LIVE ORDINANCE AHEAD was, in hindsight, not even that metaphorical of a warning. this was a stroll through a psychic minefield, one i took willingly—though speaking of consent...
being faced, even before the story begins, with a forced denial of a plea for the reader to *not* begin this story, AKA explicitly placing the reader in the position of trespasser + witness + voyeur, is a brutally elegant piece of tone setting. i didn't expect anything less from you.
i won't do a play-by-play but the much remarked-upon furious opening is a breath of fresh air as much as it's the first live mine in the dirt. reading from my thirty-something vantage point, the foreword pierces through to the teen that graduated the year obama was elected + the nowhere girl back in 2016 who was only just beginning to contemplate transition when trump was elected + the woman who broke up with someone (earlier this year) when they refused to drop amazon because the person wanted to "remain practical".
not that it matters: in the grand scope, i myself am not part of any active solution, just a small piece of grit that barely registers as friction to those in power. the story begins.
the audio work in this thing, especially for it being your first VN, is immaculate. knuckles on window incandescent buzzing cars passing crickets chirping—but when the crickets stopped and the sobbing breaths started, it awed me a little.
the sense of place, especially for a place you aren't from, feels tangible, rooted, probably aided by at least having a sense of time to moor it all to—the christina grimmie reference didn't pass me by; i was listening to julia nunes back then.
the 2024 sequence, where Coral weighs her past behavior and past traumas hand-in-hand... being candid: that shit got me. my childhood and teen years are all littered with similar experiences, things that i could sexualize and sometimes do—the bully girls who circled me on bikes that i never learned to ride, etc etc etc—so it hit that much harder when sadie's name reappeared again, in the way that it did.
i'm getting personal here because it's affecting my ability to say unbiased things about the game: when the background from the road trip with sadie (my favorite one) was reused in the segment about the uhaul, talking about the ford motor company, i felt genuinely sick.
see, i worked at a ford dealership. not in sales, but still: for an entire decade of stagnant nothing, i trudged through the tarry mire of a proto-trump conservative proving ground because it paid better than anything else i could find in my shit town. it ate my soul and stunted me until i finally fled it less than a handful of years ago. it was that or kill myself.
the a/n at the end was almost too kind (the say anything track was a heady lil throwback), but i felt... well, i don't know if smug was the right word, reading the section on Coral's name. like her namesake, she's an animal of uncertain safety, striking at uncertain prey, in uncertain danger. i identify with her in many ways, unfortunately, and especially in being a kind of snake woman. (before i read this, i revisited "Snake Girl Girlfriend", the twine game you put out in late 2017. cute to see how far you've come, but that one still hits for me too, in its simple way.)
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i'm deep enough in now to say: hi Jade. it's lovely to read more of your writing again. i still need to catch up on Burnouts in Paradise sometime. back in 2022 on twitter, you dmed me because i expressed interest in trying to find some old thread-stories of yours (Vagar, Heating Up) and you shared them with me. those old stories-by-post meant a lot to me, and were... really integral to helping me figure out what kinds of things i wanted to read and ultimately write. there was anger and discomfort and uncertainty in those stories, and i loved seeing those same things here too.
thanks for making Be Normal.