The MoeGamer Awards 2018: Best H-Scene

The MoeGamer Awards are a series of “alternative” awards that I’ve devised in collaboration with the community as an excuse to celebrate the games, experiences and fanbases that have left a particular impression on me in 2018. Find out more and leave a suggestion here!

This award was suggested by… well, me, but AK thought it was a good idea so I’m giving him credit.

We’ve explored a number of visual novels together here on MoeGamer, many of which include explicit sexual scenes.

This is not an aspect of these games that tends to get talked about all that much by gaming culture at large; some critics, outlets and even players sometimes seemingly go so far as to regard the H-scenes of a game as something of a “dirty little secret”, or simply outright ignore them altogether.

While there’s no denying that nukige exist purely to be mildly interactive pornography, true eroge make good use of their sexual scenes to further their narratives and show us another side of the main characters. Today’s award celebrates an excellent use of an H-scene for exactly these purposes. With that in mind, please be aware that there is extremely explicit text and images ahead. You have been warned!

And the winner is… no, seriously, there really is all manner of extremely NSFW filth ahead, are you ready? Okay. The winner is…

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Anna x Fatiette (Seven Days With the Ghost)

Seven Days with the Ghost by Lilies Project was an extremely pleasant surprise when I had the opportunity to cover it earlier this year. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect going into it; after I’d finished it, however, I’d had a very good time indeed.

The novel features strong characterisation for all its main cast, and an interesting personal journey for the protagonist as she comes to recognise her own homosexuality, what this means and where she might want to take things in her life’s various relationships from here. The story blends fairly typical slice-of-life scenes with supernatural elements (such as the titular ghost, the fact that the main cast are students at a school of magic and the presence of the succubus princess we’re about to discuss) and a touch of voyeurism just for good measure. It’s a good combination of elements that works well in the context of the story.

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Partway through the narrative, protagonist Ayako and her friend Anna are looking for a way to deal with Miyabi, the ghost in question. Miyabi isn’t hostile by any means — in fact, Ayako finds her a little too friendly on one particularly memorable occasion — but it’s still clear that she’s somewhat “trapped” and wants to move on. As such, Ayako and Anna take it upon themselves to visit the school’s Occult Research Club (this is a magical academy, remember) and rifle through the artifacts the group has collected over the years.

Many of the artifacts are fake or have no real power to them, but a mysterious book reveals something of a surprise within its mystical pages: Fatiette, twelfth child to Letrefasecia, Queen of the Succubi.

The demon princess reveals herself with a certain degree of arrogance, and it’s not long before she’s flooding the room with demonic pheromones to put everyone present (except Miyabi, who makes herself scarce) very much In the Mood. Spending so long sealed in that book has drained her powers, after all, and as everyone knows, succubi feed through sexual activity.

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Fatiette initially assumes that her mysterious pink sex mist has made everyone present completely helpless with desire. Indeed, that initially seems to be the case, though Anna anticipated this and bound Ayako on the floor before proceedings got underway.

“A sweet numbness engulfs my entire being,” muses Ayako, completely floored by the sheer amount of horny energy pulsing through her body. “It is indeed a pleasant feeling, but it still doesn’t hold a candle to what else I feel. I feel the constant pricks of a delightful electric current filling every corner of somewhere deep in my body, perhaps my womb or somewhere around there, from the inside, like thousands of bugs crawling.”

Eventually able to gather her composure enough to see what is going on elsewhere in the room, Ayako is surprised to see Anna seemingly also under the succubus’ spell. She’s surprised because, up until this point, Anna has been presented as “the perfect student” in numerous ways: she’s good at magic, she’s popular, she’s intelligent and she is highly assertive, even dominant — both in normal social situations and in the bedroom. So how could she possibly fall under the spell of a weakened succubus?

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The answer is, of course, that she hasn’t; it’s all a ruse. She plays along with Fatiette until the demonic princess reveals that succubi are able to change and manipulate their sex organs at will; then, knowing that Fatiette will have used up a significant amount of her already limited power sprouting the formidable-looking penis which she believes Anna is so desperate to indulge in, she strikes.

“Might you be under the impression that any girl would be attracted to the symbol of male fertility?” she asks, taunting the suddenly helpless demon princess. “How very cute. Perhaps it would do you good to study up on humans a little bit better? There are just as many human views on morals as there are humans, you know.”

Here, Anna is proudly and unequivocally pointing out something that both we the audience and Ayako have known for some time by this point: Anna is a lesbian, and one who is well and truly “out of the closet”. Fatiette, of course, was not to know this, having been sealed inside her book, and thus assumed that making Anna weak with sexual desire would naturally mean she craved a penis inside her.

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In some ways, this scene is an allegorical representation of the homophobic assumptions held by some particularly bigoted heterosexual males: the belief that a lesbian would be more than happy to have sex with a man if the “right penis” came along. Fatiette’s assumption, while not based on bigotry, does come about as a result of assuming everyone conforms to societal norms, and Anna, while prim and proper in many ways, most certainly embraces her own uniqueness when it comes to all things sexual.

Anna demonstrates through her relentless teasing of Fatiette the power that female sexuality has over men who “think with their dick”; as the scene progresses, she pays less and less attention to Fatiette’s penis and more to her vagina, which is still present after her transformation. In doing this, she is indulging her own somewhat sadistic side in numerous ways; she’s making Fatiette’s female sex organs helpless with pleasure while simultaneously denying her male organ the sweet release of an orgasm.

It doesn’t take long for Fatiette, originally seemingly the dominant party in the scene, to be literally begging Anna to let her ejaculate. And even then, Anna doesn’t give in.

“If you wish to come,” Anna says, “then do it yourself, my dear. I never told you that you couldn’t masturbate, now did I?”

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Given approval from her new “mistress” to provide herself with the sweet release she so desires, Fatiette immediately indulges, utterly debasing herself in the process and demonstrating that she is most certainly not immune to the power that sexual desire can hold over each and every one of us.

This whole scene is so great not just because it’s incredibly erotic — and it most certainly is — but because it’s such a great depiction of Anna’s character. It’s as much a surprise for the audience as it is for Ayako when Anna seemingly falls under Fatiette’s spell, and it’s blessed relief when she reveals her trickery.

It’s also a significant moment for Ayako. By this point in the story — five days through the seven in total — Ayako is already somewhat wrestling with a sense of her own identity, unsure exactly how to deal with the things she is feeling towards Anna in particular. Anna knew that Ayako was in a vulnerable state so restrained her before the sexual encounter started; indeed, throughout the entire scene, Ayako is writhing on the floor, desperate to masturbate, unsure whether what she really wants is to, in her words, “have her pussy decimated” by Fatiette’s penis, or if she simply wants Anna to “share some of her kindness” with her. It becomes increasingly clear as the scene progresses that she’s very much leaning towards the latter.

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Seven Days with the Ghost was a great visual novel that made good use of its erotic scenes to complement and enhance its narrative. And that’s why it gets this award this year. Sex can and should be fun and meaningful as well as just pure animal lust — and it’s a topic we should all try and get a bit more comfortable with discussing, particularly in gaming, where sexual encounters seemingly remain the last great taboo.

Now I think I need a cold shower and a lie down… I’ll see you tomorrow!


More about Seven Days with the Ghost

Thanks for reading; I hope you enjoyed this article. I’ve been writing about games in one form or another since the days of the old Atari computers, with work published in Page 6/New Atari User, PC Zone, the UK Official Nintendo Magazine, GamePro, IGN, USgamer, Glixel and more over the years, and I love what I do.

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