Interested in Dark Cloud but haven't played it yet?
Maybe it’s an all-time favorite and you want some more history?

Check out this “Prep Kit”, full of pre-release coverage, interviews, advertising and merchandise to get you in that Launch Day mindset!

https://goatedquest.blogspot.com/2024/04/068-dark-cloud-prep-kit.html

Let me help make every game you play feel brand new, no matter how old

Mice Tea’s Felicia route (hereafter referred to as Felicia with italics) is fascinating to me as a work that is explicitly a fandom object about a community that is usually not considered a fandom as much as a literary genre or community of insular artists. The furry community is a fandom, yes, and I think it’s why this lasers into the communal aspects of TGTF (the chosen acronym for gender-bender transformation kink porn, hereafter referred to by said acronym) as well, but it clearly is conversing with the community in ways that Gender Bender DNA Twister Extreme, Student Transfer, and Max’s Big Bust, other notable community efforts, don’t.

Those works, while enjoyable (even if two out of the three are completely impossible to find sexy despite being kink fiction), are very much straightforwardly... fiction with a gender-bender theme. Felicia is about the relationships that people have with gender-bending as a concept, how fiction about it affects them, and using kink as a tool for liberating self-expression. It’s got unobtrusive-but-witheringly-deep cuts to old figures (I am pretty sure that there’s a fucking Sparkling Generation Valkyrie Yuuki reference in one random NPC’s attire) and tempers it with newer approaches.

While Felicia’s explicit sex positivity is extremely cool and worth highlighting and shouting out as a hallmark of more “modern” TGTF, it being a centrally trans narrative instead of a trans-fetishizing narrative is the dead giveaway. The narrative thrust is different, heterosexuality is not compulsory, and it centers on a wlw romance that genuinely focuses on fluffy, cuddly intimacy and not just sex (even if there’s a lot of fucking and most of it has way above-par anatomy and prose for this genre). It’s not deep or even particularly sharp with its character beats, but it’s refreshing, smutty, and enjoyable nonetheless.

This genuine character arc elides my biggest issue with Ms. Transformistress’ pieces outside of this game, which are all coming from a similar intent of genuine trans catharsis, but are hamstrung by their short-form nature. The ethics of this fetish are always murky, but when there’s insufficient setup for establishing the character as “oh they’re actually trans and just don’t know it yet and this non-consensual change is actually exactly what they want” without essentially being a post-hoc retcon it feels tacky. Here, while Felicia is still ultimately that exact plot beat, the drawn-out narrative nature allows it to actually feel earned. The foreshadowing beats, while not exactly subtle, feel real. And despite all this, Felicia succeeds at only feeling preachy when the main character is, in-universe, demonstrating to a male-identifying person how to properly eat pussy. And, like, that’s a public service. The rest of the time, it maintains its fluffy, laid-back, relaxed atmosphere with ease.

The contrast between Felicia’s experiences and Gavin’s allows for genuinely incisive portrayals of dysphoria and euphoria, with Gavin’s hotel metaphor being a genuinely effective way to express emotions impossible for almost anybody to feel. There are portrayals of bigger things that change - people becoming more romantic, sexualities shifting, but equally important are the little beats. One person becomes clumsier and has to exert effort into making themselves present while they want, while the other dances around environments and situations they fumbled through before. The unspoken pressure of dysphoria on their executive function is essentially what causes the entire game to happen.

Gavin is an older-school TGTF protagonist, in a characterization that evokes early-middle Tedd from El Goonish Shive. A tinkerer and researcher, he instigates the transformations and has an interest in the act itself. He considers himself a man no matter what, and even when he has a vagina and breasts he is treated as and written as a man with he/him pronouns. His sex scene in the route is essentially femdom, despite everybody having female bodies, and he then switches bweteen to male and female bodies afterwards. Felicia, by contrast, is is treated as a woman by everybody within the narrative and her gender transformation is early in, more-restrained than Gavin’s, and her body never switches back to its AMAB presentation.

The route has four different side characters who each get a chance to transform, and they each relate differently - one takes to Gavin’s interest in the mechanics and act of transforming, instead being a middle-late Tedd who adopts more genderfluid self-perception (while still smuggling it out of the cities to help trans homies in the sticks), another takes after Felicia and is an explicitly trans blushing mess, one is entirely disinterested in gender presentation and essentially chooses a form out of tool-like interest (notably, this character is a real-life OC that appears in all goddamn sorts of kink stuff I’ve run into, and has few compunctions about scenarios) and one is completely unchanged by the transformation because to her it’s just a way of reinforcing their love of an animal.

These topics aren’t brought up as serious roadblocks to be pondered, they’re touchstones used to establish resonance for the explicitly queer audience it courts. There’s something to the act of transforming and its consequences that grabs somebody and turns them on, and even if it’s just effectively the result of some crossed mental wires, it’s still going to grab each person in different ways. I’ve been a lurker in the TGTF community since before I was in puberty, back when I didn’t have any other frame of reference for how somebody could metamorphose into a form that is, for all intents and purposes, far better for them and way hotter. I infrequently contribute to it, even now, under an array of pen names, alt accounts, and anonymous submissions that are, vaguely, traceable to a central internet personality that refuses to decompartmentalize herself. It’s one of the few places that, even as an unremarkable and forgotten bystander, truly feels like a home to her. This is one of the few works that gets it.

All of the let's play narration for these random-build-focused slot-machine-action-games is like 'ohh after your 50th run you'll have enough gopher coins to now unlock the Zuckerberg's Icon so now when you play Billy Boy and choose the Steven Stone for your 14th Arcana Tier you'll be able to Yummymax your way past the 4th Tier of Encroachening when you face the waves of 23 Yeti-men. Make sure to spend you 1.0% APR Slammy Shards only on Subtle-enchanted Attack Boosts to make sure the chance of reaching Heaven is fulfilled on a blue day! Like comment and subscribe