intro
disclaimer: sweet pool is a visual novel for adults. its content includes sexual assault, pregnancy, gore, violence, religious themes, disordered eating, cannibalism, and romanticization of abuse. while I won’t be showing any visuals for these things, I will be discussing the content of the game at length. spoilers ahead for the entirety of the game.
sweet pool is a game by prolific BL company nitro+chiral about a sickly student, youji, who gradually realizes there is something very, Very wrong with his body, and who has to deal with fellow students at the catholic school he attends antagonizing him while he tries to manage his declining health. I first became aware of the game wayyyy back in 2013 when drammatical murder was popular on tumblr and I decided to look up the company’s other works. I did not play sweet pool at the time because I think I was turned off by it appearing more grotesque than dmmd, which at points was already pushing the bounds of what I could stomach at the time (mink route jumpscare). I am really glad I did not play it at that time because I did not have the emotional maturity (or just… general maturity) needed to play this game and now, a decade later, I feel like I can give it the respect it deserves.
I ended up playing it now because I had koinuko’s sweet pool page relatively fresh in my brain, and my sister is out of the house for a few days which means I seek out media that will provoke a sharp emotional response from me to deal with the all consuming loneliness i am bound to feel otherwise. I had no idea how long it was going to take me, but I ended up blasting through it in two days and then rambled to my friend who had played sweet pool a long time ago about my disjointed thoughts. I will attempt to coalesce them into something more readable here.
general
sweet pool is a boy’s love game in that there are sexual relationships between male characters, but it is abjectly not a romance. one of the PR employees for the game describes it as "grotesque yet platonic eroticism", which I would say is pretty apt. a large majority of the sex scenes in this game are rape and that’s not something I want to sugarcoat. all of the three main characters assault youji at some point during the game. it’s something I want to acknowledge, but I can’t put too much of a focus on it if I want to have any kind of discussion about the characters. just because I say I like some of these guys doesn’t mean I’m excusing the horrible actions they take in the game. we’re all adults here, you understand I’m sure. cool.
with that out of the way, sweet pool sucked the soul out of me in ways I expected and didn’t expect. I did go into it with the knowledge that this game did not have any happy endings, only ones that didn’t suck nearly as much as others. that emotional damage I expected. what I didn’t expect was for sweet pool to drag up memories of my catholic years in a painful, blinding light. not to mention the whole. transgender and asexuality allegories I felt like the narrative lent itself to even if it wasn't the writers intention. and the discussion of not wanting to rely on family members hit hard as well. I’ll go more into these later.
the aesthetics of the game were impeccable. the muted, desaturated tones of the backgrounds made the really bright colors like blood and zenya’s… everything really pop. the character art was good, it did kind of feel old yaoi adjacent in the proportions but youji was at least drawn masculine (just with pronounced eyelashes) instead of being reduced to a twink half the size of the rest of the characters. one small thing I really liked about the visuals is that sometimes when two characters were together, one would be larger than the other. combined with the back facing sprites that the characters had gave the normally flat VN format a bit of depth to it. the music of the game is really good and also weird as hell at times, which is fitting. the opening to the game, I’m in blue, sounds like a christian rock song I would have had on my ipod in middle school, which I say with the highest praise. VLG is my favorite vocal track because it goes so fucking hard for no reason at all. I also really like chills01, which feels like music I would hear in a yume nikki fangame before the guitar kicks in.
so. when I said earlier about something being wrong with youji’s body I mean he starts producing lumps of flesh from deep inside him and pooping them out seemingly at random. something something mpreg joke something something omegaverse joke. even though I think sweet pool predates the proliferation of both of those jokes. the most obvious parallel I can draw here is menstruation, although I also feel like anyone with a chronic disease can relate to youji’s misery. and he does have a lot of misery. this game is very much youji’s no good very bad day with a small handful of bright spots. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it torture porn though; the game does ask you to emphasize with youji and his suffering.
