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help. this story had its fingers down my memory's throat. i coughed up undigested nostalgia:

+ k'nex that didn't actually connect right because the colorful rods and spokes (shaped like spiderweb macaroni, uncooked but so was a lot of the pasta i ate) were irresistible, flavorless candy, even as they clawed at my gums. i chewed them until they bent.

+ a plastic spoon from a kitchen playset, the fake berries attached to it somehow permanently scented like a perfume you wish you could drink, covered in teeth marks.

+ lego tires, the truest delicacy. actually chewy, flavored like a shoe, resilient to all my teething. how many lego cards did i put up on lego bricks, rubber jacked from the rims? i wondered if it would be the same as swallowing gum. 

one of the first intrusive thoughts i ever let win.

SPOILERS FOLLOW:

i pursue this level of dread in stories, both in what i consume and what i create. i think it's executed almost perfectly here, in the way Rory thinks she's solved a mystery and will gain some kind of power over Alexandria,

but Rory is swimming toward hooked fingers the entire time. when you will eat anything, the hook itself is the bait.

the fact that the dread coexists with one of the hottest depictions of visceral oral violation i've ever seen is a feat. i love the color language you employ, not just with the purple creeping in, but with the blue starburst around Rory's head while Alexandria shoves her fingers in. all the dread you promise gets multiplied exponentially by the way the forced regurgitation is the sexy scene, and the sex scene is instead the moment that dread returns. the dulled hues at the end... it's so wretched. thank you and well done. 

(also Rory is one of the most charmingly designed cat girls i've ever seen and i hope only good things happen to her in some hypothetical world beyond this story.)

i've wondered about that myself. honestly, i had aspirations of completing all 3 acts in the month-and-change sprint the jam window gave me to work with, but i underestimated how foreign the experience of coding something other than basic HTML was going to be. 

as it was, i focused on reaching the end of act II and having that serve as a cliffhanger—if i hadn't finished writing act II, i would've done an "act I only" demo release instead of submit something that ends mid-scene. plus, act II is significantly longer, and felt like where much of the overall context of the story is grounded. what i'm trying to do with what scenes Larkin... 'lays claim' to, i suppose, is something i'll get into when i eventually write the post-mortem. 

i'm overjoyed to hear you clicked with Meadow's portion, however. she's a vivid creature in my head, as much as Larkin and moreso.  (she features more heavily later.) i love when a character is stranded in the wilderness of themselves, and could easily have written weeks worth of Meadow's days and nights at Camp Moonlight—but as an amateur in the realm of original fiction, i fretted over how long such a premise could hold interest.

Larkin's segment is, probably, in need of some kind of streamlining. i would like to do more with sound in the future, as i felt (and commented on how) Be Normal did arresting things with the soundscape. likewise i felt as though there were some shared blood between my work and yours; it feels less vanity on my part to hear that sentiment echoed. 

thank you for ruminating on what's been written so far, incomplete as it is. it means a lot to me.

"the most widely used of all solvents" indeed.

SWIM4SWIM was and is water to me. that's the easiest way for me to communicate the totality of my experience with it. i'll try to articulate it more, further down.

the shallow end: this was water in the way that it was hard for me to hold. much deserved praise has been heaped on the presentation and prose in this vn—the transitions and emphatic mood "cards" dividing certain scenes gripped me hard, and i want to try digging around in the files to see how it was managed. there were many times, however, where i found it hard to know the 'you' that was being spoken to, or who was speaking it, which led to confusion on my part for what was taking place. 

that said, even though it created friction in reading for me, it also felt strangely appropriate? the chlorine burn of trying to make out shapes and actions under the surface of a swimming pool, or the obliterating murkiness of lake water. some events are approached—less with caution and more tentative determination—and then a rush of text and images follows, which never feels like fear of the event being depicted but nevertheless felt at times like someone cannonball jumping into a placid moment. which felt, still, appropriate. maybe it's uncertain because everything blurs, smeared outlines in distorted refraction. maybe i should read this with goggles on. 

the music was incredible as well, and i loved the way it shifted fluidly as each beat of a scene was hit, tonally and sonically. 

