him, have been through my share of shit that’s helped me be able to flag toxic people pretty quickly, and have a good support system in place), that wasn’t enough to justify the pages and pages of online arguments between Gestirn and other server members or all the one-on-one conversations between Gestirn and L after that.

The issues with Gestirn also go beyond pacing. By the end of the game they’ve devolved into a villainous caricature, ultimately advocating for eugenics before L finally cuts them loose. And they’re not just a terrible person—they’re also made out to be physically repulsive. Here’s a bit from when L gets on a voice call with them:

>A few moments later, they burp.
>.jesus christ not the burps not the fucking burps again
> …
>"I keep burping from a medical issue," they say, as if I'm not here. "I don't eat much which causes a gas build up. It's why I'm fat. My poverty diet. Nobody believes that's not my fault."

Soon after this conversation, L has a dream about Gestirn, which includes the following descriptions:

>Gestirn stands up, grunting as their leg fat wobbles to keep them upright.

>A mishmash of parts from human and animal alike all built into an organic perfect machine of rage. The way they're jumping and stamping, the fat jiggling up and down and rippling...
>God. They look fucking disgusting.

>And of course they haven't burped. They're too busy screaming to notice what's happening to themself. The gas is building up. It's expanding. Their stomach. Their cheeks.
>But they can't stop. It's too late. If I wanted to help, there's nothing I could do. And, really, I just don't fucking want to.
>Gestirn explodes.
>Their blood and guts, a slurry of fat and green, splatters both of us head-to-toe.

So, the character who has become the game’s epitome of evil is described as disgusting in a way that’s explicitly tied to their fatness. This moment is so suddenly and unnecessarily cruel that it severed my emotional connection with the story. And we’ll get back to that moment in a minute, but first let me talk about Val, the trans man L meets who I mentioned above. During the prologue, we see L self-consciously daydreaming, longing for “My imagined Perfect Person to come along and save me from everything I continue to do to myself and can't help perpetuating.” Right after that, Val walks up and ends up inviting L to come to his apartment sometime. Cue L’s inner monologue:

>This is what I wanted. I wanted someone to walk up to me, be smitten by my mediocrity like a wet cat in an alleyway, and pull me into a world I've been enchanted by for years.

And… that’s kind of exactly what happens. The role Val plays in the story is being exactly the person L needs. He introduces L to latex kink (the world L is referring to in the above quote), helping and supporting him every step of the way. He’s always available when L wants to hang out. He (and a friend he introduces L to) gives L his first sexual experience, which is mind-blowingly amazing. When L is interested in going on a date with Val, Val is likewise interested. When L concludes they aren’t a romantic fit, Val agrees with no hard feelings. Val supports L through the online drama and is there with him at the story’s end, promising lasting friendship.

There’s nothing wrong with L getting this; it’s nice wish fulfillment, but the beginning of the story didn’t lead me to expect that kind of narrative. And more than that… well, let’s return to the dream. As Gestirn rages at L, Val walks up and kisses him. Val, who, in stark contrast with the repulsive Gestirn, is the perfect trans man—he’s fit, he passes, he’s conventionally attractive. And, as the dream strongly foreshadows, it’s his presence in L’s life that causes L to finally drop Gestirn:

>Now, with Valentine, and how he makes me feel, I’ve realised something.
>This isn’t a friendship. This is suffocation.

I have no issue with a narrative of “getting a real friend makes you realize how bad your old friends are.” But I do have a problem when said narrative perpetuates tired stereotypes around beauty and respectability that should have no place in queer media in 2024. I want to see love/lust interests with imperfect bodies. I want to see fat queer characters being happy and loved. I want queer media to reflect the real-life diversity of queer bodies without judgment.

The rest of the game does nothing to subvert the beautiful/ugly or good/evil dichotomies of Val and Gestirn, and in fact it adds another one, offline/online. Gestirn and several other people in L’s Discord server are steeped in online queer discourse, letting strangers with strong opinions dictate for them who’s right and who’s wrong, who’s morally good and who’s evil, which identity labels are harmless and which make you a TERF. The game calls out how reductive this all is, but in doing so it portrays online spaces as inherently toxic and offline communities as inherently healthy, showing the former doing L only harm and the latter doing him only good. I speak from experience when I say that in real life, things are not that simple.

When I started this game, I thought I was in for a nuanced story about being queer in 2024. When I finished it, I just felt kind of empty.