CW: open discussions of SA, abuse, kinks and dismemberment.
*Ahem*
GOOOOOOOOOOREEEEE SCREEEEEAAAAAMIIIIIIIIIIINNNNNG SHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOWWWW!!!!!!!!!!!!
Now that I have your attention, I played a Horror VN from 2006: a properly nasty, lurid, gnarly, grody, grotesque, exploitative, sexually explicit, ultra-violent, fetishistic, no-punches-pulled, no-feelings-spared, hardcore, gaming tour-de-force!
Gore Screaming Show (best title ever) was developed by Black Cyc, a studio famous for making ambitiously written works of pornography - a lot of which extremely queer in their themes. I would recommend checking out Amelie Doree’s YouTube channel if you’re interested in learning more. She did a sumptuous coverage on a few of their games.
I knew very little about this particular title other than it’s apparently the very definition of PrObLeMaTic fiction. Morbid curiosity is the guiding force of the bold and I, myself, am quite the boldfaced lad. As such, I was compelled to dive into the slimy entrails of this unsafe, unsanitary opus to witness the depths of its alluring depravity.
What I discovered was, in many ways, exactly what I expected it to be, and more. So much more.
The basic setup has your protagonist return to his old home town after a three years absence. Something awful happened to him and his childhood friend from way back when. At the same time, a series of disappearances started occurring, all the victims being young women. Pretty early on, we discover that a ghostly pale girl named Yuka and her pet clown creature (the titular Gore) are the ones behind these incidents.
He is a hungry boy, you see. A funny, hungry boy.
Structurally speaking, the game does not differ from the classic Dating Simulator framework wherein the choices you make will determine which girl, and related route, you unlock. Each arc may reveal a new piece of information about the overarching narrative.
Gore Screaming Show lulls you into its world with an elegant third-person narration - an uncharacteristic choice for the POV-dominated landscape of visual novels. It flows organically with its succinct simplicity as it explores its characters and the every day reality they inhabit. An ordinary life that gradually gets more surreal, alien, full of floating eyeballs.
In general, the prose is straightforward. As such, when the “kid gloves” are fully discarded, we have moments of heart-pressing terror as illustrated in the example below.
The writing has a penchant for hitting you across the lower abdomen when it counts the most, whether it’s a gory description, the nastiest sex scene imaginable or both simultaneously.
You have never experienced a high-minded Eroge until you read about a clown-masked monster gutting a teacher in front of his class, splattering the cheering students in blood and making sashimi out of his organs all the while the protagonist is getting sucked off by his possessed girlfriend.
The gorgeous, detailed artwork matches the writing’s freak, so to speak. It’s emotionally expressive, ranging from conventionally appealing to deeply upsetting and every ounce of unpleasantness in-between. The juxtaposition of cute girls and the screwed up, horrendous situations they find themselves in is unquestionably “effective.”
Say, have you ever seen an orgy in which the participants start vomiting their own internal organs during the course of it? How about a penis severed from someone’s melting, rotting corpse stuck in a vagina that, somehow, still manages to finish? Do you know what a piss enema is?
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, around here, both words and pictures are working together in impeccable synergy! It’s courtesy of main scenario writer Kusakabe Matsuri and artist Ueda Metawo, whom was also the project leader.
Oh, I should probably mention the voice acting is very good.
You don’t need me to expand on that statement, do you?
What I am attempting to convey to you is that once this train leaves the station, it doesn’t stop. You are thrown into a universe of relentless escalation, tortured by exactly what you wanted until you might feel sick to your stomach or become numb to the suffering. There is a distinct wrongness to some of the erotica on display which only grows exponentially more acute as it goes on.
It’s this bizarre balance between horniness and disquietedness, a form of emotional, psychological torment drawn in the most literal, physical and wettest of senses. It’s akin to forcing the intended audience to confront their own uncomfortable feelings towards their preferred fetishes - as they jack off.
Before proceeding any further, be wary that the next few paragraphs of text are going to cover an extremely delicate topic and the decisively indelicate way in which this game (being What It Is) chooses to approach it. Pay heed to the content warning I already provided.
