My Understanding of SSSS.Gridman’s Akane

Introduction

After several years, I have finally watched SSSS.Gridman. I wanna note that I am a big fan of tokusatsu in general, so this one has been a long time coming. Before watching SSSS.Gridman, I wanted to understand a bit more about the original show but I came out realizing that this anime is not Gridman The Hyper Agent. It’s a sequel, sure, but it aims to do very different things from the anime. Also it’s very likely this has become my favorite all-time anime.

I don’t know many of the hot theories about this show. The only one I’ve mostly read and seen is the one where people claim Akane is Rikka, but I don’t buy into that for a few reasons as we’ll get to. But I’m mostly here to talk about Akane, the Computer World, and her severely debilitating depression. More importantly, how all of this wraps together in my own theory about who Akane is and, more importantly, why I didn’t buy into the theories regarding the idea that Rikka is an idealized version of Akane’s actual self. I saw many people saying that the final scene between Rikka and Akane represents Akane forgiving herself, though I don’t necessarily agree with that interpretation.

One of the biggest themes for Akane is her depression. It has one of the most realistic and scarily relatable depictions of mental illness I’ve seen in media, which is surprising considering where this was made. With how wonderfully depicted depression is, showing how absolutely debilitating and destructive it is, placed on the backdrop of a niche 90s toku I felt the need to write something about it. Because I absolutely loved this anime. I have yet to watch SSSS.Dynazenon, but this writing here is primarily about Akane.

First off, we need to talk about Gridman and how the universe works. Gridman’s world is primarily split off into three places: the Real World, the Computer World, and the Hyper World. I’ve seen some people not fully understand the difference between the idea that it’s a “dream state” world and that the Computer World is its own fully functioning existence. 

In the original show, Computer World is mostly used as a place where the main antagonist, Takeshi Todo, would send his kaijus to cause problems alongside Khan Digifier. When the Computer World is damaged, it causes similar damage in the real world, usually related to whatever Todo is trying to cause problems with. In the first episode, for example, he targets the hospital that Yuka’s family runs and it causes an operation to stop in its tracks due to power outages and electronics running haywire. 

How Akane Ended up in the Computer World

We don’t know much about how Akane ended up in the Computer World, but it’s important to note that beings from the Hyper World can link the Computer World to the Real World. Assuming Alexis is a being from the Hyper World, which is likely since he’s meant to be Digifier 2.0, we can assume he was fully capable of linking the Computer World to the Real World. Since he is a being that feeds off extreme negative energy, we can assume he brought Akane to the Computer World where he could essentially make her fall into complete despair while attempting to lure out Gridman and defeat him.

One thing to note is that human avatars within the Computer World can be assimilated or combined with a being from the Hyper World. That’s how it works with Gridman and Naoto in the original show, and it allows Gridman to fight and draw power from the Real World’s Junk. At the end of the series, after Anti saves Akane, we see Alexis gains immeasurable power after assimilating Akane. This is because he is a being from the Hyper World and she is from the Real World.

SSSS.Gridman introduces a new facet to the Computer World, which is likely an evolution that occurs over time. Originally, computer systems were a lot more simple than they are in the modern day. So it makes sense that a virtual world is capable of being created in it, while still retaining the original core of the world. So here is my ultimate theory regarding how Akane ended up in the Computer World.

Akane is a teenage girl who suffers from severe depression. She is a geek, enjoying tokusatsu and the kaiju within them in particular. She loves it so much that she can rattle off the name and history of these kaiju and even design her own. These interests are generally disregarded, especially by her peers. Suffering  from poor self-esteem, Akane typically beats herself down in her head. This gets worse and worse, as she is incapable of interacting with others which only fuels her downward cycle.

At this same time, Alexis Kerib is a criminal fugitive in the Hyper World. He is wanted for attacking and preying upon mentally ill humans. As a result, Gridman, a lone Hyper Agent, is dispatched to find and arrest him. At this point, Gridman is alone, armed only with his normal Assist Weapons: the Gridman Sword, God Zenon, and Dyna Dragon. While Gridman investigates the location of Kerib, the latter has targeted Akane.

Considering the series latter shows that Akane is suicidal, it’s highly possible she was looking up things regarding suicide and self-harm on her home computer. From here, Kerib targets and talks to her the same way that Digifier managed to lure Todo into his schemes. Both Akane and Todo are social outcasts with interests that seemingly go outside the norm for their respective time periods. The difference here is that while Digifier’s schemes revolve around destroying the Computer World with Kaiju, Kerib’s main goal is to dredge Akane into total despair before absorbing her and moving onto his next victim.

Kerib entices Akane with promises of a perfect world, created to her specifications always. In this perfect world, she will be able to have everything she wants: friends, total adoration, beauty, etc. Total control. Akane’s depression makes sure of one thing, and that is that she is never in control. Depression can rule one’s life, making you incapable of doing much of anything. It keeps you constricted, forced into a perpetual state of itself. All of this is absolutely possible, due in part to the fact that the Computer World has evolved alongside Real World technology. 

As a result, Akane creates a virtual utopia for herself: Tsutsudjidai. In this city, she is beloved and wanted and people think she’s the best. In this world, she can fix and do anything she wants. One might even mistake her for a god. Despite this, she is still internally spiraling. Her interest in kaiju is something she doesn’t necessarily share with anyone, even in the world where everyone is designed to love her. So things continue on as normal: she uses her kaijus to delete and reset the world whenever things grow too far out of her control. It is a world after all, meaning that it will constantly evolve and change without her input. She just so happens to have administrator access.

Then everything changed when Gridman finally hunts down Kerib. The duo fight, and Kerib manages to get the upper hand on Gridman. What he believes to be a successful blow destroys Gridman and splits him apart into different pieces all based around different memories. Four scattered pieces become their own individual Hyper Agents dedicated to helping Gridman. Each of them are his scattered memories of the Gridman Sword and the three pieces of God Zenon. The final two pieces represent Gridman’s memories of the original show, the first being hosted by Naoto, so that piece embeds itself into Yuta, a completely unassuming teenager within the world. The other piece represents how Gridman communicated with Naoto, Ippei, and Yuka via Junk, the memories of that being his primary method of communication forming a new version of Junk within the Computer World itself.

At this juncture, we get the series beginning where Gridman, without his memories, believes he is Yuta and communicates with his other fragments to fight the kaijus. Because despite no longer having his memories, Gridman is still drawn to fighting to save innocents but no longer remembers anything about his own history. So he has no memory of the multiple layers of reality, nor that he is a Hyper Agent tasked with hunting down fugitives.

This of course gets in Kerib’s way, as Gridman’s interference with Akane’s kaijus results in his long-game plans being thrown out a window. He attempts to keep things on track by manipulating Akane to keep making kaijus, an activity she typically enjoys due to her love of the toku genre and its many creature designs. But she only spirals the more that things fall out of her control.

Who Are Yuta, Utsumi, and Rikka? What are their relationships to Akane?

One of the biggest things I’ve seen is the idea that everyone is based off of someone that Akane knows in the real world. Obviously, this is not something I believe because it feels a bit too off with how Akane is. In the Real World, one can assume she doesn’t have a whole lot of relationships so the fact that she would be able to accurately recreate people doesn’t seem right. Episode 9, Dream, does an incredible job at depicting where these three come from and what their goal is in terms of Akane’s creation.

We’ll begin with our main character, Yuta/Gridman. Firstly, I don’t believe Yuta was a “main player” in terms of relationships to Akane. Obviously, she created certain people in the city to be her friends and Yuta was not one of them. He just so happened to be the one in the seat next to Akane when Gridman was split apart in the city. Now, I don’t believe Akane was ever really “in-love” with Yuta. Him being Gridman causes her to focus on him a lot, and when she enters into the Dream with him, he becomes her boyfriend. But notice how she doesn’t really understand what that entails. To her, it’s both a meaningful dream, not because it’s with Yuta, but because she desires a romantic relationship with SOMEONE in the Real World. Whether this is someone specific or just a general thing, I believe that’s why she doesn’t want the dream to end with him: she doesn’t want to be alone again and that if it ends she’ll be right back to creating kaijus and causing destruction. Yuta is not a character in the show, Gridman is. And it’s important to note that.

Then we have Utsumi, the local tokusatsu nerd, who is a very big fan of Ultraman in particular. Unlike Yuta, Utsumi was designed by Akane to fill a very specific niche that she was unable to ever find in the Real World: a friend who shares interests with her. If anything, Utsumi more represents an idealized version of the type of person Akane is. He is a tokusatsu fan, though unlike Akane he has his best friend, Yuta, and is shown to be capable of being friends with other people, eventually becoming a close friend to Rikka. He openly loves the Ultra series and isn’t super embarrassed to talk about it, and at the end of the day his major goal is to become closer to Akane. Why? Well because he’s programmed to, generally, but also because Akane specifically wanted him to be her friend. 

Despite being omnipotent inside of the Computer World, she still fails to befriend the person designed specifically to do so. And slowly, thanks to Gridman, he grows past that initial crush phase and becomes his own individual. In the dream, Utsumi specifically notes how he wishes that he and Akane could be friends, because it makes him happy to have someone by his side who shares a similar interest to him. But he has singularly moved past the programming he had hardwired into him, likely because he is close with Gridman. And this is why his loss is specifically hard on Akane. He was made to be her best friend, but ends up becoming the best friend of whom she considers her greatest enemy.

Finally, we have Rikka. Rikka is the one who I’ve seen most dissected regarding who she is specifically and what she was designed to be. As I’ve mentioned prior, many people believe the theory that Rikka is the perfectly idealized version of Akane and I do not agree with this. This mostly, I believe, comes from a misunderstanding of the final scene of the show where a sleeping Real World-Akane is shown to have the train pass that Rikka gave her in the Computer World. So many people interpret that final scene, and the preceding scene with the two saying goodbye to mean something about self-love. And I do genuinely like the idea, but also Rikka is so far removed from Akane that it’s hard for me to buy into it. Especially more so when we see how absolutely obsessed Akane is with Rikka. First off, why would she create a separate version of herself in this world? What does that accomplish exactly? Second, just because the Real World-Akane has longish black hair and not short purple hair doesn’t mean anything. That’s just what normal human beings look like in Japan. They have darker hair and Rikka’s friends also have darker hair.  Third, their personalities are extremely different from one another, and it wouldn’t make sense that she would make Rikka into a different person entirely. Rather, Rikka would be an idealized version of herself, but I feel that if Akane could do that she would have done that with herself. Akane is a short-purple haired girl because it allows her to live a fantasy away from the Real World, where she is just a normal girl with normal longish black hair.

So what does Rikka represent then if not a reflection of Akane, herself? If Yuta represents a basic want for a relationship and if Utsumi represents the fact that she wants to be around someone who likes tokusatsu like her… Then, I believe that Rikka represents a want to have a very close relationship with a girl. Some people don’t buy into the idea that Rikka and Akane are gay, mostly because that goes against the “Rikka IS Akane” theory, but go with me on this. Out of all of the main trio, it’s Rikka whom Akane is constantly fawning over and trying to be closer to. Rikka is just a normal girl in the world, specifically designed to be friends with Akane. Now I don’t believe she was specially designed to be her “best friend,” mostly because I feel as though Utsumi was specifically designed to be that for Akane.

Rikka is a representation of a forbidden desire she has, one that likes girls and not boys. She finds herself more attracted to Rikka and spending as much time as she can with Rikka. This initially because she thinks Rikka is close to Yuta and can find out information about him from her, but it quickly becomes a deeper and more meaningful relationship to Akane. Rikka is the only person capable of getting through to her. Everyone has an important relationship in this show with Utsumi’s being Yuta/Gridman and Rikka initially thinks the same, but quickly finds herself running after Akane. And I don’t think it’s because of how she was designed. 

Rikka is simply a kind person. Much like Utsumi, she is capable of breaking free of that “Akane is the greatest with no flaws”-type of thinking. But Rikka is also a very smart girl, and it’s plain to her that Akane is suffering. So to Rikka, she believes that she can help Akane by being there for her and being her friend. She goes out of her way to try and be friends with her, and it’s by going out of her way after not being friends at all that triggers this extremely close relationship between the two. Akane feels comfortable airing her depression and negative thoughts in front of Rikka, and I think that’s the ultimate sign that Akane desires a closer relationship with her.

In the dream episode, despite it ending with Gridman gaining back control, the most notable moment is when Akane watches Rikka leave in the same fashion as in the Computer World. Additionally, in the dream world, right before Akane meets Rikka in the nurse’s office there are a couple… things happening. First off, the way that Akane sits in the bed is as though she’s trying to attract Rikka to her. It’s not a normal way someone would be sitting or laying in a bed. But then additionally is the LGBT sign on the wall literally right before that scene, straight up in front of the screen. The L is cut off, but you can tell what it is. I feel like this is an extremely obvious point to have this be right in the front right at the scene with Rikka and Akane.

This is a crushing and devastating moment for Akane, so much so that this loss directly triggers her worst spiral in the show. She is basically inconsolable at the loss of Rikka, who at this point had dedicated herself to TRYING for Akane. But then she leaves Akane to go join Yuta and Utsumi, her friends. And at the end of the day, Akane attempts to kill herself by jumping. But she fails to do so because she’s not from the Computer World, so she just falls and is completely fine. 

Akane’s Spiral

From here on out, she goes out of her way to villainize and demonize herself, specifically to Rikka. She stumbles across the Junk shop and attempts to kill Yuta, to end everything in multiple ways. Kerib is constantly telling her that he wants another kaiju, something he was able to take advantage of due to the fact that Akane herself loves them. But now her depression is at its worst, and she is incapable of doing what she once loved. Making kaijus and designing them was her favorite thing to do, but the loss of Rikka and the different dreams results in her being completely drained of the ability to care anymore. She physically CANNOT bring herself to do it.

We see throughout the series that Akane cares for Rikka deeply, even though she constantly pushes her away. The reason for this is really related to the fact that horribly depressed people, especially chronically so, tend to lash out at people they love. Akane lashes out at Rikka, doubling down that she is a horrible person deserving of death. She stabs Yuta to give an excuse for why she should be killed. She can’t kill herself, due to the nature of the world preventing her from doing so, but she can trigger someone else to kill her. Because after the dream episode, it becomes wholly clear that Akane should be on suicide watch because if she was capable of killing herself we know she would do it. She lost everything in her magical world where she was promised that she would have everything she lacks. Now, the only person who genuinely meant something to her is gone, so she might as well kill Gridman and get killed herself.

Of course, this isn’t even mentioning how she and Anti note that Anti has the eyes of a human while Akane has the eyes of a kaiju. Because this is how she sees herself: as a kaiju. When she is turned into one by Kerib, it is the most horrifying and destructive one yet. It’s a kaiju born of how Akane sees herself, and she’s only capable of screaming. Now she can die, but she also doesn’t want to die. People with depression may have a mix of someone to save them while also wanting their pain to end. It’s a cry for help, but also a desperate attempt to escape. To people who don’t suffer this clinical depression, this may seem like a contradiction. Does the person want to die or do they want to live? Suicide is an option that is not taken lightly, it’s one that happens when the person feels there is no way out. But at the same time, a person is capable of also not wanting to die while also wanting to die. It’s a complicated feeling, yes, but it’s one that you needn’t not understand fully, but accept it is a valid way of thinking. And that’s what the kaiju represents to me, it’s why she doesn’t even fight it when Kerib turns her. It’s her suicide attempt, to finally die in the Computer World.

The Conclusion

In the final scenes of the show, Akane is saved by Anti but not before we see that she realizes the full extent of her actions. It’s a sort of realization that she knows that the people in the city have grown beyond just being things she controls. They are their own people, and she willingly killed and manipulated their minds to make her life slightly easier. Then the moment she believes she’s been saved, Kerib crashes it down upon her and seemingly kills Anti. Once more reinforcing her belief at someone caring about her as futile. 

At the same time, Gridman recovers his memories of the original show and rushes to regain his original form. He needs everyone to be present, as Gridman is made up of specific parts. However, in performing this final deed, Yuta will reawaken and Gridman will once more be a separate entity. The gang is gathered for one final battle: to defeat Alexis Kerib and save Akane. Of course, after a wonderful battle scene that is both indicative of the original series and the current one, Gridman succeeds and defeats Kerib. When Gridman used his Fixer Beam to save Akane, he revitalized the Computer World in its entirety. I believe this is because of how much this place means to Akane, it has become real to her so that when Gridman uses his Fixer Beam it generates an entire world based around the memories of its inhabitants, which is why Yuta suddenly has his long lost parents coming home. The city is no longer just a city, it is an entire world.

And in the end, Akane is finally willing to try again with her life in the Real World. She only bids farewell, however, to Akane. Why? Because Akane was the only real relationship she ever had in the Computer World. What they had transcended the tricks and designs of the world. Akane profusely apologizing only to Rikka makes sense, because she’s the one that Akane feels she’s personally harmed the most. Even when she stabbed Yuta, it was out of a desire to make Rikka hate her. To make Rikka think that Akane is the awful, horrible person that she believes she is. Why? Because Rikka is the only person Akane cares about, and Akane believes Rikka will inevitably be better off without her.

However, Rikka realizes how much of Akane’s actions were both manipulated and encouraged by an actual monster that feeds off of negative human energy. Both Akane and Rikka realize how real the new Computer World is, and Akane could realistically stay within it. Rikka finally works up the courage as well to give the pass holder to her, noting that she wants to be together with Akane. But she also knows that this is not the place for Akane, and that the latter can only heal and get better if she returns home to her own world. This scene is the most contentious, because the theory I see for this is that this is Akane forgiving herself and moving forward. But I disagree wholly. If that was true, then Rikka would not be saying things like “I want to be together with you, Akane.” and “Let’s hope that my wish… never comes true.” All of this while she holds onto Akane’s hand for dear life, hoping that doing so will keep Akane from leaving.

This scene for me is Akane coming to terms with hurting other people and getting a chance to apologize for doing so. Akane has hurt so many during the events of the show, but she can’t apologize to any of them because of how the world works. So she apologizes to the only person who matters, the only one who can understand. I feel like it’s an ongoing thing for her to forgive herself, and it’s not shown here because to me that’s the ultimate goal for Akane. Her ultimate goal is to get better and forgive herself for what she did to everyone in the Computer World. Right here, though, it’s just her asking for forgiveness from one of the people she hurt. Someone who is more than just a program, someone whom she loves and cares for deeply. And someone she will never see again.

Harold, they’re lesbians.

The final actual scene of the show is live-action, designating the Real World. Akane has the travel pass, which many people see as proof that Rikka is Akane, but again I feel like this comes from a misunderstanding of how the Hyper World, Computer World, and Real World operate. How does she have the pass? Because she physically brought it with her, a constant memory from the Computer World. She didn’t just wake up in her bed, she likely came in through a computer in her bedroom. Also, that final scene, in my opinion, does not take place immediately after the show ends. Meaning, it doesn’t happen right after Akane vanishes from the Computer World. 

Why do I think this? Because if we watch the official OxT Union Music Video from 2019, it serves as an extended epilogue to the show with Akane heading off to school with her travel pass in hand. We see that she has some friends now, as well, three to be exact. If everyone in the Computer World was somehow BASED upon Real World inhabitants, and Akane was supposed to be Rikka, then she would only have two friends because in the Computer World, Rikka only has two major friends.

And from her actions, you can see that Akane is making an effort in the Real World to overcome some of her problems. When she’s at the train platform, she makes a quick movement to be slightly closer to other people. She isn’t speaking to them, but it’s an effort to feel less like an outsider. And finally is how tightly she is holding that train’s pass holder, really showing how important it is to her. It was the only keepsake she has from her time inside the Computer World. And the importance of showing that the Real World is live action proves in the end that she is just a normal girl suffering in one of the worst ways imaginable.

My final conclusion is that if Akane was Rikka and everything happened within a “dream”, then that totally undermines everything that happened in the show. It undermines the fact that Akane constantly hurt people because she couldn’t cope with her depression and more importantly undermines the most important development she has at the end, which is to apologize for her actions and seek out forgiveness instead of just trying to further demonize herself. The Computer World inhabitants aren’t just dreams made up by Akane, they are their own real people in their own version of the world. The final scene does not take place immediately after Akane returns to the Real World, as well, because that’s not how the logic of the universe actually works.

The series is about Akane learning to cope with her depression, understand herself better and what she desires from life, and about learning that her depression can affect those closest to her if she doesn’t learn to cope properly.

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A Normal Lost Phone and Why You Can Never Go Home

The 2010s were a  time of rapid advancement in video games, both gameplay-wise and most importantly, storywise. Queer narratives in video games were, more or less, unheard of until the last decade, not counting very early PC releases such as 1989’s Caper in the Castro, a charityware game revolving around a lesbian private detective investigating the disappearance of her kidnapped drag queen friend. Since the early 2010s, more games have focused on not only queer leads, but queer female leads in well known releases, from 2015’s Life is Strange to 2020’s The Last of Us Part II. However, the most notable lack of representation is towards transgender women in these triple-A productions, with most depictions revolving around transgender men, such as 2020’s Tell Me Why and the aforementioned The Last of Us Part II. As a result, independent game developers pick up the slack for telling compelling narratives about transwomen. In 2017, game developer, Accidental Queens, released an inexpensive puzzle game called A Normal Lost Phone,that within its short playtime, tells a story of transgender teens exploring their identities online, as well as exploring the age-old adage of “you can never go back home.”

A Normal Lost Phone made its initial debut on Steam and Itch.io, before eventually making its way to the Nintendo Switch in 2018. The game revolves around the player discovering a phone belonging to a bisexual transgender girl named Sam, a revelation that one discovers as they solve the puzzles of unlocking the phone. Sam lives a double life, one that is pulling her apart, where she presents as a cisgender male to her family and local friends, while presenting as a cisgender female to her friends outside of town at a board game store she goes to. It’s slowly revealed that Sam’s family is extremely homophobic, a subplot revelation regarding an older cousin who she was told ran off to join a cult is revealed to have simply been kicked out when he came out as gay. Additionally, Sam learns that her girlfriend, Melissa, shares the same anti-queer rhetoric that her families does. While Sam doesn’t receive any direct abuse from her parents, the fear of being abused and kicked out sits heavily in her mind, with the fear of being outed dictating her almost every move. She finds that there is not really a safe place for her anywhere, even with online dating apps forcing her to present with two separate profiles as a straight cisgender male and female. Her identity is constantly challenged without her even being out to anyone, which eventually leads her to making a clean break from her home and old life of being two separate individuals, becoming one person: Sam, a bisexual transgender woman.

Queer and transgender teens living with homophobic parents is a reality that many are forced to live with. Like Sam, the idea of being outed is terrifying, but the lack of human connection regarding one’s true self can be tough. As a result, one of the most common things for these teenagers to do is to be themselves, hidden, online. In the game, it’s revealed that Sam has only ever explored being transgender, openly, online on a forum dedicated for sharing these experiences. When I was younger, having only very recently come to terms with being transgender, I found myself doing much of the same thing. I was afraid of being out at home or anywhere else in public, so I found myself exploring being transgender on the social media blogging site, Tumblr. This was the first time I truly felt I could figure out these feelings I had been having regarding my gender identity, when there was genuinely no place else to do so. For lack of a better term, it became my home, the only place I felt safe acting as myself and showing off my growing interest in queer media. It was where I was encouraged, and where I met a lot of the people who helped me grow to where I am now as a person. A Normal Lost Phone explores themes of queer and trans identity online, though limited by its gameplay medium, in a way that most pieces of larger media either ignore or fail to do. In more recent titles, such as Tell Me Why or The Last of Us Part II, it is very obvious that the stories being told are meant to be far more broad in order to appeal to cisgender players. While abuse and transphobia are both present themes in these games, they are explored through very different lenses. The former explores themes of trans identity through one’s traumatic transphobic past, having coming out at an early age, while the other explores those themes through a violent religious lens of a child coming out in an apocalyptic world where being transgender is much more of a challenge. There is honest difficulty in presenting these identities as online in video games, but none really attempt to do so either. That in there lies the problem of how publishers and developers mostly choose to appeal to a broader audience with stories regarding transgender characters, but in turn end up leaving out stories for the most vulnerable closeted queer teens. Independent developers, as a result, are left producing short games that explore these themes but at the cost of mostly being unknown to the general gaming public, they become games that one plays either by stumbling upon them by accident or someone with a large social media following discovers it. And with the more limited budgets these developers have, these stories end up in much smaller forms such as visual novels or simple detective puzzle games like A Normal Lost Phone, yet manage to capture these stories in a way that these triple-A studios with huge writing teams fail to do. 

