thank you so much for the kind words! that means a lot to me... i'm glad my presentation and art could inspire you.
on some level i think everyone exists on a spectrum of how Sunny are they on a given day, in a given interaction. a cop gets inserted into every head and if its not policing someone else, its gonna police yourself. the rare glimpses of Sunny questioning herself or having any lucidity were pretty critical otherwise i think she'd be raw cartoonish villain. anyway, had me thinking a lot about times i had been vile to people purely to insist "my" own values on them, and likewise when people had done this to me. certainly in fandom, but definitely not limited to fandom. its everywhere.
yeah... absolutely. i was also vile when i was younger (and less well-adjusted), and that behavior usually stemmed from feelings of a) peer-pressure (if i didn't show my distaste for something vocally, i'm not being critical right!) or b) general anxiety about being seen as 'evil' and 'unsafe' in the fandoms i participated in. i lost quite a few friends over this behavior.
even now, i still have times where i slip into behavior motivated by those feelings — but as i've grown older... i've found myself doing this less and less. i'd like to attribute it to a mixture of mental health management and getting exhausted by the same fandom cycles, but idk what the true answer is.
i agree with your observations on sunny too. i'll talk about this more in my postmortem, but in earlier drafts, she was more of a cartoon villain. if i had more time to finish this game, i would've given her an extra scene or two, where i could establish what she's like on a normal day.
speaking of: the horsehair worm infection & the death of the internal dialog - this was one of the most compelling parts of the story to me and so i was just mulling it over constantly. as a viewer, i walked away wishing that you had done more here, pushed the idea farther, and that disappointment is probably a good thing. anita losing herself in work, and her intuition paying the price is just really riveting.
that's another thing i would've loved to flesh out more, haha. from the get-go, i wanted inner anita to gradually deteriorate over the course of the story. if i had those extra scenes i think i could've given her a slower death — showing how sunny's rhetoric killed her over time.
still thinking about the decision to kill sunny off, and the jaded late-20s twitter thread epilogue. in some ways it feels kind of like a victory lap for Sunny, and is that supposed to be for the reader too? the job at walmart makes sense; the grappling with the optics of having been abused by someone lower down the ladder is cool, but lightly touched on - there's more here to think about? where are the other Sunny's of the world, and how have they impacted Anita - are there rumors accusing Anita being a murderer? is her life being litigated in the public sphere? there's a dead girl - how does the local law feel about it? is there a power fantasy or a sense of justice we're supposed to feel here? i'm not sure how i feel about this way of wrapping things up - i kind of wish that this had been a moment to zoom out rather than zoom in.
yup! while anita made it out alive, sunny won.
i'll confess, the ending was the hardest thing for me to write (both the latter part of the lake scene and anita's final twitter thread.) i would've loved to flesh it out a little more — more of anita divorcing herself from her online friends + followers (of sunny clones lol)... the reactions to sunny's death, and so forth. but the feeling i did want to convey was that there was no justice for anita, or anyone else in her position. to her, quitting online art and working a menial service job was the only way she felt like she could be free from sunny's influence.
thank you once again for playing (and the awesome crits), and i'm glad my game could speak to you!