Last week I wrote about Boyfriend Dungeon and how it understands the importance of expressing sexuality. Kitfox Games has created something where you can play as a man, woman, or gender non-comforming individual and your choice of romantic partner isn’t dictated by traditional societal expectations.

Whoever you find dreamy is on the table or you can keep it platonic and ace - there’s an aura of personalisation to such an approach that makes it a breath of fresh air in a medium where romance options are far too restrictive. However, discourse emerged over the weekend surrounding a certain character in the game and the wording of its content warnings.

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Spoiler warning for Boyfriend Dungeon ahead

You have to deal with Eric, a character who emotionally manipulates the player after a date goes wrong with constant messages and a physical presence that is designed to make you feel uncomfortable. You can’t block or avoid him. Players in the community are asking for the content warning to be updated, which is perfectly understandable, but others believe that said content should be altered or removed entirely to ensure those affected by said triggers can play the game without worry.

Boyfriend Dungeon

This crosses a dangerous line, and risks dampening the value of a queer narrative that seeks to explore deep, often traumatic themes in a meaningful way. People have developed an expectation of developers patching games that fit their desires, whether it be to adjust a game’s ending, the damage of a weapon, or in this case - a core element of the underlying narrative. You can have a problem with how certain themes or characters are depicted and critique them for yourself, but vocally forcing a developer to jeopardise its artistic vision to appeal to a very specific audience is a damaging precedent to set.

I find this sentiment to be especially true regarding what is a fundamentally queer story. Sure, you could play Boyfriend Dungeon as a straight character, but its romantic options, dialogue, and setting are all deliberately queer-coded, and I fear games such as this are destined to be eternally wholesome or risk being demonising for daring to broach upon foreign territory or delve into serious issues beyond a surface level exploration.

The reality is, being queer is complicated and often traumatic. Whether you’re gay, bisexual, lesbian or anything else on the spectrum, LGBTQ+ poeple occupy an existence that still isn’t accepted in a large part of the world, and even countries who do provide us with official support are occupied by bigots who’d rather that not be the case. Combine that with coming out and existing alongside heteronormative friends and family and you’d be hard-pressed to find any queer person who doesn’t have some form of trauma attached to their identity.

The Last Of Us Part 2 Ellie And Dina Romantic Flashback Before Kiss

But such struggles are to be celebrated, because we’ve managed to march through them and come out of the other side without jeopardizing who we want to be. By forcing games to be little more than bastions of paradise that seek to abide by our every whim undermines that, and arguably paints us as the ‘snowflakes’ the ‘anti-SJW’ crowd are so eager to accuse us of being.

The Last of Us Part 2 and similar mainstream examples of queer stories such as Life is Strange are also critcised for being little more than misery porn, where people like me are put through unimaginable bouts of violence and riticule purely for being who we want to be. I’ve always disagreed with this consensus, even if Naughty Dog could have done a better job in some places. Ellie, Lev, and Dina are all excellent queer characters with an immaculate sense of agency, and ultimately have control over their own destiny and emerge victorious over the bigots who seek to hold them down. It’s a tale of perseverance over our greatest demons, and one that celebrates LGBTQ+ voices and places them in the spotlight like few games have before. Despite this, it has become popular to hate, even more so in some queer circles, and that outlook just confuses me.

Boyfriend Dungeon

What can developers do to appeal to you without utterly sanitising products until they stand for nothing? Boyfriend Dungeon, The Last of Us Part 2, and so many others are flying a flag, even if it wavers in the winds of change they’re trying so hard to fight for. Queer representation isn’t an evergreen idea, it’s one that requires growth, faults, and experimentation until it reaches a more accepted definition. We are right to point out when mistakes are made and how developers - many of which are still straight, white, and cis - can do better when it comes to depicting these identities with the right amount of delicacy. Of course, queer people should be telling these stories in the first place, but we need to accept that fumbles will be made in service of progress, and demanding changes are made whenever something makes you uncomfortable is the wrong way to go about things.

Life is filled with moments that make you uncomfortable, and art should reflect that and give us the opportunity to confront themes and moments that we might otherwise be ignorant to in reality. Without this, we confine ourselves to an echochamber where we become increasingly defensive of the few things we hold dear. Wholesome games have become a sign of that mentality, and we need to snap out of it for the medium and queer storytelling to move forward. I’m all for critiquing games that pay lip-service to queer identities hoping for a pat on the back, but when games like Boyfriend Dungeon are making a concerted effort to celebrate such voices, but also want to explore some of the struggles that accompany romantic relationships, we shouldn’t be pulling out our pitchforks and rioting on the streets of Twitter.

We should be advocating for change and further inclusivity, but demanding developers remove integral parts of their stories really isn’t the way forward.

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