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I’m glad I finally got around to reading this. Audiovisuals first: Really cool use of effects to distort the photographic backgrounds (they felt oppressive and sun-bleached), and the abstract bgs were beautiful. Not to mention the money shot (if I may call it that), which was fantastic. I also liked the character designs. Alexandria… yes…

The music was well-chosen, also. Definitely contributed well to the oppressive tone.

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I deeply appreciated the intimacy of the vomiting scene. It’s a good scenario and the sensuality of it was captured well. I don’t have pica, but I do have extensive experience with vomiting, and there is a real eroticism to it, a buildup and release, and it was cool that you leaned into and nailed that.

It was also nice to see an exploration of the overlap between counseling and mothering. I had felt guilty when I first realized that that was part of what I have been getting out of years of therapy, so it was cathartic to see those feelings depicted and leaned into.

[Addendum: just read the postmortem and yeah, I didn’t jot it down but I found myself identifying a lot with Alexandria in terms of like being a person who survived abuse and wants to help other survivors but tends to be very like I’M GOING TO FIX YOU NOW about it… i care her. i hope her and Rory have a good life…]

And honestly, the ending hit me square in the nose. What would I give up for someone like Alexandria? I honestly don’t know. But I’ll be considering the question for a while.

This was really lovely! The story was super sweet, and I loved the effects of motion you were able to pull off with Magpie and the backgrounds. Very well done!!!

having been separated from my parents at exactly age 11 and pitched into an impoverished rural non-town… i found myself relating extensively both to Nadja’s feelings of powerlessness, fear, and self-hatred, and Marie’s feelings of being used up, trapped, and lacking a future.

something i think really sticks out to me is when adults are present, they only exist to solve the immediate problem of Nadja, or to argue among themselves. there is basically no parenting at play. which, well… begets this.

i really enjoyed the sparse, chill music and painterly background art. i found this a cathartic read. i thank y’all for making this

Hi!!! I’m stoked you got to check out the letters as well. It’s really neat getting to see a before and after of your thoughts. I’d wanted to respond earlier but I’ve had my hands full lately. Let’s see…

1. I agree w/ your note re: avoiding making this also a transgender story. I hadn’t intentionally avoided it in order to sharpen focus, but it did have that effect. Early in development, I felt shame about ignoring that aspect, and lamented as much in the Fluxer; it was pointed out to me that having the experience of being transgender means that my works are simply going to be informed by that, even if I “cis-wash” a character, so to speak.

2. Your statement about the abuse itself being what fills the need for comfort/companionship/love… whew. I’m still processing that. I’ve been aware of this on some level; our therapist has been working with my parts who specifically crave abuse, and we’re trying to reorient them toward healthier desires… but the way you put it was very succinct and clear. Thank you for that. I am glad that you noted the stigma-within-stigma of it, as well, which is tricky to navigate around other survivors who responded differently to their experiences.

3. I think you have the right of it as regards narrativization and memory as a creative act. I’ve always liked telling stories but I only very recently come to understand memory as not pure recall, or rather, that in contexts like this (where I am writing to express love and exorcise pain, to satisfy myself, to share myself with others), it is okay to tell stories that are not 1:1 the events. No one is on trial here. I can prioritize conveying strictly what happened or conveying how it felt but I can’t do both. And the latter is much more necessary to me.

Thank you again for reading and responding to our work! I have learned a lot from outside perspectives on this; I’m glad you and others were here to, well, help with the meaning-making of it all. Thank you. 🙏

Thank you for holding my twisted mass of feelings-guts and not immediately dropping it and sprinting to the handwash and eyerinse station. The kindness you and others have shown me has made this trust worth every fearful moment.

This VN would basically not have existed without Tampa, which was a kind of roadmap toward writing sexual intimacy as terrifying by leveraging the distance between the characters’ feelings about CSA and the reader’s. It is a naked depiction of grooming through abuse of trust and authority. The way consent and trust are warped and abused in that story mirrored my experiences in a way nothing yet had. I finally, finally felt known. It gave me language.

