Oh no.
So I want to start by saying that I haven't finished the VN. I read until around the third or fourth day, and I stopped because, and I'm just being honest here, it was very painful to continue. I really wanted to like this one, but I just couldn't. I have read another person's summary of the game's general story, so I will be touching on plot points that happen after the point I have stopped, though I will admit that some of the details I mention might be wrong. As such, this won't be a review in a traditional sense, but rather more of a discussion on why I dropped the VN and various aspects of the VN that don't work. I wrote all of this out, and I was like, "Fuck, I can't post this. It's way too harsh for a VN I haven't read all the way through." However, I decided to post this for two reasons. One is that even though I only read part of it, I had so many thoughts about the VN that it would feel weird not to put it out somewhere. The other is that Rhettoe is a cool guy. I quite liked The Curious Case of Route 19, and I do think he is quite skilled in a lot of areas, such as creative visuals, body horror, and writing horror in general. However, this VN is a major cause of concern in ways I can't really describe in just a few sentences. I'd feel bad for not giving my feedback for Rhettoe to use for future projects. So I want to make it clear that every criticism I make isn't supposed to come from a place of contempt. Rather, I want Rhettoe to improve his craft and make stories that don't run into a lot of the fundamental issues this story has.
Oh, I almost forgot. Most of my reviews have avoided spoilers, but not this one. The following will contain spoilers for the entire VN. If you're interested in reading this VN, I'd suggest that you read the VN before you read this review. I will say, though, that if you don't like the first hour or so of the VN, then it's fine if you don't finish it.
Before we get ahead of ourselves, I want to talk about some things I liked. The visuals and sound effects work to make a pretty striking and cinematic experience. The CGs, the intro, and a few other effects are really cool and immerse you into the experience quite effectively. The characters, for the most part, talk naturally, and the prose is good. Okay, let's get into the main gripes I have with the VN. From the beginning, the game makes it clear that being a werewolf is an allegory for being queer. I'd say it's closer to being trans, but there are also elements about being gay as well. From the fear of werewolves in the conservative Christian town, to the way the government and society oppress werewolves, to having to hide from the rest of society, to having to fight for your rights, to the whole body transformation horror, to the secret werewolf gay club, to the second name, there are a lot of parallels to being either gay or trans. Now, I should mention right off the bat that I don't intend to speak for all queer people. I'm just one gay guy talking about my own subjective opinions about this and how I feel about the story. Let me make this clear: I don't have an issue with a work of art being blatantly and shamelessly about queerness and the experience of being queer. I've quite enjoyed the work of JamieP, and her songs that are explicitly about being trans. But the thing about those works was that they are actually about being queer, whereas this VN focuses on an allegory for being queer. Now, it's not a one-to-one allegory, but that only highlights the problem.
Being queer, being gay, being trans, being attracted to people who are the same gender as you, having gender dysphoria, those aren't the same as being a werewolf, both in terms of lived experience and ontologically. It's hard to explain why the way this VN uses its trans allegory is so uncomfortable, but I think the videos, "Trope Talk: Robots" by Overly Sarcastic Productions and "Bright: The Apotheosis of Lazy Worldbuilding" by Lindsay Ellis (For the record, I don't like her, but the video's still good), do help explain my point here. When you use a fantastical race of people to treat them essentially as real-life minorities, well, at best it's lazy writing, and at worst, it makes it look like you want to write a story about the bigotry of a specific group of people without actually having to write that group of people. Obviously, it's bad when a person completely disengaged with the culture of marginalised groups writes stories like that. But to have a story like this written by someone who engages with queer people and the queer community daily, it feels less like reclamation and more like confusion. Like, I like werewolves, they're cool, but if someone told me that being gay is like being a werewolf, I'd want to punch them in the face. It doesn't help that there are some things about the allegory that have unfortunate implications. Namely, the whole turning into a violent monster if you reject being a werewolf. I think this is an allegory about how people who reject that they're gay or that they're trans take out their anguish on the world and are miserable. If it were just that, I personally wouldn't have gone with something so harsh. I like my fictional internalized homophobes after all. But the message of accepting a part of yourself that you've been told is sinful isn't bad. The real problem is the way you become a werewolf permanently. You have to eat part of another werewolf during a full moon to complete the transformation, such as hair or genital fluids. This means that a werewolf can become a monster just because they missed the ritual or didn't have another part of a werewolf they could eat. Both the werewolves and the humans agree that these monsters are too dangerous to be kept alive, so there's precedent for the humans to at least be suspicious of the werewolves when they could turn into monsters at any moment. Or not. Maybe they don't turn violent if you don't reject being a werewolf and just miss the rituals. I'm not sure. The VN does have both gay and trans characters in it, but the fact that the main focus is on the struggles of being a werewolf makes the queer struggles feel a lot less important. Like the queer werewolves are living in a conservative, religious town, and they barely talk about the struggle of being queer. What?
