Lovestruck is one part romance novel, one part mobile game – and it’s free-to-play.
Lovestruck is one part romance novel, one part mobile game – and it’s free-to-play.

Pop CultureMay 20, 2019

Lovestruck is one part game, one part romance novel, one part queer revolution

Guest writer
Lovestruck is one part romance novel, one part mobile game – and it’s free-to-play.
Lovestruck is one part romance novel, one part mobile game – and it’s free-to-play.

Tof Eklund reviews Lovestruck, a free-to-play treasure trove of romantic queer gaming content.

Voltage’s Lovestruck does not, at first glance, look particularly queer-inclusive. Created in 2017 to unify four otome (‘women’s romance’) mobile games, this game hub now houses at least a dozen fictional worlds (depending on how you count them) and an advertised ’50+ love interests’. Most of those love interests are the sensitive, hunky, wounded guys you see on the covers of popular romance novels, but a few are women. Actually, more than a few: 15 women at this point and, more surprisingly, two nonbinary (‘enby’) characters.

I’m always looking for transgender and non-binary representation in games, and I usually find it in punky, defiant passion projects like Genderwrecked, Heaven is Mine, and With Those We Love Alive. Those games are scrappy, sharp, hook-fanged little works of resistance and survival: the kind of story where the enby character can tank like a brick wall because they’ve learned how to take a hit over years of being beaten up at school. Lovestruck is, thankfully, absolutely nothing like that.

Lovestruck is cosy and cute, and often cliched. The settings of its stories are comfortably familiar, be they the space opera of Starship Promise, the Sopranos-inflected mob family drama of Gangsters in Love, or Havenfall is for Lovers, which just screams Twilight, right down to the protagonist bearing an uncanny resemblance to Kristen Stewart. It’s familiar, banal, and safe. But what’s remarkable is the way these safe, banal worlds include enby hellspawn JD; tall, dark and dangerous Nova; and gay moms doing crimes.

The writing in Lovestruck adheres broadly to the conventions of romance writing, which means that the focus is on characters, feelings, and the conflicts (internal and external) that get in the way of – but cannot stop – love. Nitty-gritty details about FTL travel, the laws of magic, siege warfare, and so on are not important. The protagonist of a romance does not have to possess tactical genius, superhuman reflexes, or an iron nerve: that person just has to be persistent in love.

This runs counter to the heroic assumptions of most video games, full of heroes fighting alone. While none of Lovestruck’s protagonists are helpless, neither do they stand on their own. The same is true for all of the game’s love interests: they may be powerful, capable figures (or magical pastry chefs) but they need your support. Conversely, the only characters in Lovestruck who are ‘self-sufficient’ are selfish, callous villains whose ultimate punishment will be loneliness. Smug, smirking characters aren’t cool, they’re pitiable.

In fairy tales and the movies, romances end with consummation, be that a first night together, a wedding, or a dramatically-framed kiss. Prose romance writers, on the other hand, have developed the art of love after the honeymoon, not just the happy end but the happy epilogue. If you don’t read ‘chick lit’ or crossover authors like Lois McMaster Bujold, you are seriously missing out on stories about rekindling love after childbirth, as an ’empty nester’, and after widowhood.

Literary fiction includes a lot of stories of divorce, estrangement, and sometimes bittersweet reunion, but hot domesticity is almost exclusively the purview of romance writing. Most of the plots in Lovestruck, including the queer ones, lead eventually to marriage, and often thereafter to children.

My beloved razor-tongued genderpunk games rarely include marriage or parenting. Partially, that’s because the folks creating these games are critical of middle-class morality, gender roles, monogamy, and the pretense that everything will be okay when it won’t. But it’s also because that same demographic has a hard time seeing a future that includes them, let alone gives them a legacy (like children) that will continue on after them.

Speaking as a queer parent, we can’t leave parenting to the straights, and we must support future generations in their ambition to do us one better and maybe even save the world. Whether it’s by conception, adoption, surrogacy/sperm donation, or ‘science babies’, the queer families in Lovestruck wind up being revolutionary, and their existence has consequences beyond mere acceptance.

The lead characters in Three Tattoos.

One of the stories in Lovestruck, Three Tattoos exemplifies this. In it you are a redheaded and freckled university student going to get inked with your bestie, Stella. The thing is, Stella is black, her moms are white and Hispanic, she talks about helping her little sister adapt after adoption, and, just like her moms, Stella has a strong sense of ethics and justice… but no regard for the law as such. You go girl.

