HuniePop: Basically the Worst Thing Ever

It’s like that video I made, only it isn’t shot on a crappy Logitech webcam.

CONTENT WARNING!

This post contains sensitive material that may not be suitable for all readers. The material in question includes:

- Bad language
- Mentions of abuse and trauma
- Sexual and suggestive content
- Racism and xenophobia

The Curse of Pubescent Shame
Foraging a Forest of Filth
The Rocky Road Ahead

The Curse of Pubescent Shame

I think I can speak for everyone on the planet when I say that we all have a least favorite… well… something. Anything. Name any form of media, and it shouldn’t be too hard to name the example that you loathe more than any other. Me? My least favorite movie is probably The Cat Returns, which I know I’ll be crucified for despite my incalculable level of misery and annoyance while watching it. My least favorite song by a long way is the endlessly obnoxious “Cheerleader” by OMI, yet another choice that my social life will probably never recover from despite my complete and utter inability to relate to it. As for… uh… whatever HuniePop is… it’s my least favorite anything. Uh-huh. My desire to crush it under the heel of my boot like a cockroach transcends movies, TV shows, music, games, books, paintings, sculptures, dinosaur fossils, emojis, LEGOs, edible arrangements, insurance commercials, and any other form of art…

…but it wasn’t always this way.

As someone who’s lived his whole life with high-functioning autism, relocated twice, dealt with his parents’ separation, found himself stuck at an abusive boarding school a year-and-a-half too long, and cycled through more friends than he can be expected to keep track of, I’ve gradually metamorphized between several different people from my childhood to the present day. Once upon a time, I used to say things, do things, and treat other people in ways that you would never expect from modern-day me in a million years, and among other forms of a rather touchy subject for me that I’ll be referring to as “Rem Lezar” on this blog (AKA hentai, a word that’s been almost entirely phased out of my vernacular), enjoying HuniePop shamefully used to be a regular activity of mine. This was a while before writing (let alone specifically comics) had become my passion and the focus of my desired career path, so I admittedly never thought much of the characters or how well they were written.

Before digging through this towering mound of Triceratops dung Jurassic Park-style, I feel the need to counter an inevitable counterargument regarding the term I just used: Rem Lezar. Any critical element for a legitimate narrative that this game lacks could be hand-waved by whoever still has the audacity to praise it with the excuse that, “it’s just porn.” Well, in that case, it’s a real shame that it technically hasn’t been porn since 2015—all of its pornographic elements were replaced with cleaner alternatives to (a) appeal to a wider audience and (b) fulfill the necessary requirements to be greenlit on the Steam store. So, yeah… sorry. It’s now a real game (okay, that’s questionable) with a real obligation to tell a real story with real characters. Tax that, internet.

Foraging a Forest of Filth

So, I guess I should probably get into what this thing even is. Let me put it to you this way: HuniePop is something made by someone at some point in time somewhere in the world. It’s… well… I guess it’s a video game of some kind, but treating it as being in the same camp as something like Max Payne 3, which an upcoming post (now available here) will treat with far greater appreciation, really just feels insulting to the entire medium. The truth is, HuniePop is an embarrassing hodge-podge of elements from pre-existing games while being written by a bunch of loud-mouthed, misogynistic dude-bros living in a college frat house. Before going into the game in-depth from the title screen onward, I offered a wide catalog of appropriate terms to describe it with towards the beginning of the first official video on my YouTube channel here, so here’s all of those terms edited onto the game’s title screen graphic like one-word pull quotes on a film poster.

Before you ask, the image beneath the added text you’re seeing above is an interactive experience intended for a mature audience. It is not, in fact, some crappy online flash game aimed at six-year-old girls. Go ahead and click the screen, see the pretty sparkles fly, listen to the peppy instrumental pop music, and wallow in your regret regarding why in God’s name you just put yourself in this situation. You can select whether you want to play as a boy or a girl, but not only does it not matter if you’re nonbinary—it also changes one word every half-hour and leaves the rest of the dialogue unchanged because inclusivity. Next thing you know, you find yourself in a bar at night, probably to get away from the incessant judgement and ignorance of the outside world, but the joke’s on you, as you’re immediately faced with judgement and ignorance incarnate. Dr. Eros from my comic series… I mean, a big-eyed sweetheart named Kyu comes right up to you to introduce herself. If you try to play it cool, she’ll tell you that you’re full of shit and aren’t confident enough to pull it off effectively. Even though you clearly haven’t met her lofty expectations, she decides to make it work anyhow before leaving altogether, hopefully freeing you from her drivel forever.

