The love that older men share together is so desirable to me. I’ve always longed to grow older with another man, with our storgic, companionate love maturing with age. I wish I could say Dream Daddy fits a niche that would appeal greatly to me, but the extremely tacky humor and manufactured conflicts straight out of a family sitcom destroy any genuineness that could be gleamed from this depiction of love. Yes, it’s done on purpose, but ironic shitposting is still shitposting and this desperate effort to create a “safe space” game works against it to feel like some sort of cynical joke with queer men at the butt of it. I know the writers (a straight man and a queer woman) claimed they wanted to avoid writing about experiences they didn’t know, but I honestly would have much preferred they did consult queer men and gave it their best shot instead of this neutered garbage designed to be as straight-ally-friendly as possible at our own expense.

I want to talk about Joseph’s route because it’s the only one that attempts to confront any sort of complicated relationship dynamic, and even its best ending is intentionally dissatisfying. There’s actually a sense of artistic ambition to it in theory, even if it still suffers from horribly stilted writing like the rest of the VN. Yet, the route was torn to shreds even by many fans: it was cruel, it was homophobic, it was bad representation, et cetera. On one hand, I can’t entirely fault people for being unable to recognize this as a commentary on a specific sub-set of queer men that exist when the rest of the game does so much to distance itself from any sense of reality. But, it’s also just so disheartening when people use a fixation on optics and surface-level representation analysis to shout down any story that so much as gestures towards uniquely queer pain.