so i was kind of saving this for a day when i felt gross about what i had made, what i wanted to keep making. having thoughts like "won't this harm other survivors?" "what will people think of me when they see this?" "what if i'm not 'allowed' to write about this?" "what if people decide my coping mechanisms are EVIL?". well today was that day.
up front i think this is a damned fine work. the sfx (both UI and in-game) work pulled me in immediately, the full-screen animations/interstitials looked killer and i think you leveraged them to manage the pace of things well (i wailed when i saw that stage IV was not "adulthood"/"maturity"), and the character art... i am not going to be able to get Sunny's kissy face or creeper face out of my head for a long damn while.
and the story... i'm looking back over my notes and there is a steady deterioration from "observations about technique or salient moments" to "yelling to concur or object" to "screaming at Sunny to go fuck herself, a lot" to "incoherence". so yeah. the proverbial slow-motion trainwreck.
what resonated with me though is (no surprise) the theming. like yes i largely avoided tumblr and was not really a creative up until very recently (and certainly not one of any notoriety), but as a twitter oldhead it was unavoidable, both seeing artists get exploded over being a little "spicy" and watching that behavior percolate down into interactions between fans who would hardly know or effect one another if not for yelling at one another about being problematic. it was tough not to both fear and internalize all that as Anita and Sunny had. to replicate it.
i felt you really explored the power of language and like, expression versus action. how Sunny frames her obviously manipulative and abusive behavior in medicalizing language in order to justify it to herself was just like, ugh. damn. right on the money. how she uses the language of social justice to shut down and box in Anita's expression of tastes, ideas, needs. how she infantilizes Anita and traps her in a daughterwife situation to establish a punishment-reward system, to create dependency (and fear of loss of support), to frame herself as pure and Anita as corrupt even though... just like. any action no matter how awful is fine to Sunny (awesome choice of name btw lol) so long as she can clothe it in a warped rhetoric that frames it as "good, actually". god damn. you nailed it. like you said in the afterword, i got no idea if this will change anything, but it does give people a language with which to recognize and reject abuse cloaked as purity and other such misused ideas.
also some of the particularities of Anita's imprisonment, well, sniped me from 800 yards away. god. the kissing rule. her breath. revolting. (lmao i'm going through the comments and of course this got everyone. as gross as it was, it was really the infantilization that horrified me. you really nailed what is so terrifying about being someone's uwu precious smol bean in need of a little fixing and healing come on i'll just put you in this little cup don't you like the holes i poked in it for you here eat my favorite leaves we'll be together forever :) :) :) )
also, fucking, god. i'm sorry you were able to depict so well such an utterly terrifying obsessive manipulative abusive fan/collaborator. god damn. god damn.
thank you for making this. i really did need to read this today.