#ddadds discourse

[its-just-my-shitty-opinion]

Man it’s been over a year and I’m still salty about how dirty you people did Dream Daddy. It was an incredibly progressive game with a great story and even greater characters, and y’all tried so hard to find any little thing wrong with it that you fucking killed it.

Dream Daddy and it’s fandom deserved so much better than fake pricks trying so hard to be ‘right’ and ‘pure’ and ‘correct’ that they’re going assbackwards away from progress.

[fondlemychristiansenballs]

Did I meme right?

[captainofthetidesbreath]

It’s a common point of discourse in the fandom, and I’ve talked a little about it myself, but never at length. I’ve made it clear that I don’t buy that Joseph is telling the entire truth about his affair with Robert and I often believe that most posts framing the situation ignore the context of Robert being emotionally unwell and assume that Joseph is telling the whole truth and nothing but despite the existence of the photograph, which throws doubt on Joseph’s version of the story.

The short form:

Joseph is truthful about two things: Robert propositioned Joseph, the affair ended that night. Joseph, however, leaves out one key thing: they had an emotional affair before that. Factoring in Robert’s poor emotional and mental health push him into self-destructive coping mechanisms, I frame the proposition as: Robert had a lapse (in the sense of an addiction or recovery) but Joseph made a conscious decision. Afterward, Joseph told Robert that what Robert remembered of the affair was wrong: there was no emotionally intimate relationship, only shallow casual sex—gaslighting.

The comparative form:

You know how the MC cultivates a relationship with Robert, in which Robert comes to feel he can seek emotional support from the MC and eventually be emotionally vulnerable? And, Robert comes to an emotional crisis which makes him confront his self-loathing, loneliness, and repeated failure to overcome his issues and improve as a person, and he tries to address (or not address, rather) how he feels with sex? And you can choose “Tell him what he wants to hear”, and the MC will sweep away Robert’s issues, minimize Robert’s need to get better, and lean into Robert’s tendency to use sex to cope to get laid? Then, when Robert didn’t get better, despite the MC internally acknowledging they have responsibility it, the MC outright chastises Robert and puts most of the blame on Robert—despite him taking the MC’s advice and him standing no chance without support against it all? And how it’s all generally self-centered and selfish of the MC to do this and pretend that he didn’t help point Robert toward this road and helped him get started on the path?

Well, considering the photograph on Joseph’s yacht, it’s my belief that Joseph ran this exact route and he chose “Tell him what he wants to hear”.

The long form:

Robert has a lot of issues. He’s barely a functioning human being. Most relevant here is that Robert is a) an immensely lonely person b) who struggles a lot with self-loathing c) and has failed to make lasting progress in previous attempts to improve d) because he lacks a significant support system or any individual support e) so uses casual sex, and alcoholism, as a means to cope with loneliness and self-loathing and to deflect from facing his emotional issues head-on. Robert has ruined every close relationship in his life, he believes his wife died hating him to mention one relationship, and his life is marked with deep unhappiness.

Robert doesn’t say much about his and Joseph’s relationship other than he thinks Joseph a bad person and a backstabber. Joseph attributes Robert’s animosity as stemming from Robert’s complicated relationship with casual sex and describes their relationship as a one-night stand, an affair that ended the same day it began. A photograph on Joseph’s yacht shows Joseph and Robert happy together, with Robert wearing a sweater that’s implied to belong to Joseph. This photograph throws doubt on Joseph’s version of events. Robert is not the type who casually wears others clothing, and it implies a past closeness between them that no longer exists. Mary knows about the affair between Joseph and Robert. Despite this, she remains dear friends with Robert. It’s unusual for people who have been cheated on to become or remain close friends with those their partner cheated with, unless they felt their partner in some way took advantage or that there are, for lack of a better word, extenuating circumstances that lessen the responsibility of the other party.

How did this affair start? Joseph is charming and charismatic. He is emotionally intelligent, and he often displays empathy and concern for those around him. Though he is a youth minister, he puts himself out in the community as one who will help adults work through their issues and support them in trying times, including difficulties with the end of a relationship. It is my belief that Robert felt drawn into a friendship with Joseph because of this (coupled with proximity since Joseph is married to Robert’s close friend Mary). Joseph was probably an emotional support for Robert in the years after Marilyn’s death and in Robert’s losing struggle against self-destructiveness.

