A to Z: Y?

 

    It's kind of funny, actually.  I have a decent number of Y-named characters, but they're none of them much to talk about.  (Once again proving that I did not really give "characters I have written about" enough thought as an April A-to-Z theme...)  For lack of any stronger choice, I'm going to go with the various members of the Yu Clan who show up in the massively long (and currently unedited) Mo Dao Zu Shi fic that I spent nearly a year working on. 😅

    Ideally, it'd be great if I could also talk about the canon Yu Clan (ex-Yu Clan?) character, Yu Ziyuan.  Unfortunately, most of the fics I've written so far started after her death.  😰 The sole exception to that--no, there's two exceptions.  The first one, the 1980s AU, has her only vaguely present because I did not think I could write her the way she was written in canon, nor did it seem appropriate to do so anyway, and I wasn't sure how she should behave in the modern setting, so she's more of an off-screen idea than an actual character.  And in the recently written "Last Loop," she's still alive, but none of the scenes are at Lotus Pier, so there would be no reason for her to show up. 😅

    Instead, I'll just have to talk about the OC family members I gave her.  😅  Though in my own defense, at least two of the four named Yu Clan relatives I introduced existed by definition:  when Lotus Pier is attacked, Yu Ziyuan tells her son to flee to Meishan to his grandmother so Yu Ziyuan's mother is canonically still alive at that time, and one of Yu Ziyuan's other names means "third daughter" so she must therefore have two older sisters (though I only used the elder of the two).  The further two Yu Clan OCs I introduced are Yu Ziyuan's nieces, though only one of them is even the slightest bit fleshed out.  (All of this post is talking about the still untitled Jiang Cheng fic that I spent most of the last year writing, btw.  I gave Yu Ziyuan a different OC relation in another fic, but he's not really worth talking about.)

    To go by order of age, let's start with Yu-zongzhu, Yu Ziyuan's mother.  (Who isn't quite a full "named" character since I didn't pick a given name for her. 😅)  Given that Jiang Cheng was told to go to Meishan to his grandmother rather than his grandfather, most fans have assumed that the Yu Clan is matriarchal.  This is epic, so I went with it.  😆  Therefore, Jiang Cheng's grandmother is the leader of the Yu Clan during the massive fic.  She doesn't show up all that often in the fic, though, as Jiang Cheng mentions to the other leaders early on that his grandmother and aunts tend not to pay much attention to the other clans and anything they happen to get up to.

A to Z: Nie Huaisang

 

    Again, probably not a surprise to anyone following my April A-to-Z journey who already knows Mo Dao Zu Shi.  (W will also not surprise you, in that case.  🤣)

    It's hard to know how to talk about Nie Huaisang, for spoiler reasons...which in itself is a spoiler because from his early appearances in Mo Dao Zu Shi you'd think it impossible that he could even tangentially be involved in anything that could conceivably be considered a spoiler.

    ...

    Somehow, that seems very like him.  😅  I'll just throw down a "read more" tag and get on with it, then, shall I?

A to Z: Curt Wild

(If you're looking for today's IWSG post, it went up right before this one.)

    Today's post is the first time I'm posting about someone else's character.  Which is to say that today I will be talking about my fan fiction writing. 😅  That will happen a lot this month, I'm sorry to say.  (It will mostly be swapping over between my Greek mythology addiction and my recent addiction to a particular fandom...but that fandom's characters don't get the spotlight in these posts for a little while yet.  And there's one totally original character between now and then!)

    Anyway.  Back on topic, who I want to talk about today is the character of Curt Wild from the 1998 movie Velvet Goldmine, written and directed by Todd Haynes.  The movie is a fictional reimagining of the early '70s glam rock scene, told in flashback from a mildly dystopian 1984.  Curt Wild is the movie's equivalent of Iggy Pop, only much hotter because he's played by Ewan McGregor. 😍

    Curt is a complicated character to work with because he doesn't talk much, plus he spends most (or all) of the 1970s portions of the film struggling with a crippling heroin addiction.  We also don't get to hear his take on events, unfortunately.  The movie follows the Citizen Kane format of accompanying a journalist as he interviews people for a story on a controversial figure:  in this case, glam rock star Brian Slade, Curt's former lover.  The journalist, Arthur Stuart (Christian Bale!), interviews Brian's former manager, Cecil, and his ex-wife Mandy, but doesn't get to interview Curt, so we only see the Curt/Brian relationship from the outside, from Mandy's perspective and from Arthur's own memories of being a glam rock fan at the time.  We do get to hear a little from Curt about everything that happened, but not the full story as he saw it.  So despite how much time he has on screen, he's also something of a mystery to the audience.  (Though in truth the same could be said for Brian, and he has more screen time than anyone else.)

