>> DAZ: Hi, and welcome back to Game Assist.
My name is Daz and my pronouns are they/them.
The year is 2015. Your YouTube feed is filled
with Let’s Plays of a new anime-style dating
simulator that features some extremely not
safe for work scenes and an interesting Candy
Crush-style game mechanic. Everyone is playing
it, and laughing at its cheesiness and crass
humour. This game is of course, none other
than HuniePop.
I was 17 when HuniePop was released,
and I watched Markiplier’s playthrough
of the game for a number of reasons, including
my interest in cute anime girls. I enjoyed
the game, and later went on to watch his playthrough
of HunieCam Studio.
Some parts of the game made me feel uncomfortable
at the time, but I couldn’t quite place
why. Recently, I revisited HuniePop to do
some background research for another video
that we’re working on, and swiftly realised
that it needed a video of its own.
Before we begin, here are some warnings for
your safety and comfort. This video contains
discussion and, in some cases, depiction of:
Racism, Fetishism, Alcoholism, Misogyny, Misogynoir
and Sexual assault.
HuniePop is an extremely misogynistic and
racist game. Let’s discuss why.
Let’s set the scene: HuniePop is a puzzle
game/dating simulator where you play as ‘You’,
a human who is so terrible at picking up girls
that a Love Fairy named Kyu takes it upon
herself to save you from being perpetually
single.
Right from the get go, the game is
already shaming the player for their non-existent
dating life, and pushes its ideas about love
and sex onto the player via Kyu’s comments.
This places HuniePop firmly in the pick-up
artist genre of games, rather than the standard
dating simulator genre, as success in the
game revolves around picking up women. It
is clear that the goal here is not just to
go on some dates with some nice ladies - the
goal is to fuck.
Kyu’s commentary throughout the game is
problematic for a variety of reasons which
we’ll cover more later, but from the very
beginning she is used to tell the player that
this game, and dating in general, is about
winning. She sees women as a conquest. Not
the best message to send to your audience,
especially when that audience is made up predominantly
of 14 year old boys.
Over the course of the game we are introduced
to twelve women that are available for
the player to date. These women represent
a variety of stereotypical female character
tropes from across the media, including anime.
It has been suggested that this game was intended
to be a satire, and that these 2-dimensional
portrayals of women were meant to be caricatures
of the stereotypes, but the irony was definitely
not clear in the gameplay or dialogue.
Here’s a quick rundown of the HuniePop girls,
including those who you can only unlock by
completing secret tasks. Tiffany is a 19 year
old college student, cheerleader and babysitter.
She embodies the ‘girl next door’ stereotype,
especially with her blonde hair and school
uniform, which serve to emphasize her youth,
in a horrible, infantilising way.
You meet fitness-nut Kyanna at the gym - she’s
a Mexican single mother who is also a part
time hairdresser.
Aiko is one of Tiffany’s teachers at college.
She’s a cynical Japanese alcoholic and that’s
pretty much all we know about her.
Beli is an Indian yoga instructor whom you
also meet at the gym. She wears a some kind
of bastardisation of traditional Indian dress,
and much of her dialogue revolves around spirituality
and modesty.
In the bar, you meet Jessie, a confident cam
girl and cougar, who is also Tiffany’s mother.
Lola is a stewardess who loves tennis and
wants to be a pilot. She’s the only black
character in the game, and this is handled
very poorly, which we will come on to later.
Nikki is working at the cafe when we meet
her. She’s 18, has blue hair and glasses,
and is very much a manic pixie dream girl/gamer girl type.
Audrey is Nikki’s friend and is described
simply as the ‘mega bitch’ (what a great
term). That’s basically her entire character,
plus the fact she smokes weed and is a bit
of a tsundere. Tsundere is a Japanese term
for a character development process that depicts
a person who is initially cold (and sometimes
even hostile) before gradually showing a warmer,
friendlier side over time.
Momo is one of the special characters unlocked
by dropping a goldfish in the park. She is
a straight-up catgirl looking for a home and
a master. Pretty standard stuff.
Celeste is the other unlockable character
- a blue alien visiting Earth who isn’t
meant to date humans.
Kyu herself becomes an ‘attainable’ character
once you have successfully taken one girl
on the final date and had sex with them.