I used to envy survivors of more clear or direct violations of consent. I couldn’t understand why, and I deeply resented myself for it. And I felt a lot of shame for liking some of what had been done to me once I realized that it was wrong, that it shouldn’t have happened. But because I couldn’t really point to times I said “no” and someone else disregarded that, I didn’t feel like a “real victim”.

This VN is I guess the experience of coming to realize I was denied the possibility of saying no from birth. Which isn’t better or worse than having a “no” violated, it’s just different. But looking back at it is so frustrating when I realize that the adults in my life cultivated a very specific and unbalanced kind of hypercapability in me that served their ends and left me completely defenseless at the level of conceptualizing self-preservation, of enacting disobedience. I felt utterly used.

And that doesn’t even get to what you’ve pointed at, which is the struggle of disentangling the gutknot of conflicting thoughts and feelings that can barely coexist in a kid’s brain, in their body, but can’t not exist there because those are going to result from such an enmeshed, intimate, extractive relationship. The inclarity of it is overwhelming.

God, that reads like a really pessimistic, exhausted response. Sorry for that, lmao. Thank you for writing to me; knowing others have played this at all has been something, but getting to speak with people who found it worth sharing their thoughts and feelings about has made me feel a real sense of connection. Thank you.

Thank you for reading it! Yeah, we’ve been fiddling with the description from time to time. Still trying to figure out the nuances of contextualizing a work for a public audience, in terms of what should they know going in, what shouldn’t they know. Or how direct I want to be about what’s inside it, and how much should be left up to reader interpretation.

That your mother would share such a work with you (and allow (encourage?) you to read others) is interesting but maybe not surprising, since I feel like I’ve seen that happen to other kids. It always makes me wonder to what extent it’s “look, you don’t have it this bad” versus “look how bad I had it” versus subtly trying to give you a language to grasp your experiences. And, yeah… I can’t imagine how anyone sharing this with their mother would go.

Mom didn’t directly spur me to explore strained mother-child relationships in fiction, but there was a lot of emotional offloading to us in which she would try to like, explain or contextualize her behavior. Which… I’m not sure if that made things more clean or more messy, especially at that age. When there’s enmeshment, it’s hard not to give her some like, grace and benefit-of-the-doubt anyway.

I’m glad you keyed in on the multitude of grief that powers this. We never really got a roadmap for grief at all, and so when she passed it was like, welp, guess she died? And it took a long time and a lot of information elsewhere to realize that the tragedy of that was not just that she had died, or died too young, but that she deserved a better life with more support, that she and I deserved a healthier relationship, or at least for some more years with her before the rest of our family dug their claws into me.

Ahem. Anyway.

It’s certainly an experience learning as we grow that we mirror our mothers in certain ways, isn’t it? And maybe recognizing the cyclicality of things. Even when it’s things I don’t like about myself, it’s tough not to see her in my reflection, and long for or resent her. I don’t expect I’ll ever have children, but if I do I will probably need to unlearn some behaviors first.

I hope your relationship with your mother can become something more healthy as y’all continue to grow. Or, if it doesn’t, that you can get the space from her necessary to flourish.

Thanks again for reading this, and for reassuring us about the choice to include the letters!!! We wish you the best of luck in escaping the fast food grind. 🙏

Oh wow! Thank you for reading and loving this, for finding it impactful and inspiring! And sorry for writing so much of it, lol. I hope you took a nice, pleasant break after reading Bernadette, lol.

I am really happy that you particularly resonated with my wish to understand and accept Mom. To be direct about it, she was never really afforded much patience or understanding from the rest of our family, and went so far as to teach me to hate her once they’d separated me from her. They treated her as a violent, unstable junkie, accepting zero responsibility for the roles they played in depriving her of the assistance she needed in order to heal.

And while I wasn’t really able to touch on a lot of her history, I did want to at least like, show her as unconditional a love and forgiveness as I could (as no one else would) while being direct about the burdens of enmeshment. She deserves that, even now, and she deserved it in life, too, but… I don’t think I could have even begun to work on something like this when she was still alive.