    Consequently, writing for Curt is always a challenge for me, especially since I don't really know much about popular music, and I have never used drugs or even known anyone who used them.  And, actually, seeing as he also seems very sexually motivated, my asexuality probably makes it hard for me to connect with him as well.

    So why would I write about him at all?

    Well, two big reasons.  While I am asexual and aromantic, I do have some minor romantic/sexual interest, though it's all interest that I have less than no desire to act on physically.  In other words, I kind of like thinking about love, but only so long as I'm not involved.  Um.  Okay, no matter how I describe it, it keeps sounding creepy.  There's actually a term for it, as a subsection of asexuality, so let me just borrow the definition as set out by people better at defining things than I am.

Aego (also known as Autochoris) is an orientation prefix where one's attraction is centered around individuals other than oneself.^[1][2] The prefix aego is deriven from the Latin words a- meaning without, and ego meaning myself, resulting in the combined meaning of "sexual/romantic without myself".^[3][4][5]

The exact definition of this label is imprecise and has evolved over time. Definitions include:

• experiencing a disconnect between oneself and one's object of attraction;^[2]
• only experiencing attraction in vague third-person fantasies;^[6]
• enjoying relationship-related activities in media/fantasies without desiring to be a participant;^[7]
• only experiencing attraction to situations that does not involve oneself.^[8]

Aego individuals often use this term because they feel alienated both from the idea that the absence of attraction implies the absence of fantasies regarding relationships, and the idea that the presence of fantasies implies the possibility of attraction. Aego individuals' fantasies generally do not involve themselves, only other individuals.^[6][9]

(Definition quoted from the LGBTQIA+ Wiki page on the Aego orientation.)

    In my own case, rather than getting idle crushes on actors or singers, crushes never intended or expected to be acted on, I get crushes sometimes on fictional characters, specifically in the context of their romance with some other character.  (This has been the case ever since I was a small child:  my first crush was Han Solo, but it was always in the context of his romance with Princess Leia (even before The Empire Strikes Back came out!).  Of course, since then I have lost my tolerance for hetero romance...)  So, long story short (too late!), watching Velvet Goldmine gave me a crush on Curt Wild, with his partner in the crush of course being Arthur Stuart.  (I promise it makes sense in the context of the film.)  And when I get crushes on fictional characters, I like to write about them.

    But that's only part of it.  The other part is because I first saw the movie on Netflix in late 2015.  If I hadn't had Velvet Goldmine fanfic to write, with the heroic journalist exposing the corruption festering in the White House, all while he's having a very gay love story with a gorgeous rock star, I'm not sure how I would have survived 2016-2020.  It wasn't just fan fiction, it was also reassurance and even mild therapy.

    Okay, so enough background, let's talk about how I've handled the character!  There are a lot of things inconsistent from one of my Velvet Goldmine fics to the next, and how I characterize Curt has definitely been one of the inconsistencies.  But I can't really talk about any of that without talking about certain spoilers for the movie, so I'm going to put in one of those lines that cuts off the post from the main page before going on. 😅

IWSG: Blogging

 

    So, this month's question is:

April 3 question - How long have you been blogging?  What do you like about it and how has it changed?

    That's actually a kind of depressing question for me. 😅  Because it turns out that it will be exactly ten years this summer.  Which means I'll be turning 50 soon(ish). 😱

    See, I started blogging soon after I turned 39, posting daily as I went through the voyage of entering my fourth decade.  Uh, also at the time I thought I wanted to hastily enter into a romantic relationship because I had this weird idea in my head that there was something wrong with turning 40 without having had one, and so I thought I'd use a blog to chronicle that journey and then I promptly did absolutely nothing about it, and upon actually turning 40 I sat down and looked at my life and realized that I actually viewed the idea of entering a romantic (or sexual) relationship as pretty darn scary, and so much of my stress and unhappiness just melted away.  (Proving that you're never too old to sit down and figure out your own sexuality.)

