itch.io

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.

this was lovely, both the poetry and the photography! i loved the rumination on yous or rather YOUs, the YOU of any particular work is always interesting to explore. well done!!!

this kicked ass and i'm excited to give it a reread in short order. you like took the feeling of "like seriously what is the fucking point of like having experiences and feelings and wounds and trying to what sculpt them into some sort of work that is also a knife that is also a key? when the world is the fucking world???" which, god, and you crumpled it up into a little ball and rammed it down my throat and i thank you for it

also your prose is killer, also Like Eating Glass came up in a poem we wrote recently so that's a neat bit of synchronicity, also i really dig that you went about fitting it to a younger generation. i think i fear (maybe irrationally) i'm going to be telling stories that feel irrelevant because they are set in like 2005 or whatever and it's like "how the hell could that even map onto things now"

This was sharp! And painful. Thank you for making it.

Something that really disappointed me when I returned to college is that the spaces I had left behind a decade prior were still as white as they had been. And it was clear in a lot of situations that the Asian and black students that were present didn't really feel comfortable participating, and given the environment, why would they?

yeahhh i have a person in my history who is analogous to abby's mom, and i intend to write about him someday, and it's like... i know it's going to be really tough to even vaguely humanize him when, well, i'd rather paint him with a revolver than a pen. so i might have to vent some of those feelings first :) but that's all to say, i'd be curious to see what you expand on (since i also like your blorbos)

abby is really freakin' cuuute... it was heartwarming seeing the effect nora's patience had on her :)

Up front, no need to apologize for verbosity; I'm thrilled that something we wrote made you feel compelled to share your thoughts about it! Especially because like, a lot of what you said feels very validating and really helps to hear because there are parts of us that are still like not on board with this project whatsoever. I think what you wrote will maybe help them to understand that it has merit.

I wish we could claim perfect intentionality over how it turned out but I think some aspects simply resulted from trying to be honest with ourselves about our experiences and feelings and needs.

[spoilers below for events in the story + authorial intent]

We definitely wanted to humanize Rose (and I do regret not being able to talk more about her history though I already felt the main narrative was too long) because her actions were not the result of some inherent cruelty or wickedness but of being an isolated, overworked, wounded person. Yes, she did bad things, but she was a marginalized person capable of doing good who was outright failed by systems (governmental and family) that abandoned her completely. She had no one to turn to when struggling with raising C--- except, well, C---. And a child in that situation often doesn't know that it's not right for them to be placed in the position of therapist, of maid, of lover. Hell, sometimes the parent doesn't know that either.

And that leads to how the CSA was framed which, like. One of the books we read either just prior to the jam or in the early days of it was Susan Clancy's The Trauma Myth, wherein she argues that trauma is not the primary response children have to that type of experience, it's instead confusion. Now, I can't really vouch for her methodology or results, that's not any of our skillsets, but, well, it resonated with our experience and provided an explanation for why our feelings are less terror and more like, shame, self-loathing, disgust, violation, being irreparably stained. Because C---'s future is that she learns that it was wrong, but she knows that she liked it (and maybe still does!), she knows that she didn't revoke consent, she feels utterly complicit. And she has to grapple with all that, which I guess is kind of the larger shape of this work if you zoom the camera out.

As regards the depiction of CDDs... we really had no idea how that was going to turn out. Like, we certainly wanted to portray it respectfully and naturally, not as a plot device but as an elemental part of Rose's experience and eventually C---'s as well (whether or not she realizes it). And like, we could draw on our own experiences with dissociation and resultant identity fragmentation, and kind of how switching and internal dialogues tend to occur for us now. But we really have a very poor understanding of how and to what extent we experienced it at C---'s ages, and had to do some guesswork along that front. The same goes for Rose's real-world analogue; we knew she had DID (or I guess MPD as it was called at the time) since we were like eight, but what that meant, how she navigated that, what we could to understand and accommodate... what we managed to learn was through experience rather than through any sort of dialogue or explanation. I don't know to what extent she even had the language to make sense of it herself. Which, thinking about how lost we were before we had this like plural framework of self-understanding... that terrifies me. And I think I didn't want Rose to be in that position. She had it hard enough.

I really want to thank you again for your comment. It is validating as an artist and as a person, and I'm joyed to know just how you found it to be human, and it's always nice getting like precise feedback on what worked, and also it spurred me to think more about what we were going for and how we want to try to think about intentionality and executing on a vision going forward. Thank you. And thank you as well to your friend for sharing it. 💖💖💖