This put a big smile on my face. I loved the design of Lydia and Lilac Vi, and the environments as well; in terms of visuals, I found everything very human. The story was interesting, too! Lydia's hypocrisy was frustrating and tragic, and there were a lot of little details that conveyed the pain of feeling completely owned by your creator that really just made me want to reach through the screen and wring Lydia's neck.
I also appreciated that y'all included an afterword! I used to skip those as a kid, but I have come to appreciate them deeply, and I am glad I'm not alone in feeling that way.
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[spoilers]
And as such, I found the ending appropriately cathartic. Both in Vi's articulation of her feelings, her pain, her selfhood... and the love that she did have for Lydia, her need to exist, and to exist with her mother. I was able to process some feelings about my mother through putting together my jam entry, and I hope this was also healing for y'all to create.
Also, this was a weird bit of wish fulfillment in a way. In January, I wrote a VN about a motherly engineer who after much labor brings a daughter into the world, in the body of a mostly ceramic human-sized doll. The daughter, depending on how you read the story, is named... Lilac. (My jaw dropped when I got the option to choose that name here!) I would say they have a much healthier relationship than Lydia and Vi, and the story is more about grief and tenacity, but like M0ther//B04rd it is also about learning how to inhabit a body, about developing one's own identity.
So, that similarity was already really neat, but what's funny is I had eventually wanted to write an alternate version of that story in which their relationship was more like that of Lydia and Vi; that is, more human-and-device, more "I created you and I can destroy you", more physically and sexually invasive. Basically, something that works with the themes present in M0ther//B04rd.
Just to be clear, I'm not in any way alleging plagiarism, because I am sure this is just synchronicity. Instead, I'm super stoked that y'all created a unique and lovely VN that happens to also scratch a very particular itch I've been having this year. I loved this! Thank you for making it!!!