Coughs hi im back ^^ okay analysis hat back on GO
Two months later, I felt strong enough and in the proper mood to have a look at the letters; having the narrative veil lifted so much is a much different beast that takes a different kind of preparedness to properly absorb now that I have a better understanding of why Bernadette was so affecting for me the first time. I'm glad I put in a comment before reading this extra material though ahah, I think I wanted to see how different my impressions would be before and after gaining context. Still, since this portion of the game is clearly much less fictional, I’ll try and be a bit more distant about it to respect the trouble of airing things like this out as I’d rather not be so intrusive about a real person.
It's so interesting to see so much more of the perspective(s) of the author in the present day, it's so different from the largely retrospective narrative. Like the VN itself, the letters are surprisingly mundane for how intensely intimate the main story is; from passing on an enjoyed recipe to an ordinary retelling of a baseball game, it makes for an oddly sweet feeling: there was a somewhat normal life after, well, all that. The person who lived through it went on to meet new people, hope to make a good impression on them, happen to miss home runs during concessions- and restroom-breaks. I could go on for maybe a little too long (oops, already did) about how the letters add new context to Bernadette. Reading them, I can appreciate that despite the enormity of its subject matter, it’s pleasantly focused. It doesn’t try to be about everything, it knows that it is an endeavor in the impossible task of laying out the totality of a beloved parent/abuser/partner/and more; whether portraying C--- as cisgender was wishful thinking or a narrative decision, it kept the story focused on her relationship with R--- where a concurrent theme of the transgender experience might have muddied the waters or diverted the focus of a story where a contrastingly high-visibility experience that unfortunately draws in the spotlight in our present cultural zeitgeist isn’t anywhere near the center of the story.
Elaborating on a point from my first comment, I feel I overly focused on the impact on the viewer when it came to C--- having learned to want more of the abuse she faced when the internal dynamics of the story are equally, if not more affecting. Her desire for the abuse and affection of her mother represents an oft-misconstrued aspect of abuse from someone so close: in cases like this, the abuse does not happen to come from somebody who fulfills the child's needs; rather, it is the abuse itself that fulfills the need for comfort, companionship, love. The fact that R--- has died is such a complicated matter in part because of the tension between the clear harm of her relationship with C--- and the needs fulfilled by that harm, now left unmet. That contradiction isn’t talked about as often as accounts of sexual abuse that better match the sensational cultural archetype, and so faces stigma-within-stigma when feelings of continuing love for one’s abuser long after the abuse has ended is treated like a misguided malfunction.
I was surprised in an actually very positive sense by the open admission that Bernadette’s content contains indulgent, technically untrue pieces that had become a source of gratuitous wish fulfillment for a part of the author, considering the pejorative connotations of the term as an element whose indulgence devalues a work, degrades artistic integrity; yet, I believe (and have heard a couple times from others) that its presence in the VN does the opposite. Writ large, the content of retrospective works (especially memoirs and memoir-likes) is expected to be a truthful, loyal-to-the-letter retelling of the past, paradoxically composed both of events exactly as they occurred and the intense, cathartic emotions attached to them. That's a little contradictory, right? Given the reconstructive nature of memory, emotion's role in its creation (not retrieval but creation), and the simple fact of needing to engage in the distortive act of narrativization to create a narrative, it's only natural that the facts of a story break away from reality in the act of becoming a story to better convey the emotions motivating its telling, not even mentioning wider social conditions that further incentivize the crushing of reality into digestibly unambiguous stories. This is the necessary violence in narrativization, fundamentally reducing multidimensional experiences to something that’ll fit in the medium. Reading “On Brevity” again with all this context, it really was the perfect letter to kick off the VN. The author must constantly contend with the tension between making a functioning visual novel and her need to accurately convey this specific experience of neglect and abuse as well as the greater systemic failures that created the mother(s) she knew. There are clear feelings of resentment for the persistent feeling of having misrepresented her mother, or having “[painted] a worse picture than what happened.” I have experience with this feeling. It’s hard to portray these complicated figures holistically; what one conjures from these people can feel like a comically abusive caricature one moment and like they’re smoothing everything over the next. When life experience becomes testimony, the cultural pressure for retrospection to report emotional events accurately is applied on an individual level and, when errors inevitably occur, induces shame.
That said, inevitable inaccuracies aren’t quite so intimate as wish fulfillment. I’ve been told that therapy is the process of meaning-making; so what, then, if something untrue must be treated as true to convey or even make that meaning? Wish fulfillment isn’t inauthenticity, it’s a form of authenticity that accepts what the creator wants from their work or its subject. I understand where that comes from, it’s an ugly feeling I’m familiar with in my own way. Wishing the feelings between my constituent parts and those of a parental figure both too intimate and too distant had been a more digestibly unambiguous version of a fundamentally ambiguous experience; that the experience would have been “bad” enough to not be so deniable; that it would more easily “count” as whatever acronym it’ll be best ascribed to today. Experiencing the impulse to trash all the evidence to spare myself the humiliation of putting my foot down and making a claim about reality so as to not hurt someone else’s image or just because people look at you differently when they learn these things. When I started reading the letters with the knowledge of wish fulfillment being present, I think I expected them to somehow be more true than the VN, but coming out on the other end, I don’t think either one is truer than the other. Event and perception will invariably contradict each other eventually; the VN is more loyal to perception and the letters are more loyal to event, and I find that meaningful. The fact that Bernadette is candid enough to bring up these thoughts is already a testament to its depth, but having read woeful’s comment, I don’t want to hold a potentially-trite pretension that the virtue of the work is in how others may relate to it or find it legible when its greatest virtue is in its selfishness.
How is this longer than my original comment?? I spent less time reading the letters than I did the VN… this might have been a little scattered but I can’t let an itch comment take up any more real estate in my notes document than it already has lol. I hope I've said anything interesting and my perspective has done more than distort my viewpoint, but thank you again for making this!! I promise this is the last one i promise i wont drop another 1300 word nuke in here sobs