Indie game developer Christine Love has rewritten a scene from her latest game, Ladykiller in a Bind, after backlash from players. In her patch notes, Love reports that “the bulk of the scene has been completely rewritten,” and now contains no sexual content.

While we completely support Love’s decision to edit the scene, the conversation around its existence has been disheartening. Ladykiller in a Bind is a game about queer women, by a queer woman. It is the perfect vehicle for queer women to explore fantasies — even fantasies that may seem unsavory. It’s valuable that these stories are told from a queer woman’s perspective.

Before we continue, be aware that this story includes frank depictions of sex and dubious consent. There won’t be any sexual images that would get you in trouble at work, however.

The scene in question has been a topic of conversation among people who have played the game (and people who haven’t) since its release. In the optional — and skippable, after a previous update — scene, the player’s character The Beast is forced to grovel in front of a male rival called The President in order to rescue her love interest, The Beauty.

It escalates into an interrogation of The Beast’s overwhelming obsession with sex throughout the course of the game and culminates in The President sexually humiliating The Beast. It strikes a different, much darker tone than the rest of the sexual content in the game, which focuses on care and consideration.

For some players, the idea of being forced into a sexual situation with a man went beyond kink and into deeply uncomfortable territory. In real life, belief that a lesbian could be turned (or just turned on) by sexual assault endangers lives. Some players were surprised to come across it, in a game that is mostly defined by same-sex couplings. Some reviews noted that the scene was uncomfortable.

“I think I’d rather not have a rape scene at all – especially not one in which the character, who is a lesbian being forced into unwanted heterosexual sex acts, says that she enjoys it,” wrote Kate Gray at Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

And other people, including ones who had not played the game, reached out to Love on Twitter.

@christinelove Do you really feel that the scene, in whatever form it took, 100% *needed* to be there? — cat hat (@FierceGlomps) November 1, 2016

In a later update, content warnings were clarified and all sex scenes were made skippable. But the very existence of the scene still got people heated, and not in the erotic sense of the word.

Let’s be clear about something: Ladykiller in a Bind is a game about kink. It follows a submissive lesbian who, disguised as her twin brother, can seduce and sleep her way through her senior class on their graduation cruise. It’s sexy, it’s explicit, it’s kinky as hell.

A variety of submissive fantasies are on offer in Ladykiller in a Bind. Pinpointing this one as being undeserving of even existing, as if putting it behind content warnings and making it skippable weren’t enough, is completely unfair.

Developers have pulled content in response to fan reactions before. Five Nights at Freddy’s World was removed from Steam after players felt it was incomplete. Developers removed a transphobic joke from Pillars of Eternity that was the result of a Kickstarter backer reward that gave players the chance to write custom memorial stones in the game. And of course, let’s never forget Tracer’s infamous butt pose.

All developers are beholden to their fans on a certain level. But that pressure is magnified for indie developers: Not only are they working with less budget and less publicity, but individual developers are far more accessible to their fans. No, you shouldn’t tweet angry tirades at Blizzard — but Blizzard can also pay someone to mute your tweets. There are PR people whose only job is interacting with the press and fans. An indie developer is on the front lines, doing the hard work of creating a game and interacting with fan communities. The pressure — and the stakes — are immense.

“There's a voice in my head always asking how people are going to use this to tear me down whenever I write something objectionable — not just tearing down my art, but my worth as a human,” says Arden Ripley, writer of Date or Die.

For marginalized creators, there is another layer: They know what it’s like to be misrepresented or let down down by games. No one wants to make someone else feel that way. Christine Love has every right to make her own decisions to remove whatever content she wants from Ladykiller in a Bind. But in a game full of horny teenagers who ruthlessly manipulate each other, was this sex scene so out of line that amending the content warnings wasn’t enough?

Let queer people tell their stories

There’s a big difference between a game that is unintentionally harmful, and one in which the creator is fully cognizant of the dynamics at play.