As regards the letters, and the sorta coordination of getting several parts involved, the nature of our system seems to be that a fair amount of us are generally “moving in the same direction”, so to speak, as regards her. Plus communication between those parts is fairly open, or at least tends to go through a central hub or something like maybe an unnamed general will? Still sussing things out.

I think what I’m trying to say is enough of us were on board with this project that it was going to happen, and most of us had something to say to Mom (even Au— who hated this project from day one and may not have ever directly interacted with her), that it was like “if you’re around, you gotta write a letter, that’s the rule”. Plus this is a culmination of most of a year of exploring our feelings about her on a daily basis, whether creatively or in therapy. So by then there was more cohesion and willingness to just make a big fucking thing like this.

We’re kicking around ideas of future projects about other family members and I expect those to be less collaborative (and less geared toward forgiveness), since those people moved in and out of our life more substantially and were decidedly less loving. Mom was a near-constant presence of her kinds of love, until she wasn’t.

Sorry, I feel like I’m kind of just rambling at this point. I deeply respect your appreciation for love and longing. I think if your goal is “clarity, strength, capacity for care and maturity”… it takes work but it can be done. You can do it.

Thank you again for reading our work! 🙏💖

First off, congratulations to the team on pulling though a difficult development cycle! I really would not have guessed it was such a struggle, but I think the quality of the finished work is clear and I hope it feels like it justifies the pain, lol.

Second, congrats on putting together a thorough post-mortem. There’s a lot to dig into here as a somewhat experienced writer who has basically no experience with collaborative writing. Both in terms of documenting different approaches and also the process of negotiating said differences. (And it doesn’t hurt that there’s like a dozen works discussed here that I’m interested in checking out, lol).

I definitely sympathize with the fears surrounding involving such a young character. I think it goes without saying that Han-byeol’s chapter was absolutely fascinating, as was her attempt to make sense of and do right in the world, and the work is definitely better for her inclusion. I was similarly terrified as I was putting together Bernadette, especially because I felt it was absolutely necessary to depict the “something terrible”s and, similarly, the protagonist’s complicated and controversial response(s) to them. (I’ve yet to read Nabokov’s work; instead, Tampa was a primary influence.)

My defense was to stress the autobiographical nature of the work, because if bad things happened to me, I’m allowed to tell stories based on them, right? But that resulted in responses to the work that were tinged with more pity than I’d prefer (although I am delighted that, in general, readers brought a great deal of nuance with them). This is all to say I hope nobody has given y’all a hard time over this. Apart from that one comment, which, lol.

Something else I found interesting was the decision to (or necessity of?) have the story firmly in place before the other assets were worked on. I think it makes a lot of sense; audiovisual components can be very demanding on time and energy, and one wants nothing to go to waste, but I find it necessary to work on backgrounds and music mid-draft a lot of the time. Sometimes it’s to get a sense of place, sometimes to depict a feeling visually so as to inform the writing. But I imagine that runs the risk of depleting time and energy before the project is complete, or just crossing up a lot of wires.

Anyway, really cool write-up! Thanks for the VN, and for the debrief!

fuck yea

This is so sweet, so graceful. Deeply loving and tragic. Immensely tender. Every element of Letty — the music, the art, the prose — converges on that: tenderness.

And heartbreak.

From a technical perspective, I really do think this comes together so well. I was honestly just amazed by many of the illustrations, which convey such detail and emotion through well-arranged composition and skillful leveraging of the limited color palette.

I appreciated how the relationship between Blanche and Scarlet is one of selflessness, of wishing to attend to one another despite one’s own needs and boundaries. And yet, neither can truly deny her own desire; both come to use one another despite the risk it poses to their already-troubled relationship. This unease, this cross-purpose… you see it in both of their hearts. Their bodies. The gradient between desire and fear.