the erotic scenes… they’re there! and I think for the most part they serve their purpose. now like, I’m the last person on planet earth to tell you if an erotic scene is actually good for wank material because nothing registers to me as that. but what I will say is that in sweet pool, the primary purpose felt like to make the viewer uncomfortable. and boy did my skin crawl! I actually accidentally played through one ending of the game without the nsfw patch, which meant the sex scenes were present, but with just text and no voice over and no CGs for them, and I almost prefer them that way…? there’s like one or two CGs near the end of the game that I think I preferred having them in, but for the rest of them. Hm. I guess like I can talk about how I felt the sexual assault scenes were written to be appropriately upsetting and not arousing (at least like… as far as I can tell) but the writing is at odds with the visuals and voice acting which I feel are more traditionally intended to be hot. shrugs. i don’t feel like i’m qualified to handwring over if a SA scene is sufficiently upsetting enough to not feel gratuitous to put in a horror game. I also don’t like… play eroge so for all I know the mismatch of writing and visuals in a sex scene like this are par for the course. there are a few consensual (or at least. more consensual) sex scenes later in the game where the writing matches more closely to the visuals.
last think I will discuss is the choice system in the game! sweet pool doesn’t have a traditional choice system, rather only letting the players pick between “reason”(blue) and “instinct”(red) at certain points in the game. I was a little worried about the vagueness of the choices making it difficult to navigate to the different endings, but thankfully it wasn’t hard to get all the different endings, only needing to look up a guide for the last one (the true ending). I did think the choice system was super cool and would like to see something like it again, but I do worry if it were a longer/more complex game that it would be annoying on the players end to keep track of.
characters/"routes"
having played otome games before, I was expecting sweet pool to have fully fleshed out routes for all three main choices. what I got instead was zenya and makoto having small, “bad end” offshoots off the main route with tetsuo being the main route with a whopping four endings. I don’t think that’s a bad thing that the game did, I just did feel like I struggled with liking tetsuo as a character to feel like I wanted to see his story to the end. I cared more about youji, and youji’s conflicting feelings towards tetsuo reflected back onto me. I did end up liking tetsuo more at the end, but I do wonder what it would have been like to have one of the other two guys be the main route instead
zenya
ok. so. full disclosure I put off playing sweet pool for a while even though I wanted to play it because after reading koinuko's zenya shrine I knew in my heart that zenya was unfortunately my type and going into a game where I knew I was going to go nutso futso over one of the characters felt like the equivalent of sticking my whole arm into a campfire. and yet here we are.
zenya is extremely compelling to me in part because it feels like what we see of him in the game is incomplete. he’s a student at youji’s school, but he skips class on the regular. he’s got ties to the yakuza, he has a pet iguana named kristi, he regularly screams and shakes the school gates and is generally as offputting and alien as possible. through the main route, he interacts the least with youji, although he has a profound interest in him. as it turns out, zenya is suffering a similar problem to youji in that he’s got a meat monster inside him that’s scrambling his insides on the regular. and his right eye is fucked up and bleeds on occasion and zenya makes his bodyguard slash only friend slash surrogate father, kitani, lick his eyeball every now and then as a test of his loyalty. yeah he’s batshit insane.
but there is a root to the insanity that makes it all make at least a little sense. zenya’s actual father is still around under protection of kitani, and he has completely lost it after a near death experience led to him being discharged from the yakuza and turn to praying fervently to a god that is not the catholic one, a being referred to as the “benefactor” that we find out is a lump of flesh. zenya’s father in the past had fed zenya some flesh from the benefactor in order to turn him into a Perfect Male, which failed.
wait, what? ok, so zenya’s father is part of a cult that worships these parasites that might be fallen humans that, when fed to a human man can turn him into what the cult refers to as a Male or a Female. yeah the terminology is uh, something alright, but what that means in short is that Males seek out Females to breed and make a Purebred which will then kill the Male and Female. if you guessed it, youji is a Female under this designation because he’s birthing little meat babies on the regular. zenya’s body wasn’t compatible with the process, and so he is a quote unquote defective Male whose body is falling apart at the seams.
