This one was great! I think it tells a compelling story about a kid stuck in a very, very bad situation, with just the right amount of detail to really make it hit. I also really appreciated the use of limited color palettes to make the backgrounds stand out - it helped give each background a different ‘personality’ and made individual scenes stand out from each other well.
If there’s one big weakness here, I’d say it’s the story’s brevity - while Mary’s tendency to dissociate no doubt plays part in it, I found myself confused about what was going on quite a few times - in particular, both endings felt as though they just suddenly cut off after a certain point - and while it makes sense for the ‘bad’ ending, I was quite confused when I checked out the good one and saw its seemingly arbitrary cutoff point in the middle of a conversation.
In general, I think things could also be paced out a bit more - this is a very fast paced story, but I think a few moments of relative quiet and contemplation could help the viewers better sit with the intense emotions the characters are feeling. This doesn’t necessarily need to be by splicing scenes into the existing work, either - even splitting up certain sentences into multiple ones, or adding a few more descriptions of expressions and behaviors, can go a long way towards helping with that.
With all that said though, the central story was incredibly compelling for me, especially since it’s the kind of thing that you rarely see in the FVN space. Great job!