the deep end: spoilers follow.

this was water for me in another way: i felt held by it and overwhelmed by it in equal measure. 

i went swimming yesterday. i'd been planning to go swimming specifically, in fact, to remember what it felt like to swim before i read SWIM4SWIM. it's been two and a half years since i last swam, and two years since i bought my first two piece swimsuit in anticipation of swimming again. 

i've always loved swimming. i was too big for professional swimming, but i eyed my swim team with envy for years. my main exposure to the professional world of it was the occasional olympic clip, and the exponentially more frequent news article about sexual abuse, about transgender performance, about institutional corruption. maybe it was for the best that my love of the water was kept safe from seeing if my ambition could float in it. 

it still feels surreal to think about what it felt like, getting back in the water, how natural it felt but how foreign it had become; how new-again the feeling of loving it was, but how bittersweet the forgetting of it was revealed to be. 

the love of swimming and the forgetting of it, the suffocation and resuscitation, the choking and the chest compressions—it's all so vivid and deeply felt.  

"i think, despite everything, i just want all of us to play in the pool together." the way that water can serve as a solvent to dissolve social contexts, because all of us who wade into it have evolved to the point where the belonging we find in it is only what we bring into it—or what we fish out of it, what we gut and clean—i feel like that, at least, i understand. 

bottom of the pool, breath released, bubbles few and far between: i'll share an old poem of mine that this vn reminded me of. i hope it feels relevant: https://pastebin.com/u4BVHJ3s

thank you all for making SWIM4SWIM.

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fcrnxvat bs flapueb: jnf gur fvzvynevgl va gur svany npg gb qrygnehar'f erprag jrveq ebhgr vagragvbany ("qnex lrg qnexre") be pbfzvp flapuebavpvgl? v jbhyq oryvrir rvgure rnfvyl, ohg v jnf pregnvayl fgehpx ol vg.

this was such a cute, disorienting romp—through a stranger's house in a stranger's brain, through a jesus freak's bedroom and a pitch black pantry panic attack—

and then it became, after multiple endings, something surprising. stumbling through the dark pantry of my own head, and realizing i don't, perhaps, know where everything on those shelves came from. time to check some expiration dates. 

but the game: lovely art combined with writing that pulls off the neat trick of appealing to multiple audience members at once by verbally addressing multiple POVs at once. 

thank you for writing this. 

i liked this one, though it left me wanting more. to want that and not get it, though, feels appropriate: both of these women wanted more out of each other, wanted to offer more to each other, but weren't willing to clear their own self-made hurdles to do so. the moment we find them in is a transient one in their lives, but etched more permanently in their memories if nothing else. 

the title drop lands between them like a dead mouse from a cat; a meaningful gift with which nothing meaningful can be done. i hope they figure things out somewhere down the line. 

the only way out is, in fact, through.

live through the horrors of war and manage to live through new horrors because you lived through old ones. live through being misinterpreted, on an existential level, and live through finally learning to interpret yourself at all costs. live through being loved from a distance and live through being loved from the inside out. 

spoilers below:

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i suspected that sasha was telepathic during the spider raid sequence, but learning that she's been telepathic the entire time and simply never knew what to do with what she learned was a gut punch i was wholly unprepared for. it's not a twist in the traditional sense, it doesn't cast the prior events in any new light, only the same light again, overexposed: the discovery that everything the reader knows, and much much more than aliska has allowed herself reflect on, sasha has heard on mental intercom for over a decade.

it's so unique to their circumstances that it becomes impossible to put a label on it, the thing that's been quietly happening inside sasha—it can't be called grooming, and at the same time it's impossible to argue that sasha hasn't been shaped by hearing aliska's thoughts about her. love precipitating at the intersect between what someone has been willing to do for you and what they've been unwilling to act upon.

it's phenomenal. the fact that a happy ending exists for these characters, despite the immense loss both of them have survived before and during the story... i was so relieved it hurt.  deeply earned. 

thank you for writing this, and for writing in general.