So, then, a pink-haired anime character with silk clothes and butterfly wings of the same color flies through your window in the dead of night and tells you to wake the hell up. Although she’s clearly trespassing, thus giving you every right to kick her smarmy little ass back out the window and laugh as she snaps her back against the radiator down below, she insists to you that she is, indeed, the same red-clad slag from the bar before showing pure, unadulterated, one hundred percent humility towards her own anime cuteness with one of her dozens of wise, timeless quotes destined for the history books.

“Don’t you recognize this adorable face?”

– Your selfless relationship coach.

She proceeds to convince you that this is all real, that fairies like her exist and will break into your house at midnight to chastise you for your romantic history—in which case, the people who call this game a brilliant mashup might as well believe that, too—and describes the duty of her and her fellow “love fairies” as turning “poor saps like you” into studs who solely attract virtual paper cutouts of cartoon characters written by men. You’re then given yet another taste of her kind, modest nature. Fart in a jar.

Understanding that you’re nothing more than some fat, hopeless schlub that no woman would ever want (no, she doesn’t mince her words with this), she forcibly takes you on a date to… somewhere… with a very clear sense of effort and selflessness in her tone.

“You’ll love it! Or not. I don’t care.”

– A true good samaritan.

Time for the tutorial! I hope you’re willing to do some Reddit-scrolling for the next several minutes while her nonexistent lips flap away. Apparently, a lot of prior tedium is necessary before you jump right into a ripoff of Candy Crush and Bejeweled, the two simplest and most easily learnable games that ever shone on man.

As if the whole Rust fiasco wasn’t tough enough on him…

After playing up the highly original gameplay as the most fancy and innovative system that has ever been developed by a frat house junkie, the Pink Demon finally lets you complete this sequence and even cheers you on at the end. Now, see, this is the kind of detail that fourteen-year-old me never would’ve even considered. If someone ruthlessly chastises you in the snarkiest way possible one minute and joyfully shouts, “I knew you had it in ya!” the next, that’s the epidemy of emotional manipulation. Welcome to an unhealthy relationship, Mr. Gullible. The bickering goes on once you’re back home, where she presents you with the ultimate dating tool: a Dora the Explorer toy cellphone! I mean, the “HunieBee 4.0”. Whoops. Color me inconsiderate. One of its greatest features is not, for reference, a “Find My iPhone” equivalent or a stunning high-definition camera. In fact, there isn’t even the purity of that useless built-in compass app, as it allows you to set a location tracker on a girl you just met five seconds ago. Thanks, Kyu! You’re a valiant contributor to the dark web kidnapper community!

With her newest client equipped with the perfect mobile device for every cannibalistic serial rapist, she allows you to select the next step in the “”””””relationship”””””” process, whether that be making the jobs of café waitresses even more miserable, being driven half-insane by whiny Gen-Zers at the mall, creeping on college students as they’re heading to study hall, body-shaming women of perfectly average weight at the gym, or ruining a pleasant day at the nearby state park for stressed-out schoolteachers. In the case that you aren’t comfortable with her telling you to “go talk to some broads” like a fifty-year-old Bostonian with a smoker’s cough and ask if you can play a real video game for a change, she’ll repeat the exact same line for eternity until you select one specific dialogue option.

“What’s that? I didn’t hear you. Did you say, ‘hell yeah’?”

– The bane of my existence.

I don’t know. How about you ask the fist heading right for your face?

Let’s start at the shopping mall, considering we get introduced to the hellspawn of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert. In response to her very loud-voiced Latina pal Kyanna taking her to get her bloody-red hair done the exact way she wanted it, she thanks her by… you know what? The brain-melting exchange that follows can’t properly be vocalized via text alone, so why don’t you just go ahead and watch the video below if you don’t mind sacrificing a few million braincells?

Can’t fault Kyu for one thing: she’s clearly very literate.

Since she probably figures that one insult to your intelligence just wasn’t enough, she tells you not to push Audrey the Teenage Antichrist out of your life for the sake of your own mental wellbeing, but to instead make sure she knows that you’ll always put up with her shit and never let it faze you. Now, I’m no social butterfly or relationship expert, especially considering… you know… autism, but if a verbally abusive airhead tells you to get out of her way in the rudest, most condescending manner that her all-male writers can puke up… may I be so bold to suggest that you instead maintain a thousand-yard distance from her at all times? Now, finding out that someone likes trash like HuniePop is a rare case where I’ll immediately cut all ties with them, but if you’re one of the dingbats out there who’s willing to keep seeing Audrey after she tells you to get the fuck out of her way at the end of your very first exchange with her… well, to quote Chevy Chase in Vacation, “I think you’re all fucked in the head.”

