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Holy fuck, this was distressing. I need a cigarette. I need a nap. I need a fresh wound. I need to gut something.

I feel like this is probably just saying what has already been said but this was overwhelming in its rawness and brutality, very evocatively illustrated, had absolutely zero dull moments. I am going to be thinking about this one for a very long time. Thank you 100 times for making this. (i also picked down)

Also, shouts out to Dorian. What a fucking legend.

this was lovely, both the poetry and the photography! i loved the rumination on yous or rather YOUs, the YOU of any particular work is always interesting to explore. well done!!!

this kicked ass and i'm excited to give it a reread in short order. you like took the feeling of "like seriously what is the fucking point of like having experiences and feelings and wounds and trying to what sculpt them into some sort of work that is also a knife that is also a key? when the world is the fucking world???" which, god, and you crumpled it up into a little ball and rammed it down my throat and i thank you for it

also your prose is killer, also Like Eating Glass came up in a poem we wrote recently so that's a neat bit of synchronicity, also i really dig that you went about fitting it to a younger generation. i think i fear (maybe irrationally) i'm going to be telling stories that feel irrelevant because they are set in like 2005 or whatever and it's like "how the hell could that even map onto things now"

This was sharp! And painful. Thank you for making it.

Something that really disappointed me when I returned to college is that the spaces I had left behind a decade prior were still as white as they had been. And it was clear in a lot of situations that the Asian and black students that were present didn't really feel comfortable participating, and given the environment, why would they?

yeahhh i have a person in my history who is analogous to abby's mom, and i intend to write about him someday, and it's like... i know it's going to be really tough to even vaguely humanize him when, well, i'd rather paint him with a revolver than a pen. so i might have to vent some of those feelings first :) but that's all to say, i'd be curious to see what you expand on (since i also like your blorbos)

abby is really freakin' cuuute... it was heartwarming seeing the effect nora's patience had on her :)

Up front, no need to apologize for verbosity; I'm thrilled that something we wrote made you feel compelled to share your thoughts about it! Especially because like, a lot of what you said feels very validating and really helps to hear because there are parts of us that are still like not on board with this project whatsoever. I think what you wrote will maybe help them to understand that it has merit.

I wish we could claim perfect intentionality over how it turned out but I think some aspects simply resulted from trying to be honest with ourselves about our experiences and feelings and needs.

[spoilers below for events in the story + authorial intent]

We definitely wanted to humanize Rose (and I do regret not being able to talk more about her history though I already felt the main narrative was too long) because her actions were not the result of some inherent cruelty or wickedness but of being an isolated, overworked, wounded person. Yes, she did bad things, but she was a marginalized person capable of doing good who was outright failed by systems (governmental and family) that abandoned her completely. She had no one to turn to when struggling with raising C--- except, well, C---. And a child in that situation often doesn't know that it's not right for them to be placed in the position of therapist, of maid, of lover. Hell, sometimes the parent doesn't know that either.

And that leads to how the CSA was framed which, like. One of the books we read either just prior to the jam or in the early days of it was Susan Clancy's The Trauma Myth, wherein she argues that trauma is not the primary response children have to that type of experience, it's instead confusion. Now, I can't really vouch for her methodology or results, that's not any of our skillsets, but, well, it resonated with our experience and provided an explanation for why our feelings are less terror and more like, shame, self-loathing, disgust, violation, being irreparably stained. Because C---'s future is that she learns that it was wrong, but she knows that she liked it (and maybe still does!), she knows that she didn't revoke consent, she feels utterly complicit. And she has to grapple with all that, which I guess is kind of the larger shape of this work if you zoom the camera out.

