four hearts in five places, all sick with one wish.

like, okay, breaking this down a bit. the game opens with tomoaki getting fired from his job bc he got into a fight with a customer who tried to assault (or at least harass) sayaka, who obviously is a girl — he's punished By Society™ for doing ostensibly the right thing, that is to say, protecting a woman from gendered/sexual violence. Right. so that leads him to heed a mysterious advertisement he sees which promises an easy job for an absurd amount of money. (30,000 yen per day, over the course of one month. And of course this is in like mid 2010s money too lol) in any other context this would like, immediately read as suspicious: i’d like to think i’m not the only one who thought the concept read as eerily similar to a fake job listing designed to lure people into sex trafficking. and like, while that isn’t something tomoaki thinks about, implicitly because he’s a cisgender man and doesn’t think of sexual violence as something that could happen to him, he is still worried about what on earth that could entail. But takes the offer anyway, because he’s poor and just lost his job and has no other option but to do this potentially-dangerous thing. which could mean nothing.

anyway, obviously since this is a BL game by togo mito, tomoaki is instead pushed into the role of, essentially, stand-in “master” for a group of butlers. Naturally. It’s a very silly premise that mostly exists to enable much of the h-content in the game, of which there is a lot, but I think it is worth noting that you can easily chart tomoaki’s character progression in certain routes on the line of “disaffected young man finds an avenue of societal power, becomes groomed to think of a group of people as inherently inferior to him; and, to assert his newfound societal power, ultimately becomes the one who inflicts violence on these people and is rewarded for it."

and it's like. okay, as far as i know these are not lines that are drawn explicitly in the game — but you can really easily draw them yourself. in certain routes tomoaki grows to think of himself as entitled to his butlers bodies, because he explicitly views them as his property: they exist to service him, all other things are secondary. its worth noting that these are the routes in which this viewpoint is, again, outright rewarded: kamishiro dies suddenly, and makes a last-minute alteraton to his will that leaves tomoaki with his entire estate: the mansion and everything (including the butlers) in it. so like. by becoming someone who sexually exploits a group of people who cannot say no to him in any way that matters, and fully buying into the idea that he owns these people and their bodies wholly and is thus entitled to them sexually, he's rewarded with more status and material wealth than he could have ever dreamed of prior.