In 2013, a BioShock Infinite dev gave NSFW fan artists some tips on how to make the clothes laying on the floors of their drawings more historically accurate. In 2023, she says she'd make that advice "so much hornier."
That dev is Claire Hummel, an artist who did concept work on BioShock Infinite, including the design of the Lutece Twins. She even has a neat little breakdown of that work on her personal portfolio site, with some interesting notes about the design process. She's clearly got a lot of affection for Robert and Rosalind Lutece, which is why it shouldn't be too surprising to learn she was talking about fan art on Tumblr a decade ago.
But what might be more surprising is that this 2013 Tumblr post was all about encouraging homemade Rosalind porn to be more historically accurate. "I’m not one to discourage this sort of thing - no no, I have sketchbooks full of Remus/Sirius stuff from high school - but I figured I might as well give everyone a leg-up with a more detailed guide to Rosalind Lutece’s potential underthings," Hummel said. "I’ve seen a ton of drawings of her in corsets from a good 50 years before her time and I… I needed to step in."
This is all coming back around because Del Walker, a Naughty Dog character artist, was reminiscing about Hummel's old Tumblr post on social media recently. Hummel herself responded, saying "this would have been so much hornier had I drawn it in the year of our lord 2023! We’ve come a long way, baby."
this would have been so much hornier had I drawn it in the year of our lord 2023! We’ve come a long way, baby 😎 https://t.co/tXVAO4y6MCMarch 26, 2023
Funnily enough, Hummel wasn't the only BioShock Infinite dev talking about horny fan art back in 2013. Director Ken Levine had a much different take on the topic in a Reddit AMA a few months after Hummel's Tumblr post, saying "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."
2013 was admittedly a pretty awkward time for the game industry, where it was becoming just mature enough to get embarrassed over how it had spent its early years designing female characters almost exclusively for the fantasies of teenage boys, but not yet quite mature enough to embrace the fact that people of every stripe tend to be unquenchably thirsty. These days, everyone's much more willing to admit that they're horny for Lady Dimitrescu or the Hades cast.
I'm not gonna spend this video game news article offering moral judgment one way or the other on our more open modern horniness, but I've gotta say I'm broadly with Hummel - if you're gonna draw Rosalind in her skivvies, at least make sure you've got the corset right.
Thirsty fan art or no, BioShock Infinite's legacy has changed dramatically in the past decade.
