#clockup

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CW: Topics discussed will include misogyny, SA, tentacles, racism and so much worse.

Have you ever had one of those days?

You wake up in the morning, drenched in sweat, panic-stricken. Your brain is fogged up by instinctual, atavist fear.

You sense an inexplicable dread at the pit of your stomach, it churns and twists into something tangible, something real.

You had a dream. You do not remember it.

You rise from your bed, feeling a combination of sluggish and anxious.

You splash your face with fresh water from the bathroom's sink.

You take the time to look at yourself in the mirror.

The thing that stares you back is almost unrecognizable. It wears a sullen mask of decaying flesh, its eyes have sunk deep within it. It looks tired.

...

You smash your forehead on the glass. Shards and droplets of blood fall into the sink. You look at the thing again. It's an improvement, you conclude.

You sigh.

You clean your wound and smack a band on top of it.

With your morning routine finally done, you are now ready to start your shift at the Parasitic Clit-Penis Corruption/Impregnation Facility.

Okay, yes. This might be the worst way to start a review, article or essay of any kind, I will concede. However, getting casually whiplashed around is par for the course to what I am about to tackle. In my already half-dazed mind, that seemed like the most appropriate tone setter. Speaking of which: hey, kids! Do you want to know where Tentacle Rape comes from?

Ero guro (grotesque eroticism) is, in the shortest possible terms, a subversive subcategory of fiction originated in Japan during the Taisho era. I will spare you the literary deep dive and cut to the chase. Under the specific banner of Ero guro games, we find the likes of Euphoria, SaDistic BlooD, Gore Screaming Show and many more. Regardless of quality, genre or narrative, they are united by a simple premise: absurd, ultra-violent sex is mandatory. Horror and the macabre splatter themselves atop a canvas of hardcore, impractical, sexual fetishes; anything from gory degradation to tentacles or anything the human mind can concoct. The grotesquery is The Selling Point. Incredibly upsetting content is the draw. That simply comes with the territory. Which brings me to the subject of this essay.

For your information, I went the extra mile for this title. I bought the physical version and had it imported from across the ocean. I waited for about a month for it to get here, for the privilege of actually holding a honest-to-goodness videogame case of a Japanese eroge within these two hands. Here is the "unboxing" video.

So, was it worth the wait? Let us find out.

Part 1: Of Maggots and Baits

Maggot Baits was developed by CLOCKUP, the Euphoria team, and I find it rather difficult to scrutinize at a honest, intellectual level. In that regard, my first impressions were actually quite negative, and so were my second, my third, my fourth, etcetera. According to the synopsis printed on the back cover, the story takes place in a city known as Kantou's Pandemonium, and I quote:

'When immortal, unidentified beings called "witches" began to appear, the government responded by quarantining the metropolitan area, and ceding the land from their sovereign borders. Criminals, illegal immigrants, and defaulting debtors who couldn't make a living in this corrupt world sought refuge in the city, followed by an influx of prostitutes, black market dealers, and yakuza seeking to take advantage of them. After growing to a population of 150,000 over several years, the curtain rises on this tale when a certain man encounters a lone "Witch" here in this unrecognized free city known as Pandemonium.'

That sounds like a fine hook, admittedly. It's Escape from New York but with the world's edgiest magical girls. At least, that's what you might gather by reading this passage. You would be deadly wrong, though. Whilst the provided description is technically correct, it does not do justice to the manner by which the game establishes itself. As such, I shall summarize the initial succession of events in the order it was presented to me, so that we can all feel bemused together. Sharing is caring, after all.

A couple of women (witches) wander into town, mass rape and slaughter all the men, leave. We cut to an underground casino where a bunny-eared girl (also a witch but defenseless) gets mutilated in an extended torture porn scene which culminates with her demise. She gets a "merciful death" at the hands of the protagonists, a tall guy with a shotgun and her cat-eared companion (witch) right after they killed everyone else in the building. Opening credits.

The leading duo meet up with two other witches at their fancy villa in the forest. Some other girl is also there. Together, they are preparing a plan of action... but they decide to postpone it. After just getting there, one of the guests goes back to town to find men to bang. She can't get in the mood because Shotgun Guy is too hot but he's also taken, allegedly. She fights off an amorphous, crawling mass of flesh and tendrils (called Maggot) that just happened to be looking for women to violate. Then, she meets another woman and proceeds to have a sexually-charged duel with her. She cuts off her arm and wins. Don't worry, it will grow back. However, the defeated duelist gets abducted by "witch hunters." A clumsy segue brings us to a room where yet another random girl is getting penetrated by the same kind of tentacle monster as before. This is where I'll stop.