And from the perspective of the erotic, I really like what was keyed in on: the desire to learn and teach intimacy safely, the tension resulting from the conflict between self-disgust and desire, the way that and other tensions can unpredictably spill one way, than the other.

Something I love about Letty, perhaps selfishly as I feel I failed at this in Bernadette, is that it seems the wall of resentment has largely been hurdled, and Scarlet demonstrates a serious empathy, care, and eventual forgiveness toward Blanche. Those are not born simply through Scarlet witnessing Blanche’s pain (and, that said, I think Blanche’s trauma was depicted with great care and dignity), but through Scarlet appreciating the ways in which her mother nurtured and cared for her.

I guess what I mean is that Letty to me is a very selfless work, while Bernadette feels very selfish. I don’t know that either is “the right way” to go about it, and maybe both are needed, but when next I write a story about mothering, I would like to write something more tender, more caring, more loving, something that addresses and nurtures the other little girl that was thrust unprepared into the role of mother. I would like to write something more like Letty.

I am grateful that y’all made and shared this. Thank you.

This was nuts. But it was also really like, kinda pleasant on a technical level. The color-deprived backgrounds + CGs were imposing and combined with the theming and events of the story really evoked the feeling of living under the tyranny of family, religion, black-and-white thinking.

[spoilers]

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There's a moment in Chapter 3 where like all of the pieces snap into place and I just like yelled WAIT NO STOP–

–and then everything turned out fine :)

Others have already noted it but I wanted to also throw some love for how each of the three protagonists represent a particular timeslice of a particular experience, but they speak and think and act uniquely. Kind of an anatomical diagram.

I was fascinated by Han-byeol's obsessive thinking about the Factory (and wonder what I obsessed about at her age), but I found Jenny's experiences the most intensely relatable as a former alcoholic college burnout Tarutaru Lalafell. 

Nice work!

An absolutely remarkable work. Dense, poetic, melancholy, heartbreaking. Impossible not to love as a former young queer athlete. I will need to soak in this a while before I truly come to grips with it.

Thank you all for making this.

I really really liked this! A neat conceit that I think works well to convey the feelings and experiences you were looking to depict. The characters especially were great, from their interesting designs to their deep characterization to how they played off one another.

I found the UI pleasant, clean, and readable. I also felt the struggle of adapting my usual prose style to the medium, and I think ensuring the UI supported your writing helped a lot with readability from a mechanics and like flow perspective.

And, god, I love Noa.

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[spoilers]

Bit of personal context first: I detransitioned (really, I was trying to articulate a non-binary identity, but just couldn't meaningfully do so where I live) in 2016 after about five years of living as a trans woman, and ended up retransitioning in 2025 (which, retransitioning is its own weird thing I'd like to address one day). While people generally respected my detransition, for some it was "finally you're going back to what you should have been!" and for others it was just that I readily passed as male and I had completely broken with most of my old social circles.

And I struggled almost immediately with feelings of confusion, regret, regret about the regret, I wanted top surgery but couldn't afford it, and mostly just like... it was a very isolating experience. I had no one that I felt I could meaningfully talk to about it, and so I just kind of didn't talk about it. Especially in a climate where like, the outspoken detransitioners out there were obviously going to be horrible to me if I tried to be honest about the fact that the experience of transition still meant a great deal to me and without a doubt made me a better person.

But even now, it doesn't feel like there's much space to talk about it. And the last thing I want to do is fuel the assholes who protest dronification clinics. So I still haven't opened up very much about the matter.

Sorry for going on about myself for a while. I guess what I am saying is that I feel very seen by your work, and I think you did a great job of conveying the frustration resulting from people's behavior and assumptions and endless questioning of one's detransition, dysphoria with one's own body, one's own decisionmaking, the feeling that you just created a problem solely for yourself and you deserve to feel awful and you'll never feel human again and... yeah.

So, I'm really glad you made this because, like you said, there is not much art about this experience, and I hope it was very cathartic to make both in that respect and just as a creative project! And I was really happy to read in the postmortem that you have gotten great support and insight from transgender people. And I think you did indeed convey that the blame does not lie with the dronification/transition process.

