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Oh. Oh god this is something. I'm crying like a fountain and I just had electrolysis this morning so it really sucks. But it's ok. After all that hurt for Rose, all that, I didn't ever think it would let me see how normal it is to want the impossible. That it's not wrong to want, even if it's impossible. It doesn't have to be possible. It doesn't have to have an answer. No matter how many steps I take I still feel every moment that fear and that need to know and even worse the fear that I don't know. 

But it's ok. 

They're ok. 

We're ok. 

Thank you. 

Buzz cut ending too, I just...something smelled right when that choice came up. You did an amazing job at capturing that seething feeling of being trapped under a spotlight and being expected to explain yourself. To fit their ideas, to be one of the 'good ones'. 

It just hits hard and hits close, I still claw at the rarified feminine idea but sometimes I rage and hit and spit at it, at the daft pile of performative rubble I'm supposed to climb. When my resolve breaks and I'm shaving my legs at midnight because it's going to be hot the next day and as much as I think that entire exercise is pure fucking bullshit, I can't stand the thought of carrying that masculine signal with me. Trying to negotiate my existence between the 'bite me' feminist who could burn it down and the 'headpats please' trans girl who just wants to be.

This is, this is way, way too real. This is amazing. Thank you. 

I...the feels. I sat down to binge the whole thing, and, I, my head, it is asplode. I mean, Lucy & 01 is one thing, but, they're all so finding something. How do robots all broadcast body issues? Why is it I want to slap 02 upside the head, but, go to pieces when I see how much her body looks like mine? Plump and vulnerable?

And Damien, you...you insufferable anime nerd. Bless you. 

Sophie, I hope you're doing okay, I'm sorry, the last few years have been just so hard for everyone. Thank you for making Spare Parts, no matter what happens we've all got four special little robots and one derpy girl in our hearts from here on out. Hang tight. 

I am definitely never looking at chocolate the same way again.

Finally! Someone listened to the cat! (This is terribly, terribly adorable and I was so happy to help Fish Man and Polite Man, but also to eat fish, that is the important part)

I just finished my first ending today, after binging pretty hard over the holidays and, the ups and downs, so much wonder and happiness, trial and tribulation, and just, pure tear-jerking moments of blubbering. 

Everything about this VN is so fantastic, the artwork, sound direction, the voicework, are all just so well done and the writing is a masterful piece of good ol' emotional manipulation, in a good way.

Thank you all for the love and hard work you've poured into this, it shows. 

Wow I uh. I think I sorta suspected where it might go but I played through. It’s…real, it’s very real. Real enough to remind me of my early forays and how blisteringly much it hurt to feel, well, used. It took me a while to figure out I can’t do casual hookups and they always blew up into usually one-sided emotional involvement. To the point I sorta consider myself kinda aspec, I just can’t operate in that territory. 

I wish I’d been able to put myself back together the way Dear Deer did, if he is back together that is. 

And I mean this is all aside from it generally being adorable and well put together. It’s just, yow, a megaphone of emotions. 

Please, don't be. Sometimes art has to be a punch in the gut. Thank you for finding the courage to make something so nakedly gutwrenching.

Duchess Potato is screaming 'No!' mutely at the screen, tears pouring down their face. 

Thank you so much, it was so, so wonderful. I loved the original and the expanded story, their triumphs and their struggles, and, yeah, there was giggling, crying, and being so happy for these characters. I love them all. Thank you bringing them back to keep telling their stories. 

This was so serene and sweet, thank you!

Well damn, I was ready to reach through the screen and beg her to go on and live her life without me. 

I, uh, yow. If 'crushing empathy' wasn't a feel before, it is now. 

Quality work...thx!

Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!

Touching, lifechanging, insightful and so damn beautiful. Life changer. 

Queer life angst, insecurity, mortality, meaning, meaninglessness, the works. It's like a massage for your soul, you'll sob but it's a good sobbing. 

Touching, lifechanging, insightful and so damn beautiful. Life changer. 

It ripped me apart in the same way, I saw the meaninglessness of how much I worry and fret and try to control my presentation and be 'the right gender' when...when I doesn't matter. It doesn't matter at all. In the face of mortality and love it doesn't matter. 

