No Yay / Video Games

• In Assassin's Creed Syndicate Maxwell Roth's behavior towards Jacob Frye culminates in a kiss as Roth is dying. To many, it reads as disturbing and creepy. Not least of all Jacob, who did not reciprocate, what with Roth being a sadist and would-be child murderer.
• In the Game Over of Banjo-Kazooie, it's implied that Mumbo Jumbo fancies Gruntilda, as if he has feelings for her.
• In Baroque, there's a bit of well-buried subtext that implies that the Protagonist (12) had feelings for his twin brother (13). The boys are conjoined twins and share a heart; only one of them is conscious at a time when they're both alive, and most of their communication was in the form of notes and playing chess. It sort of gets worse with the manga, which implies 12 has these same sort of feelings for the Absolute God but looks to her as sort of a surrogate for his conjoined twin. So, it's rather complicated and can be mildly unsettling.
• Bayonetta:
  • The eponymous protagonist is Ms. Fanservice who generates subtext almost constantly. Unfortunately this includes mention of "pillow talk" with Temperantia.
  • Father Balder is even worse. He's first introduced chatting to Cereza, who is sitting in his lap. He then applies lipstick to her lips, before assimilating the child into his chest. The rape-factor is made worse with the revelation that Balder is Bayonetta's biological father, and Cereza is her child self.
  • Played for laughs in Chapter VI, where a Great Beloved, a bigger version of an already huge, muscular angel monster, falls for the young girl Cereza and keeps her in his "mouth" for the whole fight. All while poor Cereza is clearly terrified of the whole experience. This culminates in a cheesy piano piece playing over the Great Beloved crying over her while he's being eaten by Gomorrah.
• In BioShock Infinite a lot of people saw romantic undertones in the relationship between Booker and Elizabeth, which actually kinda made sense until you find out they are father and daughter. Neither of them were aware of it until The Reveal either.
• For BlazBlue, there is a lot of unpleasant subtext between Relius and Makoto. His obsession with Makoto's soul borders on fetishistic, his dialogue and means of restraining her during his Astral is demeaning, and then there's Makoto's Bad Ending◊.
  Makoto: NOOOOOOOO!! Please... Please stop it! STOP!
• In Clock Tower 3, which was jointly made by Capcom using the same team that made the aformentioned Haunting Ground (and thus which has virtually no connection to the first two games in the Clock Tower series aside from the obvious theme of having, literally, a clocktower feature prominently in the story) the main villain, Lord Burroughs, is secretly the protagonist's grandfather, the aptly-named Dick Hamilton, who was so obsessed with his own daughter that he coldly ignored his wife, brutally murdered his son-in-law, and then had his daughter brutally murdered as well by his sociopathic subordinate when she tried to protect her daughter (his granddaughter) from him, with the implication that she was also raped (whether by him or his subordinate or both of them). As mentioned, he later transfers his carnal obsession to his granddaughter, the heroine Alyssa, who's the very image of her mother. She manages to kill him though.
• Condemned: Criminal Origins gives us Serial Killer X/Ethan Thomas. The subtext gets a lot more blatant in the sequel Bloodshot, where SKX actually rescues Ethan, gets close to him and holds a knife to his throat, whispering to him, "Yes... I look forward to cutting you open... learn your little secret..." or how he told Ethan, "Do you think of me whenever you look at your hand? I think of you every time I look in the mirror..." Which would all be well and good, except SKX has a huge section of his mouth/jaw blown off, and has a bunch of cuts and scars on his forehead and face. And adding to that, Ethan is a pale, sickly worn down drunk. Please, No Yay.
• One of the possible companions in Dragon Age II, Fenris, is a former slave. For a long time, a common theory was that he was more than just a body guard; especially since some of his former master's lines give certain implications. This seemed to be just a theory since Fenris acts exasperated when Isabela brings it up, but then Word of God confirmed it. Also, said former master is an old guy with Blood Magic and a serious Lack of Empathy. And Fenris has been a slave since childhood. This also manages to put a lot of Fenris' hang-ups (particularly his sometimes violent reaction to physical contact) and some of the party's comments, especially Isabela's remarks, in a much nastier light...
• Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime: What would be a fitting reward for the hero? Could he become a prince? Brilliant! But he has to marry Fat Bastard Gluttonella...
• Drakengard is made of this, quite deliberately. The hero's sister wants to jump his bones, and one of your main characters is a pedophile. Long story short, you know there's problems when the least disturbing implied pairing is the hero and his dragon partner.
• The subtext between Zoe and Alvin Peats in Dreamfall: The Longest Journey. He is a 200-year-old old green blob of fat and sweat◊. Before they meet face-to-face, he already stalked Zoe through the eyes of his cat minion and knew her body's most intimate details thanks to eating the sex dreams of her ex-boyfriend, which he very much enjoyed and brags about. When they finally meet he recognizes her by sniffing around. Then he announces she will stay in his lab, where he'll "take good care of her" and conduct experiments to uncover a secret of her power.
• In Embric of Wulfhammer's Castle , the Duchess was the "favourite" of her uncle Greyghast, she remembers his "attentions" with horror, and one flashback shows that he admired her beauty and repeatedly drugged her. It's stated once or twice that he was raping her and planned to make her his wife, but this is easy to miss and most of the time it's just creepy, creepy subtext.
• As seen in the page quote, in Fallout: New Vegas's Old World Blues expansion, after a run-in with some lobotomy-happy scientists who replace your brain with implants, and place it in a jar, you can later have a talk with it. And, depending on your perks, you can hit on your own brain.
  • Also, Benny gets grossed out if a female Courier hits on him, since he had her shot in the head and left her for dead at the start of the game. Not that this stops him from sleeping with you if you pursue it, but it's acknowledged.
  • It’s also revealed that there are people out there with a fetish for ghouls, former humans whose skin has been mostly burned or melted off by radiation.
• Far Cry 5: The "Resist" ending has Joseph Seed and the Deputy end up in a bunker together after nuclear war strikes. Due to the fact that they are the only survivors that they know and he's a religious fundamentalist, the implications of an 'Adam and Eve' scenario is evident if the Deputy is female. While Joseph's dialogue is the same regardless whether the Deputy is female or male, it still makes some wonder if Joseph has once more "found his Faith..."
• A lot of Fire Emblem games have a pair of bandits that are as ugly as hell. There is usually a lot of romantic subtext in it, and are also often than not related, usually twins. For non-bandit examples:
  • Fire Emblem: Awakening has quite a few instances of this. Notably, the player avatar can marry anyone of the opposite gender, which means you can make yourself young and then marry the oldest guy in the game. Or, more controversially, you can marry any of the second generation characters. They may be around the same age, sure, but they're actually the children of the rest of the cast. A Male Avatar can even marry Chrom's daughter Lucina. He finds out about her after he witnessed her birth.
  • For another non-bandit example, Valter's Villainous Crush on Eirika in Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones is extremely uncomfortable. He makes many comments implying he wants to rape her or keep her as a Sex Slave, most notably in his boss conversation with her in Chapter 15, and frequently calls her "[his] strong girl." There's also his comments towards Ephraim to a lesser degree, which many players have taken as an Interplay of Sex and Violence.
  • In Fire Emblem: Three Houses, Rhea is a marriage option for both genders of Byleth, but revelations on the Silver Snow (and Cindered Shadows DLC) route cause it to dive headfirst into Squick territory for many players. Byleth originated as an attempt by Rhea at cloning her mother, with their biological mother being another of Rhea's artificial humans, making Rhea also kind of their grandmother. Rhea calls them "mother" in the final cutscene of the route, regardless of if they're romanced. Silver Snow is the only route where Rhea can be romanced, so there's no way to do so without knowing these reveals.
  • Three Houses also has Hanneman, who is 57 by the end of the story, and Dorothea, who is 18 pre-timeskip and 24 afterwards, not only having a romantic paired ending, but one that explicitly mentions them having several children. All Hanneman's other paired endings with female students are platonic, which makes this one even stranger.