The ‘final boss’ so to speak of HuniePop
is Venus. Yes, Venus, the literal goddess
of love. Venus appears once you have had sex
with every other character.
She literally
presents herself as the ‘final challenge’,
once again enforcing the idea that dating
women and having sex with them is a conquest.
Once you’ve gotten the girl to have sex
with you, you’ve won. Literally, in this
case.
After looking back over these character summaries,
I realised something. The ten main girls
(excluding Kyu and Venus as they are technically
vehicles for the extremely loose plot) each
represent a different genre of porn.
Tiffany is the girl next door/step daughter.
Kyanna is a Latina or yummy mummy
Aiko is Asian.
Beli is modest or virginal.
Jessie is a MILF or step mum
Lola is Ebony
Nikki is a gamer girlfriend or e-girl
Audrey is a tsundere
Momo is a catgirl, and Celeste is for all you alien or monster fuckers out there.
So, not only does HuniePop portray women in
an oversimplified and overgeneralised way,
it conflates dating and sex - the reality
- with porn - the fantasy. Teenagers getting
their sex ed from porn is already enough of
a problem, without video games adding to the
unrealistic expectations placed on them.
So far all of this is from our very first
interactions within the game. I’ve barely
scratched the surface, so let’s get down
to the nitty gritty.
From looking at the character roster, HuniePop
appears to be a relatively diverse game. There
are four women of colour and they’re all
from different backgrounds. However, the treatment
of these women is truly horrendous. It’s
important to note here that diversity does
not equal liberation, and you need both in
order to successfully carry out social change.
Having a diverse set of characters means nothing
when you treat them like garbage.
Earlier I mentioned Kyu’s problematic commentary
as the player’s wingman. Her introductory
comment about Aiko Yumi perfectly exemplifies
how HuniePop treats its women of colour.
Before we really know anything about Aiko,
she’s slotted into the Asian fetish box.
That’s the main thing that the game wants
us to know about her. This is further emphasised
by her ‘unique’ gift. HuniePop uses gifts
as ways of upping your scores with the girls
on your dates. There are several categories,
and the ‘unique’ category is exactly what
it sounds like: a specific gift for a specific
girl. Aiko’s unique gift is a set of chopsticks.
I wish I was joking. In one of the possible
responses to receiving this gift, she calls
the player out for being racist, but in the
other two responses she seems genuinely hyped
to receive a standard pair of chopsticks.
Alcohol is also an important mechanic in HuniePop.
Similar to the gifts, it gives you bonus points
during your dates and essentially makes it
easier to get with the girls. So we can now
add ‘pressuring women to drink will make
them want to sleep with you’ to the list
of terrible messages that HuniePop is sending
its audience. This is especially harmful in
Aiko’s context, given the extreme drinking
culture amongst Japanese workers. I don’t
believe that the developer was ignorant of
this, as Aiko herself exhibits alcoholic tendencies.
In a 
thread discussing the less talked about parts
of Japanese culture, Twitter user @worldofxtra
stated that office superiors “will force
feed you alcohol until you black out. I’ve
seen women get forced drunk and taken
advantage of.” Instead of trying to maybe
tackle this issue through the medium of video
games, HuniePop instead just mirrors Japan’s unhealthy drinking culture and presents it
as acceptable. In reality, this culture results
in violence against women that, due to
virilent sexism in Japanese society, almost
always goes unpunished.
Lola, the only Black character in the game,
is also a victim of Kyu’s racial fetishism.
To clarify, racial fetishism is the act of
regarding someone’s race as an object, and
fixating on the use of this person as a sexual
object. It is a form of racist othering and
is often intertwined with misogyny.
Although racial fetishism can, and does, happen
to any person of colour, Black women are disproportionately
affected by fetishism and oversexualisation.
According to our very own Sara in the
‘Building Anti-Racist LGBTQ+ Spaces’ workshop,
“In relation to sexual fetishisation specifically,
black women’s sexuality exists in a space
where they are simultaneously treated as hyper-sexual
beings and as fundamentally unattractive.
This is especially the case for dark-skinned
women.” As well as being othered via racial
fetishism, Lola is also marked as different
within the game as she is the only Black character,
potentially casting her as “exotic”.
