Note: This is an article that touches on pornographic content. As such, it will have references to adult material and other related content. If you don’t want to read, or really shouldn’t, don’t.
One year ago today, Ken Levine told Redditors to stop making porn of Elizabeth, the female supporting character in Bioshock Infinite. He responded to the idea of Bioshock porn with this:
Seriously, whoever is doing the Elizabeth porn on deviantart, please stop it. You’re killing me. It’s like coming across a picture of your daughter. I die a little inside with every page view.
The Internet calls this Rule 34: if it exists, there is porn of it. A year ago, we reported on one such pornographic parody, lovingly named Biocock Intimate (pictured below). But there’s really nothing suprising about sexual content about Elizabeth, even with Mr. Levine’s discomfort with the subject and the nature of her relationship with the player in game.
You’d be hard pressed to find another character in games more suited for porn. This is the case for a few reasons. For starters, Elizabeth is a main female character so the player gets to spend a lot of time with her and become attached. In the last year, there are few other examples of this. Ellie in the Last of Us is generally too young, and Bayonetta has a more limited audience. Bioshock Infinite hit that perfect storm of a sexually attractive female lead, with a large audience, who was actually likeable. Sure GTA V had female characters, but can you remember any of them specifically?
There’s something transgressive about these games, GIF’s, videos and parodies. In part it is because Ken Levine doesn’t want them to exist, but it’s more than that. It’s the naivete of the character, the extra illicit nature of the relationship between her and Booker that ads to the experience. As Maddy Myers pointed out in her phenomenal piece on Biocock Intimate, a lot of Bioshock Infinite porn shows an Elizabeth who wants to be there and who is in charge of her sexuality and personhood — an existence that is far from the reality inside the game.
If anything, Ken Levine’s pleas to keep art of his creation tame were just incentive for some to create content worthy of Pornhub. And a year out, people are still creating content, still using the Source Film Maker and other tools to render versions of Elizabeth that can engage in any amount of acrobatic trans-dimensional sexual relations. Let’s see what the next year brings.