• Five Nights at Freddy's: Vanessa, the protagonist of Five Nights At Freddys VR Help Wanted, exits the game as a victim of Demonic Possession by Glitchtrap. In the 'unintended emails' in Five Nights at Freddy's AR: Special Delivery we find out, from her co-worker Luis's descriptions, that she has a habit of searching up Cold-Blooded Torture and other forms of Gorn on her work computer, with the implication she searched up 'help' at least once. Despite this, she shows signs of getting used to her new role of a fledging Jack the Ripoff and perhaps even traumabonding, as she requests a 'bunny-shaped cake' for her birthday. Luis also mentions she once ordered flowers and chocolate for herself with the message "Flowers for your grave," with the implication "Brad" was not an imaginary boyfriend like Luis believes but Glitchtrap threatening her. What makes it more unsettling is that Vanessa's last name starts with an 'A.', and that, according to Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach, her (maybe) abusive dad's name was Bill, making her Ambiguously Related to the Aftons. As Glitchtrap is either William Afton's digital consciousness or an AI imitating him, it just gets... uncomfortable.
• Guild Wars 2: Palawa Joko is about as depraved as they come (just visit his harem). He is also a long past undead lich. He is also violently obsessed with the Commander. How violently obsessed? He kidnaps villagers from around his palace, glamours them to look like the Commander, and tortures them to death in assorted ways while taking it in like fine theatre. That's right, he practices to find out which method of murder would get him off the most. This holds no matter which of the races the Commander is. And then there are the small, petty things, like critiquing your choice of allies (because he would be so much more fun). Yick.
• Haunting Ground:
  • Riccardo towards Fiona. At first, this might not seem so bad, since his voice seems pretty handsome, and he looks very mysterious with the brown cloak covering his face. Until they actually show his face, and it's revealed he's a 40-50-year-old man. It gets much creepier when the player realizes he's her uncle, and shares the same DNA as her father. And he acts like a complete creep towards Fiona — abducting her and stripping her so she has to go around the mansion naked, carving a statue of her pregnant (and telling her that he's going to make her that way), sticking some stick thing up her... apparently to make sure she's healthy enough to have his child and to make sure she was a virgin, out-and-out stalking her with a gun ("Fiona, why do you run? Let me into your womb!"), and if he catches and kills her during gameplay, the Game Over has him raping her body. The worst ending in the game is where he does manage to kidnap her, and confines her in a cage and apparently impregnates her. She's later shown as his wife, with him being very happy.
  • Lorenzo and Fiona. The guy is a crazy, decrepit, wheelchair-bound, incredibly old man. Apparently, he wants to rape and impregnate her, too. It's so disturbing when he's revealed to be her freaking grandfather. He creeps the hell out of most people with the way he crawls around grabbing onto Fiona's legs, calling her his "dear Fiona."
• Iji: Asha's obsession over Iji. He considers Dan, whom he refers to as "her partner", so unimportant he thinks Iji being upset about endangering/killing him is petty. If Iji bypasses the duel, he leaves a suicide note that makes it sound more like she rejected a date. Turning on the Scrambler makes the implied crush on her even more explicit. When Asha's dialogue is more or less composed of "<3", "TOOT TOOT", "HONK", and other possibly dirty things, you can't help but think that Daniel Remar is seriously hinting at something.
• Kingdom Hearts:
  • Axel/Roxas. Some may like it, but others... Axel is around 25, and Roxas is around 15^note but in terms of actual age, Roxas was less than a year old, since, as Sora's Nobody, Roxas was created when Sora briefly turned into a Heartless near the end of the first game. Also, Axel is, as of the release of 358/2 Days, something of a surrogate father to Roxas. Wife Husbandry leaves a really bad taste in a lot of people's mouths. And Birth By Sleep reveals he used to know someone who looked exactly like Roxas when he was a child.
  • Sora/Xehanort in Dream Drop Distance. Young Xehanort kept following Sora all throughout the dreams, he even wanted Sora to be his new vessel so much that he beat up Riku really badly.
  • Roxas/Xion considering she's a clone of Roxas's somebody. The Screw Yourself implications scares off romantic interpretations of their relationship. "I am Sora, just as I am you [Roxas]." Furthermore, Xion's true form seems to be a featureless puppet, considering that's what Larxene (who doesn't care about anybody) saw when she looked at her, though her true form could also simply be Xion (Kairi w/black hair) since that's how Roxas sees her, given he personally doesn't know Kairi and started to see her as Xion after bonding with her.
