💭 You didn't know that Lolly is a bad word

Hi guys! 

I was working on the mouth toy for you this week. It's basically ready and now I'm adding effects to make it more lively and special. So I expect it to be released on beta next week (if my tester doesn't block it suddenly). Fun fact: the most difficult part for now was actually to draw a mouth to be shown. Players see it from inside, but it shouldn't look too creepy, must match the art style and animate properly. Let me just say the current version is 4th already and we're still not 100% happy with it.

Meantime I realized I haven't posted “You didn't know” for a quite long time. So more interesting facts for today.

You didn't know that Lolly’s name appeared to be a bad choice for game promotion. 

(Disclaimer: I’m strictly against child abuse, I see pedophilia as a major deviation and I understand why everything related is a big taboo)

I already wrote about the game's name appearance. Must admit, we kept in mind a reference to “loli” as a wordplay – more like an Easter egg or a joke. Something about double standards: one hand society worships youth, energy and sexuality, but the edge is very thin, and mixing it a bit more quickly gets you to the forbidden area. My character is obviously a well-developed grown up woman, so at that time nobody thought that it might cause a problem.

Much later we learned that many people don't see any difference between Lolly and loli. For example I got hateful comments about pedo content from people who clearly didn't even run the game (I’d like to add a screenshot, but that juicy one seems to be already removed).

I saw people arguing about adding a ‘loli’ tag to the game on some site, because of.. I really have no idea why. Some publishing and reviewing sites even add it themselves (together with a bunch of other unrelated tags, but that's a topic for a separate post). The funniest thing was it attracted some actual lolicon fans who were completely disappointed: “No lollies here guys, move along”.

Then I discovered that censorship works a hard way. 

Many platforms simply have a list of forbidden words and if your content includes them: either the listed words might be converted into *** or you're not allowed to post at all. You shouldn't say S-words and H-words, so we can report our platform is safe and friendly. Lol, but ok, that's how corporations work. At least that's how it was designed to be. However users often try to bypass dumb filters, introducing new spellings, then platforms add new variations to censorship filters, then all possible vARiatIOns, warriations, var1at10ns, v-a-r-i-a-t-i-o-n-s, var i at ions and so on until in some chats you just can not type a single phrase without being censored.

As a result my game's name itself is considered a forbidden content on some platforms. For example on… PornHub. Some time ago I found a letsplay video on MyJLC. Viewers were asking what the game was and the author referred to my name instead of the game title. I discovered the reason later when trying to upload game videos by myself: your content contains inappropriate terms, or something like that.

Well, there are even sites completely changing the game name. Idk if this is a reason or they just didn't want me to google them =).

Another fun fact. Lolly might be both a full name or nickname (from Laura, Laurence, Louisa and many others). I saw a name popularity chart on one site: it rapidly goes down around the 60s, which strangely correlates with the appearance of ‘Lolita’ novel. So it looks to me like everything around the name is just canceled in modern society because of one book. 

Hey, I don't really complain. Just it was kinda unexpected. Fighting with words doesn't really solve the problems. But we're ready to easily cancel any random names, words, images and even geometric figures just because.

And now you know why being Lolly is difficult nowadays. 

Have a charming weekend!