    So, anyway, that was very late in the summer of 2014 that I started that blog (it was on Wordpress at the time, only they kept making more and more changes that made the free accounts more and more unpleasant to use until I finally said "screw this!" and decided to migrate elsewhere, ending up here) and that means I'm close to a full decade of blogging.  Though it's not been steady; for a lot of that time, these IWSG posts were the only posts I was putting up.  (This was the case before leaving Wordpress as well as after.)

    I like how blogging gives me a chance to just sort of say whatever I want (within reason) at whatever length I want.  When I get really invested in a topic, I can go on endlessly about it, and most people don't want to put up with that, and the beauty of blogging is that no one has to put up with it:  if I want to write ten thousand words about cheese, I can, and if no one wants to read all those ten thousand words, they don't have to.  (Uh, not that I'm likely to write ten thousand words about cheese.  I just thought that sounded funny as an example.)  If I start prattling on in person about whatever I'm into, whoever I'm talking to either has to suffer through listening to my nonsense or has to be rude enough to say "shut up already!"  That's not the case in a blog, since I can't tell if someone who visits a post actually reads what's written there or not, so there's no worry that I'm inconveniencing anyone.

    A lot of the biggest changes to blogging, for me, have been that switch from Wordpress to Blogger.  It's not just a question of formatting and Blogger having fewer widgets, but of audience.  Wordpress had a lot of built-in audience, and you could search the whole site for blogs by their tags, and if Blogger has anything like that, I'm unaware of it (not that I've really spent much time looking at other blogs since the change, as I have more drains on my time than I used to), and certainly not seeing any traffic from it.  (Most of my traffic on the blog seems to come from bots, in fact, though at least they're not posting spam comments.  Not sure what they are doing, but... 🤷🏻‍♀️ )  In a way, I kind of like the lack of an audience, because it means no pressure to produce interesting posts, and I actually do like the idea of just screaming into the void to vent my thoughts/feelings.  But on the other hand it's also kind of frustrating that if I do happen to post something clever or interesting, no one will see it.

    There's also the change of not feeling quite as...hmm, how to put this?  "Pressured" isn't the right word, but neither is "motivated," though they're both a bit related to what I want to say.  Hmm.....

    Well, I'll try to fumble through without the right word.  Unlike when I started (post-turning 40, I mean) I don't feel much compulsion to post to my blog, so I end up posting very sporadically, with IWSG being the only constant.  (That's one of the reasons I decided to do April A to Z this year, for the first time in ages, to try and get me posting regularly again for reasons other than NaNoWriMo.)

    Hmmm.

    I feel like there ought to be more to say, but I can't think what it is.

    (That seems to happen to me a lot these days.  Getting old, maybe...)

A to Z: Atalanta and Ariadne

 

    I haven't done this challenge in quite a few years now (I'd have to go digging around on my old Wordpress blog to see which years I did, and I don't feel like bothering 😅) so I may be a bit rusty with it, but I'm going to try my best!

    You may be thinking, based on the title of the post, that you know who I'm about to talk about.  But actually you don't.  (Unless you're one of a very tiny number of people.  Which is unlikely.)

    Because I'm not talking about the famed huntress Atalanta, nor about Ariadne, the daughter of King Minos who helped Theseus through the labyrinth.  Nope, I'm talking about two original characters of mine who were named after those two.

    Allow me to take you back in time all the way to 2014.

    (Yeah, you were probably expecting a much older date there, huh?)

    I was pondering, as often I do, a miniscule part of a familiar tale and wondering about the details that might have happened around it.

    Specifically, on that particular occasion I was thinking about the time, late in the Trojan War, that Achilles was briefly exiled for having slain Thersites because Thersites was mocking Achilles for mourning the Amazon queen he had just killed.