zenya is kind of fucked from even before the game starts. his father is scared of him, his body is undergoing regular bouts of intense pain from the parasites in him worming around, and everyone at school is scared of him because of the yakuza connections. it makes sense to me then, that zenya would lash out and act erratically at school because what else is there for him? he can’t really live a normal life, so why not seek entertainment while you still can?
zenya’s ending is very early on in the game and puts a bad taste in my mouth. zenya kidnaps youji after promising to tell youji more about his condition, and repeatedly rapes youji trying to breed with him. but since zenya is a “defective male” youji is just cursed to continue to birth awful little meat babies until his body gives out. in a way, this ending makes sense as an act of desperation from zenya to loop someone else into the special hell that he’s enduring, but zenya has shown contempt for the parasites previously in the game so it feels a little weird for him to just… give in to what the parasites want him to do? it makes a little bit more sense later on but i’m still like. meh. this could have been more illuminating for the players than just being an early bad end. chatting with my friend later on brought up the idea that zenya's ending is him giving into the parasites because he doesn't have any sort of end goal for himself, so he follows the cults expectations because that's expected to be "happiness" for him. and perhaps if he fakes it enough he can trick himself into being happy with these mismatched expectations.
zenya’s arc doesn’t end with this ending, though. spectacularly everything with him ends in the final hours of the game when youji is captured by zenya’s dad in order to be sacrificed to the benefactor in order to birth a purebred. zenya kills his dad, and is about to kill youji when tetsuo (other classmate of youji’s i’ll discuss more in a later section) shows up and fights with zenya, who suffers mortal wounds and dies cradling his own intestines, believing in some twisted way that he was finally able to birth a child. a fleshchild, even.
i do feel that zenya is a terribly tragic character who, while I’m not saying all of his actions are justified, it at least was understandable why he acted in the way he did.
makoto
makoto is markedly different from the other two leads in that he is youji’s friend from the start, and (at least for the beginning of the game) a bright spot in youji’s otherwise dull life. I did think I was going to feel very neutral about makoto throughout the game because usually the sort of sidekick/childhood friend archetype is bland to me, but makoto spins some aspects of it on its head later in the game (especially during his ending) that made him a thousand times more compelling to me.
makoto is notable among the main characters because he is not a Male or a Female he is just an ordinary guy. which provides some amount of grounding for youji while he navigates the nightmare of flesh. at least until youji starts getting closer with tetsuo and then makoto starts feeling jealous about losing his friend. it’s really interesting because the game does stress that makoto and youji are never super close even before the game starts, they are friends, and that’s that. they don’t know that much about each other. it’s an interesting dynamic that I think would feel more commonplace to readers who didn’t grow up presenting as a girl, where the social dynamics feel more complicated. I’ve heard it said before as a joke that guys can be friends based purely on shared interest in one thing, and while I know it is an exaggeration I can’t help but believe there is a kernel of truth in it. the difference between how boys and girls form friendships came to my mind at a different point in the game too, where youji’s talks with his sister about the relationship stresses he’s feeling in school, and his sister recommends that he just… talk to them about it, which was a foreign concept to youji and made me laugh as I feel I am for sure prone to coming off too blunt as someone who does, talk about it.
the game does play with themes of isolation and connection, and it with makoto that I see the superficial side of those. makoto, a popular student, has a wide circle of acquaintances but no one he feels close to. he calls youji his friend even though to an outsider their relationship seems tenuous at best. makoto is used to being liked, and when one of those tenuous connections starts to slip from his grasp he snaps.
and possibly is also affected by youji’s Female pheromones into going a little nutso futso but since he’s merely human he shouldn’t be as affected by it… right?
regardless, makoto’s frustration and jealousy at youji’s new relationship pushes makoto to a wall in his ending. he tricks youji into an empty classroom, and threatens him at knifepoint to tell him who he cares more about: makoto or tetsuo? interestingly, trying to placate makoto by having youji tell him that he cares about makoto more will simply push makoto further of the rails. he believes that youji is lying and rapes him to stake his claim on youji, so to speak. during the assault youji gets cut, and makoto laps up the blood. he’s enticed by it, and ends up cutting youji repeatedly and drinking the blood from the cuts.