Thanks again for making this!!!

This put a big smile on my face. I loved the design of Lydia and Lilac Vi, and the environments as well; in terms of visuals, I found everything very human. The story was interesting, too! Lydia's hypocrisy was frustrating and tragic, and there were a lot of little details that conveyed the pain of feeling completely owned by your creator that really just made me want to reach through the screen and wring Lydia's neck.

I also appreciated that y'all included an afterword! I used to skip those as a kid, but I have come to appreciate them deeply, and I am glad I'm not alone in feeling that way.

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[spoilers]

And as such, I found the ending appropriately cathartic. Both in Vi's articulation of her feelings, her pain, her selfhood... and the love that she did have for Lydia, her need to exist, and to exist with her mother. I was able to process some feelings about my mother through putting together my jam entry, and I hope this was also healing for y'all to create.

Also, this was a weird bit of wish fulfillment in a way. In January, I wrote a VN about a motherly engineer who after much labor brings a daughter into the world, in the body of a mostly ceramic human-sized doll. The daughter, depending on how you read the story, is named... Lilac. (My jaw dropped when I got the option to choose that name here!) I would say they have a much healthier relationship than Lydia and Vi, and the story is more about grief and tenacity, but like M0ther//B04rd it is also about learning how to inhabit a body, about developing one's own identity.

So, that similarity was already really neat, but what's funny is I had eventually wanted to write an alternate version of that story in which their relationship was more like that of Lydia and Vi; that is, more human-and-device, more "I created you and I can destroy you", more physically and sexually invasive. Basically, something that works with the themes present in M0ther//B04rd.

Just to be clear, I'm not in any way alleging plagiarism, because I am sure this is just synchronicity. Instead, I'm super stoked that y'all created a unique and lovely VN that happens to also scratch a very particular itch I've been having this year. I loved this! Thank you for making it!!!

If your friend would wish to hear it: Thank you for making this. The experience of isolation here is palpable. I hope one day you can change the outcome.

I loved this! The call-and-response of the script was a lot of fun and I think you used it well to present ideas and images, then twist them or represent them differently. The conceit was good, and the TF sequence was very well-written; I love how you captured the terror and joy of it. Thank you for making this. It made me happy. 💖🙏🦄

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[spoilers]

I am loved!

I am loved!

I am loved!

I am loved!

I am loved!

oh, interesting takeaway and i love it! i would love to examine that in a future work, as i did not really get to explore it much here and i am ready to revisit my memories of parking lot handoffs. thank you for reading this, i'm happy you found it worthwhile to gut it out!

i'm glad you found the letters fascinating! yeah like we had so many feelings at odds with themselves while making this... i was hoping to kind of show and share that experience. thank you for playing our vn!

Incredible.

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I think what really stunned me about this is... I think this captures the fragmentary experience of trying to convey not just what happened, but the history of how it has made you feel and what you did or did not do and who you are or are not because of it(, or not, it is sometimes impossible to tell).

The self and the other as not two points or a spectrum but clouds colliding. The fear and the anger and the distress as they resolve into separate bodies along separate trajectories.

I will be thinking of this and these.

this was excellent! visually striking, no doubt, but also very concisely and skillfully told. well done!!!

Hahaha, this was awesome! Funny as all hell, damn cute, and well choreographed. Excellent distillation of the frustration (and relief) of fighting games, and a lot of the feelings and attitudes surrounding them.

this was fun! i really dig your art style, it's very expressive and cute!!

Very fucking cool, atmosphere was spot-on, the conceit of the story was fascinating, and the character writing — who they were, what they felt, how they behaved and interacted with one another — well-executed.

As a sucker for "bureau fiction" (surely there's a term for it, I just don't know it), a PTSD-haver always down to read about psychology, therapy, what we can and can't do with the brain, and someone fond of (though not native to) the area, this was obviously going to be right up my alley. But even if it wasn't, it still would have been worth every minute. Very well done!

