Sexual Liberation Through Mice Tea Pt 1

16 November 2024

So. I think I should give a brief background before I start this. Review? Analysis? Political rant I'm connecting to a thing I find neat so I can keep my sanity? Something like that.

This... thing, it started out very differently. Initially, this was a short review of Mice Tea and how it builds a nuanced complicated story full of heart and wit around what is arguably just the setup for tf fetish content, in a way I have found nothing else to do before. I got about 2k words into it, and then November 5th came around. The election. I know I know, an internet blog is probably the last place you want to see the election mentioned, but this is my blog and you can't stop me. And besides, this isn't going to be a post about the election. Instead the election gave me inspiration to write something very similar to my initial idea for this post.

Alright, we all know that Trump and many other republicans thrive on purity culture and theocracy. So what if instead of focusing on the art behind the eroticism, I focused on the eroticism behind the art. Really lean into why it's so important to let sexual creations exist and to be sexual. Hence the title, and the rest of this post.

What the fuck is Mice Tea?

First off. some of you probably don't know what Mice Tea is. Understandable, not everyone grovels in the hyper niche sub-sub-sub-communities I do. A little background on Mice Tea is needed.

Mice Tea is an erotic visual novel by Cinswitch, with a focus of "tf's" aka transformations, specifically furry tf's with a touch of gender warping going on. Cinswitch is a small independent studio, but surprisingly large for such a niche focus. The team includes 1 writer/producer, 1 story/dev, 1 story, 3 main artists, 1 background artist, 1 composer/musician, 1 programmer, and 2 art devs. All supported by a host of guest artists, proofreaders, and even 2 culture/language insight consultants!

I did not follow the development of Mice Tea until early 2022, so much of its early development I have little to nothing to speak on, but I can say it has received consistent updates on Patreon from 2019 until its release in early 2023. With a team so abnormally large for such a production and such a large amount of time, perhaps it is unsurprising how well made Mice Tea is. Regardless, it is incredibly impressive to me how it manages to have 24 outfits for 1 side character by my count, not including poses, accessories, eye shapes, mouth shapes, and more, and this is the rule with Mice Tea, not the exception.

All this effort is put into a game with a very simple premise on the front. What if there was a tea that transformed you into a furry. Boom. Furry transformation game with a tea twist. That’s all right? Well, no. Mice Tea has a lot more going on beneath this fairly simple exterior. And that underneath? That’s where it shines. To get into that, I’m going to propose the idea of Mice tea separating its act’s and structures and pushing character development efficiently through its sex scenes. I’ll go route by route, starting with the first short end, and the Gavin route in this post, moving on to Slyvia, Julie, and finally Felicia (Oh I have a LOT to say about Felicia). As one might expect, spoilers abound, so spoiler warning, starting with:

Route 0.5: Short End - Mousegret

I’m actually not going to explain what happens in this route (Hey look I got to give you some loose threads to make you want to buy the game) but I am going to use the first parts of it to introduce the characters and general structure of Mice Tea.

Margret de Campos: The main character of Mice Tea, and player perspective. Margaret is not, like some visual novels, a blank slate to project onto. Because again, Mice Tea isn’t trying to be a standard visual novel. Margaret is a very strong and capable woman, with a bit of a bad habit of being too agreeable and non-confrontational. She works at the bookshop Barlows, and loves reading, almost as much as she loves tea. It’s heavily implied (and at times explicitly stated) that she does enough work to run the shop herself. She also has a very poor self image, finding it very difficult to believe when people compliment her physical form.

Felix: OH Felix. We’ll get more into Felix when “his” route comes up, but to make a long story short, Felix is Margret’s boss, and the owner of Barlow’s. Felix really does try his best, however they’re a bit scatterbrained. Felix is even more soft spoken and non-confrontational than Margaret is, and not as good at working the shop.

Slyvia: A bit difficult of a character to describe without spoilers, but for now, let’s call her what she appears to be on the surface. A conceited woman who cares more about her appearance and shopping than about others. Consistently takes unannounced time off with really obvious and poor excuses leaving Margret with little help. Despite this, even Margaret concedes that she appears very genuine and her attention to appearance pays off.

Gavin: The owner of Tea friends, Margret’s go-to tea shop and close friend and confidant. Gavin is perhaps the most put together of the cast from the get-go, with a strong grasp on who he is and what he wants. He at times may be a tad careless and repressed, but overall a guy who’s willing to “go with the flow” as it were.

Julie: Margret’s old college friend and painter. Julie returns from studying abroad the day the game starts, drinking with Margaret and Gavin. She’s a bit unscrupulous, a rule-breaker, and a troublemaker. It’s just a part of her charm. She’s always putting on a mask to hide her insecurities, granted not always very well. Julie does what she wants when she wants, but not because she doesn’t care about her friends, but instead because she cares so much she puts on a face to appear even stronger than she actually is.

Kemono Tea: And here is the bread and butter of this game. “The Tea”. Before going to the bar and getting absolutely hammered, Margaret found a box of tea on the floor with all the labels written in Japanese, including a little sticky note. I’ll bring up the rules of the tea in more depth later, but the short of it is, more tea = more furry, all the way to feral if you drink, say, 8 liters of incredibly dark tea.

Route 1 - Gavin, and what it means to find community and have control

I’m going to be skimming over the plot quite a bit with these summaries, because it frankly is the background to what really makes this game shine, the characters. Margaret, in her drunken stupor, drinks way too much kemono tea, and ends up roughly 4 inches tall and a furry mouse. Margaret gets interrupted from drinking even more by a call from Gavin. He is calling to check up on her. After no response, he comes to the house to find Maragret, well, a mouse, and leaves in fear. Margaret breaks down crying, screaming that “Just spending some time with you and Julie made me think I might have some control over my life…”, leading to Gavin coming back in and taking Margaret back to his house at her insistence.