flash forward to two weeks later. youji is gone, and makoto was also gone for a week before he comes back his normal chipper self. ignore the dark circles and the bandage on his arm. as it turns out, makoto had cannibalized youji, and after eating him he still had a hunger for flesh, which causes him to begin to eat himself, starting with his arm that he keeps bandaged in school.
as the resident cannibalism obsessed freak I thought this ending was great LMAO. i always wax poetic about how cannibalism is the purest form of love because what could be more intimate than eating someone in their entirety? nothing!!! except maybe becoming one flesh by fusing together which also does happen in sweet pool but idk I feel like there’s a raw carnal appeal to cannibalism that simply merging together doesn’t have. I’m blaming the cannibalism obsession on being raised catholic btw [does not elaborate]
aside from the cannibalism = love sidebar this ending hurt!! and I loved it for it!!! makoto is so tremendously upset about his actions but he can’t control himself. I am a little torn on where exactly makoto’s pent up feelings end and youji’s parasitic influence begins but I do think that being in close proximity to youji scrambled makoto real good. and this guy doesn’t even know about the parasites and the Male and the Female bullshit!!! he just thinks it’s all his twisted mind!!! I think eating youji ergo consuming whatever parasites were in him are what is keeping him hungry no matter what he eats. makoto is fucked and he doesn’t even know how fucked he is.
I do also think it’s funny how the game kind of foreshadowed this ending by taking any chance it could get to point out how makoto is always hungry and always eating something and has a huge appetite. I know in part it’s to contrast how little youji eats on a regular basis, but it nodding at the themes of hunger and jealousy that makoto deals with is there too.
my friend pointed out that an extra little sprinkle of upsetting to the suffering cake that is this ending is that even though makoto is popular and well liked, no one cares enough about him to ask about his bandage or his dark circles. everyone loves him but no one cares about him. and he killed and ate the only person who might have actually cared.
he also pointed out that if you avoid makoto’s end and continue on, makoto ends up in the hospital presumably after attending suicide, and youji promises to be there for makoto in the future, which is all nice and heartwarming. until you realize that in all four endings of the game youji dies before seeing makoto again after the hospital. zenya’s like, an upfront tragic character but makoto is the kind of tragic where it doesn’t hit you until much later on how screwed he is.
tetsuo
tetsuo… man….. it took a long time for me to come around on him and I still don’t like him nearly as much as I like makoto or zenya. or youji, even. he’s cold and guarded for most of the story, and every time youji has to interact with him he’s filled with Dread. and that’s even before tetsuo sexually assaults him. tetsuo is a tough nut to crack for sure, but I do think all four of his endings give pieces to the puzzle that is tetsuo.
through the story, while youji struggles with his condition, he keeps ending up partnered with tetsuo for things. tetsuo also keeps showing up when youji is alone, becoming increasingly more physical with him. tetsuo is assigned to be youji’s tutor since youji is falling behind in classes, which leads to youji visiting tetsuo at his house where they eventually have sex in probably the (second) closest thing the game has to a consensual sex scene. as in like, i’m pretty sure it was written to be yay happy moment but i still felt kind of Eeeghh about it.
anyways, over time youji starts to learn more and more about tetsuo and the iron wall that he was starts to become more approachable. and then we find out that tetsuo is a Male. so he’s got the funky fresh parasites in him too! but this also means that his attraction to youji is more a biological imperative than actually loving youji. which youji is okay with. tetsuo is willing to stay with youji, and youji is so desperate for some sort of real connection outside of his only living family (his sister) that he wants to stay with tetsuo.
and y’know, i kinda like that. a relationship where you may not necessarily love the other person but you know that they are the only person on the planet who is capable of understanding you. and you of them.
in tetsuo’s endings the two of them are being chased down by kitani, who came to the school and saw both zenya and his father Dead and now wants to kill youji and tetsuo both. the endings vary depending on if you have youji choose to surrender himself to the parasites in his body, if you fight against them, or if you’re middle of the road.