Be queer, live life. It's all we have. 

This one is filed under 'life changing games'.

It's the magic of the internet, Where Queers go to Cry™

But thank you again, I...can't imagine how vulnerable and open you had to be to put the kinds of emotions into this that you found a way to. You did an amazing thing and you should be so proud. I'm so proud of you, knowing now you were on the cusp of not releasing this. But you did. Just existing as a queer person is an effort, baring your soul as one, something else. I hope you celebrate your achievement here, even if just by existing. Please enjoy a delicious bowl of ramen/slice of pizza/pile of sushi/indulgent food of your choice in celebration. :)

I...thought I would hate this. I thought my skin would crawl. I'm an early 40's  transfemme demi mess, I've been out like, I dunno, 3  years? 4? I don't know if I lost count for good or for ill. 

Normally I don't...want to subject myself to the hookup narrative, it's so antithetical to who I finally figured out I am. I find it so hard to bear feeling like someone who doesn't the mold of what we're supposed to be like. 

I'm fat, I hope desperately to pass for a woman but it's not just a struggle, it's a Sisyphean hell. Which some days I wish I could just not give a fuck about.  You put together two characters more beautiful than I'll ever be, in ways I can never imagine and speaking words I don't think I could ever say. 

I'm starting a business, I'm leaving behind 18 years with a firm who's like family because it's winding down. I'm feeling stripped naked in front of banks, landlords, showing off business plans, receivables, projections, and feeling afraid and judged and so at the mercy of forces utterly beyond my control yet silently judging the entirety of my life up until now. 

And I am fucking flat out sobbing at this. I am bawling my eyes out. I am uglycrying, there is snot pouring from my nose. 

I don't know how you did this, but, you packed up every scrap of vulnerability, fear, self consciousness, need, repression, isolation,  joy, sadness, connectedness, every conflicted confusing conflated emotion I've had about being queer, about existing, ever, and put it into this.

So kudos, congrats, anything else I can say feels cheap at this point. You reached through the internet and took a scalpel to the scar tissue of my soul and even if I never play this again,  I will never forget it. 

Thank you. 

Well, I'm gonna go cry in the bath now. 

Cassandra 4 life! Gimme my silver fox!

Ow, mah feels.

I'm quietly shaking after reading this. I'm a fat transwoman, who transitioned at 42 and I struggle every moment with being a 'good enough woman', even more so when I drag being fat into it. 

Despite looking in the opposite direction to Primrose...the view is the same. Looking vainly towards this far off thing called 'Woman' that we can't ever reach. I want to be that woman, I want to feel that I'm normal and beautiful and I'm failing if I don't, while Primose thinks she should be that woman, as is expected of her, as she is seen. 

You made Primrose into such a beautiful person it was like a transcendence of this awful spectre of gender expectations, just for a moment. 

Thank you for bringing Primrose's story to life. Please hold Primrose in your heart with love for the rest of time, for all of us. 

That was ludicrously adorable. Thanks!

This...makes me feel rain, in my heart.

A story of love that starts in the head and then the heart can only follow. It's adorable, and brilliant. Thank you.

Well...that's somewhere between soulcrushing and beautiful. Thank you.

This was quite deliriously adorable. Best pumpkin witchling evar. 

Tsatoru is best tsundere! So cuuuute. 

That...was really freakin' cute.

Mozzy 4 life. Always behind moth rep. 

Pure, sweet, happy squishiness. Aside from being adorable, and adorable, and romantic, and adorable, did I say adorable? Just checking...

But I also really love the sound design, how the rain changes when you open the umbrella, such a nice atmospheric touch. Thank you!

A jawdropping queer headfuck (literally), my occasional guilty pleasure when I'm in the mood. Every route is fun and even on replays I find enough branches to keep them interesting. And frankly, could you please have made Robyn less gorgeous? Dammnit...

Push button, receive feels. Thank you. I mean I'm crying, but, thank you. 

Adorable and heartbreaking. 

This was so sweet, I wish there was more. The sewing part was the hardest, I kept stomping around for a foot pedal that wasn't there when I wanted to turn a corner. 

