Because I clearly was being too productive, I bought and downloaded a PC game/visual novel called Demonbane.

The premise is that there’s a kind-of-noir-ish city, in which your character is a detective, which regularly comes under attack by evil sorcerers and their giant robots, which draw their power from slash are allied to the Cthulhu Mythos entities, and the associated tomes, which in turn are all embodied as hot chicks.

…as happens.

So clearly the Sentient and Bangable Object subgenre goes back earlier than I had realized. Not much earlier, as this game came out in 2003, but before Chuck Tingle and Ursula Vernon and Boyfriend Dungeon, apparently Arcane Grimoires Except They’re Hot was a thing.

I would not mind if someone brought that back, to be honest. Especially with male books. Let me seduce The Lesser Key of Solomon, dammit!

Anyhow, the combination of Cthulhu Mythos Plus Porn caught me at a weak moment, so here we are, though “here” is not where I have yet gotten to any porn-y bits. There’s been a lot going on.

The non-porn aspects of the novel suffer from the same fate a lot of 1990s/early 2000s anime did where I’m concerned: the worldbuilding is awesome, but the takes on both gender relations and humor…do not translate well at all. Or are not translated well. It’s hard to say, but a) sitting through the super-deformed SUDDENLY YELLING AND WAVING THEIR HANDS AROUND AND FREAKING OUT style of comedy is like chewing on tinfoil, and b) oh my God the romance where each person seems to vaguely tolerate the other at best plus the girl is very prickly at any hint of sexual interest while simultaneously being clingy and jealous and the guy is just immune to…boundaries, at all, ever? UGH. NO.

(Granted, Typical Late 20th Anime Girl Behavior is a lot easier to take from Al, who is in fact a maddening extradimensional being, than it is from anybody who’s supposed to be human and have grown up with human standards of behavior.)

On the other hand, the art is really cool, as is the music. And, y’know, Cthulhu plus giant robots, plus both the main character and his nemesis are reasonably hot, so I’ll probably stick around to see the clothes come off. I am not made of stone, here.

The nemesis, BTW, is named “Master Therion,” because if you’re going to create a hot blonde evil guy who fucks Nyarlathotep, why not use one of Crowley’s three million occult aliases? What it says about me that the name sounded familiar right off the bat, I don’t even want to know.