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kelpropaganda · 3 years

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Hello. I have a question. I saw a post you made a while ago about queerbaiting in Omori, and I've been driving myself crazy trying to think of any instance of it in the game itself. Maybe I'm blind and I missed it? Or was it something Omocat said that I'm not privy to? Could you explain?

ah, yes, of course! sorry in advance if this ends up seeming a bit jumbled, I’m not very awake right now aha,, I’m also planning on making a much more fleshed out post about it at some point.

I’ll put this under a read more because this might end up getting a little long (spoilers ahead)

(edit: I just finished typing up this post and,, it’s pretty long)

[disclaimer: this is mostly going to be about Basil and Sunny, but none of the facts/opinions I talk about are me trying to say people have to ship them. or any ship I mention in this post]

I think before talking about the game itself, it’s important to look at things from a pre-release perspective, and consider promotional stuff along with OMOCAT’s general content over the years.

along the time of production, Basil has always been presented as a plot-important character, especially in regards to his relationship with Sunny.

(2013)

(2014)

(2016)

and the 2020 release trailer was really highlighting it too-

anyone that watches the trailer would know that these two characters are connected somehow. obviously that doesn’t necessarily mean romantically, and there’s a lot more depth to it than that, but I think the framing of everything is still really important. (the thumbnail is two boys holding hands!!)

now I’ll be fair, I can’t deny that a lot of promotional art is also of Omori and Aubrey, but much more explicitly with romantic undertones.

(2014)

I have a lot of thoughts about this though, my main one being that I never thought much of it, or thought it meant anything. of course, it’s an opinion, but I’ll explain why I feel that way.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with presenting child Aubrey as being attached to, and even having a small crush on, Omori. it’s fine, and it can be cute, but in promotional art, and even the game itself, it always came across to me as being one-sided, and just a bit superficial. I’ll try to go more in depth on that later.

[EDIT: 6/3; looking back I didn’t mention some things I wanted to (I didn’t edit this post very well) anyways. there actually is a fair bit of older OMORI promo art/concept art of SunnyAubrey which is fine! they’re OMOCAT’s characters and she can ship her ocs as she pleases, but what grinds my gears about it is that when you look at all of these old concepts that show that these two were probably going to be a Thing, it makes it 100% worse that at the last minute all of the promotional framing was about Sunny and Basil. only for everything in the game to become about SunnyAubrey in the end out of nowhere. hmmm smells like queerbait, OMOCAT!]

still on the topic of Aubrey though, yes there was a lot of art of her with Omori. but then there’s also these-

(2014)

(2019)

OMOCAT, how do you expect me to look at these and not think this is supposed to be gay.

and actually, I’ll throw this in here too in case I can’t find a place for it later-

(2012)

I would love an explanation.

I think anyone that’s followed OMOCAT for a while knows that she isn’t a stranger to making queer content. I don’t feel like looking for every tiny example bc it’s mostly irrelevant, but what is relevant is the general knowledge that OMOCAT makes gay things, sometimes. hell, one of her most well known characters is Pretty Boy-

(2013)

(it’s pretty easy to find Pretty Boy content so I won’t link it all)

so to round out what I’m saying so far, we have OMOCAT, a creator who sometimes makes queer content, making a video game where the plot seemingly revolves around two boys and their relationship with each other, and also drawing some wishy-washy gay art of the characters in the game. not to mention it being an EarthBound inspired game (EarthBound having an explicitly gay character, and other EarthBound inspired games also being very LGBT positive, and generally attracting large gay audiences). maybe it was just me, but all of this together already gave me expectations that OMORI was in some way, going to be at least a little gay.

and throughout most of the game, I was actually pleasantly surprised because it felt like it was. the entire game’s plot revolved on their importance to each other, to the point that it even describes it’s own narrative as a string of fate-

and the game spent so long hammering in how close they were, and how important they are to each other, to a degree that wasn’t done with any other character.

I don’t even have screenshots of everything I could add, but, my second point here is that going through this game where the most important relationship is between two male characters, while also keeping in mind my point from before, it feels safe to say that thinking it was going to end at least ambiguously gay, or not having any confirmed relationships at all, isn’t much of a stretch.

however, there was so. so much gay-coding with Basil. I don’t think my words can explain how apparent his crush is better than the game itself so-

this doesn’t even come close to the amount of stuff I could put in, which really goes to show how much this game was pushing Basil’s feelings. his entire character can be summed up with “I’m gay and willing to risk it all” which. he quite literally did do everything because he cared about Sunny so much. ofc it’s normal to care about your friends, but can anyone say that a straight person with platonic feelings would do/say half the things Basil does.

