Having spent over an hour playing this, taking notes with exceeding phenomenological care as I immersed myself in the fantasy, I have little recourse but to convey my thoughts to you in full, at their most gentle and their most cutting, for one-sidedness is a mark of barbarism. (There is another quote for your envelopes.)
I should begin, as I am prone to, with the disarmingly positive. My first reaction was, verbatim: Such Grammar!! It’s a relief to read a Visual Novel by an author who can actually WR!TE, one visibly informed, if not cloistered against barbarity, by the entire tradition of British (if I may presume you’re not a Scottish Nationalist) Literature. Aesthetically, this piece is GORGEOUS, abounding in flawless spelling, grammar, and usage, delivered with incredible diction, (where did you F!ND them??) stunning visuals and serene, topical instrumentation, which felt at once distant yet close, by some technique even a seasoned composition student can hardly fathom. I’m glad I don’t have to feel “weird” speaking in such flowery terms to you. Yet what feels odd is to pass judgement. Hell: what great writer hasn’t had to be a martyr for the cause of the philosophers and critics? I am guilty accordingly.
[SPO!LER WARN!NG.]
Parts of this fairy tale do feel like a narcissistic fantasy, but only in the Jungian or the Derridean sense. I am sure that most contemporary skeptics would agree that the desire for a shapeshifting chimera of sorts, whether metaphysical or metaphorical, can come across as farfetched and childish, yet so can most game lore. The tropes are not what I took issue with ideologically, least of all aesthetically.
The characters whom you cast as protagonists felt somewhat privileged, naïve, and thoroughly short-sighted (like my ex. L.O.L. Incidentally, she read a lot of nineteenth-century pulp and fluff, while I was the man of Salinger and Vonnegut.) I should have liked to see the third party developed in finer detail. He feels oddly familiar. It’s bizarre that such a common villain from Victorian folklore, from Noyes to Ostrovsky, has become sort of a modern hero, though this convincing period piece you have presented us with as a gift portrays him in a pre-Gothic light, at a time when people were very satisfied with the “natural order of things” and loth to entertain arguments against personal affect, employing majoritarian consent as the sole arbiter. I can only surmise that he wanted what they had, so I could never blame him upon THE!R behalf; I could only hold him accountable before the Law, which was wherefore I chose the path of legal repercussion at the end, suspecting that I could predict the consequences. (I was right.) But do not allow my Modernism to cause you apprehension.
The H.G. Wells quote, one I encountered estimably ten years ago, at a very vulnerable and religious time in my life, always struck me as a bit pompous and reductionistic. At any rate, it hardly serves the present political climate, one fraught with (often warranted) outrage, upon behalf of both Self and Other. Perhaps it is most fitting that those who elicit disdain in people are punished by their own victims; the episode with Eliza demonstrates that you might agree.
The (Central) Love Story:
My God; don’t you wish all penpalships could work like this? To think: that outside of a simple divergence in breed their emotions lined up so neatly, even by the conventional, contemporary standards which endure, both for better and for worse, to our day? Yet I would not call the story “timeless”, since it’s hard to judge who does or does not deserve a happy ending in an absurd conflict of emotions. For that, I have my own writings to expound upon. You are welcome to review them; they are published here as well. You might enjoy my wordplay also.
I caught that Cailin Calwood had been modeled after Collins. Personally, I don’t care for stories which sever status from love, since I am more drawn to tales of chivalry and corporate meritocracy, two ends of the same pole spanning half a millennium. Of course, some of Cailin’s habits are reminiscent of both d’Artagnon and Berlioz.
I ought to amend that “self-awareness” had not been developed as a psychological term until 1972*, so this feels almost like a modern apology on behalf of the Old World in its more proto-Fascist animus/anima projections.
That being said, it is a bold attempt at recreating Victorian prose and poetry, in all its triumphs and its failings. Might I suggest, however, that the quote employed by Friedrich Nietzsche is closer in Spirit to the unrequited lover, blissfully devoid of conscience than to the sophisticated animal/animus, the latter of whom haunts people (whether by magic tricks or magick) by manipulation and casual vindictiveness? I can only surmise which of these two competitors was properly the “Beast” in Beauty and the Beast, for modern shrinks make it quite clear that, unfortunately, civility is not always enough to make things work, and post-World-War-II philosophers contending with all forms of Fascism and emotivism will tell you that the Heart CAN lie.
Yet this is YOUR vision, not mine, and I respect that.
*despite having been used in 1876, ostensibly, most probably in passing and not as a “quantity” of character in daily conversation.
Bookwurms are such chums. (quoth the bookwurm.)
I blushed profusely.
Feel free to submit this to the Dream Jam!!
https://itch.io/jam/dreamjam2020
Regards and Wishes,
Lin Ji.
Post-scriptum: if he doesn’t know how charming he is, what became of self-awareness? Haha. I jest.