All He Thinks About Is Dirty Stuff

Not appropriate for those under 18.
Content warnings for discussions of sex and kink.
Spoiler warning for Drakengard 3.

My feelings on Drakengard 3 haven’t been consistent since I first played it. Fun time, lazy in a way that’s insulting, maybe both? But one thing I have thought about pretty consistently is how sex factors into it. It’s pretty relevant to any discussion of the game and all you need to do is hear any mid-mission conversation featuring Decadus or Octa to be sure of that. But does Drakengard 3 intentionally say something about sex and kink, or is it just Yoko Taro making cheap jokes out of these topics? (And what do those jokes say?)

Table of contents:

• Zero and Her Sisters
  
• Thankfully We Don’t Need to Talk About Octa As Much
  
• Dito and Decadus, However…
  
• The Real Impact of This Shit
  
• (the secret thesis of this post)

Zero and Her Sisters

To start off, we need to lay down how a lot of the character’s sexualities are portrayed. Zero’s sisters are the easiest to talk about, because they’re pretty one-dimensional, and we know what our point-of-view character thinks of them. Zero calls Five slutty, and we have that backed up by when they fight which is laden with innuendo directed by Five at Zero. Dito also mentions the fact that she was always “[trying] some new kink she’d heard about” without considering how much Dito wanted that. Zero admonishes Four for being a virgin Intoner (the implication being that all of them have desires above what a normal person might), and we can see this as a huge source of insecurity for her (and further context will reveal that she’s a virgin intentionally and sees herself as too good for sex). The other sisters are less relevant. Three’s just kinda playing with her dolls, and as much as Zero tries to get a rise out of her during her fight (“So, what does make the honey flow these days?”) it proves ineffective. Meanwhile, Two is out of commission, and One is too busy reading books in chairs with really high backs to fuck.

Zero, however, seems to have a healthier view of sexuality when compared to Four and Five. When she kills her sisters and takes their disciples, she has sex with them on her terms. When Dito asks her if she wants to have sex, she replies “If I feel like it.” Literally the first thing she says to Decadus is that she’s going to peg him. There’s a scene that’s stuck out in my mind towards the end of Branch D in which she communicates her thoughts on the sex that she has with Decadus and Octa about as maturely as someone like her is capable of, laying out hard boundaries. During missions she is focused on the task at hand despite the sexual interjections of her party members, but can be seen in the in-between-missions segments having a more positive reaction to them. Zero’s sexuality is portrayed as the best of any character in this story by far, because it’s not portrayed as a joke like the disciples, and it’s not portrayed as a character flaw like her sisters. Speaking of the disciples, though,

Thankfully We Don’t Need to Talk About Octa As Much

Or Cent, but to my knowledge he doesn’t really factor into my point here at all. Octa, however, deserves a mention, because more or less his entire character revolves around how much he wants to fuck all the time. Really, though, this is just comic relief. It’s just making fun of an old man who is monster horny, and let’s be honest we probably all know of several people who would become exactly like this guy if given the opportunity to be mask off. When he talks about why he’s betraying Three, he mentions the lack of ethics in her experiments, but she sees right through him: it’s actually because they don’t fuck. The only thing this dude really does think about is dirty stuff.

But while you might personally find that annoying, it’s more about how the game frames what Octa says more than anything else: with Zero and Dito telling Octa to shut the fuck up. It’s probably a better idea to talk about this with respect to other disciples, though.

Dito and Decadus, However…

Before I went back and watched Drakengard 3’s cutscenes to prepare for writing this blog post, this was my recollection of how every mid-battle exchange of dialogue in the game more-or-less went:

ZERO: We gotta stab these dudes.
OCTA: Well, lady Zero, I know a different kind of stabbing we could do.
ZERO: Shut up or I’ll beat the shit out of you.
DECADUS: Ough… Getting the shit beated out of me… OOOOOOUUUUOUOUOUOUGOUHGOHGHUOHGUHOGH

In the actual game, however, that’s not really how it goes, and not just because there’s rarely any cutscene that involves Octa says something -> Zero admonishes him -> Decadus gets excited by that. Zero does do some admonishing, of Decadus and Octa both, but the character who does it much more frequently than Zero is Dito. Since his introduction, Dito is kind of positioned as a straight man to Zero, pointing out when she does something too murderous or lacking in common sense. Although he definitely is kind of a little freak in his own way, that doesn’t disrupt him being framed as having a kind of maturity that Zero lacks, as the person saying what we (as players) are all thinking (or at least what they hope we’re thinking). His main interactions with the rest of the disciples is telling them to shut the fuck up, which is fair, because I also find them annoying sometimes. Let’s think about that in combination with Decadus though.