This was neat! Like the other commenter, I am curious to see where this goes. I thought the asides were interesting (both those concerning biology and the podium building), and I think you write fun banter. Thanks for making this!

This was remarkable! I was enamored with the visual design. Lovely lovely VN.

It's so frustrating, becoming so familiar with your body and its pain that it becomes like a lover, a fixture, an anchor. To know it but not know what is wrong with it, to feel insane and utterly dehumanized in the doctor's office, to just want to give up on doing anything with it at all.

The thought that zero percent is a normal amount of pain to have makes me want to scream.

That said, I have gotten back to exercising after taking a while off and it really does help with some things.

thank you so much for reading it!!! and for sharing your thoughts on it despite this stuff being tough to talk about. i'm happy that you found it cathartic and helpful to developing further your own understanding of your relationship. we struggled for so long with identifying these feelings, admitting to them, grasping them (still a work-in-progress), i think because when you're so close to a person and the relationship is so complicated and disorganized and all the bad feelings are mixed in with the good ones it's like, idk what to even do with it all. we've been excited to read y'all's submission for a bit (but somehow didn't have it on our to-play list...); i am always curious to see other perspectives on complicated mother-daughter relationships.

as regards depicting plurality i still can't tell if we set out for this to be a depiction or an exploration. the extent of our dissociation was something we for a long time lacked the language for, then denied (primarily on the basis of "well, mom had it, and we're not as broken as her nor did we go through what she went through"), and only fairly recently are like coming to explore and articulate and understand (and things are still shifting). so i wonder how we'll think about this in a few years time.

i'm really glad you found the letters to be an essential part of this! it was so difficult to fight the thought of like "these are literally just yapping, no one cares because these are of no worth" so it is cool as hell to hear otherwise from an external perspective. thanks again for reading our work and for being up for sharing your thoughts on it!!!

This cracked me right up and then shattered me. Sylvia's a mess, Clover's a different kind of mess, I think their dynamic is hilarious, the facial expressions are top notch (holy shit Sylvia's stupid fucking grin is so good)... and I think this does really capture the pain, the social marginalization, the shame associated with being transgender that so often gets tied up in the shame associated with kink, with the physical and emotional scars left by trauma.

I think the sentiment that really got me was the notion that as much as it hurts not having been a little girl, having been one might have hurt even worse. Like I can just point to a very specific section of my life and be like. Holy shit, I know I know hell but that would have been double hell.

I'm glad they were able to work things out in the end. Also incontinence representation, let's goooooo 🙏

so i was kind of saving this for a day when i felt gross about what i had made, what i wanted to keep making. having thoughts like "won't this harm other survivors?" "what will people think of me when they see this?" "what if i'm not 'allowed' to write about this?" "what if people decide my coping mechanisms are EVIL?". well today was that day.

up front i think this is a damned fine work. the sfx (both UI and in-game) work pulled me in immediately, the full-screen animations/interstitials looked killer and i think you leveraged them to manage the pace of things well (i wailed when i saw that stage IV was not "adulthood"/"maturity"), and the character art... i am not going to be able to get Sunny's kissy face or creeper face out of my head for a long damn while.

and the story... i'm looking back over my notes and there is a steady deterioration from "observations about technique or salient moments" to "yelling to concur or object" to "screaming at Sunny to go fuck herself, a lot" to "incoherence". so yeah. the proverbial slow-motion trainwreck.

what resonated with me though is (no surprise) the theming. like yes i largely avoided tumblr and was not really a creative up until very recently (and certainly not one of any notoriety), but as a twitter oldhead it was unavoidable, both seeing artists get exploded over being a little "spicy" and watching that behavior percolate down into interactions between fans who would hardly know or effect one another if not for yelling at one another about being problematic. it was tough not to both fear and internalize all that as Anita and Sunny had. to replicate it.