In 2013, the gaming community saw Gone Home, one of the seminal queer narratives of the 2010s, released on Steam. The game is a first person “walking simulator”, where the player takes the role of a woman in 1995 named Katie, who returns to her parents’ new home after being abroad. The stormy night of her homecoming, she finds that her parents and younger sister, also named Sam, are nowhere to be found. A lone note from Sam discourages Katie from looking into what happened. The eventual reveal becomes that her entire family has fallen apart in her absence. Sam is revealed to be a lesbian, who fell in love with her best friend, Lonnie, while her parents are on the verge of a divorce. Everything in the game’s setting brings up this lonely nostalgic feeling, as Katie explores a home she has no relation to where her family fell apart. Outside the large house is an unyielding storm that only highlights the isolation one feels as they play. The sisters’ parents find out that Sam is a lesbian, beginning to emotionally abuse her and deny that she is a lesbian. “You can never go back home” is the old saying that means when a person returns to a place they once were, it can never be the same as they remember it. Gone Home is the embodiment of the act of returning, whereas A Normal Lost Phone is the act of leaving. When Sam leaves, she does so without any evidence of her mere existence. Alice asks the player, plainly, to delete all data off of Sam’s phone to hide all remaining evidence of where Sam went. In a voyeuristic sense, it is the ultimate kindness one can give as the person who found the phone. When Katie goes against her sister’s wishes, it’s out of a state of worry. She has returned home, to find nothing is at all the same in her absence. And it will never be the same, her family broke apart while she was abroad and despite being a silent protagonist, the musical cues can tell there’s sadness for the loss of her sister and hope that her sister finds happiness away from their home. Both Sams are young queer women, in times where their very presence is fought against. Both leave, and via a voyeuristic third party protagonist, the player learns that going home is impossible. Not only in the symbolic sense of things changing, like for Katie and the loss of her family, but for the physical actions of A Normal Lost Phone’s Sam being unable to ever return. Her choice to abandon her old life, weighed down by the chains of her secrets, is ultimately the best choice that Sam can make. More than likely, her parents will never truly figure out why she left. Katie returns to find nothing the same, while Sam leaves knowing that nothing there will ever be the same.The internet can become a great tool for a young queer or trans person to forge their own identity, not only for the online space but also one they can eventually apply in real life to themselves.

A Normal Lost Phone encapsulates the feelings of secrecy and distress that young transgender people can have when living in a transphobic household, where there is no room for mistakes. From Sam’s secret dating profiles to her emails to her diary, hidden within a fake calculator app, there is a lot of stress the player feels for Sam. All of these are extremely realistic, right down to using fake apps to simply hide one’s written feelings. For a lot of people who reinvent themselves, and find a new way to want to live, leaving home permanently is the only real end solution to the problem of abusive or probable abusive parents. Both Sam and Sam suffer in different ways, and through queer communities, in real life and online, they manage to find something new for themselves, a hopeful future. And the overall message becomes extremely clear, and that is the simple fact that one can never return home. Why? Well, it will never be the same again.

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Cheer Up! Love and Pompoms Review

Book Cover

(Note: A review I wrote for my now ex-job back in August. I was never paid for this review, my contract having run out. If this seems shorter than my usual stuff, that’s because it is. These were just meant to be short little reviews.)

As August skims away into September, so does the summer inevitably fade as well. With vacations ending and people heading back to school, perhaps it would make sense to look at a recently released graphic novel about school. And with a social climate not so conducive to the rights of transgender people, Crystal Frasier’s Cheer Up! is a tale about gender identity, sexuality, and how cisgender people can look at trans people.

Annie is the smartest girl in the senior class at her high school, with no one coming close to her grades. The only problem is her anti-social nature, brought upon by years of bullying, which has caused physical altercations between her and her classmates. At the request of her mother and the principal, Annie decides to try out for the cheerleading team where she meets a former friend named Bebe. The latter is a transgirl, people pleasing to the point of harming her own emotional needs, all in order to keep her parents appeased to her transition. Their story is one of bonding, learning how Annie is just very socially anxious and Bebe is forced to be one of the “good ones” or fear retribution for being a “bad” trans person. And they wonder if their relationship is strong enough to withstand Bebe’s fears.

Cheer Up! has its roots in the bonds of different relationships: familial, platonic, and romantic. In addition, it also focuses on the attention being trans can push onto a person who simply wants to exist. Bebe would love nothing more than to just be treated like another girl, but rather the attention not only from her classmates but the state at large others her. This othering results in Bebe becoming extremely uncomfortable and forcibly becoming a people pleaser. Moments where she does get angry results in mockery of her putting on her “man voice” or being constantly sexually harassed by a popular male student. It’s only through changing relationships that she is able to finally begin changing for herself. Annie, a lesbian, seeing her romantically as a woman to her parents slowly accepting their daughter to the rest of the cheerleaders realizing they were objectifying her to be known as the team with a trans cheer captain.

Authors similar to Crystal Fraiser include Lilah Sturges and Kay O’Neil, prolific trans authors for the medium. One of Sturges’ most recent releases, Girl Haven, also has heavy focus on trans themes and those of gender identity. Extremely important in a time where trans people seem to be constantly under attack. O’Neil has written plenty of queer related graphic novels, most notably the Dragon Tea Society trilogy and Princess Princess Ever After, a seemingly common fairy tale that turns tropes on their heads.

The book is relatively short compared to contemporary graphic novels, but that just means that it accomplishes what it needs to without going on for too long. The main relationship is between Annie and Bebe, and it is very believable to see them slowly reconnect, as if they had never lost their friendship in the first place. The way that Bebe’s cis classmates react to her vary, in ways that do entirely make sense to trans people. Not everyone is targeting her, but the attention she has received magnifies her fears of everyone waiting to harass her. Her fellow cheerleaders are seemingly supportive, but also face their own inner biases against Bebe, to the point of purposefully leaving her out from non-school activities they all participate in. And doin this toward a girl who does nothing but attempting to placate them, solely so she can feel like it is okay for her to exist as a human.

I highly recommend this story for anyone, genuinely. The importance of humanizing trans people, specifically transwomen, has never been more critical than now. One may believe they are being an ally, but inherent biases can reflect how they may actually act to a trans person. Even Annie, who lovingly supports Bebe, steps over the line in her attempts to defend Bebe from anti-trans rhetoric. It does go to lengths to show how this negatively impacts trans people, who at the end of the day are people and worthy of respect from others with no caveats.

While short, the tale of Annie and Bebe is the perfect way to start off the school year and the fall. After all, they are commencing their own senior year at the beginning of the story. Even outside of its own romance, there is much more to grasp from it than just the base story. Another excellent release from Oni Press, that seems to always knock it out with what they publish.

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October 2021 Updates

Hey everyone! So it’s been a hot minute since I’ve been active on this blog. The last like two months blew by really, really quickly. I’ve mostly been working a lot, especially more since the holidays are always an active time for the store where I work. With all the work I’ve been doing, I took a step back from writing to avoid any sort of burnout. I would still prefer for writing to be a job in the future, to make money off of my writing.

Unfortunately, I still am unsure how to monetize my work outside of Ko-Fi. It simply seems I’m not too good at advertising my stuff via SEO. But I’ve decided to keep writing because I enjoy it. To see that my blog, dead for two months, still gets like 10 views a day made me wanna write again. I do have things I want to write, including a piece on Life is Strange: True Colors. But I plan to replay it again to get a better feeling for my opinions on it. In addition, I plan on doing more regarding my Welcome to Blackwell once the remasters release in February. I don’t want to set deadlines for myself, because then I’ll just miss them like I usually do.

The work I’ve done in the past year is some of my favorites. I had the opportunity to be paid for some reviews on another site, but however that contract has come to an end as of August. I will be posting the review that I did not get paid for. It is quite short compared to what I usually write, however I still wish to put it out here. As for the future? What do I wanna do? Well I may narrate some of my previous works and release them on YouTube in a very basic fashion. That may or may not happen. I enjoyed the few things I produced for YouTube, but I’m more of a writer than I am an editor. I do hope to do more with my YouTube in the future.

In addition, I’d love to write an analytical sequel to my We Know the Devil analysis, the piece of writing I am singularly most proud of, on Heaven Will Be Mine. Plans on that are up in the air right now, but it’s something I want to do. There’s actually quite a bit of stuff on my mind lately, and tons more stuff I hope I can write going forward.

I wanna thank anyone who is still here waiting for more. And now that I’ve better adjusted to work life, I think getting content out will be much easier going forward. Thank you for reading, and if you can spare a couple dollars or even just a moment to comment, I would appreciate it. My next post will be going up in a couple of hours, that being the aforementioned pre-written and never paid for review I wrote for my previous contract.

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The Missing: JJ Macfield Thoughts and Analysis

Key Art

One game that I’ve had sitting on my Steam Library, yet somehow never opened or played, for years has been The Missing: JJ Macfield and the Island of Memories. This game released in 2018, and when it comes to talking about video games that revolve around queer issues and themes, I basically never see anything about it outside of initial reviews that came out after it released. Over the past two days, I decided to finally play it all the way through to see what it was about. This game was nominated for Game for Impact at the 2018 Game Awards, losing out to Celeste, which unfortunately is a hard game to beat and is another of my favorite games of all time.

That said, as much as I love Celeste and continue to play it even now, The Missing is a game that hit me so hard that I was reminded of the first time I played Life is Strange. The latter game helped me come to terms with who I am, so the fact that The Missing managed to inflict a similar feeling upon me is impressive. Like a lot of my favorite games, The Missing is a game dripping with symbolism and dream logic. Is this my new favorite game? Possibly. My favorite tends to rotate between Life is Strange and Celeste, depending on my mood, but The Missing is an extremely well written game.

So what is The Missing? It’s a 2D platform-puzzle game, written and directed by Hidetaka Suehiro aka SWERY. If that name sounds familiar to you, it’s almost definitely because Suehiro is most well known for his work on the Dead Premonition games, a pair of critically polarizing horror games that take a lot of inspiration from western works like Twin Peaks. The second game reportedly had transphobic content in it, something Hidetaka quickly apologized for, noting his English skills as poor and something he would work to fix. Considering his history, I’m inclined to believe he made a genuine writing mistake and this game is part of why I believe him.

This game will contain deep spoilers for The Missing, so stop reading her if you do NOT want to be spoiled about the twists and turns of the game’s story and contain some triggering elements such as talk on suicide and self-harm, along some other topics.

So right off the bat, I wanna talk about the gameplay. Normally, I forego talking about gameplay primarily because I like to talk about story and character content. But here I need to point out that the game’s 2D platforming can be frustrating, especially on a better hardware setup. I recently got a new laptop running a GeForce RTX 2070 Super, which is wonderful compared to what I used to have. However, the game was running so quickly that my inputs were being read incorrectly. I was unable to jump as high as normal, making the game near impossible at the point where I changed laptops. By limiting the FPS down to 60, the game worked normal. But it did show me how finnicky the controls can be at parts where you have to do some precision platforming. In addition, some actions require small cutscenes every time you do it resulting in the game slowing to a crawl. I do believe, however, that these problems are minute enough not to cause a problem. I completed the game, with all collectible donuts, in around 7 hours.

The Missing is a game primarily about two women: Jackie Jameson Macfield and her best friend Emily. The two are extremely close, and while out camping near their hometown, Emily suddenly vanishes and the island turns into a nightmare. JJ is struck by lightning, killing her, but she’s suddenly granted the ability to regenerate her body after she dies. The goal of the game is to find Emily while proceeding through areas and solving platform-puzzle challenges to progress and grab 271 donuts, the game’s main collectible. Grabbing every donut is important, since each one takes you a step closer in understanding JJ as a character via unlockable text messages with her friends and her professor.