Before he’s even introduced, Zero and Dito talk about him in the abstract, saying “You’d have to be some kind of depraved pervert to serve a virgin intoner.” When we finally meet the dude, it’s immediately clear that he is maybe the world’s biggest masochist, because any time anything related to inflicting pain on him comes up he can’t stop moaning about it. A lot of the time, this is followed up by Zero or Dito telling him to shut up, but this is still fairly frequently the last line of dialogue in a conversation. It’s presented as if him getting turned on by these things is a punch line in and of itself, with no follow up required from the rest of the cast to turn it into a “joke”. You’re meant to know that Decadus being like that is funny at his expense.

And look. Decadus really doesn’t know how to keep it in his pants. Neither does Octa. But those two talking about their sexuality is basically never framed in a positive light, unlike Zero. I can’t remember a single interaction in which it is, and even if there were a few they’d be drowned up by the constant repetition of negative framing present in the mid-gameplay dialogue. In other words, as much as it hurts to defend these two: they don’t deserve this.

So, imagine being someone into the masochism part of S/M, or at least being into the thought of it. You’re playing Drakengard 3, and you’re probably in your teens or a young adult since that’s when you have the most time to play a game like this, and you’re probably young enough to not have fully formed mature thoughts on sexuality yet. Decadus is there in the game, and everyone makes fun of him for being into the things you like. The game frames it as a punchline. What takeaway do you think you’d have from this? You might derive some shame from this, maybe even enough to prevent you from engaging with it altogether, or only allowing yourself to engage with it in ways that are unsafe (in the way that stigmatising engaging with any kink leads to people practicing it unsafely).

Admittedly, I constructed a hypothetical that best suits my point, but you don’t need to hit every single point of that hypothetical to take the same message away from it, and the point still stands even if this isn’t a common reaction. This hypothetical isn’t my experience (unfortunately we will be talking about that later) but I think it’s worth keeping in mind that we can’t just turn our “media influencing us” part of our brain off for things like this, and they can genuinely impact the way a person thinks about sex and kink in negative ways, no matter what age you are or how knowledgeable you already are about it. In other words, I think the game does a decent job of trying to be a certain definition of sex-positive, but completely drops the ball in this respect, in terms of anything “deviant”.

The Real Impact of This Shit

So, before we talk about the “real impact” of this, the only data I have on that is the impact it’s had on me, and I don’t necessarily want to talk about my specific experience and emotional reaction as the big takeaway for this thing (which is why there is a secret second conclusion).

As a brief digression, I think it’s valid for you to use an analysis of a work to branch out into talking about something that’s more personal to you but I also don’t like a big chunk of them personally. It takes a lot of talent to pull off something like Let’s Mosey and I don’t think a lot of video essayists have the chops for it. I even did this with Drakengard 3 in something I wrote in the past, and it was BAD, so I’m committed to not repeating the same mistakes. Though let’s be honest: I think I just might be a snob when it comes to video essays and other amateurish media analysis?

The only reason I’m bringing up the following is that not only was it not the original point when I had when I started writing this post, but I think it’s funny, and kind of illustrates the point that I’m building toward.

So. Um. This might be slightly TMI, and I’m sorry. But I made this tweet a while ago.

Here’s the thought process of this tweet: I’d finished watching the cutscenes for Drakengard 3 to prepare for writing this blog post that you’re reading right now a few days prior. Shortly before the tweet, I was in the middle of sex, enjoyed myself, made it known, thought about how I sounded like Decadus, and thought fuck, I don’t want to sound like that guy. I didn’t let it get to me, though. And that’s all the background to it you need to know! Did I make the rest up? Who knows! If you start sifting through my posts like an archaeologist trying to understand what aspects of them are true and what are fiction, instead of just understanding them as funny posts of dubious truthfulness all around written by a ghost that lives in your computer, please understand that I hate you and am doing everything in my power to send you to the eternal torture labyrinth.

Anyway, its embarrassing, I know. Big self report on my end, thinking about Drakengard 3 while fucking and not even having any relevant jokes to offer up! I will never live it down!!! But I will lie in my grave valiantly sacrificing any sense of superiority to say that, well, that’s the impact (pun not intended). You play a game where the guy who enjoys those kind of kinks is constantly made fun of, and then you get into a situation like that yourself, and how much he was made fun of sticks in your head and gets in the way of you enjoying yourself, even if you don’t actually act on it, even if you know better than to let it get stuck in your head, because now you’re in the middle of a hot girl domming you and all you can think about is Decadus from Drakengard fucking 3 having a fat cum over the same being done to him and realising that you want to distance yourself as far away from that man as possible because, come on, it’s Decadus, think about how everyone hates Decadus, you definitely aren’t Decadus, you’re into it but you aren’t into it the way he is, stop thinking about Decadus god damnit.

Fuck you, Yoko Taro!

Ok. Glad we got that out of the way. Now that we’ve done that, though, it’s time for the secret thesis of this blog post, the thing here I actually came here to do:

IS DRAKENGARD 3 ACTUALLY THE VIDEO GAME FOR THE MODERN LESBIAN???

