♡ Iván's not-so-sfw + DoL art ♡

chibi artstyle: we're starting from the basis that a cute or chibi art style doesn't automatically imply the character is underage, which is something factually true as it is seen with multiple artists. the style is proportionate in a way you draw a young adult in a pixel chibi drawing, too. i can and have drawn my adult characters (not PCs, OCs from my worlds) in a chibi style and it does not mean they're suddenly minors, plus people have said multiple of my artstyles are cutes and all the time the characters i draw are adults. giving the 99% of the time those are my ocs, trust me when i say they're adults, i literally created them.

pc starts at an orphanage: if you don't get adopted you stay there until you're 18, this happens in real life orphanages including the uk. thus, pc's initial request for freedom makes sense, because considering the fact that they probably have been 18 for a while (we don't know how long) the fact that bailey, the orphanage's caretaker, has not made any move to give them freedom was pretty strange. why didn't bailey do that? well, you see. when we're introduced to the game, bailey says that we have to pay them back for all the years we lived under their roof. it's the first thing you read, in fact, so you can open the game and see it for yourself, in case you haven't played for a while and maybe you forgot. bailey has done this to other orphans who turned 18 before pc, we can suppose, provided other people at the orphanage have the exact same situation, including a npc named robin, who is our same age and another resident of the orphanage, and another one named 'mickey', who we help escape.

has the option to be "innocent" regarding sex: the actual stat we start with is called "you're almost entirely innocent", which means pc knows something, even if they're clueless. which is not something unreasonable, provided that bailey has been over-protective of them and the other orphans during their youth so nothing bad happens to them, which is why, when you unlock the youth ward, the first thing pc "remembers" is that they don't have many memories except being accompanied by bailey or one of their workers if they needed to go outside. it's also actually normal for young adults who have not gotten a good sex ed to be almost clueless about that stuff, it's not good, but it happens, specially if you have been separated from the real world. there's also the option to start with some awareness, too, which you can explain in other ways you desire like, for example, pc talking with other orphans about these topics after they have been relegated from the youth ward to the "normal" orphanage. the options to start innocent or not, like a lot of other customization options, are tied to the roleplaying aspect of the game. why it started that way for your specific pc or not, is up to you. i surely have my reasons as to why i picked my pcs' customization! it's really fun stuff, instead of the game telling you everything.

has their "assets" grow through the game with lack of them being the default: following this logic, pc is also a cis female by default, which would imply that pc was meant to be a cis female and nothing else. in real life, you can't grow your boobs/butt/penis size without surgeries, but considering this is a game you can make things work in different ways, for example, using pills. there's also the roleplay aspect as to why someone might want to start with a flat everything pc and turn them into a person with bazoonkas and huge ass, or the inverse, as you can also turn a pc with huge bazoonkas, huge penis, and huge ass into a flat thing with little assets. once again, game is a sandbox, you're meant to play the way you want and the game gives you the option. there are many reasons to do things.

has to go to school: as someone who has graduated from high school a long while ago, i can assure you a lot of my classmates were 18 and 19 by the time we were finishing high school. that includes me, in fact, although i'm not from the uk. just explaining that it happens and it's in fact very common. however, in the uk, education is mandatory until you're 18, too, so it's not difficult to assume that pc is also on their last year, provided that they were previously homeschooled as bailey is, once again, overly protective of underage orphans. school going on forever and ever is because the game's a sandbox and if there was some sort of graduation it would lock people out of future school content.

needs a fake id to buy booze: once again, maybe if you haven't played in a while, you forgot, but the introduction explicitly mentions that bailey has our documents. they're extorting pc with that. which one can guess, if they make connections fast or can understand text that isn't explicitly said, means that if pc had their documents they could leave and do everything they can't currently do because they're an adult and their documents would prove that. thus the need for the fake id. that's a thing that happens irl, young adults are asked for their id to buy alcohol all the time and it has indeed happened to me (it stopped happening somewhat recently, and i'm 25! i was for sure asked for my id when i was 18, 19, even 20).

hopefully this has been educative! 😊 all of this should be obvious, but what can one do about that. the lack of reading comprehension and missing things like that is a bit worrying to be honest, or maybe is just people ignoring the obvious to feed their own bias because they want the game to be something it is not really badly. maybe it should be made more obvious in the game if there's people who think like this, but there's a limit on how much you can tell your audience things before you go "i'm explaining literally every choice or thing and it's not engaging, it's like i'm treating them like idiots". thus, the massive text wall was needed.

to quote my own post to end it all: