compiled a list of some of my favorite text-based games & VNs that are specifically wlw:
another round - You play as Maddie, a woman in love with a woman named Agnes. Actually, she hates her. Actually, it's complicated. You definitely broke things off with her. And you don't regret it. At least once. Yes. At least once per day, you don't regret ending it with Agnes. Except tonight. You definitely regret it tonight.
such, such were the joys - It is the year 19xx in England. You are returning to the town of Grayling after your first year at university to meet your old school friends: Cicily Thomas, Fatima Khan, and Susheela Rajaram. As the only Indian girls at Grayling Towers, the four of you quickly became close friends, but you haven't seen each other in a year. You're not sure what has changed since then, but this is your chance to find out.
florence - Florence lies in bed, cold and still. You watch over her and wait.
perseids, or, all this will go on forever - Four trans girlfriends go on a road trip to a dark sky park, to see the perseid meteor shower.
winter - an interactive fiction about sex, trans insecurity, and a girl with a skull for a face.
butterfly soup 1 & 2 (VN) - A visual novel about gay Asian girls playing baseball and falling in love.
birdland - At night 14-year-old Bridget Leaside dreams of fantastic lands full of strange bird people. By day she's a miserable anxious summer camper, trying very hard not to think about her feelings for the mysterious girl detective in Cabin 22. And when her dream life starts bleeding into reality, things are going to get weird for her in a whole bunch of ways...
a summer's end: hong kong 1986 (VN) - Follow the story of Michelle and Sam, and how their chance meeting evolves into a deeper romantic relationship. Set in vibrant Hong Kong in the year 1986, it is an original story about love, family, and culture.
one day hike - You go on a hike in a familiar wood.
a year of springs (VN) - experience the stories of haru, erika, and manami in A YEAR OF SPRINGS, a visual novel trilogy about a trio of friends navigating their feelings of love, connection, and just wanting to belong.
pageant - Your name is Qiuyi (Karen?) Zhao, and you’ve just been signed up by your parents for a beauty pageant. You’re not ready, not even close, but you don’t have a choice. But perhaps you can make the best of it.
new year's eve, 2019 (sequel to pageant) - You are Karen Zhao, a senior in college who is home for winter break, and seeing your old high school friends for the first time in years. You are not ready, not even close, but perhaps you could make the best of it.
the revenant's lament - Way out west, in the most lonesome of reaches, strange things are afoot. Cowboys around campfires tell ghost stories and tall tales, speak of impossible, supernatural things. They say the devil walks amongst men. They say he'll grant you impossible wishes at the cost of your eternal soul. They say he can bring dead men back to life.
venus meets venus - Two women meet in a bar. This is not a love story.
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Randomly thinking about “tolerate it” (narrator voice: it was not random) and how under the cloak of fiction it is ostensibly inspired by works like “Rebecca” (which Taylor said she read during the 2020 lockdowns I believe?), with the line of “you’re so much older and wiser” indicating that the speaker is significantly younger and inexperienced compared to the person she’s speaking to and a pretty direct reference to the plot of the book.
But I saw something somewhere once that stuck with me about how it might not be referring to relative age between the characters but chronological age as in the passage of time in a relationship. And that made me think about how in a contemporary context, it might not necessarily be referencing an actual age gap between the two characters, but rather a sarcastic or cynical response to the man’s claims that he has matured (“you’re so much older and wiser [than you were before/than you were when we met/etc.]”), which then made me think about that line in relation to the woman. And that it could be taken like, “you act like you’ve matured so much in our time together and like you know everything, while I’m supposedly still stuck as the girl I was when we first met.”
Which then made me think of the “right where you left me” of it all and did you ever hear about the girl who got frozen time went on for everyone else she won’t know it and the bit in Miss Americana where she talks about how celebrities get frozen at the age at which they got famous, and how she’s had to play catch up in a lot of ways not just in her emotional growth but kind of in general. (Which also made me wonder if she’s ever been called out for immaturity/lack of curiosity/lack of education about things in her life…)
Which then made me think about the rest of the song, and @taylortruther’s posts yesterday about “seven” and “Daylight” and the way Taylor idealizes her youth yet contrasts it with an almost sinister reality in its wake, and the line, “I sit by the door like I’m just a kid,” because the discussion raised that her relationship let her recapture some of the childlike joy and wonder she’d lost. So this line is a double-edged sword: the speaker sits by the door with childlike hope that the person will come home and cherish her, but on the darker side, feels like the child dealing with the monsters she doesn’t have names for yet and the feelings of isolation she felt as she aged.
I’m not saying the song is necessarily autobiographical; like most of the songs on folkmore, it’s clearly a fictionalized story based on media she’d consumed and created, but we know a lot of the fictional songs were infused with her own feelings and experiences and… This idea swirling in my head picked up steam and now I kind of can’t stop thinking about it. Sorry but I’m a little obsessed now.
Like maybe it might start to shed light on why she identified so strongly with the novel in the first place…
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