    All murderers in the Greek heroic age had to be exiled, lest the stain of their murder cause plagues and other disasters, and then they needed to be purified by a king before they could safely return home.  Well, the Greek army at Troy didn't want to take any risks of Achilles being away for long, so they sent a king (specifically, Odysseus) with him to purify him so he could immediately turn right back around and return to the war with as little time lost as possible.  They made their way to the nearest non-enemy city they could reach, specifically Methymna on the island of Lesbos, which Achilles had conquered personally much earlier in the war.  (Not that that's saying much:  Achilles personally conquered most of the towns within a few days' reach of the Achaian camp!)

    Anyway, in the myth that's all there is to it:  they go there, Odysseus purifies him, and they go back to the war so Achilles can die a few weeks (or possibly days) later.  But--and here's where it got interesting to me--these are two particularly libidinous individuals, even for Greek mythology.  So I found myself wondering what happened while they were on Lesbos, away from all the prying eyes back in the camp.

    Even as I starting thinking that maybe they got a bit too 'friendly' with some of the girls serving them whatever refreshments the surviving locals provided them, I realized I was already naming the daughters they were going to father on said girls.  🤣

    Usually, when I find myself doing that, I accept the inevitable, and that's what I did this time, too:  I sat down to start writing the stories of those girls, Atalanta (the daughter of Achilles) and Ariadne (the daughter of Odysseus).

Finally finished, at last...

    It's been a ridiculously long haul, but I'm done with (the first draft of) this stupidly long fanfic!  🥳

    Of course, this is still just the first draft.  And the second draft will require a stupid amount of work.  But I get to do other things before I have to deal with that!  I want to get the third book of the God Killers out as soon as humanly possible (hopefully sometime next month), and I have a couple of really short fics I want to write (because I am stupid) and I need to actually go looking at other peoples' April A to Z theme reveals because I want to stop being the kind of jerk who joins blog hops and then forgets to look at the other blogs. 😰  But for tonight, I'm just gonna put up this post and relax.  Or possibly work on the summary of book two of the God Killers, but who really knows what I'll do before I do it. 🤷🏻‍♀️  Mostly, though, I'm  just going to celebrate that I finally finished this massively long work:  the first draft is 494,315 words long!  (Which took from April 23, 2023 to today, March 24, 2024...omg...that's kinda freaky that both dates are the same as their year...)  And that is just stupidly long.  (Admittedly, there's a lot of stuff in there that's been given the strikethrough treatment, but I doubt that contributes more than 10k, if even that much.)

    I still have a lot of problems to contend with in the next draft, like the primary romantic pairing being a lopsided "romance" in which he's in love and she only feels friendship, but... 🤷🏻‍♀️  Compared to the way their stories end in the original work (he eternally loveless, she long dead) it's still pretty good as an ending point.  I hope. 😅

    Anyway, I really enjoyed how I started the first scene of the epilogue, and I wanted to post it here because it will be a very long time before I can post it anywhere else.  In the final battle, the fic's lead, Jiang Cheng, took a massive injury, but didn't want to relax his guard and get medical care until after his enemy had finished dying...meaning by the time he could relax he was about halfway to passing out from all the blood loss, and ended up being fairly delirious before he finally did lose consciousness.  So then the epilogue starts as he's waking up again...  [...and I should probably point out that even though I'm working with the TV adaptation's canon, I'm following the novel's formatting of using italics to indicate the POV character's direct thoughts.]

            Jiang Cheng was…asleep?  Or maybe napping?  Unconscious?  Resting?

            Is there a difference?

            Whatever he was, his eyes were shut and he was lying down, insensible to the world.  Then the world came barging into the room, screaming and stomping and shouting and smelling like blood and sweat and death and soup.

            Or that was how it seemed to him.

            Opening his eyes with a low grunt, he slowly spotted the cause of the noise:  Wei Wuxian.  Why am I not surprised?

            Wait, shouldn’t I be surprised?

            Isn’t he somewhere else right now?

            Ugh, why does everything hurt so much?

            “Now see what you’ve done?  You woke him up, Qing-jie!”

            “Me?!  You’re the one making enough noise for a whole army!”  Wen Qing’s indignation made Jiang Cheng laugh.  Hadn’t she known Wei Wuxian long enough to know better?

            “Hey, you okay?”  Wei Wuxian sat down on the side of the bed.  “You look half dead.”