This brings me to another point. Most people, including myself, are fine with direct allegories to marginalised people in fiction, if either the group itself or the marginalisation doesn't make sense to exist within the setting. For example, it doesn't make sense to talk about the racism towards Black people in a setting composed of only furry characters, so people are fine if writers use species-based racism as an allegory for that, as long as the allegory isn't too on the nose. But the existence of queer people makes you wonder why the story isn't about queer people directly. Allegories work because they allow people who aren't part of the marginalized group to better understand what oppressed groups of people go through and empathize with them. If the allegory is extremely obvious about what it's an allegory towards, then it doesn't work. Like, if you wanted to write a story about the oppression of queer people, write a story about the oppression of queer people. Don't try to complicate things with a direct allegory to a group of people, in a story where they already exist! And if you wanted to write a story about werewolves, well, don't put in so many elements that make it hard for the average reader to distinguish between the group you're writing about and real-life groups. Unfortunately, the VN tries to do both, and it doesn't really work, no matter how you view it. If you view it strictly as a queer allegory, then the stuff about the rituals and the turning into a monster falls flat. If you ignore the allegory entirely, then it becomes hard to understand what the werewolves are going through.
This is frustrating because there's a long history of books, shows, games, and movies about secret societies of groups of supernatural people, sometimes a group of werewolves, and the oppression they face from normal people, and these stories (usually) don't run into the same issues. They work because, while a queer person can easily relate to some of the struggles they have, they're focusing on the specific struggles that the supernatural group would have in their setting, rather than trying to connect it with the struggles of real-life marginalised groups of people. You can have an allegory to queerness with fictional races, even direct ones, but the story still has to work without the allegory, and that's not the case here.
Moving on from the issues I have with the allegory, the werewolves aren't that sympathetic. I didn't really care about Zizi; the character just seemed to dump exposition about everything. Luis is a better character, but I still didn't care much about him. Like, why was Zizi the one to tell the MC Luis's backstory? First of all, it goes against the established rule that personal information shouldn't be disclosed in the den. Second of all, it just removes any potential intimacy revealing that info could have had. Even so, there wasn't really any reason for me to care about Luis as a character or what happened to him. This might sound heartless, but saying "bad thing happening to character" doesn't mean I'll suddenly care about him. You have to put in more effort to make the audience care about a character. That's kinda the point of stories, they can make you sympathetic with pretty much any character that you might have ignored or hated in real life. This VN doesn't do that. It suffers heavily from Eight Deadly Words syndrome (I don't care what happens to these characters). Going back to Luis, though, there's kind of a creepy power imbalance between the two. This might sound weird coming from the guy who includes a lot of age gap relationships in my VNs, but for me, I usually make sure that the younger guy isn't like a vulnerable person that can easily be taken advantage of. The MC just turned 21, doesn't know he's into men, and basically knows nothing outside of his small town when the story starts. When he first joins the den, he just accepts everything that's being introduced to him with only a little resistance. So, Luis's insistence that the MC has sex for the ritual, when just a hair would have been enough, and pushing the idea that he has to be hostile towards humans as the two quickly get into a romantic and sexual relationship, is a bit creepy and doesn't really paint werewolves or gay people in a particularly good light. Now look, I don't want to police what should or should not be in a VN, you can have whatever you want in your work. That doesn't mean I'm going to like it, though. This would be a lot less creepy if the MC had more agency, which brings me to his character.
I already mentioned that the MC basically accepts everything going on to him. That's not quite true; he does push back against a lot of what the wolves tell him, but it doesn't take long for him to just be okay with it anyway. He's a guy raised in a small, conservative town who doesn't hate his parents (well, parent, but you know what I mean). He'd resist the werewolves a lot harder than in the actual VN. I'm pretty sure he'd at least throw a slur at them, he'd call them demons, and he'd blame them for his transformation into a werewolf. A person in the MC's situation likely wouldn't trust the werewolves, considering how they act towards him. There's a scene where MC is talking to one of the werewolves, where they're talking about gay sex or something, and MC is like "but that's against the Bible", and the wolf goes "if anyone knew who you really are, those people following that book would kill you." That rubs me the wrong way, because it only works as a rebuttal if you assume that the MC's faith isn't genuine, when the wolf could have just been like "Um, we've literally seen moon spirits right in front of our eyes. I'm pretty sure that goes against the Bible, so...". The only way I could see a person like this reacting like this is if the only reason why he was a Christian in the first place was that he was only following orders from his family, not actually believing the actual faith. But the VN doesn't really show that. Even if it did, the VN would have been a lot more interesting if the MC had put in a lot more effort in trying to resist the werewolves, at least initially. I'm not saying this because I want to see more homophobia in my VNs; I'm saying this because I want my MCs to pack more of a punch to them. My impression of him is that he's a very weak-minded individual who's easily swayed by any adult in his room.