you've probably already seen my feelings about "mother, you + i" so to say i'm honored by the fact that you played and enjoyed what is here so far would be an understatement. thank you for sharing your thoughts both here and in the jam server. 

i felt a strong tether reading your entry after writing mine for a lot of reasons, but especially in the way both of us approached mothers and intoxication scenes from different tones but not entirely dissimilar contexts.

as far as the horror, announcing itself like a train horn in the distance: it would also not be untrue to say that dread is the emotion i am most familiar with, and there is both more and less dread forthcoming.

i'm so glad to read that the pieces are clicking, that they're not as disparate as they seemed to me when i wrote them. 

i'm not a visual artist in the least so the backgrounds were a fun experiment for me. when i finish the game i plan on doing a postmortem about the color language in them though.

definitely planning to add more sounds/bgm on the final pass, renpy's sound system eluded me more than anything but i'm putting in the work. 

thank you for the truly lovely sketches, the sonic meme moon made me laugh.
 

i've been staring at the pleasant red-on-rose-red of this page long enough that when i look away, retina-fatigued red cones asleep on the job, the world is briefly, entirely absent of that color. it's an unsettling feeling, to be presented with the all encompassing totality of a color and then look away to find it gone. 

that feels appropriate. physiological epigraph; red-on-rose-red is the inception of C--- itself, rose/red-on-unripe-green the inception of the story, the ripening of C--- the ripening of the story itself. 

i read this, inescapably, from my own perspective, one differently mothered, but which all the same felt mirrored over and over and over in my reading of it. my mother refused to let me out of her sight, even if that meant taking a child into rooms that a child maybe shouldn't be in, where things happened that a child maybe shouldn't see. she was right to worry, she still worries, never having learned that her fears were not unfounded, because it's the sometimes-duty of children to protect their parents, their mothers, from the consequences of their attempts to do well.

(creed for her, nine inch nails for me, jewel for the both of us, steam of too many baths shared, i care about animorphs and she doesn't get it, decibel ache of not-quite-maternal frustration, sharing a dirty mattress in anywhere nowhere texas. knives. drugs. moans.)

C--- and Rosie-Rose-Marie are etched in my heart now, or fit neatly into a spot already shaped like the lives they lead shown here. i feel and understand deeply the lack of moral education C--- has to work with, the way that influences what feels right, what seems wrong. i recognize so much of R---'s anger as squirming under the thumb of societal norms, societal pressure to participate, to serve and serve and serve and never be served except as emotional fast food grist for the lives of others lucky + discourteous enough to carry on functioning while digesting her usefulness for their own nutrition. 

in every way, in every form and shape, everything, is fucked, has been fucked, can only be survived through fucking it up, fucking it out, fucking it apart. it's the only tool in the toolbox of any use. 

this vn manages to make all of them human. i feel a visceral gratefulness at the sheer effort you've made to render them as such, to process the humanity of the people who have failed us as a result of being forever failed by others.

after i read 50 or so other entries, i will be reading more Bernadette Meyer. thank you for writing this.  

context: i've played the main narrative + read the post-mortem ("half-perimortem"), and will be reading the letters over time, to savor them, to stretch out the time i can spend with these recollections. i hope i wrote this respectfully of the plurality of the people involved.

take your time; my entry currently ends in a cliffhanger abruptly before the act where everything is meant to come together. but soon, soon i'll find the time to complete it. all that said: i genuinely welcome any feedback (good or bad) if and when you play it. 

felt. deeply fucking felt. being in the position of either of these characters in any relationship is difficult, but being in a relationship where both parties have mirrored dysphoric problems that won't allow the intimacy they want to express is... first hand, it's enough to make me grind my teeth. a quick punch right where it hurts. succinct in a way i hope i can ever approach in my own writing. thank you for writing this.

