Rating 5stars because I love your PASSION and I want you to keep WRITING!! I also have a fetish for 'high art' books that are too complicated for their own good like joyce shit or pynchon or david foster wallace blahblahblah etc. Disco obviously up there too, so it's fun reading those influences here. BUT. I have some quibbles. Namely, the writing in this (and in the prior iteration) is a biiit too dreamy; it lacks a concrete plot or character hook, instead relying heavily on prose/wit/obtuse-introspecty-jokes that leaves me scratching my head as to what's actually happening, or what the characters want, or where they are. Ofc very similar affect in Joyce, but that might be the problem. It's really hard to get attached to characters in lit fic. Idc if leo or molly die because they're more metaphor than they are actual characters. Idc if they fall in love or cheat on each other either. I only care about joyce doing wacky shit and beautiful flower-of-the-mountain type imagery, and that's the same feeling I have w/ almost all lit fic, (tho if you've read infinite jest, I do actually care about Hal y_y). All of this to say, I think the audience you're writing for would appreciate a more concrete, grounded writing style with direct scenes that follow typical plot structures and beats and external things happening rather than the internal, introspective haze I feel this gets caught up in.  I get that's sorta the point because of the disco-style thoughtbubble boys, but it'll often be like, character A says something, then internal dialogue blahblahblah, then character B will respond to the thing character A said and I'll have to scroll back up to remember wtf is happening and it's all vry disorienting without much payoff, other than I get to think 'this author is clever', which isn't something you need to prove to anyone. If anything I think your storytelling will benefit from you trying to write 'dumber', more straight forward, and adding clever bits as a flourish rather than as the main dish. Keep the wit, but add in more bland descriptors that aren't trying to do anything but fill in the white-void of whats actually physically happening in the external story. (I don't think this would even take a whole lot of rewriting to pull off tbh, just some cuts and some structural narration: your minimalist bgs and sprites are vry cute but they're not enough to forgo explaining where people are standing in relation to each other, or what the room looks like or feels like or smells like--it's too white-voidy! more descriptors pls!) Obv all this is subjective and pls do what fills u with the most motivation and all that, but I'd personally love a version of this or future stuff that's written just sliiiightly more on the YA or New Adult style of the spectrum (with save the cat style beats & very obvious genre-fiction tropes) rather than the impenetrable 10000iq allegorical story where i won't feel anything when the boys get to do kissy kissy scenes. Anyways, your ambition & skill is admirable, and I hope ya keep at it!