Joseph, in his own crumbling marriage, was similarly unhappy and lonely, and he sought a fix for it outside his marriage—from someone who sought him for support. The relationship likely deepened into an emotional intimacy and ultimately became an emotional affair. From where Robert is standing in things, I don’t doubt that Robert knew what was going on. It’s reasonable to ask: if Robert knew what was going on, why didn’t he end it? However, when Robert has so few supports and when Robert is as terribly lonely as it is, I expect he found it impossible to break the relationship or resist the draw of emotional intimacy. He has been lacking it for a long time. Perhaps, for the first time in years, Robert felt good about himself, felt content and loved. How could he end the affair and go back to loneliness and self-loathing? If Robert had a stronger and more extensive support system, I’d imagine it would’ve been so much easier—but he’s in a terrible situation and he has little outside support and little personal strength to get himself out of it.

I imagine for Joseph, he felt similarly content and loved for the first time in a long time. And such, there was a period of contentment in both of them, the emotional affair without any sort of physical consummation of the relationship.

I stress here, because Joseph puts himself out as an aid and a counselor in the community, it is inappropriate for him to be pursuing emotionally intimate relationships with those who seek his aid or those who are desperately in need of the kind of aid he provides. There’s some argument to be made that Robert and Joseph were normal friends, without this added dimension, or that it doesn’t necessarily apply because it isn’t a formal counseling setting. It is my belief, however, that the dynamic inherently disadvantaged Robert, who is mentally ill and emotionally unhealthy, and that Joseph, as someone who is emotionally intelligent and acts as a counselor-type figure in the community, ought to have taken more care to avoid this. While there’s something to say here about possible difficult for Joseph to support for himself, the pressures of having to keep up a perfect appearances, the inability to find an outlet for the frustrations in his marriage, Joseph is arguably in a much better position to do so. Joseph isn’t fighting against numerous self-destructive tendencies at all times, Joseph isn’t as isolated as Robert is, Joseph doesn’t struggle to make social contacts, Joseph isn’t deeply emotionally unhealthy.

Emotions are a messy business, however, and Robert nearly has messy as a primary character trait. On Robert’s third date, when Val is driving up to “patch things up” with Robert, he is forced to confront his failure as a father, his failure to make lasting progress in his self-improvement, his constant losing battle with self-destructiveness, and his deep self-loathing. To distract himself from it, he tries to initiate sex with the MC. This appears to be a pattern of behavior with Robert, and he uses sex to keep his mind off his issues and his negative feelings. Generally speaking, sex is often used as a coping mechanism for self-loathing because one temporarily feels good. It’s my belief that Robert suffered some emotional crisis—someone with as complicated and repressed an emotional life as Robert does likely faces them regularly—and he fell back on old coping mechanisms: he propositioned Joseph for sex because that was how Robert knew how to deal with this crisis. Joseph, marriage still crumbling and caught up in an emotional affair with Robert, accepted.

While it’s true that Joseph was caught in a deeply unhappy marriage, and it’s true that Robert knew that Joseph was married, when propositioned, the onus falls on the married one—it is their responsibility to their commitment. Even that aside, I again point to what I believe is an inherently unbalanced dynamic in their relationship.

Generally, I characterize this moment as: Joseph made a conscious decision, Robert had a lapse (in the sense of an addiction or recovery).

I believe here that Joseph was faced with a choice much in the way the MC is during Robert’s third date: he can rebuff Robert and make Robert take up the difficult, but much healthier, task of facing his issues in the face (tell him what he needs to hear) or he can let Robert remain comfortable in his self-destructiveness and use this moment to advantage to deal with his own issues or own desires (tell him what he wants to hear). Whether it’s Joseph doing it or the MC doing it, in both cases, it is selfish and arguably irresponsible: it is consciously prioritizing their own feelings over helping someone who is spiraling and is seeking them out as support. As for whether or not Joseph understood this, I believe he did; Joseph, again, is an emotionally intelligent and generally empathetic person.

