This is the point at which male and female characters actually divert in their scene choreography, as Minthara flips our character up into a lying position on the altar.
![[Linked Image from i.imgur.com]](https://i.imgur.com/lgiPtty.png)
For male characters, the scene progresses with Minthara jumping up onto the altar with us, then flipping around to adopt a reverse cowgirl position for what we can presume is penetrative intercourse of some variety. After a few rapid-fire camera cuts of different angles, Minthara flips around to facing cowgirl, and the scene ends with a long shot of her continuing to ride us in between kisses (or possibly the female drown beginning to devour her mate... it's unclear).
Throughout this latter part of the scene, the male actor moves more or less like a crash-test dummy; like an afterthought to the scene. It's clear the scene designer(s) was(were) focused almost exclusively on Minthara and didn't have a great deal of interest in the male participating in the scene; this is another hallmark of for-porn scene shooting.
As for the cut itself; the knee-on-shoulder shot that this last part of the scene branches out of is just bad – a large portion of the cut is just your leg covering Minthara's face, and more of that uncomfortably obvious missing penis.
When she hops up on the altar with us Minthara faces the camera partially with her knees spread, and we can very clearly see that she's got nothing between her legs – it's smooth all the way around, and we can see that (my particular screenshot had a moment of bad lighting, so it's not as clear as in other moments of the same sequence). It doesn't matter what the scene attempts to do; it cannot succeed in any way if it both contains “barbie dolls clacking together”, and also shows us that it is; either don't show us the genitals at all, ever, and give up on choreographing as overt adult content (which would require the vast majority of this being ripped out and re-done from the top), or accept that you're making adult content here and put those details into the models properly - so that when we
do have small teasing glimpses here and there scattered through the scene, it doesn't immediately kill any hope of engagement with the scene.
The same issue is present in the following long shot as well; Minthara is moving up and down on empty air – there's clearly no penis there. We could reason the other way and suppose that the theoretical penis is lower down – perhaps I'm misreading the location of our character's hips – but if that were the case, and the penis would be conveniently obscured by leg and thigh, well, that's just not feasible either; if it were the intended case, then there would be no way that Minthara is achieving comfortable penetration where she's positioned right now; no matter how forward-set we imagine her vagina might be (and we're already having to imagine that it's exceptionally backward set to account for the smooth front shots), there's no way a penis that is low enough to be hidden by her leg is going in.
Overall this kind of long shot works well for teasingly erotic sequences, but not for overtly pornographic or adult content ones. It can be shot in a way that artfully excludes the genitals without being particularly noticeable that you're doing so, if you're clever with it. This shot tries hard to do that, and aside from the invisible penis and/or poor alignment, it doesn't look bad as a shot... but the missing-yet-obviously-visible genitals kill it completely.
The next three shots happen in fairly quick succession, only a couple of seconds apart each. The camera angles are... odd. Yes we can work out what we're being show, but it's not a smooth angle or a clear composition. A large percentage of the first shot is blocked out by the back of our character's head and neck (which, why can we see that at all if he's lying flat on the altar?), and we can only see a tiny fraction of the character that the camera is trying to give focus to. Minthara moves in a slow gyration, but it doesn't communicate well from this angle. She's also looking back, towards the camera, but even though we can get that impression, we can't see her face properly – if she's looking towards us, we should see the face properly. This shot would work better if it was an erotic shot of Minthara's back as she rides, from over the shoulder of our character; you could also give the male character something to DO in the process – let him caress her hips, or run his fingers down her back, for example – something that suggests actual interaction and communication between the actors, rather than dolls going through poses.
After that, we flick around to look at the male character. He looks like he's trying to get a pebble our of his shoe.... and also, we notice, is elevated up off the altar – presumably from where we just stuffed a camera underneath him in the last shot. Once again, though, in terms of lighting and composition, the actual camera focus of this shot is Minthara's shoulder and breast, which moves in the most eye-drawing gyration compared to anything else in the shot, while the male is mostly still and making that bemused expression.
The third comes 'back' to Minthara, again drawing the attention to her near breast, while she hides her face from the camera. The angles used here are a little off-putting to me, because it comes off, between the fast cuts, as though the characters (primarily Minthara) are twisted and reposed into slightly different angles to suit the shot, while the scene pretends that it's a continuous take. This may not be an entirely fair criticism, however, as it's only an impression that I personally get.
The scene finishes off with another long shot, as Minthara flips around again into facing cowgirl – it does actually communicate this transition in a more or less artful way, compared to some other cuts and changes.
The wooden performance from our male actor doesn't help much, unfortunately, but the major issue in the closing shots is the same one plaguing other parts of the scene; Minthara keeps moving throughout – obviously the penetrative sex is still implied to be continuing – but her motions bring her behind up and down over clear empty space, and it's far too visible that she's moving on nothing at all... (or, as before, same possibility, the imaginary penis is supposed to be obscured, in which case it's in a position that it can't possibly be going in at all).
There's no pacing in this scene. There rhythm is entirely flat and uniform all the way through, with no build and no peak – a dramatic face close-up of a moderately flat facial expression doesn't cut it. The characters move at more or less the same pace whenever they are shown, with little to no variance, and the focus seems to be primarily on the mechanics of what pose they're doing, rather than anything to communicate actual eroticism. Usually it's one actor doing one thing at a time, with the focus being on that, while the other is a passive facilitator. I'm not convinced anyone had a good time here, and I don't believe anyone got off, even if they claim to have.
That's it for the male side of this branch; I haven't gotten a male halfling up to this point yet, unfortunately. So much of my time goes into bringing up alternate files that I'm falling behind on other things I meant to do (What I wouldn't give for a dev tool to test things like this more thoroughly and rapidly...)