Now, if this sequence of plot beats I laid out for you seemed unfocused or scatterbrained, lacking proper narrative cohesion or contiguity, held together by a flimsy thread, that is precisely the point I was making. The narration does the bare minimum to introduce the setting, the premise and stakes but it feels mechanical, situational, in a constant rush. Characters and their motivations are quickly addressed, almost dismissively, so that it can get to the H-scenes as fast as possible. Therein lies the fundamental problem, the game's priorities are heavily skewed towards the erotic portion rather than the storytelling aspect, to a ridiculous, unbalanced degree. It may seem ridiculous to complain about deliberately freaky, pornographic art self-indulging too much but, I promise you, the criticism is warranted in this case. When the main attraction is too overpowering, and every other aspect is slimmed down, we may end up with a work that is, ironically, selling itself short. Especially if it's attempting to tell a story with any modicum of ambition, one that needed time to breathe.

The protracted length and quantity of the grotesque porn disrupts the pacing. Everyone is thusly reduced to fodder for the fetish du jour. Hell, some of these women are only ever introduced to be nothing but Scenes, as if the game had to fulfill an unreasonable quota! Speaking of unreasonable quotas, there's that Parasitic Clit-Penis idiocy I half-jokingly cited at the beginning. It's technically a Bad End that gets flagged after making a wrong choice, but it's no mere fail state... It's a whole, self-contained, two hours long scenario with ten whole H-scenes! It's a dumbfounding amount of non-con nastiness for a single route just after the first branching path! One click of my mouse led me down a hole filled with [CENSORED], [THE MOST RACIST THING EVER] and [YOU CANNOT DO THAT TO A URETHRA], all described in an outdated, misogynistic, borderline transphobic language. Oh, right. The writing. I'm going to have to talk about the writing, aren't I? Let's just say, it's not great. It has issues. Several issues that eventually conflated into a wriggling mass of issues - and tentacles, of course.

Part 2: Welcome to the Racist House

Comparisons with Euphoria will be inevitable, overwhelming but mostly fair. Not simply because it's made by the same developers but because of its visual and thematic pedigree: it's adorned by the gnarly, breathtaking art of Hamashima Shigeo - who also wears the hat of project lead. More crucially, it tackles very similar themes, for it is also about Misogyny and violence towards women being the roots by which Society is upheld. The key difference is that Maggot Baits is, somehow, even less subtle about it. The world of this game has sprouted from an event of pure evil so utterly unspeakable it has essentially re-written the rules of Reality within its own confines. Witches are the physical embodiment of that trauma whilst the maggots are violence incarnate.

It's a setting borne from systemic violation, subsisting on it, thriving (both economically and magically) on the sorrow. These women are at the epicentre of it, powerful enough to destroy armies, actually named after real hurricanes, yet still unable to disentangle themselves from the social and literal trap holding them here. They are indeed stuck in an endless cycle of birth, rape, death, rebirth that makes an open mockery of their individuality and crudely reaffirms the "Natural Order of The World" in the eyes of those who profess it. The Cruelty itself is the point, more so than the lust and objectification. There is an attempt to comment on how Cruelty is the tool used by power structures to enforce "undisputable facts", which is heavy-handedly compared to how Christianity has historically done it, and how "justifiable" sexual assault becomes under such hierarchy. It doesn't quite land, though. However, let us put an alarmingly large pin on this entire conversation, for now. I have more pressing matters to wade through.

As previously stated, the balance tips too hard on the side of H-scenes, to the point that it breaks the dramatic momentum of a given story beat and harms the pacing. The "creative" shite on display often steers the attention away from the theming rather than exclaiming it. That is an equilibrium that Euphoria usually handled excellently with both the fetish bait and the narrative working together for the benefit of its message. The maggot-variety fetish bait, however, is weirdly off, and so is the writing. I should point out this VN does not have the same writers as Euphoria - and it sadly shows. The main scenario was provided by Kurashiki Tatsuya whilst the pervy content was, apparently, the labour of one Kurisu. That might explain the noticeable disconnect that exists between story and pornography. The former wants to string the narrative and characters along in a somewhat messy, thematically bonkers, potentially captivating journey. The latter is more interested in comparing women to a variety of animals, primarily sows and bitches, with the occasional ableist, body-shaming remark thrown in whenever they are physically deformed by the absurd violence. This occurs, constantly and consistently, in every Ero guro segment and, as you've been made aware, there is a lot of the stuff. One might be inclined to defend this (let's generously call it) choice by claiming it's meant to "match the energy" of the moment. It's supposed to be fLaVoUr. That could work if the narration were to be in the POV of a deeply disturbed man, like in Euphoria, but it's not.

