Post by Xauxenox in Straight!? comments

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Hello,
I'm a horny player who got trapped into following the story til the end with butterflies in the stomach during half of it.

I found the game on an explicit website and prefered to download it from the actual source. In a hurry to unhornynize myself, I completely missed the revamp part and played the classic version, which wasn't too much of a problem.

As you might already have guessed, I'm one of those who came for the NSFW and stayed for the feels. And what feels they were!

I've never really read any romance before. I have troubles feeling strong emotions and that's why I'm seeing a therapist. I only realised it was more than a porn game after I had the choice between two different routes.

I got attached to Braden at that point so I chose accordingly and never regretted it.

Spoiler Warnings from here

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS :
I'm gonna start with a lenghty and useless first sentence to protect wandering eyes from getting spoiled. Here we go. The sex scene that one would expect in a NSFW game kinda never came (even though I enjoyed the final explicit scenes and am one of those who consider it to be "unvirgining") but the thing was so well led that I didn't mind at all. When I started, I definitely wanted them to do the deed, but the writing succesfully led me to only want them to end up together and happy. The attempt at sex at the end made me actually chuckle. How cute, how relatable, how I wish I had that experience as a first time!
END OF SPOILERS.

The NSFW question now set aside, I'm going to talk about the rest.

As I said before, I don't think I've ever read actual romance before.

Thanks to this work, I now know I'm not made for this :
the thing made my stomach churn with emotion, and I felt compelled to finish it so I could move on with my life.

I feel like I felt too much emotions for my own good. Maybe not for my own good, but that definitely felt overwhelming.

Probably because I identified to the main character like crazy (I had a massive crush on a straight guy and never built the courage to confess -as I was and still am a 100% sure that I would have gotten rejected-), I was violently touched by the story : I fell in love with the character you wrote and couldn't stop thinking about him while I wasn't playing. When I was talking about it to people, my stomach churned again. That's a thing I should talk about to my therapist!

Anyways, I'm not sure this would have happened with any other romance. I think *you* did an amazing job and that you have an ability to create relatable characters. Sure some scenes were idealised and would have probably never happened in real life (that's why we write romances I guess), but the characters themselves reacted accordingly.

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS :
Ash was legit funny, Mikhael is a friend that could fix anyone's life and I won't even talk about Braden because my stomach will start to churn again (it literally is right now). Zack was at a perfect point between being its own character and extremely relatable.
END OF SPOILERS

Now I will be able to close this game and delete it. In a few days I will think that I was stupid to have felt such intense emotions about a romance visual novel, but this doesn't change anything to the fact that you've done a wonderful job at touching people right in their heart. You're an amazing artist, man

Aaryn1 year ago(+2)

Heya,

Thank you sincerely for the long, well-written response and thank you for reading and taking the project as a serious attempt. No worries on the horny reader approach, you're among thousands, lol. I actually take that as a compliment: that you downloaded for the horny reasons and stayed for the story.

That being said, I have no idea how this story stacks up with other "romances." Honestly, I dont even know if it's a romance-- i've never read one either. But it felt like what I'd want a romance to be. I've actually never seen a gay themed movie or read any gay-themed literature or novels-- I purposely avoided them while writing this because I didn't want them to influence this story.

Sorry about the upset stomach throughout this thing. If it makes you feel better, you're not alone there; I had the same stomach pains the entire time that I was writing it. It was cathartic but brutally honest and difficult sometimes for me to accept or share. I'm glad to hear you're in therapy. While I don't know your situation, I was going through my masters program in clinical psych when I wrote the majority of this so I'm familiar with therapy and have worked in the field. That being said, please don't take this story as "truth" or some type of "correct" way of doing things. It's simply a template on communication and honesty and self-acceptance that worked for these particular characters. Not everyone has the same journey so remember to listen to yourself, but if any of these interactions spoke to you or helped you, please take them and use them to your heart's desire. I tackled a lot of heavy issues in this story and it was even more fun to do all of that under an "adult" tag. Hell, the Discord was full of churning emotions-- especially for the ending. I'm glad it spoke to you and I'm glad you checked in to share your thoughts and your experiences. Good luck to you. Thank you for reading, thank you for leaving an emotional response, and thank you for your being a part of this for me <3

Xauxenox1 year ago (3 edits) (+3)

I was sure you were doing something linked to psychology, I felt like there was no way you had no knowledge in this field for you to be able to write with such accuracy. It's a good thing you used your skills to write such a story.

I was however surprised to learn that you've never read or seen any fictive gay romance either before : that makes your work even more authentic than I thought, because you wrote straight out of your heart, without using stuff from potential past litterary experiences (something that most writers efficiently and rightly do).

Thanks for your concern and advice. I already had this kind of approach to be honest. Even if I can't expect everything to work like with Zack and Braden (if only: I would have a perfect guide!), their story made me realise that, even as an out of closet bi dude, I should still let go of the labels and just consider myself as myself and nothing else.

I learned that trying to find a label as if it would have helped me find my identity is not a solution. My identity is unique, just like anyone else's, and for this reason I can't a 100% appeal to any label that has been created by anyone else than myself (that's more or less what Mikhail once said to Zack, if I remember well!).

I feel like that's quite an interesting thing that happened in the LGBTQ+ community. For a community that originally had to form itself because it couldn't be labeled efficiently by society, I think that it's now doing an awfully good job at creating a multiplicity of labels for people to fit in (top, bottom, vers, twink, twonk, fem, masc, bear ...). I know this is a complicated issue and labels help with representation and inclusivity, but in my case, I'm way too much overthinking stuff to be able to use those efficiently (and I'm not the only one apparently, as it's also the case with Zack and Braden and I'm not sure those two came out of nowhere).
That's partly why I don't really feel a part of this community despite not being straight, even if I fully respect it.

This is the main lesson that I got from your story: if you can do without labels, definitely do without them. This might be a bit too succint of a summary, but this comment is already pretty long, lol. I know there were a lot more, but that's the one that appealed to me the most (along with the communication stuff, but that I kinda already got it from past experiences :)
I'm sure this lesson will remain after the week I'll have used to digest all these intense emotions I felt (and to come to terms with the fact that my chances of ever meeting a perfect copy of Braden are more than slim haha), and I feel like I've got to thank you for this. Take care

itch.io

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