50 Shades of Blueberry

If you are of a certain age, largely congruous with being there when AD&D was the new hotness, you probably remember when entertainment aimed at children was rife with kink.

No, I’m serious. The Adam West Batman show was probably the most well-known. Every story was a two-parter, and the first part invariably ended with Batman and/or Robin captured and tied up in some bizarre, slow-acting death trap. Like a rotisserie cooker, or beneath giant magnifying glasses, or inside a giant mousetrap, while Julie Newmar (or Eartha Kitt) crawled all over them wearing tight spandex and purring.

That, ladies and gentleman, is the sort of image that will stick in your subconscious and never be dislodged. Especially if you saw it five times a week.

Batman was, of course, only the tip of the iceberg. Saturday morning cartoons were rife with this sort of thing. A single episode of the Speed Buggy cartoon, “The Hidden Valley of Amazonia” involves not just the female doms/male subs the title implies, but also forced feminization, objectification (people as widgets on a conveyor belt), togas, and the ever-popular mind control. And that was probably a rehash of a nearly identical plot from the not-fetishy-at-all Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space episode, “Warrior Women of Amazonia.”

The bizarre thing was how much all of this was hidden in plain sight, a sort of purloined chain-letter of kinky deviance all over the place. Part of that, I’m sure, was the dominance of the counter-culture at that time, but there also seemed to be willful blindness about things. Things like the twisted and macabre horror-film-disguised-as-a-kid’s-film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

This movie is a magnum opus of body horror and industrial objectification. Kids have their bodies warped and twisted in numerous ways, or get trapped in industrial machinery, or burned alive in a furnace. (At least, that’s what’s strongly implied.)

Maybe it’s his relative youth that allows Kiel Chenier to not treat any of the murder and mutilation of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory as normal kids fare. Instead, he embraces the kinky body-horror of the whole thing and plays it as a straight-up Lamentations of the Flame Princess probably-kill-you-all-but-in-amusing-ways adventure.

The thing that Kiel does that the movie doesn’t is linger on the effects of all this body-horror. In the movie, children die off-camera, while the horribly disfigured and mutated are dragged away by the creepy Oompa Loompas. In Blood in the Chocolate, warped bodies become classic OSR-style challenges. Getting inflated isn’t something that just happens for a moment; it’s an ongoing condition and slow death-by-degrees that has to be dealt with (or possibly even capitalized on). And, honestly, that’s one of the more normal things that can happen to PCs in this adventure. Characters can be forced into cannibalism, literally uncontrollably eating their buddies to death.

This is really warped stuff, and even above-and-beyond what I’ve come to expect from LotFP; there’s some twisted stuff in Broodmother Skyfortress, but none of it is as twisted or personal as what’s in Blood in the Chocolate. In Broodmother Skyfortress, you see ugly, twisted, icky stuff. In Blood in the Chocolate, your character becomes ugly, twisted, icky stuff. And then explodes.

The use of cultural icons for humor purposes does make this look, at least on the surface, similar to Venger Satanis’ Alpha Blue stuff. However, where Alpha Blue implies a certain amount of Yakkity Sax playing in the background, Blood in the Chocolate is deadly earnest, which makes the silly bits go from comedic to downright creepy, the same way Pennywise the Clown isn’t in the least bit funny, but all the more terrible because of the associations.

This all means that Blood in the Chocolate is a welcome step in the right direction for including fetish content in your RPGing. It’s not just window-dressing (as is often the case in Pathfinder adventures) but something the adventure (and likely one or more PCs) wallows in. It’s not exactly the focus of the adventure, but it certainly is both unavoidable and central to the fun, if not the plot. I don’t think you could really play this game straight, though I suppose if you did and just ignored all the implications, hey, that would be an awful lot like Saturday mornings in the ‘70s.