itch.io

I absolutely loved seeing your play-by-play on Bsky. It wasn’t just enjoyable to me, it was valuable to me. I know people are playing my stuff, but I rarely get to see a play-by-play of it, and sitting with reading and reading through this game together in the same room or in a discord chat is just NOT my thing after working on it for so long. I really like letting people engage with my work at their own pace!

What really got me though, with you, is that it was my first time really seeing someone who wasn’t into vampires read this thing, and that is an audience that is SO interesting to me, as a guy who isn’t into vampires, and is not interested in writing them further if it’s not with these characters. I’m not a vampire fan. I’m a visual kei fan who wanted to make someone really old, really slutty, and full of existential dread. And vampires were right there. Either I made up a type of guy who was immortal, or I made a vampire. But obviously, most of my audience has been Vampire People, many of which engage with Parfum because they like vampires and they like the aesthetics. I often fear that the contents of this VN sit in a place that won’t make those fans happy, and also won’t make non-vampire people happy, either, but seeing how invested you were in it the whole time made me really happy. It was such a rare treat to see someone engaging with my work all the way through who wasn’t like… my husband play testing it, lol.

I also… don’t like to police how people interpret my art, but it felt like your perception of Val was so spot on to what I was going for. Referring to him as “grandpa” or “big walking dog plushie” is very close to how I see him. He is an old man and a teenage girl and a beautiful woman and Just Some Guy who needs a bath and a fucking cigarette. Even though this is how a lot of people tend to see him, I still get many people who are blinded by their attraction to him and think of him as Sexy and Dommy the whole time, and also people who straight up HATE him and have no trouble telling me they want him to suffer. Such is the curse of having the Stereotypical Blonde Vampire. This is gonna sound so hammy, but I think for both of those types, they fear Val’s sincerity. He is an embarrassing person, and I know that, because there are lots of parts of myself I gave to him that I was embarrassed of and wanted to accept more, and often I can tell these things make people uncomfortable enough to ignore them for the sake of seeing him as a Big Sexy Doll, or get angry at them enough to use him as a punching bag. No matter how people engage with Val as a character, I want them to bring him their sincerity, because he is not only bringing his, but mine as well. This goes for all my characters, but with Val especially. For some people, bringing sincerity is like bringing a handbag or a coin purse, but for others, it can be more difficult, as heavy as a suitcase full of bricks. Thank you for bringing your sincerity to engage with my work, however heavy sincerity may be.

also: you are like the first person to be afraid of kenny. while i’m not afraid of him myself, i think this is justified. kenny is the number one most thirsted over character in this game but if they ever got a chance to shoot their shot with him irl there is a 100% chance he’d do something that sends them running screaming out of clair de lune. they think they can match his freak, but they can’t. val sends lu to clair not just to learn about vampire shit, but also to see if it scares him away. but of course, lupino verona, a man who has sat at a table with too many italian mobster uncles with huge obnoxious cigars to count, is like, “uh… yeah. he’s just kinda weird i guess.” insane.