The prose is an omniscient third-person narrator. Hence, the voice of God is incessantly hurling gratuitous sexism at all the female characters. That is not a great look. Furthermore, the other game never felt this aggressively misogynistic, not even at its worst. The fact is, Maggot Baits can be quite annoying to read if the Selling Point is mired by a prose that always performs the same trite, repetitious ritual of fLaVoUrFuL descriptions. On that note, I shall tell you about what really soured me on this title.

There is a witch by the name of Irene. Irene is brown. A notion the text is all too eager to point out at every turn, every sentence, every punctuation. It obsessively wishes to remind you that her skin is dark, her look is foreign and her breasts have more melanin in them! This happens both in the regular prose and, especially, during her Scenes. The colour of her skin is the most recurring element of her description, her defining trait by the sheer volume of its mentions. The actually cool Undine motif is barely addressed. Her entire personality gets effectively reduced to her race and her being brown is just another fetish. Oh, by the way, did you know there's a Bestiality scene in this here videogame? It sure would be an insanely racist move to put that character in it, wouldn't it? Incidentally, this too happens in the parasitic penis sub-scenario which, as I forgot to mention, is actually titled Welcome to the Monkey House. All those aforementioned animal comparisons are looking worse and worse by the second. Look, I would like to think I'm rather open-minded when it comes to kinks... I am going to draw the line at racism.

Part 2.5: The Ballad of Shotgun Guy

After seven or eight bad first impressions, it was nice to be able to firmly sink my teeth into something substantial - or even remotely edible. Shougo, the shotgun guy, was almost a compelling main character. A traumatic event linked to the birth of this wretched Pandemonium destroyed his entire identity and replaced it with a (literal) rage boner. He lives for violence and revenge, using people as tools for his aims. That is the relationship he forces onto his companion, Carol the Witch. A throwaway line also reveals that he's queer.

The notion of him being a gay man automatically makes the dynamic between these two so much more interesting. Carol is down bad for him but lacks the emotional maturity to understand her feelings whilst Shougo could never love her the way she would want but still needs her as a weapon. They must have sex for plot-related reasons which, in turn, only burdens this already unhealthy arrangement with more complicated emotions. It's a unique angle for a toxic "romance", spicy and flavourful... and I had zero confidence in its eventual pay-off. Returning to the regular path, right after barely surviving the Monkey House, was a Herculean task. I had absolutely no reason to believe anything good could come out of this or any other angle proposed within the text. I was absolutely right, by the way.

I abundantly lamented how the Selling Point off-scales and subsumes every other aspect of this diegesis unto itself until all semblance of meaning is stamped out, only a decaying, thoroughly debased husk remaining. Yet, I still cannot properly make you understand how existentially miserable and rancid this chaotic, hot mess of a "story" felt. The initial shock was eventually replaced by anger, then annoyance and, finally, a quiet resignation. There were many times when it seemed the narrative was on the verge of a compelling point. There were individual pieces, tassels, character arcs and dynamics that were primed for interesting developments, but you do not get anything even remotely satisfying by the end. The novel did not earn its tragedies, its bittersweet resolutions, its thematic brownie points because the Selling Point took precedence on everything else. As weirdly moot of a criticism as this may appear, I shall keep banging on it because, once again, Euphoria had shown us it was possible (not guaranteed but possible) to have your cake and eat it too. Maggot Baits, by contrast, ate too much cake, barfed all over the place and ruined the party for everyone! We have, alas, one small silver-lining.

Part 3: She "Died" for Our Sins

I want to briefly talk about a specific element, an Actual Theme, that managed to spitefully resonate in this gouged out, worm-festering corpse of a novel. The game makes a lot of statements about Society, about Misogyny, about Women's Suffering and Men being like maggots driven by the desire to violate them. This game also hates Christianity, with a passion. To give you a more cut and dry vision of how Maggot Baits approaches the topic: the game will stop whatever it's doing to invade your eye-balls with walls of text in open condemnation of Colonialism and religion-motivated genocide, all to merely frame the arrival of a guy that looks as if Samuel L. Jackson from Pulp Fiction were a Hellsing character.

Furthermore, Maggot Baits is the type of narrative that will spend several paragraphs recounting the Suffering of Christ in fetishistic detail, down to the nails that impaled him and his body crushing under its own weight. Which, in turn, would serve as an introduction to the Anime Girl version of him. ... And if you think that sounds crazy then you've better buckle up for what comes next! For the sake of my mental health, let's set aside the long, complicated history between Japan and The West, which has always coloured how Japanese media tackles The Church, and focus on the analysis at hand. The idea that through sorrow one can reach salvation is doubtlessly rooted in some bad visions of Christianity, and the VN is running wild with it. It's the ideology that spurs the unimaginable horrors at the base of the setting, a world erected atop the assailed, mutilated corpses of 26 girls at the hands of 5000 horny men. This is the face you are making right now.

