The Taphouse

So, guess that’s us gay now. That’s a joke. Don’t feel like a gay thing.

If there’s one game I would ever go gay for, it’s Street Fighter II. I devoted so much time to it on the SNES in the early 90s, I may as well have been going out with it. Mostly Ryu, sometimes Guile. Never Dhalsim or Zangief. I never remembered who was who with the bosses as they all switched round. Except for Sagat.

What am I blathering about? Well, Striking Vipers is a one v one fighting game in this fictional universe and the two male protagonists of the show end up using it to have sex with each other, virtually. Thank you and good night. It’s obviously not that simple, as they’re supposedly both straight. But are they, though? That is just one of the myriad questions you ask yourself with this one. If you dare to venture out into the internet (big ‘if’), the full gamut from ‘LOL there (sic) just gay LOL’ to ‘actually, I often wonder what it’s like to have sex as a woman and would try this if I could’ is explored but I’ll leave it to you to find that out. As I found it equally intriguing and infuriating. But that’s mostly due to the varying levels of ignorance, tolerance and education on display.

So, the Taphouse. It’s not even really in the show. Off to a flyer, hey. Theo* is out for the night in the nearby Jericoacoara Bar and stumbles out of it, giving her Uber driver directions, stating the Taphouse as a nearby landmark to aim for. So there we are. I’ve swiped the colour and font from that and applied it here, as there was nothing else to really go on. The figures you see either side are the male and female characters Roxette and Lance, whom the two lads choose to ‘play’ as.

São Paulo? No idea, mate. The show is obviously meant to be set in some kind of metropolis in California, but anyone even moderately Brazilian will tell you that the filming location is the country’s largest city. If we’re saying a man can teleport into a woman’s body and feel what it’s like to orgasm as such, I’m saying the Taphouse is in fucking São Paulo.

Fight me.

*As if it wasn’t already complicated enough, Theo is the woman in this episode.