Most of these challenges are not solved normally, however. As I said before, JJ can regenerate her body after being harmed. Of course, her body can be completely decimated with her having to horribly harm herself to remove limbs up to only being a head in order to progress through these puzzles. JJ can also harm herself in other ways, including setting herself on fire or breaking her neck in order to flip the area upside down. All of these self-harming behaviors are integral to the gameplay. The last gameplay type is running away from the Hairshrieker, a monster made of bones that chases JJ through the island with a giant box cutter. It’s pretty much just platforming with a monster that will kill you.

First Hairshrieker encounter

So far it seems like a pretty normal horror puzzle game, right? What could possibly be so deep and meaningful about it? Especially if it’s a queer game being written by a Japanese auteur. It’s weird, because I’ve played games by queer or trans devs that deliver authentic experiences to players. Now I’m unsure whether or not SWERY consulted anyone when writing this game, because it feels a lot like Tell Me Why in the aspect of being a game written with consultants in mind to produce an experience that feels genuine.

From the very beginning, the game lets you know that there’s something up with Emily. Hiding secrets and running away from JJ at every point, with JJ unable to ever catch up to her. As JJ collects donuts through the game, reaching a certain number will unlock text chains that JJ has previously had with people she knows ranging from friends to her professor to her mother and Emily, though the latter two unlock no matter what as you progress through the game. Each chain shows what kind of person JJ is around certain people. Around her punk rocker friend, Abby, she seems always willing to help as well as being understanding of Abby’s plight about being talked down to for her attitude and the way she dressed. With Philip, who is less of a friend and more an annoying classmate, is a rich kid who takes advantage of JJ’s kind attitude, even though JJ is fully aware she’s being taken advantage of. There’s Lily, a more feminine girl who seems to have an obsessive crush on JJ. And finally there’s Professor Goodman, a product designer whom JJ works for as an AI (assistant instructor.)

Text chains with JJ’s mother and Emily are probably the most important. Throughout the game, they will periodically update to reveal more of JJ’s personality. JJ is truly only herself around Emily, where there’s a stark difference in the way she interacts between someone like Lily or Abby compared to Emily. JJ seems to put on a mask for everyone else, only showing joy and her insecurities to Emily, who is always there to show JJ support. JJ’s mother, on the other hand, has a horrible relationship with JJ. JJ often gives her mom one word responses as the mother seems to push all her wants onto JJ, such as JJ becoming some sort of heir to the family. This implies JJ’s family is quite rich in some aspect, as the mother desperately wants JJ to inherit her deceased father’s legacy and often talks about how happy she is that JJ turned out “normal.”

Early on, the game wants you to believe that Emily has a secret. The secret can easily be interpreted as Emily being a lesbian and having feelings for JJ, who may or may not reciprocate them. At the beginning of the game, Emily attempts to lay her head against JJ’s, only for JJ to pull away making Emily quickly move away. However, JJ eventually relents and the two hold their head against one another. So is that the secret? Of course not. It’s very obvious that JJ and Emily have feelings for one another, but they’re both unsure how to process their feelings. All that matters, however, is that Emily loves and supports JJ unconditionally. Because it’s not Emily who has the secret, it’s JJ.

Throughout the game’s text chains, JJ will also interact with texts from FK, her stuffed animal she carries everywhere for emotional support and the mysterious appearance of a doctor with a deer head, speaking like he was straight out of the Red Room in Twin Peaks. Eventually Emily begins speaking like that as well, making things feel a lot more like a living nightmare. While JJ is always extremely angry and exhibits self-harmful behavior both physically and emotionally, FK represents a more innocent part of her. They represent the part of her that still has love and hope inside, but the anger, fear, and depression that JJ has often overpowers FK’s innocent pleas to try and help her. As the game goes on, JJ slowly calms down and becomes less hostile toward FK, eventually their words helping JJ stand up once more.

Talking to Philip doesn’t really do much, other than show JJ’s less than enthused responses to his spoiled nature. The other three, however, all slowly hint at JJ’s secret. Conversations with Abby often revolve around JJ asking her how she has the confidence to dress and act as her true self, and how she deals with superiors who question and criticize her. With Lily, it’s often talking about more feminine activities. And despite Lily often coming off as stalker-like, JJ continues to speak to her because there’s not a lot more people to interact with her interests such as baking and cooking. Her conversations with Professor Goodman often feel more like the proper parent JJ wishes she had, with Goodman often offering her advice as well as talking about his family and interests. He also reveals that JJ’s mother often attempts to divulge information about JJ from Goodman, which only serves to make JJ more uncomfortable about how much her mom pushes her to be “normal.”

As she gets closer to the end of her journey, texts from everyone become more hostile. This all begins when JJ’s mother finds out her “secret” after invading JJ’s privacy at the family home by reading her diary and questioning why there are women’s clothing in JJ’s closet. Phone calls from Emily slowly reveal that something is wrong, with text messages lining up with what Emily is saying to her. We hear distorted weeping as JJ follows after Emily up to the clock tower they loved as kids. We hears sounds of electricity, the distorted deer man’s voice, and a voice that continuously says things from JJ’s point of view. It all continues building up to her finding Emily’s body hanging from a noose, as well as a note on the ground.

JJ reads it.

It’s a suicide note.

It’s not Emily’s.

JJ weeps and hangs herself next to Emily, before her body breaks free of the noose and she falls off the clock tower. Her body is barely able to regenerate when it lands, and she slowly walks through the hallway of her small university. We see shadows mock and berate JJ, some people even becoming physical. She only just barely gets through all of this because of Emily always being there to support her.

Final text messages reveal a few things. With Abby, JJ attempts to bring something up to her several times, but she decides not to when Abby doesn’t reply. Abby does reply eventually, revealing she was busy setting up for a concert and becomes worried when JJ never replies back. Philip doesn’t even notice that JJ’s gone, only thanking her for telling him to follow his acting dreams. Professor Goodman invites JJ to share dinner with he and his family. And Lily? Well this text chain is important, because it pretty much reveals what happened that led to the events of the game.

JJ and Lily went to the library to study, with JJ covertly checking out a book about a certain “condition.” We’re not told what it is, but Lily reveals she saw the book and proceeded to ask other people about it. Those people didn’t keep their mouth shut and word about JJ’s “condition” quickly spread. In addition, once discovering JJ’s diary, her mother decides to send her off to a special kind of therapy that will make her normal again. With all of this happening, JJ has an emotional and mental breakdown to Emily. Her emotions spiral about how much of a freak she is, while her mind makes up stories that Emily only talks to her out of pity. Emily initially gets a little angry at this, before realizing what might be happening. JJ doesn’t reply for a while only eventually saying “goodbye” to Emily, ending the text chain.

So what is JJ’s secret? While it isn’t technically revealed until the last scene of the game, one can pretty much put all the pieces together at this point. JJ is a closeted transwoman and the only person she’s out to is Emily. The clock tower JJ goes to is where she came out as trans to Emily when she was younger, declaring that she was “Jackie Jameson.” And JJ was so happy when Emily didn’t abandon her. As JJ got older, she still presented as male out of fear of being harassed. It’s why she’s so locked up when speaking to anyone who isn’t Emily. It’s why she asks Abby how to properly deal with not letting people get to you or standing up to an abusive parent.

JJ suffers from horrible gender dysphoria, taking out a book from the library most likely about the subject. Lily was not attempting to be malicious, but her actions cause her to out JJ to the entire school. It’s implied JJ is from a place where being openly trans is a death sentence, since being trans in the United States has long been a favored target of harassment from conservatives, TERFs, and other bigots. And considering how 2021 has been nothing but the rise of the GOP targeting trans people with TERFs becoming more and more prevalent thanks to outspoken bigots like JK Rowling.

Harassment against trans individuals are very real, with bad apples often being used as “evidence” that all trans people are evil and bad. Though, I’d argue by that logic then all cis people would be the purest form of evil if we judged all cis individuals by the cruelties of every cis monster in history. It’s just history repeating itself, like if a convicted criminal was gay back in time, then homophobes would use a singular instance of one person to justify hating an entire section of humanity. I think it’s important, if you are cis, to have empathy for trans individuals during this time. Trans people just want to exist. We want to live our lives without having to live in constant fear that someone wants to murder us for just existing. For just eating lunch at a park without fearing that some cis man will come and beat us nearly to death for existing. People like the GOP or TERFs like JK Rowling are cruel individuals. They don’t care about humans or anyone else other than themselves. They just want us dead.

And that’s the mindset that JJ has. JJ believes that her mere existence will make Emily’s life worse off. That people will make Emily a target of harassment if people knew that the person closest to her was trans. JJ lashes out at her for a specific reason. To make herself feel more like the monster she believes she is, so that it will be easier for her to justify committing suicide to herself. To make a monster and make Emily hate her for it, something we see when JJ is fused into the Hairshrieker while Emily shoots a shotgun at her. A symbolic representation of JJ trying to make herself feel like a monster so Emily will hate her, and not feel bad when JJ dies. Of course, the reality of this is the complete opposite. Emily loves JJ, she is the single most important person in her life. It takes a conversation, after JJ realizes she is already dying, with FK to realize that even if everyone else hates her that there’s one person who doesn’t. There’s one person who loves JJ so much, that JJ dying will doom her as well. That JJ needs to live and be there for Emily the same way that Emily is there for JJ.

A final confrontation with the Hairshrieker shows JJ, in her dream, no longer breaking apart when she self-harms. It shows that pain is always going to be there, but with the resolve that Emily will always be there for her, she’s able to avoid falling apart into pieces as she eventually kills the Hairshrieker and finds Emily. She finds what she was looking for this whole time, a final text message to FK showing that JJ is starting to feel better. It was the fear of Emily dying from JJ’s attempt that drew her to confront her negative feelings, something we see JJ do when she believes Emily is dead.

The final scene is telling because JJ wakes up as how she looks in reality: closeted and presenting openly as male. Before her is a paramedic with a deer head sitting behind him in the room. The deer man being the paramedic attempting to save her life. FK, her beloved plushie, was pooling blood together and helping stop JJ from bleeding out after she fell unconscious. A phone call from her mother shows JJ, in my opinion, ready to say goodbye permanently to her. An acceptance that her mother is a horribly negative influence on her life, suggesting and nearly forcing JJ into conversion therapy. We found out that JJ eventually told her mother and she did not take it well at all, implied to be the straw that broke the camel’s back that caused the suicide attempt. Emily discovers JJ’s suicide note and finds her quickly enough to call for help, with Emily’s weeping and saying “you broke our promise” representative of JJ dying and leaving Emily, since their promise was to never be apart from one another. Emily eventually rushes in, and the two hug with JJ thanking her for always supporting her as well as telling her she’s reconciled with herself and found what she wanted. The game ends there.

But that’s not the end. If you had collected all 271 donuts through the game, you will be rewarded with several images that take place post-game. JJ is now openly trans and Emily takes her to try on new clothes, some of which resemble her dreamscape’s outfit. The two are shown happy together, moving forward from the tragedy stronger, that one person can make your life all the better by being there for you.

One of three pictures that’s a reward for collecting all donuts

The game hits hard. It hits hard in a lot of ways. There’s a scene where JJ describes her body mutilation in detail to FK, but it’s really easily seen as JJ describing the horrific extent of her gender dysphoria. And the gameplay reflects that. JJ self-harms and her body falls apart, a body she feels so gross and foreign in. How she hates it so much, and how no one else around her can understand that pain. How she lashes out because she can’t fully understand why it hurts her so much. She hates herself, she thinks she’s an overall negative factor to everyone else. It doesn’t help that she is this way because of her mother constantly drilling this sort of thinking into her head: that she is abnormal and must be made normal through conversion therapy. JJ would rather die than that happen, and she justifies this through depression-filled mental gymnastics to prove she’s better off dead to herself and Emily.

This game is not for the faint of heart, especially if constantly hearing bones breaking and body parts flying around is a trigger for you. However, the game does not pull punches in showing how cruel the world can be to a trans person. Even if not 100% of people are going to harass you, it can feel like that if there’s a big enough chunk causing you problems. JJ’s mother is the only person not supportive of her struggles. While the game’s ending does imply the mother feels remorse, and JJ forgiving her, I’m not so sure. That, to me, may just be JJ’s kind nature showing through in general. But I feel as though the problems her mother caused can not just be forgiven through a single call right after a suicide attempt.

