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i liked this one, though it left me wanting more. to want that and not get it, though, feels appropriate: both of these women wanted more out of each other, wanted to offer more to each other, but weren't willing to clear their own self-made hurdles to do so. the moment we find them in is a transient one in their lives, but etched more permanently in their memories if nothing else. 

the title drop lands between them like a dead mouse from a cat; a meaningful gift with which nothing meaningful can be done. i hope they figure things out somewhere down the line. 

the only way out is, in fact, through.

live through the horrors of war and manage to live through new horrors because you lived through old ones. live through being misinterpreted, on an existential level, and live through finally learning to interpret yourself at all costs. live through being loved from a distance and live through being loved from the inside out. 

spoilers below:

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i suspected that sasha was telepathic during the spider raid sequence, but learning that she's been telepathic the entire time and simply never knew what to do with what she learned was a gut punch i was wholly unprepared for. it's not a twist in the traditional sense, it doesn't cast the prior events in any new light, only the same light again, overexposed: the discovery that everything the reader knows, and much much more than aliska has allowed herself reflect on, sasha has heard on mental intercom for over a decade.

it's so unique to their circumstances that it becomes impossible to put a label on it, the thing that's been quietly happening inside sasha—it can't be called grooming, and at the same time it's impossible to argue that sasha hasn't been shaped by hearing aliska's thoughts about her. love precipitating at the intersect between what someone has been willing to do for you and what they've been unwilling to act upon.

it's phenomenal. the fact that a happy ending exists for these characters, despite the immense loss both of them have survived before and during the story... i was so relieved it hurt.  deeply earned. 

thank you for writing this, and for writing in general.

you've probably already seen my feelings about "mother, you + i" so to say i'm honored by the fact that you played and enjoyed what is here so far would be an understatement. thank you for sharing your thoughts both here and in the jam server. 

i felt a strong tether reading your entry after writing mine for a lot of reasons, but especially in the way both of us approached mothers and intoxication scenes from different tones but not entirely dissimilar contexts.

as far as the horror, announcing itself like a train horn in the distance: it would also not be untrue to say that dread is the emotion i am most familiar with, and there is both more and less dread forthcoming.

i'm so glad to read that the pieces are clicking, that they're not as disparate as they seemed to me when i wrote them. 

i'm not a visual artist in the least so the backgrounds were a fun experiment for me. when i finish the game i plan on doing a postmortem about the color language in them though.

definitely planning to add more sounds/bgm on the final pass, renpy's sound system eluded me more than anything but i'm putting in the work. 

thank you for the truly lovely sketches, the sonic meme moon made me laugh.
 

i've been staring at the pleasant red-on-rose-red of this page long enough that when i look away, retina-fatigued red cones asleep on the job, the world is briefly, entirely absent of that color. it's an unsettling feeling, to be presented with the all encompassing totality of a color and then look away to find it gone. 

that feels appropriate. physiological epigraph; red-on-rose-red is the inception of C--- itself, rose/red-on-unripe-green the inception of the story, the ripening of C--- the ripening of the story itself. 

i read this, inescapably, from my own perspective, one differently mothered, but which all the same felt mirrored over and over and over in my reading of it. my mother refused to let me out of her sight, even if that meant taking a child into rooms that a child maybe shouldn't be in, where things happened that a child maybe shouldn't see. she was right to worry, she still worries, never having learned that her fears were not unfounded, because it's the sometimes-duty of children to protect their parents, their mothers, from the consequences of their attempts to do well.

(creed for her, nine inch nails for me, jewel for the both of us, steam of too many baths shared, i care about animorphs and she doesn't get it, decibel ache of not-quite-maternal frustration, sharing a dirty mattress in anywhere nowhere texas. knives. drugs. moans.)

C--- and Rosie-Rose-Marie are etched in my heart now, or fit neatly into a spot already shaped like the lives they lead shown here. i feel and understand deeply the lack of moral education C--- has to work with, the way that influences what feels right, what seems wrong. i recognize so much of R---'s anger as squirming under the thumb of societal norms, societal pressure to participate, to serve and serve and serve and never be served except as emotional fast food grist for the lives of others lucky + discourteous enough to carry on functioning while digesting her usefulness for their own nutrition. 

in every way, in every form and shape, everything, is fucked, has been fucked, can only be survived through fucking it up, fucking it out, fucking it apart. it's the only tool in the toolbox of any use. 

this vn manages to make all of them human. i feel a visceral gratefulness at the sheer effort you've made to render them as such, to process the humanity of the people who have failed us as a result of being forever failed by others.

after i read 50 or so other entries, i will be reading more Bernadette Meyer. thank you for writing this.  

context: i've played the main narrative + read the post-mortem ("half-perimortem"), and will be reading the letters over time, to savor them, to stretch out the time i can spend with these recollections. i hope i wrote this respectfully of the plurality of the people involved.

take your time; my entry currently ends in a cliffhanger abruptly before the act where everything is meant to come together. but soon, soon i'll find the time to complete it. all that said: i genuinely welcome any feedback (good or bad) if and when you play it. 

felt. deeply fucking felt. being in the position of either of these characters in any relationship is difficult, but being in a relationship where both parties have mirrored dysphoric problems that won't allow the intimacy they want to express is... first hand, it's enough to make me grind my teeth. a quick punch right where it hurts. succinct in a way i hope i can ever approach in my own writing. thank you for writing this.

