this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2025
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Ah, hexbear, were you can be openly homophobic by calling a fan-drawn picture of two girls cuddling "gooner shit".
Edit: To elaborate and clarify for the cishet guys on this side, that comment is a prime example of how you people view us lesbians. We simply do not exist to you, so the cultural production our communities generate out of passion and to make up for the fact that mainstream culture only produces lesbian content for the male gaze can only be explained to you through that very lens, that it must also exist for the male gaze, read: be "backwards gooner shit". That there are tons of terminally online lesbians who draw this stuff as a hobby, because they enjoy it, is unimaginable to you, so you equate a SFW image drawn by a lesbian for lesbians to lesbian porn, the only point of contact you have with our culture.
The game is gooner shit, the drawing is banal. I'm sorry for not specifying, it literally just didn't occur to me that someone would take it that way, though clearly a few people did.
in what way is the game uma musume gooner shit other than it has an anime art style?
The entire reaction among everyone I know who plays this, and even some big streamers, has been "I must encourage and support my horse daughter to be the best racer she can be" - I have heard no goonery whatsoever lol
Yeah I really don't know where this poster is coming from.
I feel like I'm in a parallel dimension right now. Does gacha where you collect girls as what amount to pets not come off weird to people anymore? Or the designs like the girl on the right and attire of several other characters? Are we back to the kayfabe where the presence of moe blobs mean everything is wholesome and unproblematic?
CW: actual gooner character designs in links.
Wait what the hell is wrong with Gold Ship's design? She's got a bust? I mean is the mere existence of boobs gooner?
I don't want to say that there's not some horniness in some of the character designs - indeed, I'm sure one could find something fetishistic about nearly any anime character design. But Cygames is pretty good about avoiding the full-on gooner design.
I should say, I am Vanillaware's biggest defender on this site. I love their games full stop. But if you think Cygames is creating gooner shit here clearly you haven't played Dragon's Crown or Thirteen Sentinels.
Those are gooner character designs. They are designed to explicitly accentuate sexuality (guy and girl btw). The studio is fucking horny. Compared to them, the small things in Umamusume are stuff that you're probably projecting on. Could you argue there's some designs that might be a bit horny? Sure. But it's not designed in a way to appeal to the gooner. You have to do the work to take the design and bring out any lewdness, rather than it being inherent like in Vanillaware's work.
And on the point of collection, yes the fact it's only horse girls is maybe just worthy of a little scrutiny. I played Dragalia Lost and Granblue Re:link and those games had guys and girls. However does this really mean that it's gooner? I'd say Vanillaware's mixed gender casts are way more horny and way more gooner than the all girls horse game
This is such bad faith. Do you really believe that encapsulates the relevant part of her design? Her costume is clearly designed to accentuate the large breasts in a way that would be deeply uncomfortable for doing track (and I think a little uncomfortable in general, because it's basically putting a wedge of fabric and a tight strap under the breasts that rides into the ribs, which seems like it'd get sweaty or worse). Like, this isn't some catastrophe of design, there's a reason I didn't put a huge amount of emphasis on it, but it's the clear direction of the costume design to have sex appeal, it is detail being added for only that purpose, and when you can point to many such choices across many costumes in this game about grinding or paying money to get pet girls and costumes for them, that tells you about the sort of game that it is.
Like, I know there are games out there that have character designs that literally come from hentai artists and look it, but for someone who accuses me of having a warped perspective, twice accusing me of "projecting" (one of the more revolting arguments that you can make in this context, given the coding of some of the characters), I really need to question your ability to evaluate it if you're holding up Dwarf as a high example of being a gooner character design. No, not because he's a guy. I'm completely confident there are some people who are really into him and that probably informed your selection, but the design itself from the handful of images that you presented reads much more as a male power fantasy than an androphilic (straight woman/gay man/etc.) fantasy, as often happens with male characters who look bulky to the point of deformity. It's like calling the Hulk sexualized. There are occasional depictions that actually are (e.g. leaning into his dick also growing commensurately with the rest of him), but principally the appeal is meant to be toward (presumed het) men fantasizing about being strong. If you wanted a male character who was still a muscular power fantasy but had more unambiguously sexual elements, an easy (though not extreme) example is Zwei from Soul Calibur V as he appears in his portrait. Classic elements include the framing of the abdomen and unbuttoned pants. Sort of conspicuously missing is an emphasis on the Adonis belt, which you'd sort of expect given the other elements if they were committing to the bit, but SC is a very male gaze series for the most part, so even the more sexualized men are still pretty mild. You get a handful of examples of characters in Granblue who you're probably familiar with who are a slightly more exaggerated version of things like this, like Belial.
I do agree with you that many other games are more gooner, like Granblue in its various forms, I just pointed to the cast being all female for the horse game because it makes it a little more obvious what they are going for.
There was someone here the other day making the "projecting" argument to defend Dandadan and this site at least used to have someone who said the same thing about Goblin Slayer, though at least the latter knew it was cope, I think.
I just picked the dwarf because he literally has a 12 pack and yes, he's probably a power fantasy for dudes but is showing as much skin as the girls. And then literally every character in 13 sentinels being naked. But yeah I could find other examples from vanillaware for every taste. Btw Cornelius is probably the least lewd here, bad example, but I couldn't include Velvet without her husband, felt bad, their love story was so good.
What I'm saying is that saying a character design that accentuates busts but literally shows 0 skin is somehow "gooner" seems like you're setting the bar pretty fucking high. And that's why I'm saying "projection" because you're doing a lot of work to make it "gooner" - especially when there's other games that do the work for you. What's the line? I feel like to just take any character design that's remotely sexual and call it gooner is pretty bad faith.
