my captain's unbinding postmortem

I decided pretty much immediately I wanted there to be a shipping component. I think the easiest setup would have been for the main character to be a self-insert shipper who is then confronted by sexy tulpa… But I didn’t really want to do that. For one, I have never self-shipped. It’s basically a foreign continent to me. I’m sure I could have managed, but I think it would have felt pretty inauthentic. Plus, I was really interested in the complete rejection of admitting your desire. If you self-ship, even if you’re doing it with an OC or an idealized version of yourself, you’re admitting some level of involvement. With shipping two characters who are not you, there’s a lot more plausible deniability.

After this I flip-flopped some on the ship itself. I was interested in the idea of the ship changing and then the character appearing after that happened in apparent reaction to the change. The easiest way to make this gay was to have it be a het ship where the boy the main character would have a suppressed crush on ends up being a girl. But I was interested in untangling why a gay girl would be interested in a m/m ship. And again, m/f (while this is not always the case) tends to logically lead to some kind of self-insert.

So I spent a lot of time thinking about what people get out of shipping. There’s a trend of mapping your interests in fiction onto some kind of deep-rooted trauma you need to uncover. Oh, you like found family? Must have some big problems in your family, huh? That sort of thing. I think this is generally pretty stupid, and it’s possible for people to like what they like without it being Indicative Of Your Past Scars. …But I also think there’s probably a reason that I ID as a lesbian but still have spent a good deal of time writing about fictional anime men. I won’t replicate everything I put in my journal on this blog, but the thing I decided I wanted to really show was the feeling of removal from the situation. No woman means you can’t project on the situation at all, right? You can imagine the idea of gay love, but not actually sit and think about what that means for someone like you.

Once I had an outline down, I wrote a lot. I knew based off of my outline this was likely to be pretty long. I guessed about 20k before I began writing but after a few days realized that was definitely wrong. I sent snippets to friends as I went (special thanks to everyone who listened to me yap about my VN for over a month), and kept expecting to find places to cut scenes and move the story along faster. But this never really happened. I still think I could have done some structural edits and ended up with a leaner story, but none of the people who read it as I went found places that needed the chop. So I decided to just push forward.

I think in hindsight I should have mixed up what I did more. There were days where I felt obligated to write because I was worried about not getting it all done in time, but couldn’t accomplish anything because I wasn’t in the right headspace. I did some character sketches and UI design, but I probably could have done more art if I had chilled out a bit. But I also felt like I didn’t want to draw until I knew what I needed to draw. Who knows.

After writing, I had a little over two weeks left. I frantically drew everything and got everything implemented in Renpy, editing as I went. I’m always amazed by how long the last 10% takes. There’s so many little things to do… On Sunday before the deadline, I told myself that I would tap out and finish early and not spend the whole day working on the VN… but then the last little things I wanted to do ended up taking all day anyway. But it all got done.

Characters

Sarah was pretty straightforward to write and draw. It may not amaze you to learn this, but she’s pretty heavily based on me. I definitely drew more from my negative traits— Sarah is self-defeating in a way I’d like to say I’m not anymore. She assumes that no one wants her around because she doesn’t like herself, so she doesn’t see why anyone else would like her, either. Of course, this only makes her more unlikeable. The self-fulfilling prophecy!

We're not exactly the same. Sarah is pretty painfully self aware in a way I was not always at her age. This can be a good and bad thing. I’m also much more willing to try to talk to someone who approaches me than she is, even if I fumble. However, a lot of her saddest feelings are things I’ve felt. It makes it difficult to talk about her as a fictional character! Sarah is my friend and my enemy. I want better for her but also want to shake her by the shoulders and tell her to get a grip. Luckily, this seems to be the reaction most people had to her as well— especially people who have had similar experiences to me.

She’s pretty much always had this design— I really liked the cat Gudetama sweatshirt. However, going back I found in earlier sketches that she had her hair tied up instead of the headband. I kind of like the tied back look! I’m not sure why I changed it. I might have just forgotten that this was my intent.

Graye is, of course, much easier to engage with as a fictional character, because even in the world they exist in they’re fictional! Graye was meant to embody the foil character of shonen animanga that just inevitably ends up being more compelling than the lead. Pretty much everyone seems to like Graye, so I think this means mission success. Some of the feedback I got was that Graye was simply too dazzling and outshone Sarah… But, well, that’s a tough competition for Sarah to win.