It’s not just Stella. In Three Tattoos, there’s no developed romance as such, but the player is invited to crush on any of four rebellious hotties in the tattoo parlor: Rahim the tattoo artist, whose dark skin is covered in Arabic tats; Hikari the half-demon bad girl; Robin the grunge 2.0 enby; and Stella. All of these characters are children of, or otherwise connected to, existing Lovestruck characters; Stella’s the only one with two moms. This ‘next generation’ of characters is super gay, inverting the ‘one in four’ ratio of queer to straight romances from early Lovestruck games to a single straight, cis dude (who is probably an immortal Djinni) and three queer crushes.

The preponderance of hetero content in Lovestruck isn’t incidental to this – there are a lot of games out their that contain elements of ‘lesbian chic’ targeted at straight men. All of the shirtless guys in Lovestruck make it a safe space for women, as conservatively 101% of misogynists are also homophobes, the kind repelled by strong men with sensitive expressions as surely as vampires are repelled by garlic.

But because Lovestruck is safe for straight women, it’s also safe for women who might not be straight but aren’t ready for the local dyke bar. User comments on the woman-woman romance with Rory in Gangsters include things like “I’m not into other women but…” and “Aurora made me realize that I was [queerer than a three dollar bill].”

There’s nothing keeping men from playing Lovestruck, just as there is nothing keeping men from reading regency romance novels (and quite a few do), but your average misogynist isn’t going to give the game a second look, and any transphobe who stumbled in would quickly realise that neither the game nor its community shares their prejudice.

It surprised me that I’d never heard of Lovestruck before I stumbled across the app. I’ll allow that it’s not going to be indie or raw enough for some, and that games targeted to women get a lot less coverage, but there is another factor I have to bring up: Lovestruck is free-to-play. It’s far from the most onerous or tedium FTP system, but I know that’s a full-stop dealbreaker for many.

So here’s the grift: Lovestruck wants to sell you bundles of Tickets and Hearts. A Ticket allows you to play a chapter of a story, and hearts are used to unlock additional scenes with your digital heartthrobs. With a little patience, buying Tickets is completely unnecessary, as you get a new one every two hours, up to a maximum of two. If you’re not a compulsive binge-watcher, you should have more than enough Tickets. Even if you only play once a day, you can finish a ‘season’ (complete story arc) in about a week.

Lovestruck is far from perfect. The game is racially diverse but sharply limited in the body types it depicts: everyone has a thin, athletic frame, with some of the men more muscular than others but only in the range from Peter Parker to Fabio, with most falling squarely at Steve Rogers. Women vary greatly in height and cup size but not in girth, and all of the nonbinary characters fall within a narrow range of androgyny: think K.D. Lang circa Drag.

Even in terms of LGBTQ representation, the ‘G’ is missing. Iseul the Elf is bisexual and a couple of the other guys have queer markers, but I’ve yet to see so much as a gay BFF. As every story’s protagonist is female, every romance involves at least one woman. Gendering the protagonist allows each character to be written with a defined sexual orientation, but precludes gay (male) stories and Lovestruck doesn’t so much as mention polyamory, perhaps for the sake of its most conservative readers.

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A more pedestrian flaw is that while some of the art is extremely cute, there are moments that are unintentionally ridiculous, including a few of the older costume designs and the absolute proscription against bare breasts. Bras are worn even when bathing and, except in the most recent series, men don’t have nipples. I blame Tim Cook.

In particular, Helena’s story from Love Legends is worthy a note, as it deals with abuse and domestic violence in queer relationships. That part of the story is really well researched and written (much more so than the sword and sorcery stuff) and is upbeat even as it deals with the lasting effects of trauma, but it really should have come with a trigger warning.

Lovestruck is not going to win honours at the Indie Games Fest, or take away the Booker Prize, but it’s a treasure-trove of light, happy queer (and straight) content, and it deals with some serious relationship issues more deftly than one might expect, given its candy-shell exterior.

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George Clooney’s Catch-22 can be streamed in its entirety on TVNZ on Demand.
George Clooney’s Catch-22 can be streamed in its entirety on TVNZ on Demand.

Pop CultureMay 20, 2019

Review: Catch-22 meanders off-course on its journey from book to miniseries

Guest writer
George Clooney’s Catch-22 can be streamed in its entirety on TVNZ on Demand.
George Clooney’s Catch-22 can be streamed in its entirety on TVNZ on Demand.

