This was the first of over 50 vns i've read this past month that made me cry.
spoilers below-----------------------------------------
The turns the story takes are so insidious and breath-catching. So eye opening to see witness the ways both characters covet Chrys.
In spite of the circumstances, Stephanie and Chrys's relationship came across to me as genuinely sweet. It first soured to me when she saw through Hellen's ruse; the way she degraded Hellen's femininity, her dress, her makeup, everything she had previously internally praised under the guise of it being directed at a trans woman was suddenly regarded with disdain. The line where she asked if the friend was envious or jealous was so haunting in retrospect.
Such a fantastic job portraying trans women as the women of women; targets for both disdain as lesser or imitations of the feminine, of women, and sex objects to be possessed and owned. Finally, someone I, as a woman, can treat like men treat me.
I've been coveted in this way most notably by a former partner, and my father. The partner was bisexual, but lamented that she went from dating "one of the good ones (men)" to just dating a woman. She was affirming, but still expected things of me as though I was a man, and made my life a living hell when we split. Stephanie's cancellation of Hellen following her discovery stung; I wonder how she might have behaved if Chrys had rejected her. My dad's coveting of me manifested as a sudden shift to try to control me; to possess what he felt he was losing. My (his) agency over me (his son); things like my (his) masculinity being threatened, my shirking of my expected duties as the only vector of paternal lineage on his side of the family.
The ending fucked me up so much because I came close killing myself as Chrys did, and would have if I had been a bit younger, a bit less independent, a bit more vulnerable. It's so fucked that it's the cis women who get to persist; who get to have this bitter "happy ending," who get to keep raping Chrys's memory after she died by their hands, after she died for their sins.
Absolutely blood curdling that we will never know what Chrys was actually like. We only have the self-serving accounts of people who coveted her, envied her, were jealous of her too much to ever love her. We only hear Chrys's story from the people with her blood on their hands.