There’s also the talk about whether or not JJ and Emily are in love, and I believe they are. The implications show that they are closer than just platonic best friends, but JJ’s self-doubt and self-hatred drive a wedge between their relationship evolving. This is something we talked about earlier, where JJ moves her head when Emily tried to lean on her. Being intimate, both emotionally and physically, keeps them from taking a step forward due to JJ’s depression and anxiety. By the time of the post-game, JJ is starting to become more accepting of herself and she’s able to be openly happy with Emily in public, showing they may be moving forward closer than ever.

Do I recommend this game? Yes. Even though the game is written by quirky Japanese auteur, it has this genuineness to it that feels a lot like Tell Me Why, a game that features a transman as one of its two main protagonists. Though this hits closer to me because JJ is a queer transwoman. Playing through the game, I noticed my behaviors parallel greatly with JJ’s drawing me closer to this story. I’m upset I didn’t play it sooner, but now that I have it’s certainly one of the best games revolving around being trans and why I think SWERY was being sincere in his apology about the second Deadly Premonition game. Because this was a game super understanding of the trans experience, how cruel people can be to trans individuals, how others are supportive, how outing someone (even unintentionally) is something that can ruin a life. But we are humans too. We just want to live life. And be happy.

Cut images of Post-Clear JJ, possibly meant to show her mental health improving and to go along with the images of her getting new clothes.

Even though this isn’t a game made by a trans individual, it’s one well-researched and genuine in its ability to make others feel empathy for the trans experience while also validating the negative feelings a trans person might feel through their life. It’s a shame this game is barely talked about, because I highly consider playing it if you haven’t yet. An excellent piece of queer horror. Since I’ve done this, I guess it’s time I put effort into analyzing HWBM next, huh?

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We Know the Devil: Full In-Depth Analysis

With the release of We Know the Devil on Nintendo Switch, I believe it’s time to post my full in-depth analysis and explanation of We Know the Devil. Some of you who follow me may know this was originally intended as a video, and written with that intention. However, with my new work and my love of writing still what I love most, I’ve decided to post the script to this video as a singular post. This is a long analytical essay, clocking in at around 9000 words. This is long, yes, but it’s also an essay I’m very proud of. For anyone who has played WKTD and not fully understood what a lot of the meanings are, this is for you. This is my love letter to We Know the Devil and Worst Girls Games. Thank you for this game that helped change my life.

(Note: This obviously contains spoilers for every facet of the game, so I highly recommend you play the game in its entirety before reading this.)

Daughter of God by PhemieC, a WKTD Fan Song

Introduction

I think there is nothing more frustrating than growing up in a semi-religious household and proceeding to attend religious school up through high school. Especially when it’s Catholicism. Maybe it’s because there’s so many different messages to be said about it. How people who are Catholic can so wildly differ from center-left to extremely far right.

This too was an obvious split I could see growing up, especially in high school. Religion was always overhead when I was growing up, though, mostly in in elementary and middle school. We were forced to attend church twice a week, sometimes thrice a week early in the morning each time. As I grew up and slowly discovered a different purview of the world, it often clashed with the ideas and thoughts drilled into my mind by the religious institutions I had been raised in.

I didn’t realize I was queer or trans until I was in university as a result. Things never clicked for me because I was simply raised to believe being queer was wrong, and the idea of being trans simply never even existed. What caused my break with religion? I’m not sure. Maybe it was the people I met who were genuinely terrible, but often propped up in school as the “good Catholic kids.” How could they be so good when they would bully me at length, I thought. Eventually I would define myself as myself and not by outsider opinion, but of course I was a lot older by then.Maybe that’s why one of my favorite games of all time is We Know the Devil, a Western-made visual novel developed by Worst Girls Games in 2015. This short 3-4 hour romp is somehow one of my top five favorite games of all time. How? How is this little indie visual novel developed by a no-name studio in a little more than four months so high on my list? Well that’s what I’m here to discuss.

We Know the Devil is a game whose main target audience are queer and trans people, I think that much is obvious. Aevee Bee, the writer and co-director of the game, is a transwoman so you can tell this was always gonna be a game I was going to have to check off my list at some point in my life.

Development wise there’s not much to say other than the game was developed in a little over four months, as I said earlier. Kind of amazing to see how fast something like this can be developed. It’s well put together for a simple visual novel, though there are some grammar and spelling mistakes sprinkled throughout the dialogue. It doesn’t bother me too much though.

The art direction for the game is unique and extremely pleasing to my eyes. All the backgrounds in the game are nothing more than photographs taken on a digital camera. All of them are empty and give a feeling of isolation, of areas abandoned by humanity left to be reclaimed by nature. Some might call it lazy to not just design backgrounds, but I feel it fits the nature of what this game is. It has an eerie feeling that’s hard to shake, like watching The Blair Witch Project.

The character art for the game is equally good. Black and white monochrome character sprites with what looks like the sharpness turned up as high as it could in order to make it look like it was taken on an old digital camera from the late 90s. Of course, it goes along super well with the photographic backgrounds used for the game.

Venus

The music for the game though? Sublime. Good. I’m no musician so I can’t give you an in-depth reason for why I think the music is so good, I just find it to be very pleasing to listen to. Alec Lambert, the composer, creates a mostly haunting yet sometimes peaceful soundtrack that fits the game absolutely perfectly. It reminds me of scntfc’s soundtrack for Oxenfree, another game I absolutely adore. Only this one feels a lot more distant and corrupt, which again, fits the game a lot better than anything else.

But above all else, it’s the characters, their arcs, and the overall themes of the game that sell me on why this seven dollar visual novel on Steam is not only one of my favorite games of all time, but also why it’s one of the most important to me.

Take it from me, living in the Midwest isn’t great. Even though states like Michigan or Ohio are pretty north, you’re pretty much living in a deep southern state in most places. Much of the land you’ll see is often empty fields of corn or signs telling us we’re all going to hell soon and Jesus has spoken that the rapture is upon us.

The Summer Scouts are not a great place to be. Like at all. Dressed in uniforms with white shirts with crosses stitched onto the chest pockets, it’s very familiar. They aren’t just a religious summer camp after all. This is where they send the specifically bad kids who need the extra work put in.

Every time you run through We Know the Devil, you’ll encounter the same choices to make but with different outcome choices.

We have our members of Group West as well. First there is Neptune, who is the most outspoken and sarcastic of the three. She seemed annoyed and tired with almost everything, often shutting down anyone and everyone with her sharp tongue if she’s not ignoring them while she’s on her phone. Next, there’s Venus. Venus is quiet, shy, and called the pure one of the group who doesn’t even cuss which gets him teased by the other two. Though he’s often looking for something, something that makes him feel utterly incomplete and lost, attempting to fulfill this void by pleasing others even to his own detriment. Finally, there’s Jupiter. Jupiter is the top of the class over achieving academically girl. She’s good at most of what she does, but always fails at the end. The type to blank on the final question and cannot answer for the life of her.

The three attend a bonfire led by the titular Bonfire Captain. And oddly designed character who has more in common with the Hawt Dawg Man from Life is Strange than he does anything or anyone else. 

He tells the story of himself and two friends he once had when he was younger. How he liked one of these two friends and the other he dismissed as annoying. Over time the captain talks of how he attempted to be an even BETTER friend in order to help the annoying friend along. But eventually he would give up claiming:

“Some friendships you can keep up. The rest you gotta leave up to god.”

Surface level this seems like a friendship that has simply ended, vanishing off like many do. However, as I like to always think, context is key in literally any piece of media. The captain plus his two friends equals three people, just like the rest of the groups in the game. And as expected of a camp counselor in a Christian summer camp, he is extremely Christian. He mentions that some of the annoying things his friend did includes “[He] wouldn’t go along with us.” And he follows it up with: “I probably could have stopped it if I had told him to cut it out and man up instead of basically doing the opposite.”

The implications here is that the annoying friend is someone who did not follow the status quo. Someone who was outside the nice comfortable square that a white cisgendered heteronormative Christian society has made up. Something happens to the “annoying friend” that is implied to have had something bad happen to him. But the captain did nothing. He admits he could have intervened to save the person, but he chose not to for he decided it was god’s will that this person was punished.

The game has barely even started, and yet right off the bat the game is dropping some heavy hints about what is to come. The world of We Know the Devil is different from our own. There are many evils that only God can protect the people from.

After the events at the bonfire, the captain will tell Group West that it’s their turn to face the devil. The devil being within a small cabin in the woods. On their way there, they encounter Group South, the best/worst kids in camp. In that they try to suck up so much they end up being the most annoying ones in camp that Group West hates. Group South harasses the group, particularly Venus, as they attempt to repair the sirens.

The sirens and the radios make up two of the more important aspects of the world in which the game takes place. The sirens set up around the forest are designed to make public awareness that the devil is attempting to break in. The radios that the campers have are the only weapons that can fight off the devil once it shows its face. For you see, the analog channels is how God communicates with people and protects them from corruption.

The three members of Group West have a lot of great banter off of one another, and you really come to enjoy all three of them as a group. The three have very different personalities, but they all have the same types of wants and those wants allow their differing personalities to come together well.

However only two of the three can come out unscathed…

One will end up alone. Two won’t.

[BLUE – Neptune]

Neptune: sarcastic, tired, confident, and angry.

Neptune is the only one of the three who shows any sort of backbone to anyone else in camp. Neptune is also the only one who accepts who she is on the inside. But also she’s not willing to ever show it on the outside.

More than anything, she knows that there is something more that Jupiter and Venus want. They don’t know what it is and they don’t seem to want to think more about what they want. And this? This instills anger in Neptune more than anything else.

Neptune is a character who knows what she wants. But she’s not willing to go the full way in order to obtain it. She envies Venus’s kindness, but believes that kindness will never be able to let a want be obtained. Being mean and sarcastic is more truthful, and it lets he not feel bad about being unable to get what she wants. But in the moments of kindness she does show, it’s ever filled with her wants. Her wants of Venus and Jupiter.

Throughout the game, it’s often Neptune who brings to light most of their issues. She’s perceptive, but she covers this up by a facade of sarcasm and laziness. Neptune is the type of person who knows who she is deep down, but when confronted she gets defensive about it. She gets angry and denies it. 

Neptune knows who she is. She knows who her friends are. She knows what they want. But she’s not gonna rob them of experiencing figuring out who they are. But the issue stems that she herself is not ready to accept herself openly and out. She’s angry at herself too for the hypocrisy, but she ignores it. Rather she lets it fester. She lets it sit there and grow exponentially often resulting in her own anger.

The intrigue that Neptune lays out is her unwillingness to tell the others who they are, but rather she pushes them to admit it themselves. After the drinking session with Venus and Neptune, the former attempts to confront Neptune about her need to be mean to everyone. Most of it slides off of her, but Neptune’s response is calm for once. Telling Venus that the wants that he has can’t be given to him by kindness. He has to figure out what he wants and admit that to himself in order to obtain it. But Neptune also remarks that she’s a bad kid too, because her own kindness is wrapped up in her own wants.

Similarly, she does drop hints throughout the game about the other two’s identities and problems. With Jupiter, she often tells her off for her self-harmful behavior. Whether it be talking down to herself or seemingly melting down over a small thing that Neptune doesn’t think matters. When it comes to truth or dare, Neptune tells Jupiter to reveal who she likes. Neptune knows the answer, but before Jupiter can even respond, Neptune says nevermind. Perhaps she, herself, is too scared as well.

During seven minutes in heaven, though, she does show off much of her own hypocrisy that makes her seem not too different from Jupiter. They are both, physically and metaphorically, in a closet making out and touching each other. But because no one else is there, it’s impossible for anyone else to ever determine what happened. It’s their words only, and only can become truth if they both say it out loud.

With Venus, she often attempts to nudge him towards figuring out what he wants. She knows he has a crush on her, seen during truth or dare. Though she playfully, though soaked with her trademark meanness, teases him about it the two have a rapport that’s equal and as meaningful as the one that she has with Jupiter. If not more so bringing out that short gentle nature that’s buried somewhere deep within Neptune.