Katie Meadows reviews Catch-22, George Clooney’s bleak and boring TV adaptation of the classic novel.

Even if you are not familiar with Joseph Heller’s 1961 satirical novel, you will be familiar with its title — a catch-22 at its most technical is a paradoxical problem with no solution because its rules inherently void the possibility of a solution, though the term has gone on to more broadly represent a situation where one cannot escape or “win”. Catch-22’s eponymous crisis revolves around young Captain John “Yo-Yo” Yossarian (Christopher Abbot, from Girls), who is serving as a bombardier stationed on an island off the coast of Italy in World War 2. As part of his draft he must serve a number of missions and becomes heavily distressed by the trauma of this service, but every time he is close to fulfilling his duty the amount of bombardier missions he must serve is increased.

While he tries to scheme how to get out of his service by means of mental instability, a doctor informs him of the military’s catch-22 clause that throws a wrench in the works: to be dismissed from missions he must be proven clinically insane, but to request dismissal on the grounds of fear of trauma during said missions automatically proves your sanity as you are able to clearly acknowledge that you fear clear and obvious danger, as any sane person would do. This particular mini-series adaptation is helmed by George Clooney’s Smoke House Pictures production company, with the Nespresso Silver Fox also directing and co-starring – with Kyle Chandler (the dad from Friday Night Lights) and Hugh Laurie (you know who Hugh Laurie is) providing support.

Before I get going, I feel it is important to note that I have never read Catch-22. It never came up in any of my English classes in high school. I stopped reading “classic literature” written by men and recommended by men in high school, after I borrowed Catcher in the Rye, a book about a man that does not bother to appease anyone other than other men, from the library and hated it more than any other book I have ever read.

The (almost entirely male) cast of Catch-22.

None of this is to say Catch-22 is a bad book; I’m sure it’s worth something for it to be so revered. I just don’t see myself reading about men and war, even if it functions as a satire of those two things, because I don’t think it’s made for me to consume. I think an adaptation should be able to function as a separate entity from its source material, and I don’t think this series meets that goal.

I am very glad I decided to research and ask around about Heller’s 1961 novel before I wrote this, because otherwise I would have said something like, “Hey, why is everyone being so rosy about war?” My Spark Notes-intensive research has lead me to understand this is part of a purposeful structure to deliver delayed punch-lines — which I have mentally compared to Arrested Development — and that the novel ends with a true depiction of the horrors of war.

I also understand that America loves a bloody war, and loves to send people off to die in them and glorify those who do; I just don’t know if I have any faith in this miniseries shirking that national narrative of patriotic bloodshed within a tight six episodes that has already used an excessive amount of screen-time for what is essentially endless montages of lads.

Also, every single woman in Catch-22 is naked – except for a nurse who wore clothes and said three lines. The strongest female representation in Catch-22 is my name watermarked on the advance screener I got from Paramount, which I cannot stress enough was a very exciting part of reviewing this. Every time the screen was black, there was my name right in the middle, and it made me think “Wow, I can’t believe I made my own series on Hulu!” It also made me think, “I can’t believe I didn’t put more women in my series on Hulu!”

It feels like the screenwriters struggled to adapt a book known for its quick and sardonic writing to screen; the dialogue is very fast and leaves no space for comedic timing, and conversation becomes monotonous. The barking circular logic of Yo-Yo’s officers and fellow soldiers loses its wit and irony when it’s not punctuated written words telling the reader when to pause. On screen, the dialogue descends into militia minutiae that’s lost on a viewer who lacks familiarity with war jargon. Timing is so important to comedy, especially when the humour needs a beat for you to let it hit you. Instead, in Catch-22, would-be funny lines get lost in a blur of angry men.

Hugh Laurie and Daniel David Stewart in Catch-22.

I reckon if you saw Catch-22 with George Clooney in the at-home cinema that he definitely has, he would be watching you watch it the whole time and saying, “Haha, did you see what I did there?” every five minutes. I think this miniseries will eventually be a great DVD box set gift for your father, step-dad, uncle, or any other miscellaneous older gentleman in your life.

Perhaps the need to be faithful to a source material that requires such distinct translation to work is Catch-22’s own catch-22: is it possible to successfully adapt a novel to film that relies so heavily on the experience of reading it?

You can stream the entire series of Catch-22 on TVNZ OnDemand now.

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