            “I feel worse.”  Jiang Cheng tried to sit up, but didn’t manage much.  “Where am I?  How did I get here?”

            “You passed out due to massive blood loss,” Wen Qing told him, walking up behind Wei Wuxian.  “Next time, don’t refuse treatment just because the enemy hasn’t finished dying yet.”

    [Wei Wuxian is the lead of the original work, and kind of Jiang Cheng's adopted brother (though also kind of not, since he wasn't formally adopted).  "-jie" as a suffix means "older sister," and can be used with an actual blood sibling or (as in this case) as a term of endearment (or affectionate teasing) with a woman older than the speaker who is not related to the speaker.]

    Anyway, it's kinda freaky.  When I did a mini-outline for what needed to go in the epilogue, I looked at what I had written and then said to myself  "Ugh, looking at this, it’s gonna be even more than 10k, isn’t it?" and you know what?

    The epilogue ended up being 10,300 words.

    To me, that seems pretty freaky, since I usually cannot judge in the slightest how long something will be from the outline. (Like the time I thought an outline section would be about 50k and it turned out to be more like 150k....)

    I just had to take a screenshot of the final double palindrome of the work. 🤣 Because I'm weird like that. Kind of a doozy, though! 😅

    And this happened earlier this afternoon:

    I have a terrible tendency to do things like the above, where I was writing along and just started typing my own thoughts instead of the narration. I did that a lot in this scene, actually, because I had plotted it all out and written it in my head twice over (consistently) earlier in the day, but when I got to the scene--the point of which was for Jiang Cheng to talk to his love interest, Wen Qing, and establish that no, his grandmother wasn't forcing her to marry him, but that she actually wanted to--it came out all wrong and kind of went insane. To the point where I gave up on it and decided that future me could deal with it.😅 I'm too burned out to write a scene that difficult right now, you know? Besides, I probably need to retool their whole relationship in the next draft, so she's more into him the whole time, and thus doesn't have to have this weird aromantic but somehow still into him even though she only thinks of him as a friend thing going on.

    Anyway, in the case of the above, the problem was that I am just far too aromantic and asexual to write a detailed kissing scene. Because I've never done any kissing, and it just sounds icky. (This is also one of the reasons I cannot write detailed sex scenes.) In this case I was also extra uncomfortable about it because it was hetero, and it's been a while since I wrote anything hetero.

    Aaaaaaand it's dinner time, and I have not stopped working on the computer since getting up this morning. (Seriously, ate lunch at the computer and everything.)

    I think I need to just hit "publish" on this post and leave it a jumbled mess and worry about the rest later.

    Like tomorrow. After I've eaten and slept and done other vital functions that I have been putting off.

    Because I have finally finished this %$^#$in' long thing and I deserve a rest! 🤣

IWSG - On Love

 

    As I continue to wallow in the throes of research on an overwhelmingly large topic in order to write most of someone else's visual novel, I keep finding myself focusing on one of the two parts of the game I absolutely will not be writing:  the love story parts.

    Not focusing on them in the sense of "it's those parts I find myself imagining writing" but in the sense of "how do I even write the lead-ins and lead-outs of romantic scenes?"  Knowing your limits is, of course, an important part of being a writer, and I have long since come to understand that I 100% cannot write characters falling in love.  Being someone who does not feel romantic or sexual love, this is hardly a surprising fact.  (Though it is surprising how long it took me to figure out that I couldn't write it; I kept trying to write love stories stories with love in them long after I realized I was asexual and aromantic.)  For the most part, in my own works, even if I can't remove romance entirely, I can at least work to avoid the "falling in love" stage of a story and it generally works out at least enough for me.

    But this time it's not my story, so I don't have that control.  And, as is common (but not universal, no matter what some people think) in visual novels, there is a dating sim aspect to the game.  Well, "dating sim" isn't really accurate, but I'm not sure what a better term would be.  I can't really explain the story since it's not my story to share, but I think I can at least admit that the player character has entered a mostly-closed location in search of a particular individual who he knows is there but whose face he does not know, so he has to get to know all the people there who match the missing person's general description (age, mostly) in order to figure out which one is the person he's looking for.  In the process, he can fall in love with one of them, leading to a different branch of the story that leads to the romantic ending with that character.  (Not that all the suspects are potential love interests, and at least one of them won't return the player character's affection even if you pick them...)  Consequently, when we leave the research and planning stage (another hindrance in writing this game is that we're having trouble finding times we're both free to discuss the game) I'm going to have to write each character's subplot such that it could lead into romance, but doesn't have to.

