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This performance absolutely blew me away.

The parallax of the theater seats is so cool! The myriad ways we are signalled as to which character is speaking was so natural and at the same time so mesmerizing. The art direction is so focused and well-defined and PRETTY! I love all the little details, the text imperfectly printed on theater pamphlets, the ways the stage dances around itself, the overwhelming amount of beautiful setpieces that y'all made for this, sometimes to only be seen for the blink of an eye.

Just before playing this, I was actually thinking a lot about set design for my next game, specifically on how The Adolescence of Utena, as well as the full series moves things around. This performance confirmed for me that all those things and more can be done with renpy, and I'm looking forward to digging through this thing's guts to see how it was all done. 

I barely think I'll be able to scratch the surface on how much I loved the writing. To start, the wordplay is out of this world. The title alone, "Moth X Flame," being the roles of the characters AND descriptive of the the theming and narrative is genius. I loved the monologues exploring plurality, gender, sexuality, aberration-as-disease, medicalization of the human experience, interpersonal relations as related to blood, conformity, monogamy, and rejection of the self. I was especially impacted by the scene about the self-pruning bonsai, due to my own experiences of being coerced into trimming away parts of myself for others.

I have a penchant for speaking and writing in an odd theatric fashion, and often suppress it for the sake of being treated as human. This play opened my eyes to how much of myself I am discarding by denying myself the bacchanal ecstasy of theatrics.