  • Riku/"Ansem" in Chain of Memories. It reached a peak with this lovely exchange:
    Ansem: Riku... I can see your heart...
    Riku: No...it's not. Darkness this foul could only...only be—
    Ansem: That's it, remember me... Let me drift into your heart...
    Riku: Ansem!
    Ansem: You called out my name. You have been thinking about me... You're afraid of the darkness I command. Good... The more you think of me, the closer my return draws. And when I have awoken, I will take hold... Your heart will be mine!
  • Then, in Kingdom Hearts III, upon his final defeat, Ansem fondly reflects on the "journey" he and Riku had together, and Riku admits that he would miss Ansem. The scene feels strangely sentimental considering this was the guy who had been obsessively harassing and attempting to groom Riku since he was 14.
• Mass Effect:
  • After some close listening to Harbinger's lines, a large fraction of them make it sound like he wants Shepard. Really, really bad. Even Mecha Cthulhus want Shepard.
  PRESERVE SHEPARD'S BODY IF POSSIBLE.
  I KNOW YOU FEEL THIS.
  I WILL FIND YOU AGAIN.
  • In universe, Ashley will complain if Shepard jokes about her and Liara fighting over him. Afterwards, he can suggest a threesome, which promptly causes Ash to dump him.
  • The second game was working on a romance with a female Shepard and Tali, but her voice actor was really uncomfortable with the idea, so it was dropped.
• Mermaid Swamp: Yuuta with Yuka after the former becomes possessed. They start out as good friends and Yuuta expresses understandable concern for Yuka when she becomes ill. But slowly his innocent affection for her becomes increasingly obsessive and creepy. It's implied he was masturbating to Yuka while she's lying in bed seriously ill, with her whole body grotesquely swollen, and Rin later catches him standing at Yuka's bedside, staring at her and going on about how "beautiful" Yuka is and how he much he likes her being so "docile". Rin is extremely disturbed and orders him to get away from her at which point he becomes violent towards Rin. Considering the later revelation that Yuuta was possessed by the spirits of the Tsuchida men, who were obsessed with 'mermaids', kidnapping women, keeping them in water, and then preserving their bloated bodies in tanks after they died, the whole situation becomes even worse, especially as it means Yuuta wasn't even in control of himself at the time.
• Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots: The fight between Vamp and Raiden has some extremely disturbing homoerotic imagery: the grappling, the almost rutting-like motion when Raiden stabs himself to nail Vamp, the white cyborg blood, the crotch-knife licking and stabbing which almost looks like penetration of a different sort; plus, when Raiden stabs himself and Vamp, they end up in a pose that makes it look like Vamp is spooning Raiden. And then Vamp pulls Raiden closer to plunge the blade in farther.
• Mobius Final Fantasy has a lot of this between Sara and Wol. The beats of it work like a conventional FF romance, down to the odd Internal Homage, but due to the railroading effects of the Prophecy, both are Strangled by the Red String to an extreme and everyone knows this, including her. She appears to regard herself as a prize, mentioning that her heart was conflicted, but then asking Wol 'will you have me?'. On top of this, Wol appears to dislike her. He shrinks away from her touches, gripes about her in private to Echo (saying an impression of her was 'too talkative') and keeps noticing in his internal narration how bad she smells, saying it's 'like rot'. Her role in propping up a system where millions of people are pulled from their worlds to die pointlessly for her certainly doesn't help.
• Waylon Park and Eddie Gluskin (aka, "The Groom") in the Whistleblower DLC of Outlast. Gluskin wants a wife and children... by castrating Waylon to make him into the perfect bride.
• Persona 5
  • There is a subset of the fandom that ships Kamoshida with Ann, Ryuji, or Mishima, all characters who have either been sexually harassed or physically abused by him.
  • There's also Shido/Akechi. Shido is heavily implied to be a rapist and isn't above manipulating others to get what he wants, and has had Akechi under his thumb as his personal assassin for at least two years. Akechi's supposed Uncanny Family Resemblance with his dead mother and attitude towards Shido doesn't help, despite him being aware of who Shido is.