if you surrender to the parasites then youji and tetsuo go back to youji’s apartment and have sex and fuse together into a beautiful flesh cocoon. out of which a Purebred tumbles out of it that kitani happens upon later and decides to save. this ending is… the true ending in my heart LMAO. i think there is something hauntingly beautiful about the two of them becoming one [see earlier note about this being the second most pure way of expressing love]. they both are so happy in the moment…. even if they are both under the influence of the parasites at this point I think it’s nice for them both to have one final moment of joy when they’ve been suffering for so long… there’s also a line in there where tetsuo asks youji to stay with him forever and in reply the youji says that it would be nice but forever doesn’t exist… with the implication of that makes the current moment even more precious and irreplaceable. I can’t entirely put into words how that shit made me feel but I felt a sinking in my chest and had to go outside for a minute just to process it.
the middle of the road ending is what I got first and looking back at it compared to the other endings this one feels like a bit of as letdown. youji and tetsuo escape back to youji’s apartment and try to have sex like in the previous ending but kitani shows up and shoots them both dead before that can happen. and then we flash forward to some moderately unrelated stuff that sort of but not really ties up the cult subplot. honestly when I first got this ending I was crushed because it felt like youji and tetsuo had worked so hard only for it to come to nothing, but reflecting back on it I just feel kinda Meh because it was a Meh ending. bowing to neither extreme of the reason/instinct choices leads to a milquetoast (comparatively) ending which like. I guess I should have expected that.
the ending where youji fights back against the parasites is actually secretly two endings, because if you go back and get the ending again you get another choice which leads you to The True Ending TM. the first ending you can get here is youji and tetsuo jump off the roof of the school and land in the school’s pool to escape kitani, and youji gives up part of himself to save tetsuo (lit. like. transferring his flesh to tetsuo to heal his wounds). youji lives on as a… no longer human thing for another two years living with tetsuo until he passes away from his lack of. flesh. we are never shown what youji looks like after giving part of himself up to tetsuo but I am just picturing like a flesh lump with a head attached LMAO. I feel kind of so-so about this ending too because while superficially it seems like the most traditionally romantic of the endings you can get with tetsuo, I can’t help but lean back on tetsuo saying he’s doing this because youji is a Female and nothing more. how much of this ending is just an extension of this biological imperative? who knows. maybe tetsuo also feels like he needs to do this because youji saved his life. shrug emoji
the last ending, the true ending, initially threw me for a loop. it splits after tetsuo and youji jump in the pool. at first, it looks like youji is going to sacrifice himself for tetsuo again, but then he backpedals and says he wants to live! and then we flash forward to tetsuo in the hospital with amnesia. youji is nowhere to be seen. tetsuo eventually finds himself retracing the same paths he did prior to getting his amnesia, as if trying to gain back his old self by following the breadcrumbs deep in his neurons. he remembers youji’s name. he sees youji across the train station. and then the game ends.
pictured above: my immediate reaction to the true ending and my friends response. I did not know a damn thing and the devs refused to elaborate. I did learn that tetsuo seeing youji across the station was something that was added later to the game, with it originally just being tetsuo remembering youji’s name. I am… inclined to believe that youji is not alive in the true end and that the youji that tetsuo sees is just a hallucination. I’m still…. workshopping a theory for what happened to youji in the end but what I’m working with right now is that youji managed to remove/neutralize the parasites in tetsuo, at the cost of his own life. I don’t think that entirely meshes up with youji’s desire of wanting to live, so I’m wondering if after absorbing tetsuo’s parasites that youji like… ascended or something? became one with the parasite god? I’m really unsure about my thoughts here other than I think for sure youji did something to de-parasite tetsuo. maybe I’ll update this page after I read more up on what others thought and solidify my own theory.