It is also important to understand that, due
to the complexity of misogynoir, Black women
can be fetishised by white women, and Black
men, as well as white men. So Lola can be,
and is, fetishised by a large portion of HuniePop’s
player base. McCullogh states that due to
Black women’s predisposition to curvier
body types, “they are seen as being ‘grown’
from a young age, and are therefore somehow
‘asking for it’.” This is important
to note when looking at Lola’s costume and
body type. Sure, most of the women in HuniePop
have large breasts, but they’re not Black,
so the same fetishistic ideas do not apply
to them.
This hypersexualisation of Black women based
on their rapid development is actually a product
of the slave trade. Kesiena Boom summarises
the history as, “In order for white men
to justify their rape of enslaved Black women,
they spread the idea that Black women were
sexually insatiable. In this way, any instances
of sexual assault were actually just “giving
them what they wanted.”” Misogynoir is
an ongoing problem in our society that needs
to be addressed within mainstream feminism,
if we are ever going to move past the idea
of the “Hypersexual Jezebel” Black woman
in our video games.
HuniePop’s racism is present in Beli and
Kyanna’s character portrayals too. As an
Indian woman, Beli is described as stereotypically
submissive and modest, and not in a way that
suggests any nuance. And Kyanna is another
example of the ‘unique’ gift being a racist
stereotype - who gives a sombrero to a Mexican
woman? Once again, she reacts as if this was
the coolest and most thoughtful gift anyone
has ever given her.
Instead of attempting any representation of
bilingualism, Kyanna just occasionally says
‘loco’, and her large family and single
mother status both reflect harmful stereotypes
about Mexican familial relationships.
For a game about loving women, HuniePop sure
does hate women.
There is a base level of respect for women
as people missing from the core mechanics
of this game. Sure, you can choose the slightly
less creepy dialogue options when chatting
to the girls, but there are some elements
of the gameplay that are fundamentally built
around disrespecting women. Take the fact-finding
elements for example. One of the ways to gain
points with the girls is to find out facts
about them, and then correctly recall the
answers later in the game. As a mechanic,
I quite like this. However, it is immediately
tainted by the use of ‘bra size’ and ‘weight’
as fun facts. When I first saw this dialogue
option, I thought it was part of the ‘creepy
route’ and the girls would just tell you
to fuck off for asking, but no. They seem
more than happy to reveal their personal measurements
to a complete stranger.
You can also just straight up lie to the girls.
In particular, Tiffany asks whether or not
your relationship is exclusive. Not only is
it impossible within the game’s mechanics
to respect her desire for monogamy, you are
given the option to lie to her face about
your other relationships. This blatantly disregards
Tiffany’s desires and emotions, and also
shows no respect for her sexual health. STIs
aren’t a feature in the game
but if this situation were real, your failure
to be open about your sexual activity could
result in Tiffany, or any of the other girls
for that matter, contracting an STI without
realising. Women’s bodies are not just vehicles
for sexual pleasure. I can’t believe I have
to say this in 2020, but yes, women are indeed
people.
Jessie represents a category of women that
are constantly disregarded and disrespected
both in the media and in real life - sex workers.
Having dropped out of school at 16 due to
her pregnancy, she became a porn star to support
her daughter.
This backstory is extremely
common in media portrayals of sex workers,
as it is assumed that all sex workers do sex
work as a last resort, and that they don’t
actually want to be doing it. I would recommend
reading Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight For
Sex Workers’ Rights by Juno Mac and Molly
Smith if you want to know more about sex work
politics around the globe.
Jessie’s appearance also falls into stereotypical
sex worker tropes. She wears a low-cut leopard
print top, which according to Colette Shade,
is a “signal of poor taste and of “trashiness,”
which really means that it represents the
sexually available lower-class woman.” Author
and burlesque dancer Jo Weldon says that for
leopard print, “There’s an association
with women who behave badly, usually sexually.”
She also mentioned in an interview for the
Washington Post that leopard print “became
the uniform of the bad mom” in the 60s.
Peg Bundy in “Married With Children” and
Mrs Robinson in “The Graduate” are just
two examples of this archetype making its
way into the mainstream. We can now add Jessie
Maye, promiscuous and alcoholic single mother
in HuniePop, to that list.
