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Back in... July? Sraëka Lillian and I put out a little game for the Toxic Yuri VN Jam. I wanted to write a postmortem right away, but, like everyone involved in the jam, we were suprised to be immediately derailed by an unexpected blitz of censorship. If you're involved in indie games at all, you probably know what I'm talking about: the moral panic against erotic games, first hitting Steam, then directed at Itch, supported by Mastercard, Visa, Stripe, PayPal, and a reactionary vanguard of evangelicals and conservative feminists.

I had, and have, nothing particularly intelligent to say about these zealots. Any attempt to use the law as a bludgeon against art is so absurd that to take it seriously demeans us all. I've written and deleted many boring diatribes and humiliating appeals on the subject. At least our game is still up. In fact, most, if not all, of them are.

Is the internet dead? Is it dying? Is social media over? What else, what next?

I don't think we're done. Dissident, queer, and subaltern voices will continue to bother the fringes and occasionally occupy the mainstream, in digital and analog space. The entire internet cannot be controlled. The entirety of politics, the economy, public space, the environment, cannot be controlled. While some percentage of the population, for some percentage of their time, submits to algorithms and GenAI just as before we've submitted to TV, to tabloids, to Hollywood films, the church, and every other ideological state apparatus, not everyone is so well-behaved all of the time. Getting counter-hegemonic ideas into the mainstream is always tricky, it requires skill, luck, innuendo, metaphor, creativity. Kink content will, by its nature, be divisive and upsetting. Queer pornographers are not likely to have enduring mainstream critical and financial success, and will often have to work at the margins. We can rattle our cages, but we should keep some humour, some perspective, some faith in our ability to find each other again.

Our current moment, as artists and as enthusiasts, is an absolute orgy of new and archived work, even as it is also a time of repression, war, and moral panic. Public libraries, bookstores, wheatpasted posters around my neighbourhood, online archives, and social media continue to lead me to all kinds of wonderful things. Do I have any idea how to make a living with my work? No. Do crackdowns on online marketplaces hurt artists? YES, of course, and if we can fight against them, we should. Ireland just finished piloting a UBI for artists program, and is planning to make it permanent. Public arts funding could go a long way toward freeing artists from weaponized profit motives, at least. What about the more despotic forms of censorship, direct commands from leaders to cancel their critics, or strict laws against eg. "promoting homosexuality"? Who the fuck knows. I guess people keep trying to fight in whatever ways make sense in their context. Everywhere, people do what they want to, and make noises about things that piss them off, at least some of the time.

In any case, here are the dykes I drew and wrote about. I was overwhelmed by the reception we got, the story really seemed to work on some people!! Sraëka came up with the basic premise, and it was a really fun challenge to come up with a fitting story that felt honest. I thank them very much for being so supportive, for pushing me to go darker, and for their inspired typesetting, coding, and UI. Play FREW/HORT on windows or in your browser now!!