i felt you really explored the power of language and like, expression versus action. how Sunny frames her obviously manipulative and abusive behavior in medicalizing language in order to justify it to herself was just like, ugh. damn. right on the money. how she uses the language of social justice to shut down and box in Anita's expression of tastes, ideas, needs. how she infantilizes Anita and traps her in a daughterwife situation to establish a punishment-reward system, to create dependency (and fear of loss of support), to frame herself as pure and Anita as corrupt even though... just like. any action no matter how awful is fine to Sunny (awesome choice of name btw lol) so long as she can clothe it in a warped rhetoric that frames it as "good, actually". god damn. you nailed it. like you said in the afterword, i got no idea if this will change anything, but it does give people a language with which to recognize and reject abuse cloaked as purity and other such misused ideas.

also some of the particularities of Anita's imprisonment, well, sniped me from 800 yards away. god. the kissing rule. her breath. revolting. (lmao i'm going through the comments and of course this got everyone. as gross as it was, it was really the infantilization that horrified me. you really nailed what is so terrifying about being someone's uwu precious smol bean in need of a little fixing and healing come on i'll just put you in this little cup don't you like the holes i poked in it for you here eat my favorite leaves we'll be together forever :) :) :) )

also, fucking, god. i'm sorry you were able to depict so well such an utterly terrifying obsessive manipulative abusive fan/collaborator. god damn. god damn.

thank you for making this. i really did need to read this today.

Holy fuck, this is a trip so far! Equal parts heartbreaking and terrifying. You have me screaming at and pounding my monitor as if it's a window I can somehow communicate screeched NOs through. Definitely excited to see where you take this.

I really fell in love with the three kids as characters, as people. Getting to see Meadow's, then Larkin's perspective on the nail-painting hangout time layered melancholy on melancholy... I fear for a third visit.

I think you did such an incredible job of like communicating the horror of knowing something bad did happen or is going to happen and feeling/being powerless to stop it, and then giving the reader that same feeling. I am going to be holding that feeling for a hot minute. Excellent work, and thank you for sharing it!!!

thank you so much for playing (and appreciating!) our VN!!! i think you make a really great point about the like cyclicality of human failure and the fucked-ness of everything and the only real option a lot of the times is to kind of like fuck it back, to maybe fuck it back into place. a kind of percussive maintenance of the world.

i'm glad (and sad?) that i was able to show dynamics between R--- and C--- (and how they respond to the world) that were resonant for you. i think especially in R---'s case, there is that deep need for rest and healing (and to be cared for, to herself be mothered), but also this like dread that she's realized as an adult that like she has no real possibility of that as a very isolated woman in poverty and chronic (physical/mental/emotional) illness, and some part of her will at times whatever it takes to buy her a moment's peace.

and then as you elucidated there's also the like aspect of being joined at the hip or really connected via a sort of spiritual, bidirectional umbilical cord, and how that results in being dragged into situations that are really no place for a child to be in, because the alternative (separation) is conceived of (and may very well be!) far worse. for better or worse, R--- was unwilling to abandon her kid to a world that had abandoned her.

also i really like the metaphor you led this comment off with, it is fantastic!! 

(also i am excited to a) read your work! and b) write about growing up in anywhere nowhere texas (soon, i hope) which is a place that is. god. this mess is a place, for sure. might spend the rest of our life here though :) )

also thank you so much for the art!!! we couldn't really put it into words yday but it's super cool seeing what stood out to y'all... i love the girl soup and the torch depictions... also *hits you* *gets small* is still cracking me up...... 🥲

god, it's tough to be in Ari and Indi's heads. you can really feel how the abuse and shame and social isolation Indi's been put through has wormed its way into her worldview. and the rage Ari feels about having to be this pillar for everyone, even the woman who abused her. utterly bleak and abject... it was heartbreaking to watch their relationship corrode.

i did also appreciate the integration of child logic to the the girls' perception of what was done to them. it was dead on and sadly very natural for them to be just very confused by the situation.

i thought the visual design and background work was fantastic, the audio was produced well and very fitting, and the character sprites were very cute. a very well-rounded work!

i loved the character designs and sprite art! really very melancholy seeing flashes of hope throughout and knowing things won't just go well...