I suggest that we act like the gym and the Nutmeg Café don’t even exist because nobody cares. The café is boring, and the gym’s an excuse for absolutely disgusting body-shaming towards a character who clearly doesn’t deserve it. I think we should cut right to the park, where we meet an Asian college professor in a terrible mood. Knowing this stress-ball feels just as poorly as any teacher or professor does in our economy, Kyu naturally reveals her revolting beliefs via the quote that has forever determined my burning hatred for this entire game.

“Dude. Bruh. Asian chicks? Don’t even get me started. I have, like, the worst case of yellow fever ever. EVER. Like a YELLOW. PLAGUE.”

– Der Fairy Führer.

You know what, though? I’ll give her this: she’s only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the blatant racism of this entire scene. Should you have the gall to ask “Ms. Yumi”—which is the way you’d refer to a college professor, after all, but only if you’re stupid—to teach you karate, she’ll be instantaneously roused from her egregious mood, giggling jovially and asking, “could you please be more racist?” Did I mention that I feel literally violated just writing this?

Now, as I said, this game hasn’t counted as pornography by definition for eight years now, but it’s very disturbing to me that the fumes of whatever humiliating neo-Nazi sex fantasy it used to be are still very much present. Maybe, if the people responsible for writing the game’s script had any reason or good will, they would’ve been thoughtful enough to cut this stuff out… but, you know, nobody cares. They’ve already demonstrated their immunity from cancel culture, Markiplier’s a celebrity for making clickbait videos celebrating their game, and the entire YouTube platform sucks except for RedLetterMedia.

It should also be noted that this isn’t even the last time the character takes pride in poking fun at her own racial background, considering she later complains about how “Japanese” her name sounds when she introduces herself as Aiko. Now… again, I am by no means a sociologist, but if an Asian woman is already in the mood to sock someone in the eye, and she has to listen to some douchebag YouTuber with an out-of-control net worth asking her to teach him martial arts… I think I have a pretty solid idea of what he’s in for next.

The last location we’ll be going over here is the university, where we meet… ummm… a girl named Tiffany that I’m ninety-seven percent sure is not yet a college student. I don’t recall seeing any college students wearing red plaid schoolgirl skirts that barely cover their thighs in my time living on campus, so… you know what? Instead of showing what she looks like in any visual format, I’m just going to leave this rather apt Law & Order: SVU intro parody embedded here for your enjoyment.

The Rocky Road Ahead

Yes, this game goes on for hours after this point—all of them just as painful as the first ten minutes—and this consists of numerous locations and characters that are equally as lifeless and subject to the same childish, insulting, blatantly all-male writing. The rest of the cast includes such colorful characters as a middle-aged nymphomaniac, a pseudo-Buddhist, a “chocolate waitress” (Kyu’s words, not mine), a space-hooker, some green-haired woman from Kid Icarus, the disturbing end result of an unethical human-feline cross-breeding experiment, and a blue-haired antisocial nerd who’s the most likable and considerate character in the game… until she’s used for sex just like everyone else. I can’t imagine why my lack of surprise outweighs my disappointment, considering she’s surely written by the same desperate horndogs who wrote the rest of the cast. Hell, at a certain point, you’re forced to waste your precious time on this planet dating the Pink Demon herself, and through it all, she further torments you by accusing you of owning underage pornography, sexually molesting your washing machine, and demeaning you like a snarky preteen girl for so much as asking her what her favorite color is. I can understand why the developers chose this little angel as their alias on social media!

See, as maddeningly unlikable as Audrey the Awful is, the kindest thing I can say about her is… well… at least she’s honest about how nasty and borderline psychopathic she is. Every line of hers is dripping with aggression and condescension, and she certainly doesn’t mince her words during that insufferable exchange at the mall (as a sidenote, I’m still not convinced that the voice actresses weren’t directed to sound as loud and obnoxious as humanly possible in that scene, let alone the whole game.) As bad as that is, on the other hand, I do believe that Kyu is much worse, as she has such an innocent look to her and even that anime girl giggle that’s gone from just plain bothering me to practically amounting to psychological torture whenever I hear it. While the game’s popularity is still disheartening to me eight years later, I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that so many gullible schmucks have played right into her game—she constantly switches her identity from the snarkiest, rudest person on the planet to a supportive, childlike guide, then back to being snarky, rinse repeat.