Edit, just to be totally clear. I'm not saying some anime design can't devolve into very horny shit that's uncomfortable. It totally can. But I feel like the horse girl game, as it is right now, is of the lowest priority in the war against gross
stuff. We shouldn't throw "gooner" around carelessly - not because gooners aren't deserving of contempt (they are!) but because to paint this with two broad a brush just tends to align with reactionary positions on sex. We should always call out bullshit like 10000year old dragons or the male gaze at work in Bayonetta, Nier, or Vanillaware's ourve (and btw I'd argue all of those attempt to deconstruct the gaze to varying degrees of success). But using "gooner" at the slightest whiff of sexualization in a character design just feels like a losing battle.
I should have been more explicit, but part of the reason that I made the Hulk comparison is also that he's mostly naked. As it is culturally received, showing skin doesn't always have anything to do with sex appeal and there are many ways to do it besides being exposed (e.g. the example of the woman you showed me, who was in one of the portraits in a skin-tight suit but pretty much completely covered, with that being more sexual than the costume where more skin was visible).
My point was: a) the big lady's individual case isn't that significant, b) there are nonetheless not just incidental points of emphasis but genuine contortions in the design to favor sex appeal, and this costume generally does that above communicating anything else, c) you can point to many similar contortions across the cast in costumes and characters in this game about paying money to collect women and girls as pets and assets, and the confluence of these two thing is important to my interpretation.
You're relying on an inadequate rubric for this that I normally only see from comic fans trying to say that there is equality in how male and female heroes are designed (there is not) by completely misunderstanding the most basic concepts of what sexualization is. Nudity can be used to sexualize, but they aren't the same thing.
For example, Cornelius is a fine enough pretty boy, but he's not lewd at all, and for the same reasons that Dwarf mostly isn't, the king just barely counts with the emphatic V figure that, by cartooning standards, does not reach the point of deformity. Like, in the gallery, look at that picture of him with Vulcan, do you perceive the two of them to be on equal footing here? Do you believe that her stockings, by merit of covering her skin, are subtracting from her sexualization? How about the thong? The prince is the only male character you've shared that reads as a meaningful example (on account of framing), and even then he's barely past the acceptable bounds of a Disney prince in that regard. I suppose it probably reads a fair bit differently to some gay men (who are not the target demo, I'm pretty sure), but in terms of designs for appealing to a straight woman, this is all on a range from very mild to non-applicable. The same cannot be said for the designs of the women. Turns out male gaze is a thing.
Fully agree here. And yes I would basically agree that even at their most handsome character designing, Vanillaware is a male gaze factory. I should be clear, I'm not trying to argue that the sexualization of Vanillaware's men is on par with the women. Indeed, the sliding scale here (Dwarf is less sexual than Amazon even though they're both muscular to an obscene degree in large part because of posing and gender norms) is part of the point - what is or isn't gooner shouldn't be based on reception but instead the authorial/artistic intent. It's clear Vanillaware's artists are out to maximally sexualize their women and insert their men into very heteronormative gender roles (knight, pretty boy, hulking freak) that only get fully sexualized by fans (e.g. some fan artist going ham with Ingway and Onyx or something). Bayonetta is sexualized by the game (even as it tries to turn that into empowerment), 2B is incredibly sexualized and the game calls you out in the 9S storyline for it. However even calling out your own design's horniness doesn't absolve the author from the gaze. You might play/deconstruct it, but it's still there.
I'm not saying there's not an argument for the male gaze (or, in games with male characters, a "sexual" gaze - looking at the fans of pretty boys here) at play in Umamusume. Of course there is. But the same could be said of any media. Would we call Legend of Zelda gooner? The sexualization of Link by decades of fans is well documented. The thirst is real. But the most the game does is call attention to his femininity in the Gerudo towns. Maybe that's a nod to the many horny fans of Link over the years, but it's not "gooner". The same might be said of (to use a game with a woman protagonist for a moment) Horizon. Aloy is a conventionally attractive woman, I'm sure there's plenty of gooner shit about her (to the point we got the hilarious cringe tweets about her peach fuzz from actual gooners when Forbidden West came out). But the game isn't explicitly horny about her even if you could easily go down the sexualization path with her.
To return then to the horse girl game - I can totally see how the combination of gacha+character design can feel a bit cringe. But "gooner", for fanart that's explicitly focusing on a cute relationship for a game that in the grand scheme of games is probably in the lower half of horniness - it feels a bit misguided comrade.
Edit: I should be totally clear that I'm very bad at figuring what either my cishet woman or gay male comrades are into. I know there are many types - burly, pretty, twink, etc. - but aside from a gay enby comrade telling me of how they think Link's been twinkified over the years I'm really not equipped to say what is or isn't to the gaze of the gay man or straight woman. All I'm saying is the character designers can be real clear when the game/character is gooner (again, Vanillaware's entire output is what happens when horny guys create games. See also Gwyndolen in Dark Souls). Cygames in the horse game, so far, is not yet over the line. This isn't to say it's not free of sexualization, but I wouldn't suggest the character designers are gooners in the way that I would levy that accusation against Vanillaware's designers. Or hell, Kojima
's depiction of women is way more gooner than the cute horse game.
I'm interested what you make of actual hentai then
Is this supposed to be witty? There being worse offenders in some respect does not negate the lesser offenders.
If everything is gooner shit, nothing is gooner shit.
I think it's actually quite easy to distinguish between a gacha game where you collect women and girls, some in obviously sexualized costumes, as pets and private assets, from "everything"
I don't see what the offense is in the first place aside from you projecting