the transgender agenda and headcanoning eroge protagonists as asexual
buckle up because here comes the part of this write-up where I try to coalesce the fragments that have been bouncing around in my head for the past three days into something vaguely resembling human sentences. I was going to split these into two sections but the asexual allegory kind of runs into the transgender allegory which also runs into the religious trauma themes (which I wasn't going to mention in the title since it’s long enough). I also will make note, as I mentioned in the intro that everything I read into the game re: asexuality and transgenderism is stuff that the writers did not intend. I just have had the (un)fortunate series of experiences where some stuff in this game hit me Very Hard for reasons I am unwilling to talk about in their entirety. I’ll provide some context from my own experiences, but I am trying to not drastically overshare on neocities dot com so if things on my side seem vague or unclear then well. I’m sorry but that’s how it is babeyyyy
with that long preamble aside, i’ll start with the most blatant allegory (to me): it’s about gender. what I mean by this is that whenever I see a character struggling with changes (painted as horrific) happening to their body I am inclined to read it as some sort of transgender allegory. not that I think youji is a trans woman, seeing as his body dysphoria also involves a heavy dose of pregnancy trauma. I’m honestly leaning into him being a trans man, seeing as he’s traumatized by the experiences of his body producing young without his consent, which also kind of leans on the religious trauma. that’s right, I haven’t even brought up any of the (subtle, but present) ways the story deals with religious guilt and trauma!!
I didn’t go to catholic school like youji, but I did have cofraternity of christian doctrine classes weekly after public school where I got a healthy dosage of religious education while my brain was soft and moldable. apologies for the open disdain towards catholicism here, but seeing as it’s taken me a decade to unlearn what was impressed into me as a child, even still struggling with some of the ingrained thought patterns to this day, I have no love for the catholic church.
from very young, the church told me that my purpose in life as a Good Catholic Girl was to get married and have lots of Good Catholic Children, a concept that made my stomach turn in ways I didn't have the vocabulary to explain. flash forward a decade later and it’s like. duh i’m transmasc and sex-repulsed aroace of course I’d be upset with being told I’m supposed to be the opposite of what I know I am. all of that turmoil in my childhood I saw nakedly clear in youji’s struggles with his body throughout the game. the spikes in libido that brought only immense disgust (i didn’t even mention that earlier, but yeah youji birthing a flesh pile was often accompianied by the immense need to jerk off) and the repulsion involved in having your body being used for birthing against your will, were all thoughts I had struggled with while I was actively in the faith blown up to a nightmareish degree. thankfully it was exaggerated to an extent where it wasn’t mind-searingly painful to play through the game, but there were more than a few times I had to stop and step away from the game because youji would comment something that was a mirror of what I would have thought to myself a decade ago.
disregarding the fact that like. you do see youji’s chest and penis in game and he doesn’t have top scars or signs of phalloplasty, I really feel like sweet pool’s themes of bodily autonomy (well, rather the lack of it) and religious guilt are strengthened if you read youji as a trans man, struggling with his body giving birth on its own after it’s something he actively ran away from. almost reading as a divine punishment from trying to go against what the church impressed into him as a kid.
reading youji as asexual goes hand in hand with all I’ve said about him being trans I think. youji doesn’t initiate any of the sexual encounters in this game, even the ones that are more consensual than the others. I could argue even that in what is the “nicest” experience for lack of a better word, that youji has given himself up to the parasites and is being piloted by their will, not his own. I think him being asexual dovetails with the religious trauma in that he’s disgusted by his spikes in libido, which is something he probably wouldn’t have experienced before but would have been told is Bad and Dirty. I think it also dovetails into the idea of him being transgender because being asexual would put extra fear behind the concept of having to procreate and have children, something that happens in a nightmare form to youji over and over again.
so in conclusion: youji trans masc asexual religiously traumatized king.
before I exit this section entirely I do want to give a nod to zenya because I also feel like he has some sort of Gender Thing going on with him but without the extra burden of religious trauma and asexual struggles that youji is going through. I’ll be honest I saw zenya snap over getting called a “defective Male” and I was like ohhhh that is so transgender of you. he also has daily periods of feeling deeply upset with his body like youji so like. pretty easy metaphor for the gender dysphoria babeyyy. I don’t see him as transmasc only because he is my favorite so I get to bestow upon him the greatest gift I have… nonbinary identity. man if I had a nickel for every blonde haired antagonist man I headcanoned as nonbinary I would have two nickels. which isnt a lot but it’s weird that it happened twice!
other thoughts, or how do you connect with others?
