oh, no, I just read when AS is coming out! all right..... I'll just play the best route again and bask in the happy there.
czidnoma
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whoa this is fascinating. it was a bit difficult to get into with a lot of text right off the bat but once I could get my bearings, it didn't take long for me to get deeply invested.
one "complaint", I guess: there's an undefined choice during character design. second to last one, I think? no explanation for what I choosing the color of.
A note on consistency in the scenario: It's strange that only 20 years passed and in it a whole war happened, a system of slavery was established and dissolved, a species of billions lost and regained its independence in one mere generation, and then the young people say something like "We're the first generation of humans to be allowed to receive the same education as other races!" No, you're not! Their parents would still have whatever level of education they reached before the war, and the youth should be aware of that.
20 years is just incredibly short for all that to happen. For comparison, in the Star Trek universe, Cardassia occupied Bajor with little resistance and yet the occupation lasted 50 years, it took over 30 years for the infrastructure of slavery to be developed, and it took about 30 years for the Bajoran Resistance to organize and win independence back. And even that speed of events is.... compressed significantly for the sake of fiction.
The characters need a more reasonable sense of time, or the timeline for the events needs to be extended for statements like the quote above to be believable.
I was expecting another cheap, lurid, and deeply triggering fetish behaviorism game. That shit you play because you don't know how to deal with abuse that you've done or survived, so you're stuck just reliving it.
But... this game understands the power dynamics, emotions and motivations involved in abuse, and for both sides, much more than anyone like parents or BCBAs are taught to.
It has to be said that the overall premise and several events are still blatantly abusive. That's not going to be eliminated from explorations of this subject as long as oppressive power dynamics exist in the real world. But getting there is going to mean more informed portrayals, and this game is that. Even though I am still never going to trust behaviorism in actual practice, this has actually helped me resolve some of my feelings.