Up front, no need to apologize for verbosity; I'm thrilled that something we wrote made you feel compelled to share your thoughts about it! Especially because like, a lot of what you said feels very validating and really helps to hear because there are parts of us that are still like not on board with this project whatsoever. I think what you wrote will maybe help them to understand that it has merit.
I wish we could claim perfect intentionality over how it turned out but I think some aspects simply resulted from trying to be honest with ourselves about our experiences and feelings and needs.
[spoilers below for events in the story + authorial intent]
We definitely wanted to humanize Rose (and I do regret not being able to talk more about her history though I already felt the main narrative was too long) because her actions were not the result of some inherent cruelty or wickedness but of being an isolated, overworked, wounded person. Yes, she did bad things, but she was a marginalized person capable of doing good who was outright failed by systems (governmental and family) that abandoned her completely. She had no one to turn to when struggling with raising C--- except, well, C---. And a child in that situation often doesn't know that it's not right for them to be placed in the position of therapist, of maid, of lover. Hell, sometimes the parent doesn't know that either.
And that leads to how the CSA was framed which, like. One of the books we read either just prior to the jam or in the early days of it was Susan Clancy's The Trauma Myth, wherein she argues that trauma is not the primary response children have to that type of experience, it's instead confusion. Now, I can't really vouch for her methodology or results, that's not any of our skillsets, but, well, it resonated with our experience and provided an explanation for why our feelings are less terror and more like, shame, self-loathing, disgust, violation, being irreparably stained. Because C---'s future is that she learns that it was wrong, but she knows that she liked it (and maybe still does!), she knows that she didn't revoke consent, she feels utterly complicit. And she has to grapple with all that, which I guess is kind of the larger shape of this work if you zoom the camera out.
As regards the depiction of CDDs... we really had no idea how that was going to turn out. Like, we certainly wanted to portray it respectfully and naturally, not as a plot device but as an elemental part of Rose's experience and eventually C---'s as well (whether or not she realizes it). And like, we could draw on our own experiences with dissociation and resultant identity fragmentation, and kind of how switching and internal dialogues tend to occur for us now. But we really have a very poor understanding of how and to what extent we experienced it at C---'s ages, and had to do some guesswork along that front. The same goes for Rose's real-world analogue; we knew she had DID (or I guess MPD as it was called at the time) since we were like eight, but what that meant, how she navigated that, what we could to understand and accommodate... what we managed to learn was through experience rather than through any sort of dialogue or explanation. I don't know to what extent she even had the language to make sense of it herself. Which, thinking about how lost we were before we had this like plural framework of self-understanding... that terrifies me. And I think I didn't want Rose to be in that position. She had it hard enough.
I really want to thank you again for your comment. It is validating as an artist and as a person, and I'm joyed to know just how you found it to be human, and it's always nice getting like precise feedback on what worked, and also it spurred me to think more about what we were going for and how we want to try to think about intentionality and executing on a vision going forward. Thank you. And thank you as well to your friend for sharing it. 💖💖💖