feotakahari

I saw a video arguing that the protagonist of Black Souls is supposed to be a bad person even at 0 sin. He doesn't really care about any of these women; he just thinks they can fill the hole in his life. I disagreed with this take. His relationships are pretty shallow at first, but he bonds with some of them in their endings.

Black Souls 2 makes the protagonist more obviously transactional. He treats women as vending machines--currency goes in, sexual favors come out.

On the one hand, if the point of Black Souls really was supposed to be that the protagonist didn't care, then I clearly missed that. On the other hand, the blatancy of Black Souls 2 feels like it's objectifying women to make a point about how the protagonist objectifies women.

I’m not sure “objectification” is the right term for what authors like Percival Everett do. The sexy women don’t get interiority or a clear sense of their motivations, but at the same time, they get all the decision-making. It’s a mystery what they’re deciding based on, without clear motivations, but they still get to initiate and control the relationships, while the men are portrayed as completely helpless and incapable of choosing not to have sex when offered.