thank you for playing!!! i'm glad my game could leave an impact on you...
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.
yeah, i was there too... i am a tumblr vet, but a lot of what happened in ckofntac was based off of how twitter fandom culture rapidly changed into mid-2010s tumblr fandom culture after the great porn ban migration. not to say that that behavior... wasn't there before, but it got so much worse after the migration. i internalized a lot of that behavior as a teen/young adult.
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.
yeah, yeah... glad you caught that. even now, i see a lot of people in fandom/adjacent spaces justifying their abuse towards someone else using social justice/medical-adjacent language, and it leaves me very unwell... like, every time i see a callout post (or adjacent) with a "do not harass this person" at the front i'm like "i'd hate to say this, but by making this post you are automatically inviting harassment onto someone."
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.
yup. at the end of the day i just want this work to help people to recognize this behavior for what it is: harassment and abuse.
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 :) :) :) )
yeah that was the stuff that scared me most too. i'm glad everyone found sunny's lack of hygiene revolting, but the infantilization is what truly felt like the worst. being seen as a "cute lil baby/wife who doesn't know any better" is suffocating.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.
yeah... :') i won't speak too much on it (though her abuse never got as vile as sunny's did), but as i mentioned in the afterword... everything that anita says about bluet (to inner anita) is real, and happened to me.thank you for playing. and fwiw i think your work for this jam was harrowing and beautiful — in the way that it captured the complex emotions and pain that came with the experiences you had.