As regards the depiction of CDDs... we really had no idea how that was going to turn out. Like, we certainly wanted to portray it respectfully and naturally, not as a plot device but as an elemental part of Rose's experience and eventually C---'s as well (whether or not she realizes it). And like, we could draw on our own experiences with dissociation and resultant identity fragmentation, and kind of how switching and internal dialogues tend to occur for us now. But we really have a very poor understanding of how and to what extent we experienced it at C---'s ages, and had to do some guesswork along that front. The same goes for Rose's real-world analogue; we knew she had DID (or I guess MPD as it was called at the time) since we were like eight, but what that meant, how she navigated that, what we could to understand and accommodate... what we managed to learn was through experience rather than through any sort of dialogue or explanation. I don't know to what extent she even had the language to make sense of it herself. Which, thinking about how lost we were before we had this like plural framework of self-understanding... that terrifies me. And I think I didn't want Rose to be in that position. She had it hard enough.

I really want to thank you again for your comment. It is validating as an artist and as a person, and I'm joyed to know just how you found it to be human, and it's always nice getting like precise feedback on what worked, and also it spurred me to think more about what we were going for and how we want to try to think about intentionality and executing on a vision going forward. Thank you. And thank you as well to your friend for sharing it. 💖💖💖

I'm really glad you liked it and found it so moving! And, god, I'm glad the final scene worked for you and others, because it really was supposed to be something else, and I felt what I did instead was just going to fall flat.

But yeah I like writing internal feelings a lot (whether that's in the emotional or mental or physical realm) because they occur in this physical place that exists but because it's filtered through the brain and the mind, you have the freedom to write about it in metaphor, in image, in strange or idiosyncratic ways.

Also I'm really really happy that you read the letters! It felt like so much to ask of anyone and I was not sure about their inclusion at all until after spending weeks writing them and being like, damn, I think these all gotta go in.

also fuck i miss my bass guitar

i loved this! really well-rounded audiovisuals; this was pretty to look at and hear, and the scenario and dialogue were very solid. i was super bummed when jess went off ;(

also like. i still remember the first time z—— (god help me if she gets ideas from this) felt me up (thankfully she didn't quite drop me...) while i was mid-conversation with someone and it was... a mortifying experience. but i think seeing jess' behavior here makes me feel less weird about it somehow? idk! but thank you so much for making this. 🙏

agreed, those panel-breaking CGs really stood out quite remarkably, probably my favorite of many lovely visual flourishes!

this was super cool!!! i find Louisa intensely relatable, particularly in the moment where Wulfwynn challenges her to just walk out, noting that she's perfectly capable of sustaining herself without being tied to a man, and Louisa shuts this line of thought down because she is certain that no matter what, her father will close off all exits to her... being ruled by that fear of a heartless man's power (founded or unfounded) is a brutal experience, and i think you perfectly captured it.

this was beautiful, fascinating, and just plain satisfying. well done!!!

I'm very fond of Lady Grizraz (she's my type, lol). Do you intend to use sound effects or music later? I think that would help flesh it out further, especially if the story is going to be told mostly from Cecilia's perspective.

Thank you! Yeah I uh, it's a bit of a hot potato under that swaddle; hold on tight! I love when a work makes me feel lucky to read it; I'm happy I could give that feeling to another.

Thank you! I had no idea how this was going to be received, so I'm really happy to hear you found it resonant. 🤝

ohhh this was good and unsettling! i got really unnerved reading through the description of neglect. i'd like to reread this sometime and think further about like, what my art means to me and what i am hoping to get out of making it.

happened to read this on a day where i almost screamed at my therapist for like insinuating that the best thing i can do with my life is continue to live it for the sake of other people and then i played this and. god. talk about being kicked while i'm down. i hope one day Leslie gets to be someone who isn't Leslie. 

i loved the effect you used for the backgrounds and thought they looked great in greyscale! unfortunately i found monochrome text on greyscale difficult to read, but that's hardly a dealbreaker. ok time to attack lily :)

i'm hesitant to comment since i only reached one ending thus far but:

i really really liked this! the animations get you revved up for the next chapter, and Laura being visually represented by her eyes looked cool as hell, and also i think she's kinda awesome and relatableeeee *twists a lock of hair around my finger*

i'm excited to come back to this and check out the other endings. i thought the "fill in the blank" choices were interesting to subject the player to, and also hell yeah author notes. i crammed a lot of author notes of a kind into my game and i think it's cool to get a look behind the curtain (+ to get to see the various influences)

well done!!!