By the end of the night, they can hear God speaking a sermon on the radio, buzzing lowly through the cabin.

“A method for the extraction of bile. Create an incision on the middle finger. All the water of the body can be thought of as a single ocean, as one drop- and extract the resulting ink. Place in a vial and explain to it the worthlessness of the treasures of earth. Break it against a mirror, the cause of vanity- each of you shall choose. It is certain the devil is coming.

Neptune becomes angry. Why? Because both Venus and Jupiter believe they are the devils. But Neptune? Neptune believes, in every sense, that she is the most likely to be the devil. Why? Because she’s the only one who knows who she really is. And the mere idea of Venus or Jupiter becoming their devils makes her believe they are simply saying it to pity her and make her not worry about being the devil, but we know they also truly believe it.

Neptune coughs. That’s her signature reaction. She coughs primarily when she’s either rejecting her own voice or when she hears Jupiter or Venus putting themselves down. When a person vomits, they often throw up the contents of their stomach. However, if you dry heave enough without anything in your stomach and cough violently enough, you’ll puke up your stomach bile. In one of the choices of a non-Neptune exclusion route, we see that Neptune needs to eventually be taken to the bathroom to deal with her cough because she fears she’s gonna vomit up said bile.

More importantly, to me, it represents something Neptune hates more than anything. She hates when Jupiter and Venus hate themselves out loud. When people say something horrible about themselves, a tertiary party who disagrees often says to “stop spouting bullshit” if it angers them enough. She hates that they won’t accept themselves, but she herself spouts the same bullshit by not admitting the truth about her sexuality out loud.

Eventually she becomes the devil when she is forced into the bathroom. She coughs. She vomits. And she sounds louder than ever, but refuses to come out of the bathroom until she eventually relents.

Neptune is forced to the bathroom during one of her coughing fits, this one the most violent yet. The coughing becomes louder and louder, each cough more violent than the last resulting in vomiting. The others want her to come out. She refuses. Come out, they ask. She refuses. They ask again. She breaks and comes out.

Neptune is leaking bile and ichor from all over her body. Her ichor will force Jupiter and Venus to admit to themselves who they are and turn them into devils. She’s so sick of the two of them not accepting themselves, something she previously wanted them to figure out on her own. But this time? No. Their refusals have annoyed and angered her so much that her devil form wants nothing more than to MAKE THEM understand themselves.

Neptune bashes Venus up against a wall, happy enough to force him to taste. Jupiter attempts to save him, but Neptune is a devil now. With much more physical power, she easily is able to knock Jupiter away. All inhibitions are gone now. She refers to Jupiter as “babe” and opens up finally about it all.

She hates how the world determines the three of them are bad. How because of their inherent queerness that they have to be “good”, but Neptune? She thinks they’re good already. So, so, so good. Neptune can now see how overwhelmingly unhappy that Venus and Jupiter are. So she simply stands there and rants at them about how obviously unhappy they are in her eyes, and how she will make them happy by forcing them to understand. She’s angry about it. Furious even. That’s why her devil form is the only one who gets the chance to speak to the others. How being one’s own queer self is “wicked.” How it’s wrong. Neptune hates that.

The idea of “good” is brought about by what social conservatism says is correct. Being good cisgendered straight Christians who obey their parents and their church. But Neptune’s idea of being good, or by extension the devil’s, is that you are who you are without shame.

“She’s a flood, of every wicked thought, and they are pouring out of her mouth.”

Neptune’s bile and ichor will stain the others. It will make them devils as well. But there is nothing to fear when there is two against the devil. It’s there because it’s a stain that is hard, or near impossible to remove. Neptune wishes to stain both of her friends, her crushes, so that they will join her. So they finally understand.

The radio contains the power of God within it. Thus, it is the only weapon powerful enough to cast the devil out from a person, erasing who they are so they fit God’s image.

And in the end? Neptune is left to dry, the ichor draining from her while Venus and Jupiter keep watch. The wicked thoughts are gone, though were they ever even really wicked in the first place? Be who you are. Don’t let anyone else tell you who to be. Of course, that’s selfish isn’t it? The treasures of the earth are not for us. We are to obey god and not become vain…

Blue Ending CG

[YELLOW – Venus]

Venus: Kind, pure, and wanting.

Venus is a pushover. He doesn’t swear. He’s one of two kids that the captain likes. Venus doesn’t like that though. Without an intentionally mean bone in his body, Venus just wants to get along with people and avoid the complexities of arguing with people.

Unlike Neptune, who knows who she is and what she wants… Venus is the opposite. He is lost. He can’t figure out what he wants. The lights he sees throughout the game are analogous to that feeling of when a word is right on the tip of your tongue. You can almost feel it out, but then it’s gone again. And no matter how much you think on it, it simply never comes.

Venus is the only “male” character of the group, but it’s not that hard to guess there’s much more going on with Venus than meets the eye. We know very early on that Venus is pretty much a doormat for everyone else.

Despite his avoidance of arguments, he often finds himself envious of Jupiter and Neptune. Jupiter’s ability to not get harassed at all and Neptune’s ability to simply snark and harass right back.

Early on we can see Venus doesn’t really stand up to anyone. Group South particularly harasses him because he doesn’t stand up for himself. He’s timid, but also has a serious mean streak. He often says things that get under the skin of others, though it seems to be unintentional. He’s extremely innocent in a lot of facets, but also can feel extremely insensitive and not catch when he says something that does hit hard. Neptune mentions this to Jupiter, and how she wishes he did it on purpose and not just unintentionally do it.

Much like how Neptune coughs horribly every single time she says something she doesn’t truly believe or when she wants to angrily reply to a self-defeating Venus or Jupiter, we have a similar thing occurring for Venus. Throughout the game Venus will make note of lights. Lights that no one else can see, and these lights usually appear to Venus when he thinks about something. Something…

Just like how Neptune’s cough gets worse and worse as she progresses into a devil, Venus sees these lights more and more. Guiding him… somewhere. 

The lights can easily be seen as something like the Will-o’-the-Wisps, small beings of light leading him “astray.” Something that Neptune mentions in a scene between her and him is that Venus is looking for something. Some sort of identity to grasp onto, but he can’t reach it. He doesn’t know what he wants, and thinks that the world can reward it upon him if he’s nice enough. It’s Neptune who informs him that it won’t happen. Why? Because she knows that exact same feeling of having a kindness filled with want.

When fixing the radio deep in the night he and Jupiter talk about his beliefs, and the most telling thing is that he finds life to be unfair. No matter how much a person can try, things will never turn out for them. That certain people don’t have to try hard, and they’ll come out on top. When Jupiter says that she believes the people in the normal scouts try harder than her, Venus can only quickly reply and ask if she truly believes that anyone in the normal scouts have tried harder than her.

This is the best point that Venus makes and shows his true belief for why he acts the way he does. The world isn’t fair. Reality isn’t fair. And that’s what Jupiter tells him. Life simply isn’t fair, but it’s what Venus says next that rings eerily true.

It’s a reality that someone else created.

And that’s completely right. We can remark life isn’t fair, and often or not people will reply with that is true, but that’s simply how life is. But Venus has the forethought to mark that the lives we live are set up by society. A society who has made the rules that life will be unfair for certain people. This entire conversation rings true to me. Immediately after he has another knowledge nugget to drop on us.

He asks Jupiter if it makes her mad when the game is rigged from the start, but they also tell her to “do her best!” Wouldn’t that make her angry? It makes Venus angry. It makes Venus so angry that he doesn’t even want to try because it’s rigged for him to lose from the beginning. Venus can only ask and wonder what is wrong with him… What does life want out of him?

Throughout the game, Venus obviously has very low self esteem about himself. Even within his own group, he finds himself only being useful for repairing the sirens and radios or being the one who gets teased. Despite this, he keeps on moving forward. Cranking out a smile hoping he can figure out what it is he wants.

Venus goes to extreme lengths to try and not cause a fuss. To his own chagrin, he is quite well attuned with fixing the radios and other things. Not because it’s something he wants to do or likes to do, but because people expect that of him to do. He hates it, but he sticks by and keeps doing it because that’s what he thinks he needs to do to keep goin. When outside with Jupiter making the rounds, he notes that Group South wanted him to screw up with a radio in the dining hall. He knows they’re wrong and he knows how to fix it, but he lets himself get in trouble anyway. Openly admitting to the fact that he gaslights himself because it’s easier than going down the back and forth where he’ll just believe them anyways.

But at the end of the day, Venus feels ignored and unseen. So disconnected from the world that when Jupiter naturally thinks that the two of them are friends Venus interjects to question it. As well as the idea that he simply wants to play dumb and sit away because he notices whatever is going on between Jupiter and Neptune. Jupiter finds the idea that boys have it easier with emotions because it seems so straightforward. Though Venus rejects this notion, claiming that boys seem to find it easier to get mad about a secondary thing in order to hide what they might actually be angry about.

Jupiter asks what Venus is angry about, but immediately notices he’s lying. He isn’t angry about anything. Rather, he’s jealous. And Jupiter notices he’s jealous of her and Neptune. A jealously so seething, that Jupiter can feel it. But Venus doesn’t know why. Venus is afraid he can’t change, condemning himself to that factor. He will let himself be hurt physically before he is cruel to to others.

Then hands appear around his neck and start choking him. Jupiter rushes to stop the hands, which suddenly vanish once she takes hold of him. He cries and says it’s okay. Not angry. He says it’s okay. But even Jupiter knows it’s not okay. It’s just not.

By the end of the night, they can hear God speaking a sermon on the radio, buzzing lowly through the cabin.

“Shining as Lucifer, the morning star, in the dawn, and symbolizing the arrogance of desiring a beauty that is not god’s. Venus 5:23. That which appears to be within grasp, and yet, is ever- of the vanity to be seen and to see. The human eye sees clearly by the light of god, but the devil by his own light, and thus sees only his own truth- each of you shall choose. It is certain the devil is coming.”

Do you see that? It’s the light. The fireflies are all over, but they don’t see it like he does?

The ending is nigh, isn’t it? God speaks of arrogant beauty that is not his. Neptune eventually tells the others they need to leave. But the lights are here. In mass, they have arrived towards them, now enough to be seen by Neptune and Jupiter. And the lights only want Venus. 

When the lights come into the cabin, they decide to run. Though, they have to force Venus to follow. As they attempt to escape, the lights become more and more overpowering. They aim for the road, where the artificial street lights will protect them. But not all is well, but it’s off the table. Jupiter trips and falls onto Venus. Her attempts to help him up, results in her injuring herself.

Why are they there protecting Venus? They don’t need to. Venus is used to being the butt of the joke. Used to being the one who’s there to fix the radios. Venus is used to being the odd-one out. The one who sits back and seethes with envy against Jupiter and Neptune. They should leave him behind to his ultimate fate against the lights.

But now Venus can’t look away from them. They’re glowing oh so bright and oh so horribly, but it’s so beautiful at the same time. He wants the lights. He wants to see them. He wants the others to see him.

Venus? Venus wants them to see her. See her for who she truly is. She doesn’t want to be what the cruel artificial reality tells her to be. To be the pushover fix-it man, someone who’s only good for what he’s told to do. She hates fixing things. But she did it because that’s what she was supposed to do right? As a good boy?

She’s not that. She’s not a boy. She wants to cast shadows over the light and light over the shadows. The truth is that she is a woman. Venus is a woman and she wants people to see that. She so desperately wants everyone to see her for who she is. Venus shines ever so brightly, wings covering her with eyes wide open for her to look and be the center.

Venus reaches out to us. She has eyes to fly with and wings to see. As terrible as an angel, be afraid. That wing to see the truth and that eye to lay it bare. We feel the heat on our skin and recoil. It wants something from us, a lot of things, maybe everything. Every wish of the eyes belongs to it. Nothing can escape this light. But we do. We can’t feel the beat of the wings or the light of the eyes. We can’t be seen. We chose to cover our faces. But there is nothing to fear when there are two against the devil.

All of this boils down to the idea of looking away from transgender people, especially when they’re so self-hating about it. Venus allows herself to be opened back up by the devil. To finally admit that she is who she is, and not what the unfair reality says she has to be. When Neptune tells Venus that she wants something, but can’t figure out what it is it’s quite obvious what it ends up being. 