    I am unsurprisingly feeling very daunted by this idea.

    I did at least come up with the approach of having the subplots advance in a manner similar to the S-Link scenes in the newer Persona games (the ones back on the original Playstation having been entirely different) which should make writing it a lot easier on me, but...

    ...the prospect of finding a way to make seamless lead-ins for the other writer's love-related scenes in still scaring me a lot.

    Also scary is the prospect of trying to write something set in ancient China, given my lack of firm knowledge of the setting.  Obviously, that's why I'm doing research (I've been reading a lot of online information, and have just received one of the two books I ordered last week (on top of two books I bought in person)) and have been watching some Chinese dramas on Netflix, plus reading the translation of the original novel one of them was based on, but...at the end of the day, it still feels a bit like I'm attempting to do something I'm not qualified to do.  Like, does it still count as cultural appropriation for me, a white person, to write something set in China when I'm doing so in partnership with (and under direction from) someone who is of Chinese ancestry?  I mean, I hope that makes it okay, but I still feel a little iffy.

    The irony about my extreme inability to write love is that when I read (or sometimes watch) something with a great romance in it I often find myself reacting like a giggling teenager.  *sigh*  Even to me, I don't make sense.

    (BTW, for anyone who's interested, let me recommend that drama and its original novel (though unfortunately the official translation is so far only up to volume 2 of 5 on the novel), because they're super-good.  On Netflix, the drama was given the translated title of The Untamed, which is a bizarrely flavorless title, and I don't think it accurately translates the show's title, though I'm pretty sure the drama does have a different title than the novel.  The novel's title is Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, which I admittedly can see making any network (or streaming service) wince, despite that it's a really good title.  I decided to read the original 'cause looking around online I began to realize that the drama had been heavily self-censored to be allowed on Chinese television, and it sounded like the novel let the two leads actually admit to being in love with each other.  I'm actually still only most of the way through the first volume, but it's already much more direct about...well, it's not really "their feelings for each other" at this point, just "his feelings for him" since it's not reciprocal yet...but it still had me acting ridiculously giddy because he's adorable in his inability to express his feelings.  (But that's exactly the sort of thing I know I'll never be able to write, but hopefully my co-writer will be able to add that sort of thing into scenes I've already written...)  The drama version seems a bit simplified all around (which is astonishing, considering it's 50 hour-length episodes long!) but the cast was really excellent (and the hero is quite possibly the most beautiful man I've ever seen a picture of) and the scenery and sets incredibly gorgeous.)

Finally finished my game...

So, last time I was talking about how I was working on two game jam projects.  I was actually mostly talking about the one that's not due until the beginning of December, rather than the one that was due on October 25th.

Needless to say, I spent most of the intervening time working on the latter, not the former.

It was rather like working on a particularly grueling NaNoWriMo project, only with the major difference that in a game jam, you turn in your work at the end for the whole internet to see (if it so chooses).  Kind of terrifying. :p  (The comparison to NaNo is rather apt, though, because I ended up adapting several lengthy passages from a rather awful Trojan War novel I had written for my very first NaNoWriMo, back in 2011.  The passages in question weren't awful, I feel the need to point out.)

Anyway, the game is called "Are You A Better General Than Agamemnon?" and it puts you in the role of a generic Greek king (named Creon, which was used for at least two kings of different city-states in Greek myths, and I believe does in fact have a meaning along the lines of "lord"), and you have to lead the united Greek (or rather Achaian) army through the long slog of the Trojan War (though there are two ways you can actually win in the first year).  You can find the game here on itch.io, as a free download (the pop-up might make it look like you're being told to pay, but it's only offering the option to make a donation, which no one ever actually does).  It does still have some bugs, despite all my attempts to find and squash them, but it mostly functions. :P

It was decidedly exhausting having to spend so much time on writing and coding (to what extent coding is needed in TWINE), but I feel like in the end I've made something that's actually pretty neat.  It needs a lot of work still, and eventually I want to move it to a different engine that will give it more components to function a bit more like a proper strategy game rather than a text game with the possibility to get a lot of characters killed (sometimes in very stupid ways), but as a prototype I'm pretty proud of it.  Though I do want to go back and add a glossary/list of characters that can be accessed at any time.

