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.