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Hi, I appreciate the honesty of this post-mortem a lot! I had a similar feeling about the waning toxicity of this story... Fluffy happy endings are lovely, but they can feel a little hollow. I too would've loved to see it be a little murkier, a little less of an unambiguously happy ending, but it was still a very enjoyable work in the end.

Also, as someone on the predatory/dominant end of the high trauma broken girl scale, I did super super appreciate Mill feeling like a real character with internal agency and desires instead of the oh-so-common dommy mommy kink dispenser! She felt very grounded and real, though I would've loved to see her get to fulfil her more violent desires - fair enough that it didn't end up making the deadline tho haha. Good story overall, and the vibe established with the various artistic elements was fantastic!

This was absolutely amazing. Horrible and raw and painful and beautiful and grounded and real in all the best ways, which only makes the occasional surreal moments hit all the harder for it, forcing you to resolve what the fuck it all means rather than just passively reading. 

(editing in a longer one from discord now i'm less of a mess in the immediate aftermath lol)

I came to write this after being moved to tears many many many many times by LONER_DOG and felt the need to like, express my absolute unadulterated love for it. There's a beautifully brutally honest way it shows these absolute fucking disasters making mistake after painful mistake that just... It feels so raw and horribly true to the lives of myself and other traumatised queers around me.

I often get called a miserable edgelord or whatever, with certain spheres of the greater queer community disparaging the fact that i can't get myself to deeply engage with innocent wholesome fluffy works of art. This is one of those pieces that shows exactly why I can't immerse myself in works like that, because when have our lives ever not been messy and unfair? What honest depiction of queer joy and love could possibly be complete without showing the pain and struggle that defines so much of our lives? To sanitise our existence is to diminish that joy and glory, cheapen it by making it look so damn easy and to make a mockery of those of us who don't always get happy endings.

The scene of Audrey and Maya trying to talk Haley down lingers in my mind. I've been each side of that awful fucking situation at different points in my life; burning bridges amid my self-destruction, or having to cut myself off from someone I've loved who will destroy me if I let them drag me down with them, or feeling the long-suffering exhaustion of desperately trying to save someone who makes you genuinely miserable because how the hell could you live with doing nothing? The fact that it doesn't end well only makes it more painfully real. I haven't had to bury any of my friends yet, but that's probably only because I don't fully know what happened when the direst cases stopped replying and disappeared forever.

I see a lot of myself reflected in Haley, an uncomfortable amount really. I've always found safety and comfort in power, in hurting those I love however I can to keep them in my grasp. I know that jealousy, I know that self-hatred, I feel the ever present allure of making the world go away in an ugly blaze of addiction and destruction. But I've also made it farther than plenty of other girls with shallower scars than me. And while ageing has always terrified me, this game has made me very, very, very proud to have made it a lot of the way towards my 30s. Thank you so much for this piece of art, Snek. It's going to stick with me for a long, long time.