even if you get past the insidious and varied transmisogyny, the fact that the main character is a sexual predator and one of his close friends is The Pervert(tm), the infantilization of one of its female leads and the cardboard cutout tsundere archetype of the other one, the racism of having the only black men in the game be aggressive and violent thugs who do immoral things, the fact that this is a very loosely concealed harem game with a fast and loose interpretation of science and physics, the fact that the main character is braindead and cannot engage in basic rationalization to predict one of the most obvious plot twists in any video game ever...

even if you can get past all of that, this game is just fucking bad and sucks big shit lol

Sweet Pool is a true act of artistry through transgression; it employs a variety of extremely disturbing subject matter depicted by rather visceral means including, but not limited to, sexual assault, torture, self-cutting, cannibalism, and necrophilia, in a manner that is not always mechanically necessary but rather used as means of metaphor for the emotional conflicts of the character. (By the way, consider that your content warning) It’s a game I felt incredibly unclean after playing the fanslation several years ago, and I still felt unclean after playing the official translation a couple years ago. This is not an uplifting game about how it’s okay to be gay, rather this is a validation of the pain and trauma that many queer men have experienced in a way that feels incredibly pointed.

It all starts with the setting, conveniently a Catholic school. The game weaponizes Christian symbolism to represent paranoia; it’s mentioned early in the game that the students don’t actively believe in Christian teachings, but still passively do in a manner that reflects many cultural attitudes of the era: no longer popular to be openly spiteful towards LGBT people, but the hateful words of before are something that is still passively believed by a majority of the population. Indeed, the story of Sodom is constantly invoked throughout the VN as a plot point, as a reminder of what God is often taught as believing about gay people.

Now, the core element of the body horror being “crapping maggots out your butthole” sounds incredibly alienating as a premise, and it is completely by design. Youji’s repeated “cleansings” leave him feeling disgusted by and dissociated from his own body, it’s his “dirty little secret” that he can’t express to others, at which point SP becomes not just a game about men-loving-men and reveals itself to also be a transmasculine narrative. At this point, as a cis man I’m deferring to Vrai Kaiser’s excellent article on the game, specifically the sections “Your Body, the Enemy” and “Diving Deep”. It’s a great article all-around even if I don’t agree with all the points, and I would be remiss if I didn’t concede on at least these well-thought-out points. (https://www.fanbyte.com/features/sweet-pool-best-cronenbergian-erotic-horror-game/)

It’s a good time to bring up the game’s interactive system as well: instead of being presented text choices at branches, you are merely presented with two lights at the corner of the screen representing instinct and reason. There are no words that can help you understand what they necessarily mean in each context. What’s really neat is that selecting exclusively one or the other leads you to the two bad endings belonging to the non-true love interests (more on that in a bit) that are uniquely suited for someone who only adheres to one. Selected only reason? Youji dies in a manner karmically suited to someone who cannot defend his own feelings and compromises himself way too much for the sake of “getting along”. Picked only instinct? Youji goes out in a horrifically passionate flame without any regard for his own self-preservation. These two endings contain the most disgusting content in the entire VN, and yet they work so effectively as pleas to not be like Youji nor his faux-love interests in these scenarios. One ending, the “all reason” ending, has some immensely triggering imagery to me that has managed to haunt me in a way that has lead to being a better person, because I never want to become like that.

So, Youji’s harem isn’t really a harem, so much as a pack of hormone-addled teens that can barely contain their desires to have sex with him and fight over their possessiveness. There’s a conversation to be had about BL’s tendency to overuse sexual assault, but something about SP that causes me to be more lenient is, again, tying back to its unique insight of the lives of gay men. They are all literally the only men-loving men that each other knows, and in particular Youji is the only, well, bottom in the story. I say this not to justify any of the more depraved sexual acts they perform on Youji unwillingly, but rather as an understanding that this is a very extreme metaphorical depiction of the desperation queer men can feel to find a partner, compounded with their hostile environment basically making it a miracle they discovered each other in the first place. They’re all convinced they’re each other’s only chance at being intimately understood and take pretty drastic measures in misguided attempts to assure it.

There’s a lot more I could talk about, such as the recurring theme of the characters being anxious of not living up to their legacies (hint: that’s also a gay-coded thing), the more particular struggles in communication between Youji and his canon love interest Tetsuo, the heart-wrenching true ending that served as a testament to all the gay men who couldn’t live to find their other and the gut-punching credits theme “Miracles May”, a jarringly gentle song performed by Kanako Itou that encourages reflection on what just transpired. For a rather short VN (it can be completed in under 15 hours), it’s so thematically rich and emotionally impactful. If you think you have the stomach for it, please play this game (and with the 18+ patch) for an incredibly introspective and, in my opinion, important piece of LGBT fiction.

P.S. I actually own official GIFT plushes of Youji and Tetsuo. They cost a lot and it's incredibly difficult to find someone even willing to sell them online but the fact I got the pair together was a small miracle in an of itself and I treasure them as my rarest official plushes.

mascotizing, de-eroticized, de-humanizing wooby doo-doo that started out as a low key homophobic ~sooo randim~ joke about how funny gay cultural nomenclature is to its straight creators but then got agonizingly retconned into game grumps' (ugh) flailing attempt at a self-serious inclusivity project. Too ignorant and afraid of offending anyone to portray anything resembling adult human intimacy or eroticism, and reeks with the no homo!!!! creator's fears of depicting anything messy, hot, or specific about icky degenerate gay sexuality. Never overtly cruel and clearly interested in playacting safeness and inclusivity, but the placid smoothness of everything feels like its own form of erasure--and it's a smug, self congratulatory one. This is clearly not really trying to provide anything meaningful or substantive for gay audiences: it's for obnoxious straight "allies" to play and have fuzzy wuzzies about how great they are for wubbing the cutesy wootsie daddy poos--they're smol pastel beans just like us!!! Heinous. I dont want to yuck anyones yum too hard or whatever but if you're a queer adult and love this game I kind of think you're a fucking idiot