She wants to transition, but may not even fully understand what being transgender is. She’s in some backwards ass place after all, perhaps that’s why she reached out for something she didn’t know she needed. She needed affirmation of what and who she was, but was unable to grasp for it until her old body was shed away into a being of light. The game does not miss a beat in changing Venus’s pronouns. Venus tries to open up about this, who she is to Neptune and Jupiter, who simply repel the devil from her body. Denial of who she is. And in the end, Venus is forced back into a body she does not want. She wanted to be seen, and now she simply hangs from a tree, knowing what she wants but not being allowed to have it…

Unused Yellow Ending CG

[RED – Jupiter]

Jupiter: Afraid, tired, and untouchable.

Jupiter’s personality can be easily described as not caring. Most things seem to roll right off her back. Harassment does not give her a rise, so she is left alone. People will try to walk all over her, but she doesn’t give them the time of day.

She will always take the blame, even when something is not her fault. In her mind, she will rationalize it is her fault. Early on in the night, Neptune and Jupiter attempt to get into the cabin which has a busted lock from the other groups. While there, Jupiter discovers different types of lilies in the greenhouse area before she accidentally breaks a decrepit old cabinet. Despite it being both an accident as well as something that was bound to happen because of how unkempt and unmaintained the cabin is, Jupiter breaks down and starts crying.

She is someone who tries so hard to impress and put on this facade that she’s unaffected by everything, but in the end? She takes everything on harder than anyone else. When Jupiter is left alone in the cabin, while Venus and Neptune go outside the two converse about the fact that this is happening and that Jupiter needs to let herself get hurt and then be open about it. It becomes something that pisses Neptune off more than anything, the fact that Jupiter allows herself to be hurt over and over again but will never admit she does such a thing. It is self harm.

Self harm is a recurring element for Jupiter, symbolized by her bracelet which she constantly snaps against her wrist. She does this every time she does something she believes is wrong or when she begins to get uncomfortable with her own thoughts she will snap the bracelet harder and harder against her wrist. It’s small, but it’s a persisting theme with Jupiter’s character. It’s simply analogous to self harm in that manner. Even if it’s just a wrist band snapping against her, she does it to remind herself that she is bad. She is wrong. She shouldn’t do this. She shouldn’t be thinking this. What shouldn’t she be thinking?

If it wasn’t already obvious, Jupiter is a lesbian. A lesbian with a big old gay crush on Neptune. Unfortunately, Jupiter has a LOT of internalized homophobia. 

Being a lesbian is wrong. It’s bad. It’s not good. Snap. She goes back and forth between her feelings for Neptune and her internalized homophobia about what she is doing is completely wrong.

During the Seven Minutes in Heaven scene between Jupiter and Neptune, the two we can assume are kissing and Neptune is running her hands over Jupiter’s body. Jupiter, of course, doesn’t take much of it well but is reassured by Neptune that no one will ever know simply because they’re alone. Therefore what they are doing right now? It never happened. It only happened if they both admit it happened. If only one admits it happened, it’s only one person’s word versus the other. Therefore, whatever happened in the closet? It stays in the closet forever. And no one in the Midwest will ever know or admit it either. The two could do whatever and they would be denied until admission occurs.

More often than not, it’s easy to see her own internalized homophobia through the entire game. Just like with Neptune, you find more about her when she’s in the closet with Venus. Venus, as she knows at that point, is a boy. She’s not attracted to boys like she is with girls. Not to mention, Venus doesn’t ACT like the boys she often deals with. But she has as much an emotional connection with Venus as she does with Neptune. 

She buries her face in Venus’ hair, making remarks about how soft and nice it is. Jupiter tells her that she feels safe around Venus compared to everyone else, whether it be because of her inherent dislike of guys or the overwhelming feelings she gets around Neptune. Venus seems perfect to her because of that. Venus is someone who won’t hurt her, someone safe and kind who she can just bury her face into and not care about it.

Even more interesting is that Jupiter herself ignores the pain inflicted upon her by others because it’s easier. Just like Venus, it’s easier to let pain and suffering hurt you. Except with Venus, who reacts to these lashes, Jupiter doesn’t. She shrugs and moves on, angering Neptune and making Venus sigh. She let’s all the pain hurt her because not only is it easier, but somewhere deep down she thinks she deserves it. She deserves it why though?

Unlike the other two, Jupiter is the only character who we know has some concrete things occurring at home. During the drinking session, Jupiter reveals that her dad is gay but married a woman anyways. Internalized homophobia aside, Neptune asks why then, of all people, would he essentially send his definitely lesbian daughter to such a horrible place. And her answer? They did it because it was easier than dealing with her mom.

The idea being that most of how Jupiter feels about herself is internalized because of her mother. And despite her dad being the same, he finds it easier to simply hide who he is as well and passes these teachings down to her. Not because of anything inherently bad, but because in this world it seems being yourself only leads to hardships and denying yourself to appease others makes life easier. It’s easy to see that Jupiter really does live by this sort of tenant. 

So she sits back and lets herself get harmed. Jupiter takes a beating from the world around her and says it’s okay. It’s not okay though. It’s self-harmful behavior, but for Jupiter she thinks it’s the right thing to do. Just so mom will chill.

By the end of the night, they can hear God speaking a sermon on the radio, buzzing lowly through the cabin.

“A hand held against the world. To be touched and to touch; touch is a language unto itself. And it too is a language of power. Thus unto Jupiter, which is also the language of gravity, according- the fist which can give takes too, and gives by taking, or takes by giving. Just as a word is honest or dishonest not by how it is spoken, but by he who speaks it, so is the honesty of touch. It is certain the devil is already here.”

Jupiter isolates herself from the others. It’s certain this time she’s the devil. No plan this time either. Jupiter sits there and snaps her band against her wrist, the room growing warmer with each passing moment.

She continues to try and hold it all in. To continue to deny it. Only a few more hours until dawn, right? No need to find out who the devil is, even if they all know who. Both Venus and Neptune can only look away.

It’s just a phase, right? No agreement. She begs them to mock her. To make fun of her. To make her feel bad. But they know her. They won’t do that. 

There hands and fingers everywhere. They touch everything. They squeeze the cabin like an empty water bottle. And just like that Jupiter breaks. All of herself begins flooding out in a wave of internalized hatred.

She’s so gross. She always ruins everything. And then her hairband finally breaks. And the storm of hands breaks loose in the cabin. Jupiter tells it like she thinks. She isn’t good. Like Venus had said before, anger directed at a rigged competition that is life, Jupiter bemoans the unfairness of religious doctrine changing to fit the needs of whatever society deems correct in a certain time period.

Jupiter could do her best to be good and get into heaven on that good merit. But then they ripped it out from underneath her. They changed the rules just went she thought she had it right. Her mother told her not to touch others. Dad taught her not to let herself be touched.

What if she stopped trying to be good? Jupiter is starved. Touch starved more than any person should. And she hates every minute of it. This time, however, Venus and Neptune are here for her. But she doesn’t want them to be. They should be disgusted with her. Even when they tell her otherwise, that internalized disgust of herself rings out.

She wants to touch. She wants to be touched. She wants to hurt. She wants to be hurt.

Jupiter controls a flurry of hands able to do all that she desires. Even before this form of her came out, it was present even earlier. In the closet with Venus, she gets annoyed when Venus tells her that she simply would rather be physically hurt than to be mean. On the other hand, Jupiter wishes she could be even more mean than she already is. Jupiter absentmindedly snaps her hairband, and suddenly hands begin to choke out Venus. To hurt Venus. Her deepest desires to touch and to hurt, and Venus accidentally gave her desires an open shot.

But Venus forgives her anyways, even when they both know it was Jupiter’s hands. A moment that solidifies both of their own desires. Venus being seen as a girl and Jupiter touching Venus like how she wants to touch girls. In a moment they are who they are, before they are forced to retract from that moment.

Jupiter is a lesbian raised to never be touched or to touch. Instilled that touching and being gay is wrong and dirty, and that she needs to be punished for it. She thought denying it would make her life easier and better. After all, being good is based on merits until they decide not anymore.  So what happens? She breaks down. And for a moment? Jupiter’s storm touches everything.

“Jupiter reaches out to us. She has a hand for every kind of touch; that hand is for hitting, that hand is for petting, that hand is for grabbing, that hand is for holding. We feel the pull on our skin and recoil. They want so many things from us; maybe everything. Every wish of the body belongs to it. And every wish is a hand, expressing that desire. And every hand is a storm that is bigger than the world, reaching for us. But it will not. The hands don’t touch us and the storm doesn’t break over us. We chose to be distant from her.”

Jupiter dared to be wanted. Dared to be touched. Born to only hurt. Born to think that her feelings for girls is only a phase, something queer people are told all the time. It’s only a phase. You’ll like boys soon enough, the say. Harassing you over the idea of not liking men. You hear it all the time from anyone who isn’t a lesbian. Lesbians can like men and be in relationships with them, so saying you only like women is just a phase. It’ll pass, as soon as you get the right man. Jupiter is mocked and she lets it happen. Maybe she’ll get past the phase soon.

Jupiter allowed herself to become a devil to try and get what she desperately needed. She hated herself too much, however, and told Neptune and Venus to expel the devil from her as soon as they could. They accepted her, but Jupiter could never accept herself. It was too internalized in her. 

And in the end? There’s heartbreak. Jupiter lay unconscious and alone, the devil expelled from her body. And Neptune and Venus? Te two people she cares most for? Te two people she so desperately wants to touch? They sit there together with hands interlocked with one another. Held. Touched.

Red Ending CG

[TRUE END – The Worst Girls Since Eve]

Parables I:I “The devil is only the shadow of man cast from the light of god.” The meaning of this parable is that there is no devil. 

What do you do then? What do you do when the answer seems desolate and meaningless? When the devil is everywhere, filling every gap of the darkness?

To break away from the analysis for a moment, in order to actually obtain every ending you have to leave one of the three characters alone and isolated. So what if you mathematically leave everyone out the same amount, thus no one is left totally alone?

By the end of the night, they can hear God speaking a sermon on the radio, buzzing lowly through the cabin. Wait no. It’s on the wrong frequency.

“Oh. Hi there. Oh, darling… I miss you. I have always missed you. I can still remember what your faces were like. I have missed them since before you were born. Please come back. I know I can’t offer much. The bodies I can give you are weak. The stores I tell are impossible. My world is even more precarious than this one. But please come back. It hurts to see you like this so much. So unhappy in those bodies of yours. Stricken by those stories. Forced to live in so much pain. I can’t even come save you. But I can promise one thing. There is room for three in my world. And only two in his.”

The sirens roar out through the night. Those in the camp are coming for Group West. They know the devil. Jupiter fears the worst will come upon them. Venus hopes it’s quick and painless. Neptune? Neptune destroys the radio.

The radios themselves represent a physical connection to religion and the religious community. You sit there, turning on the radio to listen to god and his sermons. The radios themselves are weapons capable of reducing a devil back into a human. Even just having one thrown can cause a devil to crumple over onto the ground, as if hit by a speeding bullet.

Neptune wonders why if god hates the devil so much, why does he not do it himself? Why does he send out his followers to do the work for him? Neptune is the first of the three to give into the devil. The devil fucking rules.

Venus wonders where the devil could be. But they are the devil. But again, Venus wonders where the devil is? Jupiter once more falls into her own pit of despair. All of her insecurities about being bad flowing from her mouth. But like Neptune yells at her about, she shouldn’t be good for people who hate her. More importantly, if she’s going to suffer and hurt herself to appeal to the people who make her feel like she is worthless why won’t she martyr herself for Neptune and Venus? More of a confrontation than anything else.

Venus suddenly blooms as well. She has found the devil just like Neptune has. In what can only be described as one of the most liberating things I’ve read since the book Dreadnought, Venus’s old body falls off. Literally falling off of her, shedding it off like a snake. No blood even. It’s not her body anymore and it’s one of the most affirming things I’ve read in fiction for a trans character.

There’s no pain. A moment of euphoria of accepting one’s self and casting who you used to be away. Neptune, for the first time, isn’t filled with vitriolic anger and sarcasm. Rather she asks Venus how she is. Her new arm looks to be in a rough place, and she makes sure Venus is okay. Jupiter still is in denial though. But this time, the other two are already devils. It’s not just her alone this time.

