I really loved everything about this one. Makes me wish that more games like this existed <3
frangelic
Recent community posts
I'm 32, and the thing that really struck me about this game was - I knew people just like Andy, just like Jenni and Laguna, just like prplsqrl, just like Sam. Some people who would offer unconditional support despite never having met me, and some people I knew in real life who would never understand who I was. This game reminds me of being a young gender confused nerd spending my time on the webtv anime chatroom, making friends with strangers online who I felt closer to than my own family. The kind of intimate detachment of AIM chats allowed for some of the most formative conversations of my life to happen in that setting. It would be really hard to explain it to someone who never experienced that internet, but this game captures the feelings I had in that time perfectly. It would be misleading to say the internet used to be better, because it still had a lot of terrible stuff on it, but it used to feel smaller, weirder, and more personal.
This game gives me this sense of bittersweet nostalgia for lost youth. I definitely don't want to BE the person I was in the past, but I miss certain things about them and that time. The uncertainty of looking to the future with a sense of mingled dread and longing. A lot of nebulous, nameless longing, that came in intense waves, that seems very specific to the experience of a young gender nonconforming person. I still feel that way sometimes, but it's never as intense as when you're young. Being extremely uncertain that you belong as an inhabitant of the world.
it taps into the reason why Sailor Moon was so appealing to someone like me when I was young. It's a fantasy of being a normal girl who gets swept into a life of fantastic, beautiful, dramatic adventure. The personalities and everyday flaws of the scouts made it seem like any normal girl could become one. But really, the fantasy that made me obsess over Sailor Moon when I was young was simpler - the fantasy of being a normal young girl, not trapped in a weird body I didn't necessarily want, not trapped under the weight of the traits expected of me as a boy. expected of me both by others and myself, which is what makes it doubly hard. the voice in your own mind telling you you're doing it wrong.
Thanks for making this game.