Take the recent controversy over Rimworld, for example. The developer didn’t mean to make a commentary on sexuality and power dynamics. Rimworld isn’t about exploring romance and sexuality at all. But the game mechanics forced players to devalue same-sex attracted NPCs — especially female ones. In the end, the game became an ugly sort of snapshot of some of today’s social attitudes, despite anyone’s intentions.

By contrast, Ladykiller in a Bind is all about sexuality and power dynamics. When Love chooses to eroticize a scene where a lesbian is forced into a sexual situation with a man, she isn’t completely ignorant of the baggage surrounding that dynamic.

All of this isn’t to say that players who were made uncomfortable by the scene were wrong. It’s fair to use reviews or personal posts to note things that make us uncomfortable. And there is absolutely no devaluing the importance of content warnings, especially when it comes to games that explore topics this emotionally complex. But the whole point of content warnings is that the conversation continues.

Content warnings are not a blackout curtain behind which we’re supposed to hide everything that makes us uncomfortable. They should ideally allow creators to explore questionable situations more often, since they can be sure anyone who read the warning and continued to play knew what they were getting into.

“I want the freedom to make messy, complex, nasty art.”

They warn — the function is right there in the name. The onus is then on the player to decide if they’re ready to deal with that content or not. The answer might be “someday,” or it might be “never.” The answer is not, “never, and therefore this story should not exist.”

There is no way to please everyone when writing about sex, especially with an issue as controversial and subjective as kink. But we keep demanding an impossible level of precision when dealing with messy topics, especially from queer developers; the backlash to this sex scene shows that the pressure is still on queer creators to write perfect queer experiences.

“I worked really hard to make my first game as affirming and positive as I could,” says Hustle Cat writer Kasey Van Hise. “But I'm in the early stages of a much less kind, much more challenging game. When I see this I think, should I even bother? Am I just going to get death threats or harassment for it?”

This is not the way we should be teaching queer creators to approach their work. There is already a dearth of queer stories out there, and it’s understandable that the hunger for this kind of content could set audiences up for disappointment when what they get isn’t exactly what they’re looking for.

But if the only stories we’re allowed to write are so antiseptic, affirmational and toothless that they can’t explore actual fantasies that queer women have, even if they are problematic, then we are failing.

This isn’t easy to talk about

This is by no means a simple conversation. Queer creators, like everyone else, aren’t infallible, and there’s always a place for criticism. But there’s a difference between analysis and nullification, between recognizing that a game isn’t for us and arguing that it’s irredeemably flawed.

Too often it seems like larger studios are lauded for baby steps in matters of representation while women, queers and other independent authors are set upon for imperfect stories that actually hew closer to the realities of their audiences’ lives. If we want more of the latter, and as more and more women and queer creators are in the spotlight for their work, then we need to think about how we relate to the authors creating the works we love. Who do we praise, and who do we castigate?

“I want the freedom to make messy, complex, nasty art,” says Ripley. “Seeing this situation happen over and over, with queer creators having their work torn apart for not meeting moral standards others place upon, it gives me so much anxiety.”

Reading Love’s interview with Ars Technica, it’s hard not to be disappointed by what happened.

"There doesn't have to be one perfect queer character who does nothing problematic and hits no uncomfortable tropes,” she said of Ladykiller. “You can lean into people doing uncomfortable things, or people doing bad things, or people even sort of hitting on some stereotypes, because it's not one person representing everyone."

Love is absolutely right. Queer experience is no monolith, and content warnings aren’t intended to demonize whatever they precede. They are not a suggestion that the content is wrong — there is a content warning at the top of this story — they’re just a way to help the consumer access it on their own terms. In the case of Ladykiller in a Bind, making the scene skippable was another way to help players navigate an experience that was supposed to be fun and sexy.

For some people, a fun and sexy experience did include that scene, and not allowing it to exist at all isn’t the right answer.

Love gave players the tools to customize their experience with Ladykiller in a Bind. It’s time for us as an audience to understand that telling diverse, messy queer stories is more important than looking for a perfect, impossible one.