This backloggd review has stuck in my mind almost consistently since I read it because I just completely do not understand what it means. It might be a joke, maybe that’s the only way we should be engaging with it, but I’m choosing to take it literally anyway because I want to.

For context, I’m a lesbian. I don’t know a non-cringy way to say this but all of those posts about me hypnotising women or whatever are not just being posted from in a vaccum, not even the hot kind. I am a lesbian that loves and has sex with other lesbians. So please consider my perspective when I say: I don’t fucking get what this review is talking about.

Prior to rewatching the cutscenes for this post, I definitely didn’t get it. Yes, Zero exists. I would let her kill me, and who wouldn’t? Yes, her sisters exist, and I get the appeal each of them could have. But within my head so much of the game was tied up in Zero telling Decadus and Octa to shut up about sex and kink, and I couldn’t really see a way to reconcile the fact that discussion of male sexuality being so, so, SO present with it being a game for lesbians.

Now, I feel slightly differently, because I realise it’s mostly Dito talking shit to them, which makes it yaoi, which makes it ever so slightly funnier, which doesn’t factor into my point at all but I did want to say it and it’s my blog post so I’m going to. I still mostly agree with what I thought before, though, but with a few caveats:

Number One (and I’m not talking about the intoner): there are a lot of women in here who are little freaks, and I hadn’t considered how much they were little freaks. Ok I guess I am talking about the intoner a little bit though Zero, Three, Four, and Five are the ones I specifically have in mind. Though there isn’t really any love between them of any kind, I completely understand the desire to, for example, humiliate Four and force her to admit her desires in the most embarrassing way possible, or wanting Three to turn them into something inhuman and monstrous or do something in particular with those scissors (I know a lot of girls like this actually). I did, in fact, say I would let Zero kill me! But, this is you being into women and playing the game and seeing a woman and going “hell yeah.” All of them have so little screen time compared to the disciples, even with the DLC, that it doesn’t feel textually lesbian just by having women in it who are little freaks.

But I suppose when you get down to it, as women who are freaks that want to fuck women who are also freaks, there isn’t exactly a lot of representation for us, is there? One of the things I remember from my first time playing Umineko was being kind of shocked at how many different evil women were in that one. Umineko genuinely helped me to understand a lot of different, not-necessarily-connected things, but one thing it helped me understand is this: in a lot of media, we don’t allow women to be evil little freaks in these specific ways and in ways that are complex. Drakengard 3 gives the intoners a tiny bit of complexity outside of its DLC and a little more within it, but even though it’s no Umineko, it fills a hole that a lot of video games (and I’m including visual novels in this) don’t, especially works from publishers in the USA and cultures that are heavily influenced by its hegemony (that I wish there was a better term for than “Signatories of the UKUSA contract/countries within the Five Eyes intelligence alliance”).

Even then, all Drakengard 3 does is give us women whose motivations aren’t driven by men and has them interact with each other, and not even all of them pass the Bechdel test, which isn’t even a good measure of these things anyway. How many of those few freak women that we see are actually gay? Conversations about representation are the wrong conversation a lot of the time, in part because it’s generally already out there in the indie space, hidden away in some corner, waiting to be found and elevated. However, while it would be nice to see more complex women who aren’t afraid to be little freaks, women who can act non-normatively without criticism, women that other non-normative women can see themselves in, there’s a much more important reason that we should be doing this: it’s just fun to watch two women flirt by literally trying to kill each other.

That brings us to caveat number two: sure, I’ll let it slide, but we could do so much better. Let’s imagine for a second that Square Enix went to Yoko Taro and went “Ok buddy you’ve done a good job with all that NieR bullshit here’s a blank check for a Drakengard 3 remake.” What would we want him to do if our goal was to really have him make the game for the modern lesbian?

Well, consider the disciples. They’re the only male characters of note in the game, and the ones who take up a big chunk of screen time and dialogue time. They talk about sex and having people knee them in the crotch all the time. They’re little freaks. It should be obvious.

In conclusion: Yoko Taro should remaster Drakengard 3 but make the disciples women instead. I know what all you girlthings are like. If Decadus was a women you would be lining up out the door to post about how much she was literally you and how many earthly positions you’d give up to be in her position. All of you milfhunters would die from too much cumming if Octa wasn’t a man (and, it goes without saying, she would still have the biggest dick). My timeline would be full of tweets about how Dito could say the vilest thing of all time and they would thank her for it. It would literally just print money! Yoko Taro, I know you’re reading this: my DMs are open. You and I both know you’d mess it up on your own so I am happy to be a consultant for this. I don’t come cheap (it’s only fair that you pay me back after the above section) but you’ll more than make up for it. Please you have to do this for me I need to see pathetic loserwoman Decadus please please please please please