Remember what I was saying earlier about the
fetishisation of Black women? It turns out
that some of the connotations of leopard print
are also racialised. “Leopard [has a] sexual
or at least eroti[c] connotation, because
it was linked to Africa,” says Émilie Régnier,
a fashion photographer who documented people
wearing leopard print in 2017. Leopard skin
and fur has its own fashion history in Africa,
with the print featuring on Shembe church
vestments, and sported on Congolese dictator
Mobutu Sese Seko’s cap when he met the Queen.
“If a woman was wearing leopard, it means
that she has a savage or wild sexuality.”
It’s amazing how much misogyny can be drawn
out purely from a character’s appearance.
As you may have noticed by now, Jessie is
also a blonde. A blonde high school drop-out,
aka the perfect example of a “dumb blonde”.
The trope is said to have originated with
the character of Rosalie Duthé in the play
Les Curiosités de la Foire, who is established
as “both stupid and sexually available”.
“In the Venn diagram of stereotypes, blondeness
is the overlap between stupidity, promiscuity,
gold-digging and naked self-interest.” This
quote from Daniela Morosini perfectly encapsulates
how the negative stereotyping of blonde women
stems from various different types of misogyny
rooted in men’s insecurities about their
intelligence, attractiveness, wealth and power.
Based on everything that I’ve talked about
in this video, I was...sceptical to say the
least when my friend told me that a HuniePop
2 was in development. The developer has expressed
a specific desire to do better in this game,
which is nice, but some of the information
that has been released is already making me
uneasy.
There are two new characters that I want to
touch on - Polly and Abia. As a trans person,
Polly was the character that I was most interested
in upon hearing about the new additions. This
is because Polly is a trans woman. Sadly,
my hopes were swiftly dashed after some initial
research. Her entire personality is a misogynistic
stereotype, reminiscent of 50s housewives
or, more recently, trad wives.
This plays
into the harmful idea that trans women have
to conform to the feminine ideal to be accepted
as ‘real women’, allowing no room for
the varieties of expression allowed to cis
women.
The other issue concerning Polly’s character
is her genitals. In the initial announcement
for her character, it is revealed that Polly
has not had bottom surgery and still has a penis.
This led to an outcry from fans requesting
that they could still complete the game without
having a sexual encounter with Polly. Luckily,
the developer did not go through with this,
but has instead added in the option for you
to date Polly with a vagina. This once again
plays into harmful ideas about trans women
and the idea that you have to ‘fully’
transition to be a real woman, and to therefore
be desirable. As many trans people will tell
you, knowing when you have fully transitioned
can be extremely difficult. The vagina does
not make the woman.
The disgust towards women with penises is
not only prevalent among cis straight men,
but also among many cis lesbians and cis bisexuals.
I can already predict the number of players
opting for post-op Polly when playing, and
it infuriates me. The developer has also removed
the use of the word transgender from the game
entirely, marking the two options for Polly
as ‘female’ and ‘female with male genitals’.
Not only does this reinforce the sex organ
binary, which by the way, is a myth, it panders
to the futanari fetish that in turn fetishises
trans women.
The second new character that worried me upon
her announcement was Abia. Abia is a hijabi
woman of colour in a dating simulator that
has previously exhibited rampant misogyny
and racism. I think you can see why I was
worried. There’s not much information out
there yet about her personality or interactions,
but we do know that she works in airport security,
and that her nationality is
“The Middle
East”.
THAT IS NOT A NATIONALITY. The developer
couldn’t be bothered to google an Arab country?
And making her work in airport security seems
like an extremely questionable decision given
the suspicion and mistreatment that many Muslim
people face when in airports. Something tells
me her route isn’t going to be a smart and
nuanced depiction of Muslim womanhood and
relationships to sex.
So there you have it! HuniePop is an extremely
flawed game, and I’m not quite sure how
we all just ignored it when it was released.
I know that at least for me it would have
been due to a lack of proper education around
sexism, racism, and misogynoir. If anything,
HuniePop has provided us with a great example
of what not to do when making a supposedly
diverse dating simulator. Maybe take a look
at what Dream Daddy did well, and go from there.
Speaking of Dream Daddy, why don’t you check
out Sara’s Inqueery video all about it!
They go into really great detail about all
of the things that DDADDS got right, and the
places where it could still be improved. We’re
huge fans of dating sims and visual novels
at Game Assist, and I personally can’t wait
to play any upcoming games in this genre that
showcase great representation.
Thanks so much to everyone for watching. If
you’ve enjoyed this video or learned anything,
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