I knew that I wanted the reveal to be ‘character thought to be a man turned out to Some Kind of Woman’, so I went back to the Well of OCs and dug up a character I had in high school named Jack. She was a pirate who killed her brother to steal his identity and escape an abusive home life and then behaved very evilly. Graye is pretty far from this character. But I definitely take some of their design elements. I also vaguely touch on their parents not being great in a few points in the script. Here’s some art I drew of this character as a fourteen year old. I tagged this as extreme gore on DeviantArt.

The other inspirations I pulled were Haruka from Sailor Moon— I think I basically recreated her haircut but less fluffy for Graye— Lady Oscar, and then the dude from the Take On Me music video. Basically the perfect lesbian.

It was also interesting to imagine the reasons that a character like Graye would be compelled by Sarah. Of course, there’s a fast track when you can literally only be perceived by one person, so their attention immediately comes at a pretty high premium. Besides that, the main way I managed this was that Graye was Overwhelmingly Sincere as a character. Sarah admires this, but of course finds it intolerable when applied to her interests. Ultimately, though, even when you’re cringing the whole time, fandom is an incredibly sincere hobby and interest! Graye just wants to encourage her passion. Well, maybe in another timeline Sarah would have had the actual self-fulfillment arc the first part of the story sets up.

Reception

Everyone has been incredibly kind in their feedback thus far. I’m really grateful that people liked it and felt seen by it. I kind of feel there are two spheres of feedback I’ve received, which are ‘this was fun and I liked it’ and ‘this came to my house and attacked me personally’. I think this is pretty cool. 

Some creators I really respect said some wonderful things about it, too. That really had me feeling like I was floating on air. If you’ve said anything nice about my VN just know I’ve read your comment like 3000 times.

Of course this is far from the most subversive thing in the TYVNJ, but I’ve not really written something before that drew so heavily from my own thoughts and feelings. Mostly it was really freeing and the writing flowed easily, but it was also pretty scary at some points! I recently watched a video where a writer was arguing that you should write more nonfiction, and one of the points he made was that ‘if you paint yourself in a negative light, you can just say that’s a fictionalized portrayal of yourself’. …This seems, well, a bit disingenuous to me. Of course people are going to know the negative parts you portray are still you. It’s not like you would write yourself like a big jackass for fun. So even though Sarah isn't me, well, it does feel a bit like airing all my dirty laundry.

I also know, of course, that Sarah was likely to be pretty relatable to an audience of gay people into anime. But it was still really cool to see that pay off, and that other people understood what I was going for.

What’d I’d do differently

I honestly feel really positively about how this project went, which is a rare experience. For a long time I’ve been struggling to enjoy working on a project all the way through. I was starting to worry I had just lost whatever enjoyment or fulfillment I got from creation. This really helped me get it back— I think it was because I just let myself have fun with it. The idea was silly and I got to just take it to its logical conclusion while cracking myself up as I went. The last chunk I wrote in a one-day, 7k sprint, partly because I was feeling the time pressure— but also because I was really excited to work on it and write the climax! 

I doubt that I’ve Solved It and every project will be like this from now, but I was really excited to experience that feeling and know I can feel that way again. If you've been burned by creative project before and are wondering if it can be fun again, I hope that you can have something that gives you a spark again too.

So, for that reason, it’s hard to say that there’s much I’d change. But if I had to:

1.  It probably just could have been more toxic overall. It certainly Ended toxic, but I received many comments from people talking about how they were thinking it wasn’t very toxic until that point. Maybe that makes the ending work and feel more shocking? But I would have liked to have written some real radioactive yuri.
2. I think the name is kind of bad. I am just very bad at naming stuff. I put off thinking about it til the very end and was desperately scraping my brain to come up with anything at all, and I’m still not very happy with it. I think in the future I just need to be thinking about it more throughout the project so I’m not going ‘fuck. shit. goddamnit.’ in the last 24 hours.
3. In hindsight there's no way Sarah would self ID as a lesbian. She would be dipping her toes in the water of bisexuality while ignoring the fact that the idea of dating a man makes her nauseous.

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