Originally, I wrote a section about the protest that happened near the end of the game that involved burning the Confederate flag. I decided to cut a lot of it because I think the discussion got into some controversial opinions that were way beyond the scope of this VN, which was probably a bit much for a scene I didn't even read myself. But from what I can gather, the scene was written with a very mixed message, and it could have definitely been improved in a lot of ways. Going back on topic, the riot ends up causing the humans to start killing the wolves, which causes a large massacre. First of all, Luis apparently blames the MC for starting the riot, when it was the werewolves' choice whether they should participate or not, and as far as I can tell, it's hard to just plainly put the blame solely on him when there were several factors influencing him. But also, it's saying that protests or rioting don't work, but the VN doesn't suggest a better solution. Protesting and rioting are the solution; it's just that Charleston is too hateful, which is why the riot didn't work. I can't put into words how cynical that message is. Like, the town's just going to be like that no matter what you do? Were the werewolves just going to die in Charleston no matter what? What kinda message are people supposed to take from that? Small towns aren't hiveminds, they are groups of a large number of people. You're always going to get a diverse group of people. Certainly, there have to be at least a couple of people who are against the oppression from the rest of the town.
Which brings me to the fact that not a single human in the game is sympathetic towards the werewolves. Part of this is because you'll get killed if you support the werewolves, but even then, there should be some dissenters. I get the whole The Smoke Room style "it's 1915, and everyone might as well be openly gay" attitude can be annoying when it requires you to have a suspension of disbelief the size of the Atlantic Ocean, but the extreme other end of the spectrum isn't realistic either. In any environment that was oppressive to a group of people, there were always people who weren't being oppressed who still called out the unfairness of their respective governments. There were people in Nazi Germany who were anti-Nazis. If white people who weren't against slavery didn't exist, we'd still have slavery today. Sure, the vast majority of people were bigoted, but there were always people who went against the grain even when they didn't have to. Which makes the VN's message even more unnecessarily cynical. I also don't like how black and white the characters are depicted. Discrimination and oppression in the real world, especially in modern times, isn't always violence. When literally every single depiction of discrimination in the VN is either violence or threats of violence, then it downplays a lot of actual discrimination and how insidious and subtle non-violent discrimination can be. Calling a minority a slur is still very hurtful, yet I could see someone reading this VN and going "well, at least he's not trying to kill you." Obviously, the VN isn't condoning such behavior, but this is a case where being blunt backfired.
Somewhat related is that non-violent methods don't make sense from the werewolves' point of view. Why doesn't any werewolf have a gun in a town that's likely to be drowning in assault weapons? If it's mandated by the government to have every werewolf be exterminated, and every human you meet either wants you dead or has tried to kill you, why would you avoid doing violence yourself? If you were in that situation, you'd arm yourself to protect the people close to you, because otherwise you'd be vulnerable. It's not initiating violence; it's self-defense. The game does have the wolves performing self-defense at a few points in the game, yet, weirdly, there's an unspoken insistence that they're unarmed. I guess we need to show the importance of non-violent riots, which fail anyway, so what was the point?
There are some other issues I had. Some of the characters, especially the werewolves, talk like modern characters. I asked Rhetto about this, and he said that the setting was not supposed to take place in a specific time period, instead being timeless. Well, it's hard for it to be timeless when characters talk like someone I could meet in an American city today. Also, I couldn't find a better place to mention this, but the game mentions that the government denies science and then talks about the wolf spirit. Fair enough, the wolf spirit actually exists, but you'd think the wolves would be more concerned with the humans denying the existence of a wolf spirit than with science. That is just a minor nitpick, though. I'm just mentioning it because it stood out to me.
Hopefully, all this rambling was somewhat comprehensible. It's kinda hard to collect all your thoughts into one post. Again, I really wanted to like this VN because there's an engaging story hiding underneath all the gripes I had with the VN. But all of its problems just weigh down the experience too much for me to enjoy it. I think a lot of the issues I had with the VN come from the fact that it really doesn't want to be a game jam entry. The 25k word limit severely limited how nuanced the VN could be and made scenes that needed a slower pace extremely s. That doesn't change the fact that I didn't enjoy this VN at all. I'm sorry, but I can't recommend this one in good conscience. For the last time, I want to make it clear that I have no contempt for the author or any of the ideas expressed in this VN. I just want to air out my grievances with this story so that Rhett can make better works in the future.