Gayming Month- Lovestruck's LGBT+ Representation

 It's been three months since Lovestruck closed all operations forever, but while the loss still stings, it pays to look back at just a few examples of how well the app's stories represented LGBT+ people. This is a quick rundown of how well the app did LGBT+ Representation.

When the app first started, it was mostly importing previously published stand-alone visual novel. The first two were known as Castaway! and Speakeasy Tonight. Both stories gave you the usual Visual Novel flare: the choice to pick your own love interest, and play their route. These games both had around five love interests to choose from: four male, one female. Those were your choices.

That's not to say the pickings weren't good; they were just slim. Castaway's female love interest was the crew's doctor, Serena Zhang, who was at first ice cold towards everyone, but later warmed up to the main heroine. Speakeasy's female love interest was called Sofia Martinez, and she was just the loveliest person around.

As the app gained more stories, so too did the selection of female love interests. However, most of these were women who were conventionally beautiful and very Femme. Although Serena and Madison (from the third Lovestruck novel, To Love and Protect) certainly had their tomboyish qualities, they were still VERY Femme.

This all changed with the introduction of Havenfall is for Lovers's first female love interest, Mackenzie Hunt. Mackenzie is unquestionably beautiful, but she's also very butch. Her story was the exploration of the seeming contradictions that Mackenzie proved herself to be: a powerful butch with a ripped body, a lover of all things geeky like comic books, and a romantic at heart. Also she's a werewolf.

OK, ladies? Please control your thirst.

Mackenzie proved to be VERY popular with the fandom, and in fact one could argue her story is one of the most popular in the Havenfall fandom. 

As the app added more stories, it soon became the standard for each game to have more than one female love interest. However, sometimes these second love interests would come later in the game's development, and only AFTER many males were added in. Such was the case with Love and Legends, which had TWO lesbian love interests, with the second one being introduced as the sixth (of seven) character to romance.

Ahh, but sometimes it's quality, not quantity! The second love interest, Helena Klein's, story has proven SO POPULAR with the fandom, one could well argue she's the most popular love interest in the whole app! When I first started interacting with the fandom, it was not unusual to see Helena be among AT LEAST the top 5 favorite love interests in the popularity polls on Reddit. This is due to the strength of the writing in Helena's story, being one of redemption for a character who was once evil and wicked. In fact, Helena was originally one of the story's villains! 

Tall, blonde, leggy, busty, and kick-ass... yeah, it's a total mystery why she's so popular. (/s)

The app continued to add more games, but soon a change was noticeable: male and female love interests were more even. What I mean is that, for every male love interest in the story, there'd be a female love interest. And these female love interests would ALL be wildly different from one another, to cover more diverse tastes. Among the first games on the app to do this was the sci-fi action thriller Villainous Nights, which had five love interest, three of them female!

There were more butch women, femme women, and everything in between. You had canonically bi women, pan women, and of course, questioning women. You had EVERYTHING you could want!

"But what about non-binaries?" I hear you ask. Yes, the app had non-binaries! Four of them, in fact: JD from Havenfall, Cyprin from Astoria, Galen from Reigning Passions, and Arin from Ever After Academy. I've no doubt more would have been added, had the app not closed down.

This character's love story was tragically cut short due to the app's closing.

Ah, but going back to the men; although cis-het men made the majority of the male love interests, there was no shortage of Queer men, either. MANY of the male love interests were either bi or pan, regardless of the fact that most, if not all, the player characters were exclusively female. Although functionally (regarding gameplay) their Queer sexuality was irrelevant, from a writing standpoint it was always relevant to the characters.  And besides, non-straight men deserve a little eye candy, too!

The ladies have had enough cheesecake; here's some beefcake for the guys! And yes, guys, you have a chance; this man is pan!

The lesson to be learned from Lovestruck is this: variety is the spice of life. We gamers LIKE having choices, and we like having a variety to choose from. This of course applies to Love Interests as well; we don't want the same thing but in a different color, we want different things! Let me make the choice between a tall, leggy blonde and a petite, pink haired mage! I LOVE the idea that I can choose between, say, a butch lesbian werewolf or a femme lesbian vampire hunter wearing leather! Give me choices that MATTER!

And this is what Lovestruck eventually got right: there are so many different ways to be Queer, and to present oneself. There's no monolith of Queer people, after all! You've got hardcore, man-hating butch lesbians, you've got ultra femme bisexuals, you've got super manly gay men sitting right beside the campiest gay guys imaginable.

Lovestruck had what I can only call the BEST LGBT+ representation I had ever seen, and I don't mean in just video games. In all the media I've consumed, I've never seen such inclusive representation as I did with Lovestruck. Although the app may be closed down, its spirit lives on with the fandom. And there may come a day when its stories will be brought back, to be enjoyed by a new generation of gamers.