The story tackles violence and its lasting consequences. A lot of said violence is sexual in nature. It is shown directly.
Now, I am not in a position to judge depictions of assault in fiction, when or where the line should be drawn, how and what to show to get The Point across, and so forth. It’s an inherently tough subject to broach, let alone to show in a fictional context.
Traditionally, the Horror genre has been the most “successful” with this topic, being uniquely tailored to safely explore it through the use of metaphors - as in, the monster du jour acting as the embodiment for a traumatic event. That is what I thought Gore Screaming Show was going to do, at first.
Gore is a grotesquely shaped toy-man-thing that devours the flesh of young women and, therefore, you would normally come to the conclusion he might be some manner of representation for sexual violence. Because that is how mainstream Horror media analysis has taught us to think.
It is also interesting to note how unexpectedly subdued the cannibalistic scenes were, initially. The intent was naturally to build suspense before reaching a crescendo but it also gave me the false impression that the game was going to be more subtle about its themes. Then, I was reminded this is Hentai.
There is no metaphor, no allusion, no implication, no visual shorthand and absolutely zero consideration for your personal boundaries.
My gut was skewered by explicit, uncut, unavoidable scenes of rape, written and illustrated in graphic detail.
Neither Gore nor Yuka, for that matter, are being figurative about anything.
Look, I won’t defend this. I shan’t condemn it, either. A part of me feels that certain topics should be handled tactfully but I refuse categorically to act as the moral arbiter for cartoon pornography - doing so is a gateway to fascism. Let people enjoy their fantasies, I say. Besides, non-con is a staple of the medium so I should not have been surprised.
However, here’s the deal: the SA scenes aren’t sexy. They are, inevitably, voyeuristic and male gaze-y but these elements are offset by the framing, which is meant to evoke the darkest, most upsetting emotions in the player. They are gross, horrifying and plain Godawful by design!
In one such case, the prose vividly described the experience as dehumanizing, the victim’s body maimed until the pain and the humiliation broke her. She felt everything from shock, confusion and denial to fear, anguish and even guilt, before her consciousness dissociated from it all. At some point, as this scene kept going and going and going, my mind also began drifting away. The moment I noticed that, I recoiled in abject terror.
This “non-con fetish” porn had the audacity to use its own explicit format to figuratively assail the reader, instilling the most viscerally unpleasant imagery into them, daring them to feel aroused.
There’s plenty of hyper-realistic, physically impossible ultra-violence to be found in this visual novel (especially in the bad endings) but what made the aforementioned scenario truly revolting is how it was grounded within a believable, real life horror that goes often unseen.
Those responsible were not the supernatural villains of the piece.
It was a group of students.
I must stress, again, that I’m not equipped to bestow judgment upon this. Hentai might not be the best medium to sensibly process this level of trauma but, on the other hand, has any “clean” artistic portrayal of the subject truly captured the pure, mind-killing brutality of it? Is that unfiltered depiction a step too far or was The Metaphor always tacky and reductive?
I do not believe there’s an objectively wrong or right answer here.
That said, the fact I was forced to engage, earnestly, with these questions and reconsider multiple decades’ worth of ideas on how sexual violence should be mediated in fiction, made me appreciate the artistic value of Gore Screaming Show.
So, by now, we seem to have thoroughly established the nature of the beast. I have spent an uncomfortable amount of words to describe the many ways this title might disgust or horrify you. Trust me, the parts I previously mentioned were not even the worst of it.
If I were to provide a more defined context unto said scenes, I would probably be banned from all websites or placed on a watchlist. Think of all the grossest scenarios you could fathom happening to a fictional character and the game will deliver on them a hundredfold.
I am not saying the hardcore pornography is all that there is to this VN, mind you. It’s just that, in order to appreciate it, one would need to reconcile the notion that a well-written story about Trauma and how people react to it occupies the same space as [CENSORED], [REDACTED] and [OH GOD WHY].
It’s a difficult proposition for most people, I realize. More to the point, though, I genuinely believe in the merits of this art form.