Exactly how the relationship ended is unknown. I believe Joseph is telling the truth when he says that the affair ended the night he and Robert had sex. The how exactly it ended isn’t much concern of mine, and it doesn’t factor in much in my stance on the relationship—it’s more how Joseph dealt with it afterward that concerns me. Still, speculating on the end of things...

It is possible that Robert acted much in the way that he does after “tell him what he wants to hear”: Robert goes cold and becomes immediately emotionally distant with the MC. Robert doesn’t end the relationship, but the MC is alienated by Robert choosing not to see Val and even try to improve as a person. It is important to note that when Robert explains his decision, he quotes the advice the MC gave him while the MC was reinitiating the sex; the MC appears to understand this and feels “a wave of guilt” before chastising Robert for not even trying. Robert ends the relationship with the MC; he believed that the MC was alright with Robert as he was and that the MC did not ask Robert to get better, but he is hurt when it turns out wrong and the MC dislikes Robert for not getting better. He tells the MC that he is also a bad person and remarks: “Funny how easy it was for you to look past this when it meant you got laid.” I tend to believe that the “tell him what he wants to hear” option involves both the MC and Robert knowing that the advice the MC gives is bad advice; however, where the MC hopes that Robert has the strength to ignore the advice and Robert, who never has the strength to surmount his issues on his own, takes it as leave to remain comfortable in his self-destruction.

Robert and Joseph’s relationship could have played out similarly: where Joseph chastises Robert for failing to go through with self-improvement, while Robert was only following the path that Joseph pointed him toward. In both cases, I’d argue, Robert feels that he was taken advantage of: others are willing to ignore and even indulge his issues as long as it benefits them, but when it becomes inconvenient, they chastise him and ignore they helped him play his hand. They’ve left him out to dry and blame him entirely to absolve themselves of blame. Even if this isn’t exactly what happened, and I’m not entirely sure that’s how it goes exactly, I tend to believe followed this structure: feeling guilty, he reframes the issue to remove his own role in the mistake, increasing the amount of blame on Robert and minimizing the amount of blame he himself must carry.

At the same time, it is also possible that Joseph immediately ended the relationship himself. Feeling guilt that he was now engaging in a sexual affair, he ended things. He dropped his relationship with Robert completely, including any friendship. This relationship, however, is one of few very close relationships Robert has and is one of few things that makes Robert feel good about himself; as a result, Robert feels hurt and betrayed and used, his coping mechanisms co-opted for Joseph’s needs. The moment Joseph got what he wanted, or the moment it becomes inconvenient for Joseph, Robert is thrown out without hesitation.

What happens after the relationship ended is the most important to me.

Much of Joseph’s place in the community relies on his reputation, and Joseph appears very dedicated to the image of himself others see. He must maintain a cultivated and perfect image of a clean-cut, faithful husband. While he cannot outright deny the affair, he likely sought to minimize the damage of it as possible. A short, one night indiscretion is less damaging than a lengthy emotional affair.

I don’t think Joseph’s actions at any point, during the affair or after it, were malicious; I believe that he thought only of himself, not of Mary whom he was cheating on, not of Robert whom he was hurting by drawing him into a relationship Robert couldn’t resist. I just believe that Joseph was selfish and irresponsible. Much of what he did was cater to his own feelings at the expense of others, keep the dirt off himself by pushing others into the mud and climbing over them. There’s much to say about how it’s difficult for Joseph to find support for himself, the pressures of having to keep up a perfect appearances, the inability to find an outlet for the frustrations in his marriage—but, again, it is my belief that his relationship with Robert was inherently skewed and that the onus of responsibility was inherently more on Joseph, who made the much more active decisions in this mess.

There’s no really good place to note this but, while it’s true that Joseph hates to be lied to, that does not necessarily mean that he himself dislikes to lie or to reframe the truth. People who think of themselves first or who are thinking selfishly in situations, they tend to hypocritically allow themselves to do what they dislike others doing. They don’t believe it’s a two-way street.

