thatoneguylucas
3 reviews liked by thatoneguylucas
Sin and Punishment
2000
I couldn’t help but laugh every time the fact one of the main antagonists name is Brad comes up.
She was everything to my 10 year old self
I don’t really have any desire to talk about most of Vallhalla, it’s well known and well liked, and I don’t have much to say that hasn’t already been said. I really just want to talk about Dorothy.
Dorothy is, at least in my perception, the most controversial aspect of Vallhalla. She’s a playful, flirty, talkative sex worker who looks 13 years old, and the game explicitly says this. She is not vaguely “young”, the game tells you she looks like a child and that she gets clients who want to have sex with her because she looks like a child. She details the jobs she has had to do and talks about the kinds of fantasies her body allows people to fulfill. This very understandably makes people uncomfortable and can definitely shift how you feel about the rest of the games blatant and overt sexuality.
When I first played this game sometime around its launch in 2016, Dorothy didn’t sit right with me. Her inclusion in the game felt like a poor decision at best and a thinly veiled “fetish” at worst, and I really couldn’t settle on which of those two options I had created in my head it was. Dorothy does talk bad about her clients, she calls them gross and creepy and predatory and like, sure. If the game didn’t do this, she would just be another character people would post softcore porn of in r/animememes with captions that say shit like “I look 12 but am actually 100! Kyah!”. But like, what was being said here? What about her calling her clients predatory justified her describing their fantasies and wishes so often? If the game wanted to call lolicons freaks, then why do it this way?
At the time I didn’t really have an answer, I couldn’t justify her inclusion in the game. If she had been cut from the game entirely and replaced with a scene where someone else says that pedophiles suck it would have been preferable to me, would’ve meant I didn’t have to read about her roleplaying as people’s daughters during sex. I can’t say Dorothy was the only factor in me dropping the game as a teen, but it was part of it; I dropped it about 3/4ths of the way through.
The game stayed with me though, and I knew at some point I’d replay it and finally see it through to the end. Finally, now, as an adult in 2023 I picked it back up and finished it, and I completely see Dorothy in a new light now.
Since I had last experienced the game, two things changed that led to this shift in opinion: I transgendered and I became a sex worker. Every single day, regardless of what I do, say, post, or want, my sex work revolves around me being a girl with a penis. Every client I get, every job I do, every single piece of content I make is tied to how people feel about trans women both consciously and unconsciously. When I read Dorothys dialogue, all of this new life experience made it all click for me. I’ve dealt with weird requests, had to do jobs for clients that made me feel gross. Her dialogue about wanting to cyberpunk body upgrade to a more adult appearance but choosing not to went from feeling like a lame excuse to a lived reality. Any thoughts about bottom surgery I have, regardless of if I want it or not, are filtered through knowing that if I do choose to get the procedure, I’ll be destroying any audience I’ve managed to build for myself. Her talking about the weird jobs she’s done doesn’t read like the writer’s kinks leaking through, it reads like how I talk about the weird jobs I’ve done. I have had the thought that I overshare to friends, that I talk too much about gross shit and should just not talk about it, but when I try it fucking sucks. I need an outlet to talk about that stuff, and for me I have close friends, but Vallhalla is a game about bartending so for Dorothy it's a bartender.
Last thing I want to mention is how often Dorothys safety is talked about in game. It’s something that I basically completely overlooked when I first played as a teen, but it’s brought up a lot. She’s modified herself to have a gun built into her hands, broadcast signal jammers disguised as wearable cat ears, has had to upgrade her skin to better recover from bruises. It’s all a bit silly, all explained with sci-fi technobabble, but it made it clear to me the writers understood that a character in Dorothys position is not safe, is forced to put herself in vulnerable positions for her job.
I just wanted to write this all out because it’s something I’ve never seen discussed when people talk about Dorothy. I don’t expect it to sit right with everybody, but if you had a sense of unease preventing you from enjoying the game, I hope maybe I’ve convinced you to give it another shot. Time to mix drinks and change lives.
Dorothy is, at least in my perception, the most controversial aspect of Vallhalla. She’s a playful, flirty, talkative sex worker who looks 13 years old, and the game explicitly says this. She is not vaguely “young”, the game tells you she looks like a child and that she gets clients who want to have sex with her because she looks like a child. She details the jobs she has had to do and talks about the kinds of fantasies her body allows people to fulfill. This very understandably makes people uncomfortable and can definitely shift how you feel about the rest of the games blatant and overt sexuality.
When I first played this game sometime around its launch in 2016, Dorothy didn’t sit right with me. Her inclusion in the game felt like a poor decision at best and a thinly veiled “fetish” at worst, and I really couldn’t settle on which of those two options I had created in my head it was. Dorothy does talk bad about her clients, she calls them gross and creepy and predatory and like, sure. If the game didn’t do this, she would just be another character people would post softcore porn of in r/animememes with captions that say shit like “I look 12 but am actually 100! Kyah!”. But like, what was being said here? What about her calling her clients predatory justified her describing their fantasies and wishes so often? If the game wanted to call lolicons freaks, then why do it this way?
At the time I didn’t really have an answer, I couldn’t justify her inclusion in the game. If she had been cut from the game entirely and replaced with a scene where someone else says that pedophiles suck it would have been preferable to me, would’ve meant I didn’t have to read about her roleplaying as people’s daughters during sex. I can’t say Dorothy was the only factor in me dropping the game as a teen, but it was part of it; I dropped it about 3/4ths of the way through.
The game stayed with me though, and I knew at some point I’d replay it and finally see it through to the end. Finally, now, as an adult in 2023 I picked it back up and finished it, and I completely see Dorothy in a new light now.
Since I had last experienced the game, two things changed that led to this shift in opinion: I transgendered and I became a sex worker. Every single day, regardless of what I do, say, post, or want, my sex work revolves around me being a girl with a penis. Every client I get, every job I do, every single piece of content I make is tied to how people feel about trans women both consciously and unconsciously. When I read Dorothys dialogue, all of this new life experience made it all click for me. I’ve dealt with weird requests, had to do jobs for clients that made me feel gross. Her dialogue about wanting to cyberpunk body upgrade to a more adult appearance but choosing not to went from feeling like a lame excuse to a lived reality. Any thoughts about bottom surgery I have, regardless of if I want it or not, are filtered through knowing that if I do choose to get the procedure, I’ll be destroying any audience I’ve managed to build for myself. Her talking about the weird jobs she’s done doesn’t read like the writer’s kinks leaking through, it reads like how I talk about the weird jobs I’ve done. I have had the thought that I overshare to friends, that I talk too much about gross shit and should just not talk about it, but when I try it fucking sucks. I need an outlet to talk about that stuff, and for me I have close friends, but Vallhalla is a game about bartending so for Dorothy it's a bartender.
Last thing I want to mention is how often Dorothys safety is talked about in game. It’s something that I basically completely overlooked when I first played as a teen, but it’s brought up a lot. She’s modified herself to have a gun built into her hands, broadcast signal jammers disguised as wearable cat ears, has had to upgrade her skin to better recover from bruises. It’s all a bit silly, all explained with sci-fi technobabble, but it made it clear to me the writers understood that a character in Dorothys position is not safe, is forced to put herself in vulnerable positions for her job.
I just wanted to write this all out because it’s something I’ve never seen discussed when people talk about Dorothy. I don’t expect it to sit right with everybody, but if you had a sense of unease preventing you from enjoying the game, I hope maybe I’ve convinced you to give it another shot. Time to mix drinks and change lives.