Thank you! Although I am growing worried that many people are not able to realy think about the way I present things and will take them at face value
Like there is the route with the eagles (greyed out cause it is supposed to be new game + but i will have to make it playable anyway) and it will end in war, fueled by hatred and stereotypical thinking… the bird of the eagle has been choosen specifically for this (I have really struggled with this for a long time as i am german-jewish) and I am betting my kidney people will think it glorifies something.
Yeah thats also where people not understanding it are… growing more and more frustrating to me. Like you do not want to know the amount of messages I got on tumblr if we were playing birds, or other things… (just yesterday. YESTERDAY I have been asked if the souls of the people are birds… no)
I have been waiting to write a story as such for years after I had been disappointed by man o the games here. Like, I get it, wanting to live in a world where it is not worth noting.
But thats not for me, thats not the story I want to to tell.
Because your gender, sex and sexuality is meaningful and most often people will fight over it, especially in such a toxic enviroment.
Just fyi this game will also deal with transphobia, bi- aro- and acephobia! Although it partky ofc depends on who you are spending time with (Chase will be much more understanding of being bi than any RO of the Divine Flock), but MCs father? Yeah have fun trying to explain it to a fanatic cult member that trans/bi/aro/ace is even a thing.
Same, I do not want that in every of my stories and in my game Citadel of dancing Birds (tiny update a bit days ago but I only announced it on tumblr and not here cause I hate the stress the “two months or the thread gets closed” puts me under) there it is totally normal! Also in Hawks and Doves it will come up but… in a way that makes even love feel bad (I am going all the way with the dystopia here).
Same.
But with me you can actually choose to become better (unless you choose the really obvious choices lol).
That is actually a thing in Finnish folklore, and I doubt we’re the only ones, so it’s… kinda-sorta not unexpected? Dunno if that makes you feel any better though.
They used the word therian which is a sub"grop" of otherkin which is a new phenomen, which can put people in real danger (blurred, tw suicide mention a friend of mine tried to kill herself after she was in so deep in that whole otherkin shit), so thats why I highly dislike those sort of asks.
In my eyes this has nothing to do with any kind of folklore or mythology, even if it claims to do (I know about native american and aztec and also that there are many more). You can name yourself pagan i dont care (paganism is fascinating and I myself love ancient beliefs, folklore is awesome but I am german so… yeah). But the second I see therian or otherkin? I am out.
And I wasnt aware that its part of finnish mythology, would you be willing to explain it? Or just drop the name so I can google it!
Sure! It’s called sielulintu (“soulbird”). It’s a bit complicated and not always perfectly consistent (that’s folklore for you), but the gist of it is that birds bring souls at birth and take them away at death, and that a person’s soul (well, one of them; people have 2-3 souls, depending on how you count) can take a bird-shape and go gallivanting around when a person sleeps (so one may want to have a wooden bird around to protect them from the soul escaping, which would be a really bad thing) and become a ghost after death. Also that ancestral spirits/spirits of dead relatives/what have you can come to visit in a shape of a bird. (What kind of bird it is depends on what kind of person it was and how they died.)
I think that’s certainly a fair-ish concern. While it’s obvious playing the game that the Flock and their bigotries and ideology is bad, I can imagine someone engaging with it uncritically. I love playing a zealot as much as the next person, but the interesting part about playing a zealot is not, in fact, winning at zealotry but grappling with justified doubt and emerging anew.
Definitely a tricky thing to figure out how to include, but I do think that difficult =/= bad, especially in a work that is political and complex.
That’s so surprising to me! Definitely not a fault of your writing or introduction at all, in my opinion. It’s pretty clear early on that not only do you not play a bird, but like… birds don’t actually really feature in the story? They’re not magical messengers or anything like that. Actually, the story felt so grounded in its cult setting that I was legitimately blown away by the vampire reveal . It made total sense in retrospect, though. The bird-informed language is a really nice aesthetic through-line, and I think pretty clearly symbolic. If someone picked this up as a novel, they couldn’t possibly think it was about birds; maybe people don’t apply that sort of media literacy as readily to IF.
I really appreciate a narrative where the MC is allowed to grow as a character. Often in IF, I feel like I have to early on play the sort of character I want my character to be in the end, but this style of writing made me feel from the beginning that I could have a character begin in self-hatred, or committed belief in a twisted ideology, or what-have-you, and have them work through it in the story. I didn’t feel like I had to choose rebellious options on day one to eventually get there, and I really like that.
I have to say with the state of books (or rather the surrounding reading) is the sad reality that media literacy is dead… or at least dying.
This is def my end goal when writing this dynamic! (which will also become clear in one route in the next update where you can visit a like… normal church and think a bit about what MC is actually believing in
I however also feel that rn i havent written in enough reactions but I need to tell myself that is has been like two days in-game I have time and no one just does totally changes their views on sth they grew up with just because a hot stranger tells you to.
Added aro and ace specific flavour text, added something about my work, it goes a bit further than before (main update still being written but have fun code diving if you dont mind spoilers! or really bad writing)
Sadly its not more that I can post public, many of the party variants are still only half finished.
Just wanted to get some things about my work straight (its not), so yeah. Put it in two times, in bold, getting really tired about some sort of questions I receive over at my tumblr so this had to be done to keep me from losing motivation.
Just finished it for the first time after finding your works- I really like it so far! The worldbuilding and tone are both spectacular, and I can’t wait for more. It’s the first time I see this idea written in an if, and I love it. The different customization choices, the romances, the mystery, I’ll definitely be keeping up with updates. I’m just asking about the SA content warning, it caught my eye immediately since I don’t think many ifs have that included/can be done to MC. I don’t mind it being included, but I’m just wondering, how major will that aspect be?
the sexual assault really only happens in two side routes:
One with Marcel if MC gets together with Chase at the party (only brief), the other one is the ambitious route (will happen more than once if MC continues to be powerhungry).
I have time and no one just does totally changes their views on sth they grew up with just because a hot stranger tells you to.
