LATEX, LEATHER, LIPSTICK, LOVE, LUST by THE BODY & THE BLOOD
If you want a picture of the future, imagine people debating whether ‘bi lesbian’ is a TERF term – forever.
LATEX, LEATHER, LIPSTICK, LOVE, LUST is a long choice-based game, clocking in at about 4 hours, certainly if you have to look up as many of its terms and cultural references as I did. In it, we follow the adventures of a socially awkward trans guy named ‘L’, who has worked up the courage to go to a kink club. That’s where he meets Val, who will turn out to be not just his initiator into the wonders of trans latex subspace, but also, and much more importantly, into the wonders of friendship and self acceptance. Although I had a hard time forgiving Val his remarks about the Dutch – perhaps he should educate himself and learn that the Netherlands is very much not a swamp because every single fucking swamp we had has had dikes built around it and then been pumped dry with those big fucking rows of windmills, what the fuck else did you think those were used for – he does end up being genuinely good news in L’s life. It’s a positive, upbeat story, and I appreciate the fact that it didn’t end in romance, which would have been more predictable but less realistic.
The writing is gorgeous. The visuals are good too, but it’s the writing that steals the show. There’s quotable sentences galore, like the protagonist calling himself “The world’s least fuckable woman-shaped man(?).” But more crucially, there are some really good scenes, and, unexpectedly, it’s the sex scenes that are the best. The first masturbation scene. The sex scene in latex. The lipstick scene, oh man, with the ensuing bathroom horrors. When the game is at its most visceral and bodily, it really shines. Kudos to ‘the blood’, who is apparently the writer of the piece.
Unfortunately, I did not like the basic text delivery mechanics at all. You get a few sentences. Then you have to press a button. You get a few more sentences. Then you press the button again. And so on. This is incredibly irritating. It significantly slows down the reading process, because instead of just reading on, you have to pause your reading to press the button, then relocate your eyes to the place where the new text appeared. Awful. I can’t think of any good reason to deliver text this way. If you have a static passage of text, why not just give me the entire passage at once? And I also couldn’t just press the button until all the text had appeared, because the text would disappear when I reached the end of the page. More than once did I miss text because I had too enthusiastically pressed my space bar in an attempt to just, you know, keep reading.
Even without this slowing down of the mechanical act of reading, the story progressed very slowly. It could easily have been half its current length, I think, and shortening it would have considerably strengthened its emotional impact. Many scenes seem to be there only to stress how horrible the protagonist’s initial situation is. But act 1 perfectly establishes the insecurities of L. Nothing much seemed added by the lingerie outing, or by all the long, long, long, did I already say ‘long’, passages set on Tumblr and Discord.
These also felt rather unrealistic. L was subscribing to Tumblr accounts that were both toxic and stupid… but why? He was on a completely dysfunctional Discord server… but why? Again and again, the game suggested that when there was ‘time to kill’, L had ‘no choice’ except checking Tumblr or Discord. Give me a break. Why didn’t he pick up a book, or do some Duolingo lessons, or take a walk in the park? Since he was clearly not getting anything positive from his online experiences, it felt absurd that he would keep searching them out. I get that the story is about him being liberated from the need to be online all the time, but that part of the narrative would work a lot better if there had been any obvious attraction to being online. Since ‘online’ in this game is an unrelentingly stupid place, its attraction remained entirely mysterious.
So, yeah, it felt like I was struggling (hit spacebar. hit spacebar. hit spacebar) through a text that wasn’t fully respecting my time (let’s add in another completely inane Discord discussion that we are required to read in full). And at the same time, I was being served these gorgeous scenes in extremely competent prose leading to a perfect ending. A mixed experience, to be sure, but enriching.