tracing morality through soap-bubbles

This is all ringing a little bit closer to home than I’d like… Good job!

For being a short story the concepts were explored so satisfyingly. Incredibly interesting to see succubi kind of used as a coping mechanism by the protag as it really fits her view of herself. Bravo, well done!

aaauuugh lillia sure does remind me of a certain me that I know...

spoilers follow

fantastic job showing the feelings of realizing that you and someone else are agreeing with each other, but interpreting the conversation completely differently.

I liked how adam talks right past lillia as she pushes back, how lillia was conversing with adam, but not the other way around.

The whole time I was reading adam talk about how hard men have things, I was screaming internally that lillia needs to read some goddamn transfeminist writings!!! The dworkin mention certainly influenced this. Everything adam was complaining about wrt fear of being labelled as a sex pest for being a man and how lillia has it so easy as a (trans) woman to not have to worry about that, made my head want to explode. Which I imagine is the intended reading, so bravo.

I'm just now putting together that adam was the source of the book in lillia's bag, which is a nauseating thought that has me going back and questioning everything else going on in the narrative. It's fascinating how lillia's anti-victim complex that she develops partly as a survival trait is something that makes her more prone to further victimization.

(spoilers below)

Fucck... this zapped me right back to I think 2023(?) when my local trans community's Adam first got exposed. The scene where Lilia repeats 'you were sober' over and over while he makes excuses freaked me out on such an unexpectedly personal level, as that was how the situations my local Adam was exposed for happened. 

The specific self victimisation Adam employs and the way he seems to pinpoint Lilia's own identity issues to play off of is really nasty work. It's unclear to what extent he's actually emotionally wounded, or if all along he was just saying whatever he thought would get him what he wanted. This game gets that the painful nuance of these type of people is that they genuinely are not happy and satisifed and they present their suffering in such a mythologized way, but their inability to recognise other people's unhappiness and feelings as real makes them dangerous. It's violent entitlement where a person feels betrayed when another human being isn't an NPC that exists to facilitate their escapism.  

I also appreciate how the game shows that Adam's sexual violence exists as part of a pattern of unaccountable boundary pushing, such as walking into Lilia's room unannounced, and just in general the overly familiar way he talks to her. It's very important to not doubt your gut feeling if someone is pushing you in little ways that seem easy to dismiss in the moment to not cause friction,because tey will inevitably start pushing you in big ways too. It's all very accurate. Especially how all Lilia asks for is an apology and accountability, but he reacts as if she's holding a gun to his head. And the way she internalises being a victim of violence as acceptable because of her identity is really sad, but unfortunately very, very true to how many people who's been hurt see themselves. This was honestly a very painfully cathartic game, thank you for sharing.  

On a craft level the way that the scenes flow into and build on each other thematically is really good. For example, Lotte's framework of psychology and how the perspective she understands rape through applies to Adam, and how his character is used to explore her ideas of why people act this way and to what extent a person can be ontologically evil, and the re-iteration of the figure of the succubus as a way to explore women's sexuality and sexual trauma in a misogynistic world is really well done.For a short game, the concept is explored from many different angles and perspectives that all coalesce into a very nuanced exploration of Lilia's internal struggle.   

But yeah. Gonna be sitting with this one. And I'm choosing to believe he dies at the end <3