I want to close this out by talking a little bit about the themes of connection in this game. all of the four main characters in this game struggle with connecting with others, and all of them desire connection to some extent. youji in this respect, is better off than the others in that he has his older sister that he is close to, although since she is the Only person he is close to he struggles with not wanting to monopolize her life, as she has a husband and (eventually in the game) a baby to take care of. he feels awful about being a burden on her, as their parents died in a car crash when he was young so he’s relied on her for support since. I do relate to this immensely, as situations I was in while I was growing up led me to hate needing help from anyone at all, and I would often tough things out on my own and push myself to the breaking point before asking for help. youji does the same in game, wanting desperately to not be an inconvenience to anyone in his life while his own health suffers for it. at the same time, he knows that he needs to find someone to trust to get to the bottom of what’s happening with his body. it’s these conflicting emotions that drive youji to try again and again to connect with tetsuo, and again and again run away from revealing anything that might make him vulnerable.
I’ve talked about makoto’s drive for connection at length in his section, but I do want to talk a little about how he and youji interact specifically. I do feel like they would say that they are each others best friends, at least at the start of the game, and then youji realizes he can’t talk to makoto about the changes happening with his body and then shit starts falling apart. I also think that makoto places a lot more importance on this superficial relationship he has with youji than youji does, which is part of the catalyst for makoto becoming more posessive once tetsuo starts to step into the picture. makoto’s undoing is equal parts losing a connection in general, and then losing youji specifically. I hadn’t talked about it in his section because I hadn’t put much weight on it but I do feel like its entirely possible that from the start makoto’s feelings for youji were more than friends, but he wasn’t forced to confront them until an outside force threatened their relationship. also yeah, something something catholic guilt about being a Boy liking another Boy applies here too.
tetsuo is… interesting because I feel like he’s so emotionally withdrawn from Everyone that I feel like the themes of connection are the weakest for him. I do still think that even if he claims that his pursuit of youji was purely because of the Female/Male thing the parasites have going on he had to desire some sort of connection with youji. while he has a mother and father, he was adopted and his small amount of banter we see with his mom doesn’t seem like he’s as close with her as youji is with his sister. it's possible that the abuse he suffered at the hands of his first set of foster parents stunted his normal human desires for connection, and he only started to regrow those once he met youji. even if tetsuo balks at the idea of connecting with someone else, his endings do implicitly show that he’s gotten closer with youji. and sometimes explictly. insert flesh cocoon here.
zenya desires a relationship with youji because they are the same, in that they are both suffering due to the parasites. when it comes to the connections that zenya has other than youji, he has his father that he has a strong distate for, and kitani. zenya appears superficially close to kitani, but I do feel like the power hierarchy between them keeps kitani at a distance. kitani, I think, cares a lot more about zenya than zenya does about him. so on discovering youji has the same affliction, zenya desires a relationship, not even strictly a romantic one. zenya’s offputting and eccentric demeanor distances him from everyone, and he’s decided that he can’t form normal human bonds. and yet, there still is a part of him that wants to share his pain with someone else.
conclusion
I thought I would have some sort of epic conclusion to all of this since I've spent like 72 hours straight thinking about sweet pool but I don't really... I thought it was really fun to play a bl game with little to no romance (or at least not like. traditional romance. literally becoming one with each other counts but also doesn't count). the VN dragged up a lot of emotions I thought I had safely buried and now I need to spend like a week or two unpacking all that because I!!! am a grown adult and need to confront my memories!!! or something like that... it was heavy, but I'm very glad I read sweet pool finally... also zenya is pingponging around in my head like an old DVD logo screen and I don't know how to feel about that.