• In [PROTOTYPE], there is a really, really disturbing amount of subtext between Alex Mercer and Elizabeth Greene. The scene when she ends up pinning his body beneath hers with their faces a hair apart does not help at all. But, quite apart from them trying sincerely to kill/eat each other, the obvious age difference (she looks nineteen, he looks about a decade older (The Reveal is she's over fifty and he hasn't even lived a month), their mutual creepiness, and that she calls herself his mother...well, add tentacles, disease, pustules, and blood, stir well and enjoy. Extra horror: THEY ACTUALLY BREED. It wasn't intended by either of them, but eeeugh.
• Simmon's infatuation with Ada in Resident Evil 6. Not only is the guy a total creep, but his unhealthy obsession ultimately leads him to create a clone of her, using the body of his assistant, Carla, to do so.
• Silent Hill:
  • Helen/Travis in Silent Hill: Origins. Crazy moms are scary.
  • Silent Hill 2 has James/Pyramid Head, including the infamous licking scene (PH being a manifestation of James' subconscious only adds another layer of disturbing subtext).
  • And from Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, we have Cheryl's implied Electra Complex.
• Dr. Henry West MD towards Jennifer Willis in the remake of Splatterhouse, considering he's centuries old and sees Jennifer as a substitute for his wife.
• Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) has the whole Sonic/Princess Elise subplot, with a large anthropomorphic hedgehog and a realistic human princess acting flirty around each other, as well as the infamous scene in which she kisses Sonic. Who, for the record, was dead at the time.
• The sequel to The Suffering has as one of its villains the ghost of a man who raped and killed prostitutes, and who says things like "I cut her apart so I could see her inner self." Some dialogue indicates that he's a Depraved Bisexual and has his eye on the main character. Even worse, at one point he appears to audibly fantasise you as a child... specifically as a little girl.
• Summertime Saga: Dimitri is sometimes shipped with other characters for purposes of Vulgar Humor. After all, in-canon he is a sex trafficker and a rapist.
• There is a very good reason why Van Grants of Tales of the Abyss was given the Fan Nickname Master Badtouch. Van manipulates his student Luke's mancrush on him shamelessly, and his words when calming Luke's hyperresonance Freak Out on the boat are borderline sexual. And then, of course, there's Van's suggestion that they run away together. All of this would still almost count as Ho Yay...except Luke is a clone created by Van, and Van's only reason for keeping him around is to use him to destroy Akzeriuth. Also, Van is pretty clearly an adult, what with the memetic beard and all, and Luke, thanks to the cloning process, is mentally seven years old. Mind Game Ship + Pedophilic implications = No Yay.
• Togainu no Chi features a lot of this. For example, there's one of the ending which has Keisuke ripping out Akira's guts while proclaiming that he loves Akira. He's also sporting a look that seems similar to an orgasm.
• Season 2 of The Walking Dead had entirely unintentional amounts of subtext between Clementine and Luke. They're supposed to have a brother-sister dynamic, but a lot of their dialogue comes off as flirtatious banter, which is unfortunate, as Clementine is 11 and Luke is in his mid-twenties.
• Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus: Frau Engel attractions to B.J. Blazkowicz has good reasons not to be mutual considering she's a Nazi general and he's a resistant fighter. Add to that the power-dynamic that comes when B.J. is made prisoner by Engel and the bordering on sexual harrasment that ensue and you get something rather icky.
• Final Fantasy VII Remake: Some of Sephiroth's interactions with Cloud can be seen as homoerotic: he touches him a lot and downright tells him to "embrace him". Since Sephiroth tends to Mind Rape Cloud a lot, even going as far as to show him a vision of his destroyed hometown, Cloud obviously hates his guts.
• Xenoblade Chronicles 3: It is revealed near the end of the game that between the events of the game and it’s predecessor, the latter’s protagonist Rex started a harem with fellow blades Pyra, Mythra, and Nia. While most of the fandom was accepting of it, a minority of them, primarily Nia detractors, are against it, or at the very least have Nia be part of said harem and just have Rex settle for only Pyra and Mythra.
• Albedo of Xenosaga is basically the king of No Yay. He's really touchy and intimate with certain characters. These characters being the Token Mini-Moe and his twin brother. He's also completely batshit insane and can regenerate From a Single Cell.

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