[EDIT: 6/3; to add to Basil’s gay-coding, he’s also a very quaint, effeminate boy who has a lot of non-masculine hobbies. obviously not every gay man is like that, and there are plenty of non-masculine men in real life who aren’t gay, but please think about how gay men are usually presented in media to begin with. Also literally exactly how OMOCAT made Pretty Boy. there’s a pattern there. it’s also a kind of painful coincidence that both Pretty Boy and Basil are bully victims. OMOCAT are you trying to say something here]

another point I want to add here, going back to EarthBound for a second, is something a friend of mine brought up to me when we were talking about queerbaiting a while ago. she was telling me about the gay character in EarthBound (Tony), and how Basil reminded her of him. she then did some deep diving and found-

(2011)

so then our gut reaction was “okay so Basil is based off of this canonically gay character, right? right?” not to mention, the other character in this drawing looking very suspiciously like Omori. (the Omori Boy blog was originally created in 2011)

... but that is just a theory.

in any case, Basil is a clearly gay-coded character. and I wouldn’t have a problem at all with him and Sunny not getting together in the end, because that’s fine. if the game was left ambiguous with no one getting together I wouldn’t mind all that much because all of that gay-coding would still be there. but, I wouldn’t call this game queerbait if that’s all that it was, because unfortunately there came a point where there was a switch.

I really did not like this.

I said before, I didn’t mind if child Aubrey had a little crush on Omori/Sunny. I also said I never even got that big of an impression in the game itself that she did, let alone that Sunny had any kind of feelings for her. at the very least it felt more one-sided.

getting through this entire game, where we have a string of fate narrative between two boys where at least one of them is heavily gay-coded, only to be met at the very end by the gay-coded character asking his crush if he has a crush on their female friend, all coming out of seemingly nowhere, felt like the biggest punch in the gut.

and then we’re supposed to continue and finish the game as if this was how it always was.

... where was this, exactly?

of course we know Sunny and Aubrey were close as kids, all of them were close with each other, but throwing this in when we haven’t seen that level of closeness at all between them in the entire game felt so superficial to me. I love Aubrey, and she and Sunny have a very good friendship, but this all felt like a huge disrespect to her, as well as gay people playing this game.

we’re meant to suddenly act as if this was her and Sunny’s relationship all along but......... this was him and Basil. since the beginning of the game, and for the entire way through, that was what their relationship was shown to be as.

I was just so shocked. Aubrey and Kel had more chemistry throughout the game than whatever this last minute pull was. this isn’t me trying to start shit with ships, I’m just looking at the game’s writing itself.

despite their bickering, Kel and Aubrey were shown to be extremely close friends, and then OMOCAT wants me to believe that her and Sunny were always the closest out of nowhere. okay, sure.

anyways, after I finished OMORI, it hit me that there are no explicitly gay characters, despite everything I talked about before. sure, Pretty Boy makes a cameo appearance, but it doesn’t really count for anything. and yes, Space Boyfriend is canonically trans, but he wasn’t even created by OMOCAT, and you could play the entire game without even knowing he’s trans, so it doesn’t really seem like it counts as good representation either (I am cis, so take that opinion with a grain of salt.)

an entire EarthBound inspired RPG game, made by a creator known for her LGBT comic characters, that had a string of fate narrative between two boys, and in the end didn’t have a single explicitly gay character. it feels quite bad, frankly.

and that why the queerbaiting makes me so upset. because even though Basil is so gay-coded, because of him asking Sunny if he has a crush on Aubrey, all of his feelings can be completely overlooked. this is why people can say “Basil isn’t gay” and it can’t be disproven with canon evidence. a game doesn’t need to have a character say “I’m gay” or “I love you” for them to be canonically queer, but. OMOCAT decided to use that line to write off any possibility of ambiguity.

and then. post-release art of them.

(2020)

(2021)

....that last drawing reminding me of-

(but maybe that’s a stretch?)

doing all of that after releasing your game... thanks for pretty much nothing, OMOCAT.

anyways... I think that about covers most of my thoughts. this ended up being longer than I thought it would be ahhh,,, thank you for reading if you made it through this. I hope my thoughts make sense, and that you see where I’m coming from a bit more clearly now!

EDIT: a couple more thoughts here!

[EDIT: 6/3; also gonna slap this post here at the end because I hate OMOCAT and this is the cherry on top to all of the shit I just talked about. OMOCAT queen of heteronormativity]

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