At Gavins house, Margaret finds out that the tea changes more than her appearance. She makes a nest in her sleep, and can’t stop herself from making a little hoard. Later, she finds herself gnawing on a matchstick, stopped by Gavin. Margaret panics at her complete loss of control, and she and Gavin work out the plan that Margaret will have complete control of everything Gavin does, since she can’t control anything else. Margarets’ first major action is to force Gavin to re-open his tea shop, since she feels guilty about him temporarily closing it to deal with the whole mouse situation. While there she takes a literal tea-bath and comes to terms with another property of kemono tea. It acts as a minor aphrodisiac, at least in small quantities. With the amount Margaret has drinken? It’s unbearable.

Later back at the apartment, Margaret opens up about this side-effect to Gavin, stating her discomfort with mastrabating in her mousey form, and asks Gavin to help her. Gavin is nervous, and requests that Margaret leads the entire experience. This scene, the first sex scene in the first route, is where I want to start the real point of this post. This scene, is undeniably, inaliabley, pornographic. To take the common criteria in art critique, this scene is high in eroticsism, and medium in its expression of the form, the eroticism is a major point, in terms of both writing and art. This scene isn’t “tasteful nudity”, it’s a fetishistic, pornographic, erotic, sex scene. And it’s one of the most artistic parts of this whole visual novel.

This domi-mouse-trix scene is the natural conclusion to the emotional, story, and character arcs up to this point. This scene reveals Margaret’s wishes, fears, hopes, dreams, and flaws in higher depth than any point before it. Gavin is the most human here out of arguably any other point in the whole novel, afraid, horny, and in love. There is not art in spite of eroticism, there is art almost entirely due to eroticism. This is a scene of what it means to be alive, to struggle, to find temporary peace, through the expression of sexual dynamics. That, is the true essence of Mice Tea. Before I ramble too much about the rest of this route, I feel it important to mention Mice Tea’s very progressive attitude towards sex. Of course the main character is bisexual, but more than that, the mechanics of Mice Tea and the way the world treats sex is far more sex-positive than many other 18+ media I’ve experienced, in a way that deeply strengthens this idea of eroticism as art, instead of eroticism despite it. Every character in Mice Tea, after a sexual encounter, clarifies their new relationship verbally and clearly. It’s never assumed that just because two characters had sex once that they're romantically together or are even going to have sex ever again. Sex is treated as just an experience, a deeply compelling and interesting experience with deep ties to our senses and emotions, but still just an experience. The game itself outside of the world leans into this too, with options to turn off nude sprites, skip sex scenes, and get content warnings before every single sex scene. This sex-positive perspective really allows the writers and artists to delve into sex from an incredibly compelling perspective, without falling into the at times a-phobic traps of describing sex as “the basis of humanity” or “the basis of romance”. It’s something else, and that’s beautiful.

Moving onwards in the plot, Gavin and Margaret confide in Julie, who translates part of the box and assists them in finding how to reverse Margaret’s condition. After a few more conversations, and another tea bath, they go back to the apartment. Kemono tea works off emotions. “Heating up” through drinking the tea furthers your transformation, while “Cooling down” by meditating or sleeping reverses it. After a meditation session Margaret grows slightly, but at a pace that shows it will take a long time to get back to normal. Gavin drinks a small amount of the tea to test some of their theories as well, turning into a still human-sized anthropomorphic falcon. Margaret helps get a picture of Gavin for him to see, and can’t help but tease him by going through his images in his phone.

There, Margaret finds something she’d never expect. Furry transformation porn. It turns out Gavin is a big furry, and finds tf’s especially hot. Margaret is enraged, thinking he probably orchestrated this whole event. She runs back to her own apartment where Julie has been staying, and discusses all her fears with her. They decide to tell Gavin that Margaret doesn’t quite trust him yet, but they can talk tomorrow. The next day, Gavin comes over, and tells Margaret he didn’t plant the tea, and that if he knew what the tea did, he’d take it himself. After a long conversation involving Gavin’s kinks, Margaret says she wants to learn more about it, and joins Gavin the next day at the local furry convention with tickets from Julie (Long story) (Well. short story, but story I don’t have the time to discuss in this post).

There, Margaret finds her own interest, and reignites her prey dom - predator sub relationship with Gavin. The ending of this route has a couple variations and I really do want to leave some parts unspoiled, but suffice to say, after everything is out in the open, Gavin becomes far more clearly interested in the sex, and they come to have much healthier, open, and hornier sex after everything.

Despite how much I’ve gushed about this route, it’s actually the route I like the least! There is nothing wrong with it, no, instead everything good about this route is done even better in the other routes. It’s truly impressive the amount of incredible writing and art in this game. Before I draw this post to a close, I’d like to briefly go over the makers of this game, at least the ones I know.

Thank you makers of Mice Tea!

First off, massive thanks to everyone overall on the Cinswitch team for making this game.

Congrats Zoe S. Figueroa for such incredible writing on this game,

And thanks to The Transformistress for introducing me to this incredible project :3

Well, that was long winded and somehow far briefer than I expected, but if I can manage to shut my trap and stop writing, in about 2 weeks you can expect part 2, Slyvia’s route. As a trans woman myself, this will sure be an interesting route to try and keep concise, god knows I failed this time. Best wishes, and remember, your best tools in this world are kindness and love.