Here's p———'s response, as you saw in the server (posted here for posterity): "i'm really sorry you also went through being a kid like this.. i think something that still makes me really angry about the way kids are treated is like.. being loved around people and misloved when people aren't around.. knowing nothing you do will fix things.. and especially how they tell you how you're supposed to feel or react so you don't even get to have your own feelings or boundaries..  thank you very much for reading our story and especially sharing the visual notes you took,, which really hurt to look at but like in the way that it hurts to be seen,, you know?? i hope you treated yourself to something nice after reading it 💖💖💖💖"

I think something I wanted to add is that we've struggled for a long time with "re-parenting [ourselves]", that is to say, giving ourselves now the quality and amount of attention and care and guidance we deserved then. Part of it was like a resentment of having to do it instead of someone else doing it (like, "isn't the point that it's someone else doing the caring?", "[we] do enough work already"). But I also think part of it was that it didn't make much sense until looking at our CPTSD through a plural framework and recognizing that behind the flashbacks were entire stuck parts in need of that re-parenting work. I was thinking about this in response to your later comment about the difficulty of relearning how to feel and like and dislike (which I 100% relate to and it feels like a big part of re-parenting is the work of helping each other figure out those things).

I dig this so far! The character sprites are gorgeous, and I think the set of introductory scenes does a fantastic job of characterizing Fio and Apollo while laying out the broad strokes of the setting. Really curious to see where this goes!

i'm glad to hear it and hope you like it! (although given the content i do not begrudge anyone if they don't click with it). she was probably like the first poet we really glommed onto, and we have a lot of fun doing exercises to see what our spin on her voice is, and we do wanna try and do more of that along the lines of Desires of Mothers and the journals that resulted in Studying Hunger. her stuff to us is like getting to see inside a person's brain in real time lmao

this kicked ass! i liked the composition of small image over large bg, and i was impressed by how evocative the photography was. deeply, deeply obsessive and erotic and sad. thank you for making this 🙏

this felt like being lost inside of baklava... heightened and disorienting and layered and wistful and sad. it felt like being caught in the tides the whole time... it made me think a lot about the ways in which we give ourself to others and the ways in which we have to take ourself from others and the like... deep inner need to just be in a world where there is less give/take and more share?

the ruminations on age were interesting as someone who is steadily approaching 40 and seeing like. both the feelings of "holy fuck i am becoming unlovably old" and "age has affirmed my identity and i am this close to escaping childbearing age" were expressed so well.

the captor scene was absolutely heartbreaking especially as told from the perspective of observer who already knows what happens especially as a reader who like instantly keyed in to what was going to happen because, well, been there done that.

i'm really thankful you made this especially as a system who largely does not remember our dreams anymore and after reading this i am even less sure than i was if that is a good or bad thing. also i like your weird girls they were really neat...

oh thanks for the leads on this topic! it's funny, our submission was genuinely one-half an epistolary work, and inspired by epistolary poetry (in our case, largely Bernadette Mayer's Desires of Mothers), but the letters themselves were not written primarily as poems (barring a few exceptions). that said they do meet that criteria to a lesser or greater extent... i think we're going to continue to explore this since it's an area we don't quite understand yet lol.

that said i can certainly sympathize with the narrator's hesitation to let susu read her poems... i've found even when i am not necessarily writing about someone or to someone, if they're on my mind when i'm drafting or revising, it's not always something i want them to see. or at least i'm aware of it being very vulnerable to let them see.

Holy fuck, this was distressing. I need a cigarette. I need a nap. I need a fresh wound. I need to gut something.

I feel like this is probably just saying what has already been said but this was overwhelming in its rawness and brutality, very evocatively illustrated, had absolutely zero dull moments. I am going to be thinking about this one for a very long time. Thank you 100 times for making this. (i also picked down)

Also, shouts out to Dorian. What a fucking legend.