LIVE ORDINANCE AHEAD was, in hindsight, not even that metaphorical of a warning. this was a stroll through a psychic minefield, one i took willingly—though speaking of consent...

being faced, even before the story begins, with a forced denial of a plea for the reader to *not* begin this story, AKA explicitly placing the reader in the position of trespasser + witness + voyeur, is a brutally elegant piece of tone setting. i didn't expect anything less from you. 

i won't do a play-by-play but the much remarked-upon furious opening is a breath of fresh air as much as it's the first live mine in the dirt. reading from my thirty-something vantage point, the foreword pierces through to the teen that graduated the year obama was elected + the nowhere girl back in 2016 who was only just beginning to contemplate transition when trump was elected + the woman who broke up with someone (earlier this year) when they refused to drop amazon because the person wanted to "remain practical". 

not that it matters: in the grand scope, i myself am not part of any active solution, just a small piece of grit that barely registers as friction to those in power. the story begins.

the audio work in this thing, especially for it being your first VN, is immaculate. knuckles on window incandescent buzzing cars passing crickets chirping—but when the crickets stopped and the sobbing breaths started, it awed me a little. 

the sense of place, especially for a place you aren't from, feels tangible, rooted, probably aided by at least having a sense of time to moor it all to—the christina grimmie reference didn't pass me by; i was listening to julia nunes back then. 

the 2024 sequence, where Coral weighs her past behavior and past traumas hand-in-hand... being candid: that shit got me. my childhood and teen years are all littered with similar experiences, things that i could sexualize and sometimes do—the bully girls who circled me on bikes that i never learned to ride, etc etc etc—so it hit that much harder when sadie's name reappeared again, in the way that it did.

i'm getting personal here because it's affecting my ability to say unbiased things about the game: when the background from the road trip with sadie (my favorite one) was reused in the segment about the uhaul, talking about the ford motor company, i felt genuinely sick. 

see, i worked at a ford dealership. not in sales, but still: for an entire decade of stagnant nothing, i trudged through the tarry mire of a proto-trump conservative proving ground because it paid better than anything else i could find in my shit town. it ate my soul and stunted me until i finally fled it less than a handful of years ago. it was that or kill myself. 

the a/n at the end was almost too kind (the say anything track was a heady lil throwback), but i felt... well, i don't know if smug was the right word, reading the section on Coral's name. like her namesake, she's an animal of uncertain safety, striking at uncertain prey, in uncertain danger. i identify with her in many ways, unfortunately, and especially in being a kind of snake woman. (before i read this, i revisited "Snake Girl Girlfriend", the twine game you put out in late 2017. cute to see how far you've come, but that one still hits for me too, in its simple way.)

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i'm deep enough in now to say: hi Jade. it's lovely to read more of your writing again. i still need to catch up on Burnouts in Paradise sometime. back in 2022 on twitter, you dmed me because i expressed interest in trying to find some old thread-stories of yours (Vagar, Heating Up) and you shared them with me. those old stories-by-post meant a lot to me, and were... really integral to helping me figure out what kinds of things i wanted to read and ultimately write. there was anger and discomfort and uncertainty in those stories, and i loved seeing those same things here too.

thanks for making Be Normal.

i felt like i was reading the audio-visual equivalent of striated layers of toxic rainbow paint, layer upon layer of distortion that felt exponentially more difficult to look at as it went on, but that felt really apt because the events transpiring inside it ARE hard to look at directly and should feel that way, for the reader and for the character(s), who are trying to observe or remove themselves from observation depending on the scene. 

really long run-on there but this has really inspired me to try getting better at what i think is a strength displayed here: loose-but-coherent, a resilience toward the idea of trying to explain circumstances that can't be explained, only depicted in relative truth. 

(also felt viscerally mirrored multiple times in the smallest but most vivid ways, like talking about cold drinks and their relief, sharing a moment with a key and a door, what constitutes a sign of damage--i could really go on.)

thank you for writing this.

there were parts of this that made me feel seen in ways i didn't expect or predict. even not being plural myself, i was enthralled seeing the dichotomy of the eternal transfem fight-or-flight QTE siloed off across Jess and Alice, and the way Jess pushed against Alice's fear-based boundaries toward an ethically dubious conclusion is really sticking with me for a while. it ends in the only place it could end (without being double the length that it is); i like that we don't get to see the fallout of the choice they made with Ellie. really lovely work.