The role of power in this game

[TrammityPrammity]

Tell me something, who has power in this game's narrative? I don't think there's a clear answer to that. Lunarie has a great amount of power in the narrative simply by virtue of being the player character: she needs to succeed in order for the game to progress, and the game ends with her victory. A significant portion of the game's mechanics and story tell the narrative of a simple knight saves the princess story. The unpatched version of this game tells that story without contradiction, but it's in the game's erotic content that the narrative becomes confused.

The game in its original 18+ form features mechanics and scenes that disempower Lunarie. Enemies will jump you, giving you only 1 turn to knock them off before a rape scene is triggered; The game pushes you into prostitution, stripping, and/or offering your body to an old man by making the non-erotic alternative to progression a boring arena grind; and many other mechanics, such as trick rooms and surprise encounters, all serve to disempower the player. And I think it's important to note that two opposing forces I've laid out of empowerment and disempowerment are not necessarily in conflict with each other. In a well-made piece of media, these forces would work together to create conflict within the narrative. However, the devil is in the details; Lunarie's disempowerment serves only to distance her from the player.

Every Lunarie H-scene involves her being raped. These scenes are framed in a way that sexualize and objectify Lunarie's suffering, and this creates a conflict between the player's competing, incompatible desires. For most of gameplay, the player's motivations align with Lunarie's: defeat the enemy in front of you, complete your mission, etcetera. However, in the case of H-scenes, the player is pulled out of Lunarie's perspective. She continues to be the narrator, but the narrative told by her words, the images shown, and the general tone of the scenes replaces the role of player with the role of voyeur. The voyeur simply sees Lunarie as a sex object. to the voyeur, her motivations only exist as context for erotic scenes that tear said motivations down. The voyeur has no reason to care about her quest, and the player is similarly opposed to the narrative told by the H-scenes. And yet, the player and the voyeur reside within the same entity: you. The end result is that the player and the voyeur are in a constant internal struggle.

I find all this interesting. Like, in my eyes, Lilitales can't be about these concepts of power. The narrative told by its story and basic gameplay progression, and the story told by its subtler mechanics and H-scenes, are at total odds with each other. It's not coherent. Other elements of the story, such as vampires and the church, can't really come to meaningful thematic coherence befause the game's core themes are inherently fractured.

Anyway, yeah. That's interesting to me.

[Histidine]

I don't have any deeper comment to make than "nice analysis", so, uh... nice analysis.
(And I think it's broadly applicable to the broader subgenre within H-games, too.)

[Combat Wombat]

This is meant to be one of those games people play to watch a female protoangist getting raped every 45 - 90 seconds. However, it does have merit as an actual game, something that many games that fall under the discreet heading of "Adult games" are not able to claim.

[PirateMouse]

Well, as long as we're weirdly over-analyzing an H-game, I'll throw in my two cents':

What really struck me as in some way problematic or unfortunate is that in a game rife with sexual content, Lunarie is permitted no agency and development as a sexual being.

Early on in the game, Lunarie has a parasite, the "lust worm," forcibly inserted into her body. There's no way to avoid this event, and there's no way to ever really be rid of the lust worm, either. The parasite feeds and grows off of Lunarie's sexual or sex-related (e.g., erotic dancing) encounters and can, in turn, be pushed back by Cless's treatments. We all know this.

What's noteworthy here is that Lunarie has exactly zero growth as a sexual being, for good or for ill, that does not relate to the lust worm's progression. Not only does she show no signs whatsoever of trauma no matter how many times she's raped, but as long as her lust worm percentage is kept low, she doesn't even change her attitude about anything she's doing willingly. Lunarie may have danced every day and sold her body for money hundreds of times, but as long as you manage to keep her lust worm percentage low enough, she continues to behave as though it's all happening for the first time (seriously, how many times can she be surprised about stripping in front of an audience?). There is no difference between Lunarie the virgin with a low lust worm score and Lunarie the professional stripper/prostitute with a low lust worm score: both act like fresh-faced, wide-eyed, innocent virgin girls unexpectedly finding themselves in a new situation.

What it comes down to is that there are exactly two versions of Lunarie, depending on whether you've crossed the 80% lust worm threshold, and both are classic male fantasy archetypes: there's wide-eyed innocent virgin girl Lunarie (even if she's had sex hundreds of times), and there's lusty slut Lunarie. That's it. Lunarie is never permitted to grow sexually in any other way—say, to become cynical, to actually enjoy sex (regardless of the lust worm), or to at least begin to regard dancing as routine and "just a job." In fact, Lunarie is not really permitted to grow sexually in any fashion at all, because any "growth" is not hers; it's just the result of a parasite that was forced on her beginning to take control over her body.

This brings me to a final point on this: the version of Lunarie who's begun acting like an archetypal slut. To get to this version, we need 80% lust worm growth. Not only is Lunarie's attitude toward sex entirely due to the influence of an unwanted parasite, but by the time she's this far along, she's beginning to be in real danger of losing her mind entirely. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but to me, there's something of an echo of "slut shaming" here: women are not supposed to enjoy sex too much (apart from Airi, who enjoys it TOO much and to a downright disturbing and squicky degree), and if they do, then they need to be punished for it.

Anyway, that's me way over-thinking a game that was never meant to be analyzed like this. My thoughts, for whatever they're worth.