The narrative utilizes the medium’s language to empower its theming. The Dating Sim aspect, for example, will have you purposefully make the “wrong” choices to progress to a character’s good ending, which is a moving tale of inexperienced love, toxic codependency and a boatload of unresolved issues.
Another good example: unlocking a certain girl’s route will require being slightly mean to her friend, whom is also a viable option. This works as foreshadowing for the secretly dire status of their relationship. Although, if you are too dismissive of her, they shall both be struck by a fate most unkind.
The H-scenes themselves, while shocking, are seldom gratuitous. They may serve a purpose within the story.
A certain route endeavours to explore the psycho-sexual decline of a repressed girl as her libido spirals out of control and her (implied Christian) guilt warps her self-identity to the point of a full breakdown. Her H-scenes add to the nightmare by literalizing the ongoing corruption that erodes her carefully constructed social filters, leaving her a quivering mess of self-loathing and mental slut-shaming.
The passage above captures, oh so succinctly, the profound damage caused by sexual repression. The conservative values instilled into this young woman by her abusive upbringing effectively crash through her closeted feelings. Her mind, body, ego are tearing apart at the seams.
On that note, do you enjoy Body Horror? After this, you will not.
CW: spoilers for the endgame.
Allow me to go off on a tangent here.
It shakes me to my core realizing that a game basically titled Death by Blood and Cum has a better, more mature grasp on these matters than a lot of “respectable” media. Namely, it understands that there is no such thing as an appropriate response to trauma.
It’s not merely the life-altering event itself that ruins people, it’s the feeling of isolation, of lacking any form of support in their life, that allows the negative thoughts to fester. Having to keep on living without the means to confront whatever fucked up shit happened to them. Drowning in fear and self-hatred. Alone.
Is it really surprising that those lost in a world of darkness would then end up hurting others in return? That their own response to trauma is lashing out against everyone else thus propagating the seemingly endless cycle of abuse? Is their pain not real?
These ideas are firmly reflected in the principal antagonist, Yuka. She is responsible for some of the most vile, atrocious, unforgivably monstrous acts in the game. You, as a player, get to witness some of these acts all throughout it.
Yet, after all that, when the true final route rolls out, the game flips the script on its head and asks the player to embrace her perspective. Her trauma had, both metaphorically and literally, stunted her growth. Her body and mind are constantly trapped in the hell she felt that day: the cold, the crawling bugs, the dripping blood, the fear, the hunger, the hate, all of it, always.
What she’s done is still inexcusable but that doesn’t mean she was never worthy of love. In fact, it’s that exact treatment (being seen as less than human) that led her down the path of bloody retaliation, in the first place!
Every main character in this story is someone who has gone through some terrible, unfair garbage and was left to deal with it. More over, the supernatural world that haunts every facet of this diegesis is fueled by the shared historical tragedy of World War II, which drives the point home: cruelty does not exist in a bubble, it affects us all. Monsters aren’t born, they are made.
It’s astoundingly nuanced for a title that features [CENSORED], [REDACTED] and [GOD IS NOT REAL] thrice over!
Ultimately, in spite of everything, the parting message is one of hope and tentative optimism. The ghastly events that scarred you do not have to define who you become as a person. You deserve a chance at happiness, you are entitled to empathy and companionship.
You aren’t a “bad” abuse victim. You aren’t PrObLeMaTiC.
Your pain is real and so are you.
In conclusion, Gore Screaming Show is what your religious, moral panic brain-rotted relatives had warned you about when they were screeching incoherently on “The Evils of Porn.”
It’s nasty, gnarly, grody, grotesque, unclean, sexually violent, sincere, heartfelt, bold, unflinching, difficult, painful, tragic, hopeful. It’s messy, it’s human, it’s authentically itself. It’s art.
And it is so difficult to discuss in earnest.
It took a stomach of steel to get through its many gut-churning hurdles but it was a journey I came to cherish.
It feels as though it should not be legal to purchase and play this - but it is. You can buy the game, easily. It’s on JAST USA, GOG.com and Steam! You should play it. No, nobody should play it. You can get it but maybe it’s best if you don’t?
You’re an adult. You make the choice.
—
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