The graphics are beautiful, the outfits are so gorgeous and playful and the stories are short but adorable. I totally burst into tears at the last one. This is really special and playful and happy.

Thank you for making this. 

Yeah I uh, not to derail and air a whole pile of TMI but, well. Prior to transition I didn't have a huge sex drive, didn't really partner up at all and just 'dealt with it' when it became a nuisance. One of the things I actually felt really divorced from masculinity about was the relentless pursuit of sex, I never understood why people put so much effort into chasing it, at all.  So, months into HRT and between the E and the Spiro the limited sex drive I had really went away and, oddly, I found I didn't really miss it. Which started me wondering if there was a piece I was missing?

Then as my E levels climbed, and I started crying at everything, and blah blah, I found things kicked back in, not so much sexually but I turned into a completely shameless sponge for gooey romance. Discovered via a sudden need to consume slow-burn/fluff fanfic, and any interest in being erotic suddenly turned into a yearning for emotional connection. That this also dovetailed with my orientation doing 360 burnouts in the parking lot, well it didn't help, as it would be 'hella lesbian' on Tuesday followed by 'Okay pretty bi' by Friday, and back again. 

I think nuking away the masculinity that I really struggled with also let me peel away the expectation of being capable of sex without significant emotional attachments, I mean, the few partners I had (as an ostensibly gay AMAB) tended to tell me I was 'clingy' when in retrospect, I feel I wanted more emotional availability that I was capable of getting from them. 

So now everything seems to hinge on my ability to connect with someone before any real sense of wanting to go further kicks in, and it's been hard to stand by that when so often there's this expectation of hookup first, lovey-dovey later when I seem primed to run the opposite direction, as in, cuddle-me-until-I-cry and then I might jump your bones. 

Then doing this all in middle age (43 now) is just, icing on the cake. Somedays...oy. 

But to the point, really after this long winded spiel, is maybe I wasn't allo to begin with and finding more comfort with my existence seemed to let me see what I really wanted. I honestly wonder, too, if walking away from performative masculinity also let me open up to the idea that I didn't need to be 'capable' of completely allosexual performance because while men are expected to be romantic, it's within a somewhat, to me, narrow range of performances. Men lust, women pine, is sort of how I would characterize it, at least, what I internalized. 

Then even within queer spaces, there's sometimes such an undercurrent of sex-as-liberation or as a transgressive performance or what-have-you, and that's not to say I'm not sex-positive, I'm just, positive it doesn't actually matter if you do or don't and sometimes I wish that there would be more inclusive in queer discussions where ace/demi voices are too often either sidelined as 'well you're just repressed' or worse, just ignored as one more roadbump on the highway to aspirational normativity. 

Anyway it's been a freakin' weird mix of learning and un-learning. 

Christ sorry for the essay, thanks for responding and, yeah, again, thanks for putting that piece out there because it is super, super relatable. and vulnerable and just really nice to see. 

This totally hit me in the feels because I feel...I think, the exact same. Transitioning turned my sexuality inside out, and it wasn't just who I was attracted to but how I was attracted. When I identified as AMAB I always had a difficult time relating to the instant-hit-it-off-let's-go-jump-in-bed-use-too-many-hyphens school of relationships, and wrote it off as me being, well...just uptight. 

But becoming myself, if it's the hormones or the reflection, it's...been so much clearer that I'm hugely romantic and I absolutely need that emotional connection, and it's not being a prude, and it's not something to be ashamed of. It's just hard as even talking about demi, or ace, or just acespec identities in general is something that makes most people's heads go 'bork?'. 

Still...thank you for putting this out there. It means a lot. Thanks.

Okay I need to stop playing this late into the night but it's sucking me in like nothing else has in ages. There's so, so, so much in here that's speaking to me. and not to spoil, but, Lucy and 03, out shopping, straight punch to the gut. That could not have hit closer to home, and, it took a lot of guts to write. So uh, thanks. It's beautiful, they're all beautiful. *cries like a gay robot*

Ok that was frustrating but...worth it because those two are so, god, damned, cute. It's not fair. I wanna adorbs star GF!!

The gay robots are back! Today is a good day.