Mighty Jill Off: Anna Anthropy’s Boot-Fetish Platformer

In 2008 the independent developer Anna Anthropy released the free platform game Mighty Jill Off. James Harvey did the art. Andrew Toups wrote the music. Jill, the player character, is a submissive with a boot fetish. The Queen kicks her to the bottom of a tower for acting like a greedy slut, and the player climbs back up to finish the punishment. The controls are move, jump, and a slow descent. In the air, holding a direction and tapping jump makes Jill drift. That precision under pressure is the skill, instead of button-mashing combat. The game is an homage to the 1984 arcade game Bomb Jack. Spikes, fire, and spiders that attack on their own kill Jill in one hit. Death sends her to the latest checkpoint. She has infinite lives, so there is no game-over screen that wipes the run. One-hit death becomes a masochistic comedy of retries. The characters are adults.

Anthropy, also known as Auntie Pixelante, made the game to put dykes and perverts on screen, against the stereotype of lesbians written and drawn by men in ads. She treated the difficulty of getting Jill through the hazards as the same structure a top uses when taking a bottom through a scene: control and trust, not a hardcore player’s brag. The player’s hands do a kind of dominant caretaking. Jill’s body takes the hits. For players who know kink, submission is the vertical climb, death is service that was not finished, and the checkpoint loop sits next to aftercare.

How the Queen and Jill were drawn

Harvey tried to keep the pictures recognizable to people inside BDSM and still watchable for people outside it. The Queen is a fully adult woman with relatively realistic proportions, sexy and authoritative, an amalgamation of lesbian friends he had been attracted to. Jill is about three and a half heads tall, between a funny little Mega Man-type sprite and a grown woman. Harvey refused a childlike body so she would not be read as a sexualized child. She is an adult submissive, drawn innocent and eager to please. The title-screen background plays the power relation in an expressionist way. The Queen’s tower was first imagined smooth and straight. He rejected that because it looked too phallic. Color carries feeling: a rose tint for blissful affection toward the Queen, a grey wash for sadness. Jill’s suit ended as shiny all-black rubber, not a crude costume. That was the landing point for an adult kink cartoon that still had to stay readable and funny.

In October 2008 Anthropy released Mighty Jill Off – Jill Off Harder Edition. Clearing the original level in under twelve minutes unlocks a second, much harder climb. At the end Jill is gagged and bound to a large X-cross and whipped once for each minute she took to reach the top again. That is an ending image in the game, not instructions. She also released Jill Off with One Hand, a OneSwitch-style build meant to be played with one hand. In 2010 Jill appeared as a playable cameo in Super Meat Boy, a boot-fetish submissive inside a widely played indie platformer.

Rock, Paper, Shotgun and Game Set Watch praised the SM themes. GamesRadar and Bitmob praised the ruthless difficulty. 1UP.com listed it among favorite free PC games of 2009. Gamasutra named it a runner-up among the top five indie games of 2008, not the winner. For adult readers who understand BDSM, it is not a novelty skin on Bomb Jack. Lesbian dominance and submission, boot worship, and a sadomasochistic retry loop are the mechanical and narrative core. It looks at sexual power, takes apart essentialist gender roles in games, and treats the failure as the point.