That's for later, though.  First I have that other game jam project to finish. ;)

I will probably not do much on that between now and November 1st, however.  (What with today being the 29th, that's not saying much, of course...)  As I am again refraining from doing an official NaNo project in protest of the way they ruined the site and especially the way they decided to massacre all our projects by making their hideous cover art the focal point of the project pages, with everything we've written about the projects squished into teeny tiny text boxes on the back like bleeding afterthoughts, I'm going to be an extra rebel in that I'm not even going to be working on a novel or counting words; I'm going to count minutes and work on game scripts.  As I did last year on my old blog, I'm going to use my blog to keep track of my progress.  (Which I hope will be able to continue steadily, but...I have no idea what's going to happen to my mental state after Tuesday.  I can only hope...and vote...)

Anyway, I'll be polishing and reworking the rough draft of the escape game I talked about last time, and working up the glossary to go with it, as well as working on the way the game should look.  Once I have the game finished (more or less), then I'll deal with going back and adding a glossary to "Are You A Better General Than Agamemnon?", as well as trying to fix the bugs.

If I finish with both of those tasks before November is over, I actually have two other games I want to make, as well as wanting to get back to working on the whole novel that the escape game is just one chapter of.

One of those two games is a direct...what should I call it?  Reaction against? Rebuttal of? Well, whatever you want to call it, precisely, I was inspired by my rage at the description of an otome game I saw in the "Coming Soon" section of the store on the Nintendo Switch.  (An otome game, I should explain for those who don't know, is a type of dating game wherein you play a woman and are courted by a selection of handsome men (and/or have the option of trying to court one of the many handsome men around you).  I've actually played some that are pretty good, but a lot of them are not.)  I had actually clicked on it because I wasn't sure if it was on the level or if it was a parody.  I'm sorry to say it was on the level, and particularly badly translated if the game's sales page is any indication, but what enraged me was two parts of the description.  First, at the top it said:

You are a so-called "love-allergic" girl who spends her time at home in a track suit.

How to interpret that but that the heroine is, like me, aroace?  (Or at least aromantic.  I suppose she doesn't have to be asexual, too.)  Also that she likes comfortable clothes, but so what?  So does Amy Wong, and she's not exactly short on boyfriends.  (Futurama character, for those who don't know.  Always wears a pink sweatsuit, and is known for her massive number of boyfriends.  Until she gets involved with the love of her life, that is.)

But then towards the end it says...

This is a love story game in which relationships form between the "love-allergic" heroine who wears track suits around the handsome men.  ...  In this romance simulation game for girls, you can go from a life empty of romance to one in which every day is filled with excitement and happiness.

In other words, the game is designed to force an aromantic/asexual/aroace heroine into a heterosexual relationship.  And you're supposed to be rooting for that.  They expect you to pay money for the experience of denying this woman's sexuality.

That is deeply, deeply wrong.

If the game was about a lesbian being forced into a relationship with a man, Nintendo would never have allowed it on the Switch.  And if they did, they'd be getting picketed by LGBTQ+ groups all over the place.

But because it's about an aroace woman, an equally distressing situation is being completely ignored.  (Admittedly, given how little effort went into the translation, I doubt it's going to have much in the way of sales, but that's not the point here.)

So, I am going to write an anti-dating game, where the player character is an aroace young woman who's in a situation where she has handsome men courting her aggressively, and the point of the game is not to get forced into a relationship with any of them. 

Looking at the game jams of the past on itch.io, it looks like the annual Asexual Jam is held in January, so I'm thinking this game would be perfect for that.

The other game I was thinking of making I will talk about later, because I just realized it's now past midnight, and I'm suddenly quite tired, so I think I will go to bed now. :P

(Yeah, my brain has not yet recovered from the strain of the last week of the game jam...)