The so-called witches trapped within it are the ghosts of those girls, the physical embodiments of their trauma, unwittingly reborn to endure the torment for the sake of someone else's idea of Salvation. The maggots, their natural enemies, are the coalesced masses of their violators. The main villain, a true immortal witch, aims to forcefully recreate the Suffering of Christ at a much larger scale, absorbing the despair of all those girls, over and over, with the intent of becoming the New Jesus and reshape the world in her image. She stands still, in the yawning abyss above her domain, in self-inflicted crucifixion, waiting for her servants to do her bidding. That is to say, capture the witches, have them broken and impregnated by maggots, give birth to themselves, and repeat the cycle. Now, that is crazy!

In the common route, she actually succeeds. She harvested all that pain, humiliation, unfiltered sufferance and created a world without war, sickness, hatred - or so the oddly fabulistic narration at the end will have you believe. However, the remnant of that anguish still lingers, a curse of darkness upon the land itself.

That's because no society built atop so much horror, so much vileness can ever be acceptable, can ever be real. The fairy tale ending only emphasizes how much of a farce it is. 'The End Justifies The Means' is the self-righteous delusion of powerful egomaniacs. There is no such a thing as Good Trauma. Surviving it does not make people stronger, it does not better anyone as a person. You are but a nameless victim who had to suffer because someone in a position of authority deemed it necessary. The witches, born from rape and made to be raped, reflect that. On paper, that sounds like a meaningful denouement. Not a loud, self-serving proclamation amidst unhinged porn but an actual story being told that organically reached a thematic throughline - wow, what a concept! That only illustrates what we could have had here.

The true route unlocks afterwards. It is, somehow, even more miserable than what preceded it. Do you remember Shougo and Carol? This is their story and, just as I predicted, it is garbage. If you were wondering, him being gay didn't end up mattering in the slightest outside of toothless, "edgy" queer-baiting. Relatedly, CLOCKUP pulls the Fated Encounter trope with its two leads (again) and it's the grossest one yet. All that previously mentioned intrigue, flavour, the compelling dynamic shared between the two, get flushed down the toilet to make room for a wretched, heteronormative romance, a disgustingly saccharine resolution and a miracle pregnancy through the Power of Fucking Love! It's the second time this studio smacks me across the face with an insipid final pairing and my patience for such shenanigans has evaporated. I would say they wet the bed with this ending but the sheets were already soaked in blood, tears and various bodily fluids from the start.

Part 4: Why Are We Here? Just to Suffer?

As I completed Maggot Baits and looked back at everything it had to show for itself, the prevailing sentiment was just how fundamentally bleak, cynical and hollow it all was. Instead of themes, it had self-aggrandizing, sweeping statements delivered with the poise of a half-baked preacher. In place of a cohesive story and fully realized characters, it had basic beat-by-beat plot progression to fill in time before the next scene of ultra violence would rear its head, "holes" to be filled by grody tendrils and random NPC's dicks - or, sometimes, knives. Misery for the sake of titillation with delusions of grandeur. How could you take anything this game has to say about violence against women seriously when three thirds of the cast exist solely to be abused as the prose incessantly compares them to sows or cows? When a major character gets re-introduced in an elaborate rape + disembowelment sequence lasting a total of thirty minutes of real runtime only for her to casually shake it off afterwards and be on her merry way, what conclusions would you reach about Maggot Baits' message?

Understand that I am not mad about this being exactly what it is, I am dejected and irritated at the idea that it pretended to be about something. Or, rather, that it almost was about something but all of it, All Of It, is undercut by its own rampant sexism, racism and plain bad writing. Even SaDistic BlooD, for all of its gratuitous, woman-dismembering nonsense, at least had the courtesy of a sufficiently neutral prose. It was also very short, not the ludicrous forty hours long, neuron-frying gauntlet this one ultimately turned out to be. I cannot believe I'm re-evaluating SaDBlooD. What have I become!?

I think I'm done here. I am exhausted, well and truly spent. My mind feels like it had to run a marathon but instead of the expected feeling of elation that comes with reaching the goal, all I have instead is profound ennui. I have truly gained nothing from this challenge. Nothing but tiredness.

This VN is now my line in the sand. It is the benchmark by which every PrObLeMaTiC fiction will be judged in the future. Because it doesn't matter how "awful" your work is perceived to be, I can almost guarantee you it will not be like the game where a woman's outgrown penis is used as a onahole. How's that for a Selling Point?

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