While it’ll probably sound bizarre at first, it harkens back to 2021’s The Black Phone and the recurring theme of hiding behind an assortment of masks. At the end, when the abusive father acts apologetic after his two children manage to defeat and escape from Ethan Hawkes’s masked abductor, they can only glare down at him like that Seymour Skinner meme, as if to say, “you’ll just be wearing another mask tomorrow.” The people who like HuniePop are like those kids if they blindly smiled and returned to their toxic dad with open arms—they just have to deal with his true self because they’re too dense to see it coming a mile away. As they say, “fool me once, shame on you—fool me twice, shame on me.”

Let’s just say that, since I finally grew up and saw this game for the lame trash that it is, it’s grown beyond just an inside joke, as I’ve essentially formed an unending rivalry with Kyu herself throughout my videos, mods, and comic book scripts. The villain known as Dr. Eros from my comic series ElectroNuke can be best described as a cross between Kyu, Poison Ivy, and Carmen Sandiego, being a seductive neurochemist and founder of an all-female team of physiologically enhanced mercenaries. She based her identity and those of her agents off a similarly pathetic dating sim, and each of them are obvious reimaginings of HuniePop characters. The unfortunate fact is that all of these agents were normal women who had their purity and humanity stripped away to meet Eros’s standards for perfection, giving her a sort of Pygmalion quality for good measure. Aside from that, I’ve also run this bizarre series on three separate YouTube channels that pits Dr. House against Kyu in both Grand Theft Auto V and the Batman: Arkham games using mods. This is because the show was one of my favorites when I actually used to watch TV, and the protagonist is just as cynical, careless, and condescending as Kyu, but he almost always ends up saving a life by breaking all of the hospital’s rules—he always knows that he’s right when he is right, whereas Kyu is constantly wrong but is too full of herself to realize it.

At the end of the day, my feelings toward HuniePop are tantamount to George Lucas’s toward The Star Wars Holiday Special—give me time, a hammer, and any existing physical trace of the game, and I’ll gladly smash it off the face of the Earth. It’s something that should never have existed, received the acclaim that it’s received, or seen two other related titles in the form of a spinoff and an official sequel. Funny enough, I recently recorded and edited a full movie of Mafia III, and considering that game’s plot, acting performances, and overall cinematic presentation all come right out of a goddamn Scorsese movie despite its relatively lackluster gameplay, seeing it belittled compared to this sleaze still makes me want to remove my entire association with the gaming community. I mean, just overlay the IMDb ratings for either game over Lincoln Clay’s deeply moving final exchange with Sal Marcano over a glass of scotch, and you’ll feel the same profound sense of shock at what happened to an entire artistic medium as I do.

However, I can’t stomach the idea of ending this post on a sour note, so I’ll make a sort of funny but heartwarming connection between my HuniePop video and 8MM with Nicholas Cage. Like Nick Cage and the child snuff film ring, I’ve learned about how widespread and out-in-the-open games like this are, how their popularity is helped not by the smaller underground content creators out there, but by the biggest and most powerful on YouTube—Markiplier, JackSepticEye, Game Grumps, you name it. I’m screaming at their lawyers, “HOW CAN THEY LIVE WITH THEMSELVES?! EXPRESSING THEIR LOVE FOR KYU AS SHE… AS SHE RAMBLES ON ABOUT THE YELLOW FEVER?!” and just like the child porno directors’ lawyer, they just tell me, “Because they could. They did it because they could.“

Yet, after all the venting and frustration, I received a single comment on that video, and it sent me the same message that the letter at the end of 8MM sent Nick Cage. It was from a woman who only used to enjoy HuniePop because she was coming to terms with her sexual identity at the time, but she agreed with every one of my points and now understands that, no matter how many LGBTQ+ players that the game might’ve attracted, the developers never gave a hot fuck about any of them. She even pointed out that HuniePop 2: Double Date is so much worse that simply watching YouTubers play it made her want to take a shower. Like the letter Nick Cage received, it was a reminder—a glimmer of hope, even—that goodness and maturity do exist, and as long as they do, tragic occurrences like this never have to drag us down a rabbit hole of darkness and depravity.

So, let’s keep making fun of it!