More important for Venus is outright talking about her dysphoria. All this time something had been bothering her. She would look on at her friends with jealousy, but there was never an answer there for her. And how the body peeling off, transitioning, helps her to not have to feel pain thinking about the things that are off about her body. It’s normal. She feels normal in a body that better reflects her.

Jupiter is the only hold out, still fearing for her own life. The false ideas instilled in her are staying strong. Neptune brings up a new argument. One that relates to the other three endings in the game.

In those three endings, they are achievable by leaving one of the three out and then having the other two use their radios the exorcise the “devil” out of them. And then the other two will be completely fine, at the cost of the third who was turned due to their isolation and not allowed to exist. And the worst part? Jupiter calls it gross, but Neptune says it’s normal. Because it is normal. The other endings show how normalized that kind of behavior is. To give up one of your friends in exchange for one’s own self preservation. To out them.

It’s ugly to do that to someone. To turn someone into a scapegoat. To live in a society where one’s self preservation can make you hurt someone else so badly. And the fact isn’t that there’s a scapegoat to be had, but as Venus said: “What’s ugly is we have to choose at all.”

But Jupiter’s walls are finally breaking down. She cries. She misgenders and then properly genders Venus correctly. Despite it all, despite knowing it the fear is still there. It’s an understandable type of fear. Coming out and living as yourself can be life changing, either negatively or positively. It’s scary.

But in the end, there is no more going back. To a life that they all hate. Neptune doesn’t want to go back home. To that life. Venus doesn’t want her old body back. She’ll die if she has to go back. But they promise they’re there for Jupiter. And they won’t abandon her in this time of need. And that’s what makes it different. They’re all there for each other. There is no two against one. There isn’t a scapegoat. None of them are afraid anymore since they finally do have each other supporting them.

The devil is representative of things that society forces people to repress, especially queer and trans people. As much as non-queer people want to say it is, the problems that queer and trans people faces, including teens, is still horribly relevant today. God are those who believe in a world that must be ruled by their religion. They don’t think for themselves, they follow the teachings of their church and hurt others. It’s a religion that teaches you to love your neighbor, but they hide behind their religion like a wall. They hide and harm and say its in the name of god. And if there is a god? Well he’s a shitty god. He lets people suffer in his name and kicks back watching them suffer.

But now they are the devil. They are together. They love one another. It’s best friends forever. It’s a first kiss. It’s a love story. Jupiter’s storm finally is allowed to begin, her blood mistifying around them. Neptune’s dark color ink and bile finally begins to clear up, all the toxicating elements within her finally washing out. And Venus is there to help clean her. Calm and patient. And Jupiter’s storm of hands makes sure every part of Venus knows she’s loved and seen. They’re finally content and happy.

Though despite it all, others will try to rob them of their happiness. It’s only natural. Humans are cruel to others who aren’t exactly like them. Ready ot hurt at a moment’s notice. Why? Because they’re different. Not only are they different, but they are no longer ashamed that they are different either.

And while the three dream of fixing the camp. Dream of freeing everyone from shackles that institutions have placed on them. The camp? All of them are like Venus, Jupiter, and Neptune. They just need a little coaxing to be freed. To understand like them.

They have a new apple. There is nothing to fear when there’s two against the devil. But they can’t wait to see what they’ll do against the three worst girls since Eve.

True Ending CG

Ending Remarks

I want to thank you, personally, if you made it this far into the essay. This was one of my favorite things I’ve ever written. And going through it again personally reminded me how much I do enjoy love writing. I would love to make writing my profession one day, since it’s something I genuinely love doing and it’s the one thing I think I’m pretty decent at. I’m not GREAT at SEO, so I’m not sure how many people will come across this. But I would love to make posts more regularly, however now that I work I’ve been unable to to do so as much as I want. My ultimate goal is to make this my job. And I would be thankful if you considered tipping me on Ko-Fi. It would mean the world to me, truly. Links below to my Twitter and Ko-Fi, in addition to links to where you can buy WKTD yourself now on Switch!

Also yes I do own the glow in the dark art print. And yes, it does hang on my wall framed.

Get the game at:

• Itch.io: https://pillowfight.itch.io/we-know-the-devil
• Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/435300/We_Know_the_Devil/
• Nintendo Switch: https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/we-know-the-devil-switch/

Follow the Creators:

• Worst Girls Games: https://twitter.com/worstgirlsgames
• Aevee Bee: https://twitter.com/MammonMachine
• Mia Schwartz: https://twitter.com/mightyatom

If you want to support this blog:

• Follow me on Twitter!
• Tip Me on Ko-Fi!

Knock, Knock, Knockin’ on Hooty’s Door Review

(What’s this?! A new post?! Yeah. I wrote this for Tumblr, but I realized I could also place it here. Funny how you can write so much, not thinking too hard, and then remember you are writing.)

So I just watched the newest Owl House and it was one hell of a doozy of an episode. So much happened in like 20 minutes, but I think talking about it might help processing what the point of this episode really was.

The basic plot rundown for everyone, to keep it fresh, is that Hooty wants to help Luz, Eda, and King with their individual problems. His interference actually helps them all, but he believes that he’s only making things worse. On the Hooty side of things, it shows that he’s slightly smarter and more aware that we really give him credit for but the end scene shows he’s also as obliviously dumb as we usually think. Each one has a problem: King not knowing what kind of demon he is, Eda running herself ragged to find power to help fight Belos, and Luz continuing to fright about her future now torn between the Isles (emphasized through her crush on Amity) and the human realm (emphasized by wanting to build the portal home.)

With King, it’s a short little ditty about how King doesn’t need to 100% know who he is right away. As he grows up, he’ll find out more about himself and who he is even without someone just giving him answers right away. We see he gains a shockwave-like power through loud yelling, induced by an emotional response. It’s a nice little moment, especially how King reacts when he sees how upset Hooty is.

The next two are far more indirect, however. With Eda not sleeping, Hooty uses magic cookies to have her get some sleep. This heightens her dream state, causing her to flash back to scenes in her youth that stick out due to her curse. The first shows a young Eda bidding her father farewell before a trip, but when he pulls a form of party popper that sets off fireworks, this frightens her and turns her into the Owl Beast which badly injures her father’s eye. We don’t see the direct aftermath, but we know this was traumatic to Eda and part of why she ran away from home.

Next, she flashes to Raine, where we find out the two indeed dated at one point. However, because Eda lies about her curse, Raine breaks up with her and chooses to join the Bard Coven. This triggers Eda’s curse, but we don’t see the outcome other than that Eda would rather suffer in silence away from people she loves out of fear that she might harm them like she did her own father.

Eda then sees the Owl Beast from its own perspective, long in the past. A mysterious witch, with a moon figure where her face should be, attempts to capture the Owl Beast. She succeeds and reduces the creature down into a scroll, the scroll that Lilith will use to curse Eda. This confirms that the Owl Beast is its own independent demon that, for whatever reason, was forcibly turned into a curse to be sold showing that it, too, is a victim as much as Eda is. Bound by the red string of fate, Eda decides to hold it and end the back and forth between the two in her mind. If only for a minute, they share a quiet moment before Eda wakens to find herself as a foxy harpy lady now that she is truly coming to terms with her curse. She sees Hooty, and tries to thank him for making her face her fear, but he thinks he failed and freaks out again.

Finally, he helps Luz. Realizing that Luz will never make progress on either of her goals without finishing one first, he attempts to help her ask Amity out. It goes about as badly as you’d think, with Hooty kidnapping Amity and dropping them into a “Tunnel of Love” to convince Luz to just ask her. When Luz refuses to admit her feelings, out of fear of rejection, Amity accidentally drops that she likes Luz while Hooty once again freaks out. Using their newly found powers, Eda and King manage to calm down a rampaging Hooty while Luz is forced to finally ask Amity out, and we get a cute scene after with hands being held and the two still being scared.

The most obvious thing to come out of this is that Luz is starting to finally figure out what future she wants. She wants to see home again, but also she wants Amity to be in her future regardless of what happens. Slowly, but surely, we see that Luz’s roots are both in the human realm and in the Boiling Isles. Both have become part of her, and she doesn’t want to abandon either. With her and Amity finally becoming named dropped girlfriends, they can focus on figuring out how Philip built his portal back to the human realm. But this, in general confirms that Luz wants the demon realm and the Boiling Isles to be part of her future no matter what happens. The only question for her now is connecting it to how she wants the human realm to fit in. Also, in general, the fact that they are girlfriends and they say that word is beautiful. It happens in pure TOH fashion, forced to happen by circumstance. Or is it? We see that the rampaging Hooty created a heart in the stone where they confessed their feelings for one another, implying that this too was part of his plan to get Luz to confess.
The scene, in general, also flips the trope that a confession needs to be this huge grand thing. Or in terms of an episode, an entire episode dedicated to it. It shows how Luz and Amity are both far too nervous to actually admit their feelings, and that there would never actually be that PERFECT moment to do the PERFECT confession. Luz and Amity‘s own self doubts mean that their would never actually be an episode dedicated to a confession, because it requires Hooty going absolutely nuts to force Luz into just pulling the bandage off. Again, it’s done perfectly in a way that only TOH can bend tropes.
We see this as well, adding that Philip successfully integrated witch magic and human science in his attempts to build the door. Just a note on how Belos may do the same thing to build his own science-magic hybrid stuff.

Overall, this was another great episode. It had tons of little details in it that we’ll continue to see sprinkled out. Hooty ends by saying “all the mysteries are solved” but in reality, none are. We’re just moving steps forward to see where the next die will land. As always, The Owl House proves to be one of the brightest series airing right now in tons of different ways. Each part of this episode brings characters to face something that they need someone as hard headed and blunt as Hooty to make them confront. And it’s done extremely well, and doesn’t take away from these reveals. I look forward to seeing what’s next.

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sorry

Things have been eh right now. Writing was taking me nowhere, so I had to go find a job for money. I will write more, but my job takes up a lot of time. I was hired for closing, so my usual nights where I would find time to write is done for now excluding days off. I wanna write more, but it’s hard. I get so tired after work. And I wanted to apologize.

June 1, 2021 PRIDE MONTH Update (Part 1 Uploaded)

No update last week. Don’t worry, I didn’t forget. Last week was a family thing, our dog of fifteen years passed away. As a result, I realized things might be tougher than I imagined and decided to take a week off from working on it. Also I’ve decided to upload this video in parts in the end. Originally it was only going to be a single video, but I realized that I would get no content out ever if I did that. So for now, the plan is uploading this in either one more part or two more. Depends on how much content actually comes from it.

Despite that, I wanna work on this and maybe some more simpler talky videos for Pride Month. Things that are a little more unscripted and mostly my thoughts on some queer stuff I’ve been reading and watching. It might be easier for me to do so to fill out some videos in-between these more researched and written out videos.

I wanna thank you all who have continued reading and such even though I don’t post as much as I’d like to. The videos are sometimes hard for me to focus on, but I wanna get better. Unfortunately, the loss of our dog hit hard and out of nowhere so things kinda got shaken up last week. They’re improving, and hopefully I can turn out content people enjoy. Thanks.

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May 17, 2021 Update (22%)

Photoshopping for sprites

So barely any progress. Well this time I have an actual excuse. I got my second COVID-19 vaccination last week, and my reaction to it was far worse than my first dose of it. While I am doing much better now, it should probably be said that I didn’t get much done because of it. I did some more voice over and editing, finally finishing the introduction and moving onto the first section by talking about Neptune. I bought the art book for WKTD, so I do have full access to the sprite sheets which makes it easier to get clear images of the characters.

Right now, I realized that the way I’ve been editing has been all wrong. For video clips, I’ve been cutting them up in the same premiere timeline, but I realize with how much I need to do it, and how much I need individual scenes that I need to individually edit these down just so I don’t lose my mind in the premiere timeline. That is my goal for today, at the very least. I’ll continue doing this until I have all the clips rendered out into smaller pieces so they’re easier to edit. I’m still new to editing videos, so I’m learning premiere on my own along the way. I’ll see you next week for another update!

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