I'm Very Normal About Zapo From Nitrome's Fault Line

A Freak Ass Essay About Fault Line and It's Protag

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On June 16th, 2010, Nitrome released a small puzzle-platformer flash game that would go down in their history as being one of their most ingenious games ever made, Fault Line.

The game's premise was simple yet very intriging to me: You play as a little test subject robot with rocket hands use the arrow keys to move around the character and use the mouse to click and join nodes together to fold entire parts of the level into oblivion like they were paper.

I was 10 years old when the game came out. At the time, I initially thought that the game seemed a bit boring and that the robot looked like a total nerd. "Jack Frost (another Nitrome character) would stuff this guy into a locker lol" was what I thought to myself as I looked at Fault Line's thumbnail on Nitrome's homepage.

But then I played the game. And the rest was history.

Now I'm 24 years old and I am still desperately holding out for a sequel for this awesome game! I find that its innovative gameplay, beautiful pixel graphics, and ominous, surreal labratory setting are just too interesting too abandon on a 13 year old flash game.

And I now that I got that sappy intro out of the way, let's talk about the Fault Line robot (His name is Zapo) and why I, as an NSFW artist, love drawing porn of him.

His design is simple, yet very cute, iconic and memorable: Small little robot with a silly hat, grumpy little face, big eyes and spiky mouth/fangs, purple and yellow colour scheme (Complementary colours work well with the design), detachable rocket hands (like Rayman!), silly hexagon body and stubby legs. He's not a typical, conventionally attractive guy with a tall, muscular body or a chiselled face, but a cute chibi robot!

In official Nitrome art, he's depicted doing silly, innocent things, such as holding up a finish line sign for the Rush runners and driving on a busy highway as a truck. He's the last character anyone would expect porn of....

And this makes him all the more attractive!

Drawing porn and ero-guro of Zapo feels exhilerating to me. The idea of seeing him and other innocent Nitrome characters I loved as a kid in such adult situations feels so dirty and taboo... and I love it!

I love seeing Zapo getting turned into a bitchy fleshlight by big, girthy, grimy tentacles. And I love seeing him working as a stripper surrounded by other cute Nitrome characters throwing money at him! And I love shipping him with other Nitrome characters, like the protag from ChangeType()! And I love drawing him getting his clit stimulated, teased and tortured by chainsaws!

It's also so easy to create darker works about Fault Line!

Around Easter this year (2023), I made a dark, erotic Nitrome fanfic called "Isolation Chamber", in which Zapo is "punished" by reality itself for trying to harness power from the white nodes so he could bend reality on his own. It was fun but also kinda scary for me to write because it contained darker suject matter than what I was accustomed to writing at the time (dub-con). Looking back on that poem, it's definitely more non-con than dub-con. Even at the time of writing it, I knew it was a non-con type of story, but I was too afraid to commit to saying that it was, but I wanted to write the poem, so I toughened up a bit and labelled it as dub-con. Not a non-con label, but it was the most I could muster up the courage to do at the time.

I might remake it with better visuals and a more honest approach to the non-con elements to it some day. I might even expand on the story to make it longer, sexier and darker. Perhaps I could also make Zapo more dominant after a while and write it into a weird, toxic, cosmic horror, non-con, romance fic? Idc, but it would be fun to revisit it someday.

It's just so easy to be a pervert about Nitrome games! So fun!

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