There’s even the way that Joseph tells the MC about the affair: Joseph reminds the MC about Robert and casual sex, he ensures that’s clear in the MC’s mind, then he tells the MC about it making sure to emphasize that Robert asked first, Joseph characterizes himself as weak and vulnerable, pushing the MC to comfort Joseph. Even though Joseph says that he himself is partially to blame, the framing of it causes most of it to land on Robert—to the point that the MC blames Robert. Again, the photograph casts doubt on the way Joseph frames it and indicates that there’s more to it than he’s telling. Joseph engaged in a reframing of the entire situation, a denial that it takes two to tango, that probably Robert was acting under the context of an already intimate affair, and absolves Joseph of as much blame as possible while pushing more of it onto Robert.

Even though there’s evidence that the relationship was a long and close one, Joseph tells the main character that his relationship with Robert was only a sexual one confined to a single night. By denying what really happened, by reframing the events and leaving out certain things about their relationship before the sexual aspect of the affair, changing the entire narrative to best serve Joseph’s attempts to maintain the image of himself he needs others to see, he’s gaslighting Robert, both directly and by proxy. He’s telling Robert, and telling Robert through other people, that what Robert remembers is wrong—there was no emotional affair, there was no emotionally intimate relationship. Only shallow, casual sex.

It’s this denial that is most damning in my opinion. Rather than responsibly own up to the entire, long affair, and risk tarnishing his reputation, Joseph gaslights Robert to minimize the damage—leaving Robert out in the cold, forced to relapse with the loss of the only emotionally intimate and supportive relationship he had, while Joseph stays, mostly, clean.

[thewoesofyaoi]

How is "the white, cis, fit, predatory and conservative gay man hiding behind an straight marriage is a demon that feeds on the despair of the other 6/7 gay dads that are moc, trans and fat" homophobic. It doesnt "portrait" "All Gay Men" as evil unless you reduce the game to the white cis dude and ignore the 4 mlm of color, the trans mlm and the fat mlm. Specially when written by a bi man, it comes up as a social criticism dressed as a horror story, way, way before homophobia.

“how is a deeply closeted gay man being a predatory demon who feeds on other mlm’s unhappiness homophobic” like can y’all even hear yourselves

[raddadds-blog]

brians second date dream analysis

so this anon doodle sent me an ask saying the dream in Brian’s second date was pointless but Me, a Tireless AP English Student that has been programmed to analyze things like this, decided to take a closer look. and when it clicked I kinda…. fucken blew my own mind. read this,, its worth it Trust Me,

anon doodle asked: I found it weird that the strange dream that your dadsona had about his dad in Brian’s second date really amounted to nothing. Like what was that even about.

it’s meant to be taken metaphorically, not literally. the Dad agreed to go fishing with brian because he wants to feel good at something. he wants to be better than brian, because brian is the dad’s goals in life.

lets… look at this step by step

so the dream starts. the Dad is fishing in a lake. “I don’t understand why but … my life depends on catching fish right now.” the Dad is desperately trying to catch fish, but none of them are taking the lure. “You used the wrong lure.” the Dad’s father says this while giving him a disapproving stare. “I’m panicking… all [my] lures in the tacklebox are the same.” the Dad starts panicking, and now his father is gone. then the Dad falls into the water and… sinks. he’s drowning, and as he’s drowning, he sees all the fish that were just below the surface the entire time, “taunting” him. fish Brian shows up and tells him he was using the wrong lure.

now… the metaphors… the lake? the dad’s insecurities. catching fish? the Dad comparing himself to people and trying to change. the fish? everything the dad wants to be. the Dad’s father? the voice in his head.. the lures? the Dad. the lures represent who he is, the life he has to work with. each time he casts a lure he loses a part of himself. “you’re using the wrong lure?” the voice in the Dad’s head that is saying “you’re not good enough” the boat the Dad is in? his emotions. as long as he thinks he’s doing fine, he’ll stay afloat. the part where he falls in the lake? the Dad feels like he failed. why brian is a fish? he wants brian. he wants to be brian, he wants to be better than brian. he wanted to “catch” him and show off to the world and say ‘hey, I can be just as good as him’.