LIVE ORDINANCE AHEAD was, in hindsight, not even that metaphorical of a warning. this was a stroll through a psychic minefield, one i took willingly—though speaking of consent...

being faced, even before the story begins, with a forced denial of a plea for the reader to *not* begin this story, AKA explicitly placing the reader in the position of trespasser + witness + voyeur, is a brutally elegant piece of tone setting. i didn't expect anything less from you. 

i won't do a play-by-play but the much remarked-upon furious opening is a breath of fresh air as much as it's the first live mine in the dirt. reading from my thirty-something vantage point, the foreword pierces through to the teen that graduated the year obama was elected + the nowhere girl back in 2016 who was only just beginning to contemplate transition when trump was elected + the woman who broke up with someone (earlier this year) when they refused to drop amazon because the person wanted to "remain practical". 

not that it matters: in the grand scope, i myself am not part of any active solution, just a small piece of grit that barely registers as friction to those in power. the story begins.

the audio work in this thing, especially for it being your first VN, is immaculate. knuckles on window incandescent buzzing cars passing crickets chirping—but when the crickets stopped and the sobbing breaths started, it awed me a little. 

the sense of place, especially for a place you aren't from, feels tangible, rooted, probably aided by at least having a sense of time to moor it all to—the christina grimmie reference didn't pass me by; i was listening to julia nunes back then. 

the 2024 sequence, where Coral weighs her past behavior and past traumas hand-in-hand... being candid: that shit got me. my childhood and teen years are all littered with similar experiences, things that i could sexualize and sometimes do—the bully girls who circled me on bikes that i never learned to ride, etc etc etc—so it hit that much harder when sadie's name reappeared again, in the way that it did.

i'm getting personal here because it's affecting my ability to say unbiased things about the game: when the background from the road trip with sadie (my favorite one) was reused in the segment about the uhaul, talking about the ford motor company, i felt genuinely sick. 

see, i worked at a ford dealership. not in sales, but still: for an entire decade of stagnant nothing, i trudged through the tarry mire of a proto-trump conservative proving ground because it paid better than anything else i could find in my shit town. it ate my soul and stunted me until i finally fled it less than a handful of years ago. it was that or kill myself. 

the a/n at the end was almost too kind (the say anything track was a heady lil throwback), but i felt... well, i don't know if smug was the right word, reading the section on Coral's name. like her namesake, she's an animal of uncertain safety, striking at uncertain prey, in uncertain danger. i identify with her in many ways, unfortunately, and especially in being a kind of snake woman. (before i read this, i revisited "Snake Girl Girlfriend", the twine game you put out in late 2017. cute to see how far you've come, but that one still hits for me too, in its simple way.)

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i'm deep enough in now to say: hi Jade. it's lovely to read more of your writing again. i still need to catch up on Burnouts in Paradise sometime. back in 2022 on twitter, you dmed me because i expressed interest in trying to find some old thread-stories of yours (Vagar, Heating Up) and you shared them with me. those old stories-by-post meant a lot to me, and were... really integral to helping me figure out what kinds of things i wanted to read and ultimately write. there was anger and discomfort and uncertainty in those stories, and i loved seeing those same things here too.

thanks for making Be Normal.

i felt like i was reading the audio-visual equivalent of striated layers of toxic rainbow paint, layer upon layer of distortion that felt exponentially more difficult to look at as it went on, but that felt really apt because the events transpiring inside it ARE hard to look at directly and should feel that way, for the reader and for the character(s), who are trying to observe or remove themselves from observation depending on the scene. 

really long run-on there but this has really inspired me to try getting better at what i think is a strength displayed here: loose-but-coherent, a resilience toward the idea of trying to explain circumstances that can't be explained, only depicted in relative truth. 

(also felt viscerally mirrored multiple times in the smallest but most vivid ways, like talking about cold drinks and their relief, sharing a moment with a key and a door, what constitutes a sign of damage--i could really go on.)

thank you for writing this.

there were parts of this that made me feel seen in ways i didn't expect or predict. even not being plural myself, i was enthralled seeing the dichotomy of the eternal transfem fight-or-flight QTE siloed off across Jess and Alice, and the way Jess pushed against Alice's fear-based boundaries toward an ethically dubious conclusion is really sticking with me for a while. it ends in the only place it could end (without being double the length that it is); i like that we don't get to see the fallout of the choice they made with Ellie. really lovely work.