i really liked the bgs! both the art and the interesting polygonal effect!! 💖

"do you have to call it that every time" yea

thanks for this i think something i struggle with is an obsessive need to be legible even if that comes at the cost of the reality of my experience

whew, those endings got me good, especially the latter one... weaponized self-loathing is so brutal, so grotesque... i think you captured that very evocatively! 🙏😢

this fucking kicks ass!!! vivid verbally and visually! excited to see the rest of nicoletta's ordeals and yes nyd is an absolute baddie 🙏

I'd been trying to read things in submission order, but I knew that once this released I'd want to drop everything else and check this. I was not disappointed. I also did not expect a disastrous trip to visit one's girlfriend in Boston wherein she worked most of the time and very little romantic or physical interaction actually occurred that so closely mirrored my own such experience. Lmfao.

And of course this is not simply an audiovisual delight (which I found very soothing, which is good because I needed soothing), but scripted and delivered brilliantly.

[minor spoilers below the cut]

What really stands out to me on a first read is the deft layering of circumstances and perspectives to enable each of them to kind of speak about and reflect off one another. Like, the strike of '94 and scorekeeping and Boston + Montreal and the AIDS crisis and of course Ys and Yamos are not set dressing, but people and phenomena and contexts that have meaningful things to reveal about one another and about things at large. I will be studying this.

This was really cool! I loved the sleekness of the visual design and getting to see different facets of Jana over the course of the playthrough. Does make me want to take my as neededs... :)

god, the shit one puts up with for someone smoking hot. i'm going to scream at a wall now

this was a fascinating idea and i think you delivered brilliantly on it!! you really captured the struggle of grasping, then confronting, elusive memories from childhood, and the farcical nature of roleplay when the participants are not quite connecting. this was awesome!!

i can see why this came up again and again in the fluxer. god this is fucking bleak and yet comic. thank you for writing it, i need to go smoke now. you absolutely nailed this... good grades / 10

harrowing!!! and so tender... 💖

your art is evocative and pleasant and/or distressing to look at! i think it was really effective at conveying Kristel's inner turbulence. as much as i feel for her (also an only child of a single parent who was forced to grow up immediately, lol), i can't help but feel worst of all for Chasity... who will care for her? ;(

this was super super beautiful and stylish! well done!

that it happened to dredge up old memories of a complicated relationship i had with another girl who would make out with me at parties was an unexpected surprise. god i miss her lmao

i don't know why but this just felt chill as fuck. immaculate vibes. rich with personality. and just damn weird. A+

very well-executed bleak snippet of the flow of social isolation -> self-isolation. sad but lovely ;(

this was really fun! i love the character designs <3

something i've been trying to figure out lately is how to write the experience of waiting, waiting, waiting, nothing, nothing, nothing, and the kind of horror and unease it can impart. i think you took a really interesting approach to it and it resulted in something quite disturbing! also i'm in love with your art style. this was rad!!!

This fucking whipped. Pleasingly harsh audiovisuals. Uncomfortable interaction. Loved how you jarred the conversation by layering in moments of internal dialogue. Era cracked me right up. Nice 'n' sharp.

this is gorgeous! the title cards are striking, and i love the personality of the chibi-style character sprites, and the backgrounds really reinforce the moods of the scenes. deeply unsettling, too, and sudden. like a machete :)

(also the music kicks ass!!!) 

this was lovely! i especially loved the background art, which was super pleasing to look at <3

this was really rad! and i genuinely got freaked out; i did not know you could do that in renpy, lol. i especially liked Emile's design, she's lovely 🙏

i loved the pressure scene... i cheered