now let me rewrite it. the Dad is living. he’s under pressure to be good, to change himself. who’s putting him under this pressure? no one. he’s doing this to himself. no matter how hard he tries, he can’t change. he hears a voice that tells him he’s not doing good enough and that he needs to try harder… but he can’t. the Dad doesn’t understand that he can’t change who he is, and he panics. the voice is gone because he’s consumed with the stress he’s put himself under… and the Dad finally breaks down. he’s drowning in his insecurities, looking at everything he could never be pass him as he sinks lower and lower. now… the voice comes back… but it’s brian this time. telling the Dad he’s not good enough.

which…. is why he’s always competitive with brian…. it makes so much sense now oH mY goD

[punkfistfights]

on dream daddy: a dad dating simulator, re: criticisms

as a nonbinary lesbian, i just have to say that i am so disappointed at how other sapphic people on tumblr are reacting to ddadds. 

(quick disclaimer: i haven't played the game. i was going to buy it but my laptop only has two gb of ram and ddadds requires four. however, my friend @nbnightwing, does have the game and is doing every ending he can get (he's done them all but hugo and craig) and has been sending me screenshots as he plays because he knows how much i wanted to play. i've also watched several playthroughs on youtube, including craig's entire storyline. so i know the game pretty well). 

i'm gonna be frank: before the game i was very nervous about it. i wasn't sure if it would be good representation of achillean people and their relationships. i was worried that it was just going to be a joke, not to mention the fact that i don’t trust the game grumps. but then it came out. then i saw how the game actually plays through. so here we go. 

first things first. while the game grumps are genuinely fucked up, this is not their game. they voice some of the characters (meaning every now and then they grunt or say a word or two) and they produced it. so torrenting the game because you don’t want the game grumps to have your money is useless. you’re just denying the actual creators money. 

now that i’ve addressed that, let’s move on to the other two big criticisms. 

the cult ending everyone is so up-in-arms about is non-canonical. that means it doesn’t actually happen in the game. if it ends up being a dlc, cool because that sounds like an interesting storyline. if not, oh well! either way, that ending wouldn’t be homophobic. if joseph was the only gay man and shown to be a cult leader? that would be homophobic. but he’s one out of eight gay men in the show (including the playable character) and you know what? gay men can be anything straight men can - including evil cult leaders. 

lastly, the game isn’t misogynistic. the focus is, of course, on men because it’s a game about gay men. however, amanda is easily one of the main characters being the playable character’s daughter and there is so much character development for her in the game. mary is shown to be a caring woman stuck in a loveless relationship who has resorted to alcohol - she’s not a great mom, but she is a good character. of the other dads’ children, six of them are girls (and one of them is canonically sapphic and has a girlfriend! you only meet her if you play her dad’s run though). 

now that i’ve gotten through the two biggest reasons why people are hating on the game, i have one last thing to say. 

this game isn’t ours. this game isn’t for wlw. we can buy it, we can play it, we can enjoy and make content for it, but we can’t claim it. this is a game about mlm (or as @nbnightwing says, dld - dad loving dads), for mlm. let them play it and enjoy it without your endless criticisms. let them have fun with some of the little positive representation they get. 

look, i get it. we all need to be critical consumers of media and you can enjoy something and still be critical about it. however, claiming the game is homophobic and misogynistic, when you don’t actually know much about the game? is irresponsible. grow up and let achillean people have something that belongs to them without feeling the need to constantly hate on it. 

[gothwonu]

I can't believe theres discourse abt a dating simulator bc theres a possibility tht there r characters who r gay and evil when I, myself, am gay and evil and so are almost all my friends.

[mightywaddles]

The whole ddadds discourse is produced from non-lgbt+ white people and/or people who have never played a dating sim in their god damned life and/or people who hate arin hanson and think that the teams of developers should be punished because he helped them gain popularity The small team of newbie developers can't give you the Godlike game that you are wishing for, it's not going to be perfect, not everyone is going to be represented, and that is okay. Does it piss you off that you weren't properly represented? Then make your own game, make your game where all of the candidates are transparent and precious cinnamon rolls that can do no bad because they are Gay.