Musings

Warning: References to sexual assault, and possible TMI

This game is three things for me.

1. An attempt to write about trauma, as has become a running theme throughout all of my games and stories.

2. A love letter

3. A product of my desire to create a Twine game in Godot because I love Twine games, but I have an adversarial relationship with CSS and Javascript.

The trauma is pretty self-evident, I think. There are a lot of good articles out there about what consensual non-consent (CNC)/rape fantasy/rape play is, what it isn't, and how the names for this kink are misleading, but a lot fewer about how sexual assault survivors engage with it.

(There is no actual nonconsensual activity or rape involved in CNC, just the pretense of it. Participants may agree beforehand that words and phrases that would normally be used to indicate that play should stop, such as "no" or "stop," will be ignored during the scene so that they can be freely used as part of the roleplay without causing alarm, but any safe and sane play will still have participants agree on a system for indicating actual distress and a desire to stop the scene. This may be a "safeword" that participants do not anticipate will get used in the roleplayed scenario, or the commonly-used traffic light system, where "green" indicates enthusiastic consent, "yellow" indicates some discomfort but generally no need to stop play completely, and "red" indicates the scene needs to be stopped completely, do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars.)

There's a lot of anecdotal evidence online, and one interesting VICE article that I'll link to at the end, that plenty of sexual assault survivors with an interest in CNC already had this interest prior to being sexually assaulted: the sexual assault didn't cause that interest to vanish, but the resulting trauma may have complicated how they now engage with this interest.

Even if one is lucky enough to dodge the shame that might result from trying to come to terms with deriving enjoyment from the idea of simulating a lack of consent after having experienced the unenjoyable experience of "the real deal," the fact that there is now trauma in the mix and newly-acquired triggers that have to be avoided makes planning and navigating a CNC scene much more treacherous suddenly. There are now pitfalls that need to be carefully steered around, some of which may not even be evident until they've been stumbled into at least once. Scenarios that sound attractive and desirable in theory may now trigger unpleasant memories. Maybe you still find the idea of being safely choked hot, but you can no longer feel a hand anywhere close to your neck without flashing back to a time when it happened to you in a decidedly not-hot setting and manner. In addition to the unpleasantness of reliving a traumatic incident when you're just trying to have a good time, there's also frustration and anger that something you want to enjoy has been rendered off-limits, or at least, handle-with-caution, and now you have to go through a whole desensitisation regimen to try to reclaim this activity that you want to enjoy. Or maybe that's just me.

I wanted to explore those complicated logistics and that frustration. I also wanted to just write about the logistics of planning a roleplay scene. I just love logistics in general (yes, that part is true), but there is also something fascinating to me about how much attention to detail there is in the planning and navigation of such scenes, and the level of love and care for one's partner that that speaks to.

I've seen discussions of how sexual assault survivors may find CNC healing because it allows them to reenact certain scenarios that were frightening in the moment and re-experience them in an environment where they feel safe and know they can put a stop to things at any point, this time around. I haven't seen anything (yet) though about how the love and care inherent to painstakingly devising and playing out such a scene may be healing in of itself, as the polar opposite of the callous disregard and cruelty from painful past experience. Maybe that's just me. I'd like to think it's not just me.

This game is also a love letter.

Further Reading

Billock, Jennifer. "When Rape Survivors Have Rape Fantasies." VICE, 29 January 2018, www.vice.com/en/article/when-rape-survivors-have-rape-antasies. Accessed 19 March 2025.