LUNA-TERRA RUN

i dunno maybe it's taken me over a month to write about this because i'm fucking insane about LT. did the CM ending, since i did the MF ending for saturn. really glad i watched a bunch of gundam before this one, LT isn't char but playing from her perspective is definitely more fun when you've seen the char aznable burger commercial. i think the first time around, i did not appreciate pluto as a character nearly enough. and i didn't even know who europa was....... imagine going your whole life and never seeing her......... what a horrible way to live

Gave me big "This Is How You Lose the Time War" energy. If I'd played this before reading that, I'd say it reversed.

I appreciated how my understanding of events grew over three playthroughs both through gaining more context and also just repetition. I was so lost as the start of my Saturn playthrough, but I got it by the end of Pluto's.

One point to note: I would have liked the main secondary characters of each route to be a little more involved in the endings. I was invested in Mercury, Mars, and Europa, you know.

Got every ending. So much of this game was like looking into a mirror and then also kinda seeing my brain's interpretation of my friends in that same reflection. I see Luna-Terra: "That's my buddy Maya", I see Saturn "That's my buddy Izzy", I see Pluto "That's my buddy myself". A beautiful little collage of ideas held together under some of the best VN presentation I've ever seen (sometimes with VNs, giving presentation to make the game look like it has more gameplay than it does is all you need to make it feel like a more deep and engaging experience! Really! I don't know why either!), and that isn't even to mention the beautifully hilarious dialogue. So much of this is gonna stick with me forever-

"Why couldn't you just be a bad person with bad ideas and wicked dreams!?" (Halimede complaining about their frustration towards fighting the protagonists)

"It's not really pain, but it's a feeling so overwhelming it shuts Saturn down like pain would. It's fascinating, full of information." (Description of Saturn kind of getting off on being shot)

"I'll forgive you if you left us for something stupid, but I'll never forgive you if you left us for something you don't believe in!" (Pluto complaining about Luna-Terra's motives)

Appalling and unendearingly juvenile: it's a display of trans women's tragic, enforced inability to conceptualize a future for themselves, bereft even of the understanding of this limitation.
The lack of structure, which in a more purposeful work might express a belief about narrative itself or the patterns of human life, is here an expression of its belief in the fundamental passivity of the demographic it represents. Its characters are incapable of meaningful action: everything they do is an expression of sexuality, while actual sex is functionally absent from their world -- it is reminiscent of Valerie Solanas.
The vacuity of the interpersonal relationships between these characters, which never extend beyond flirtation, seems lost on the game, which miraculous transmutes these into serious, committed intimacy in the final act. Love and belonging are nothing more than an abstract hope here: the labor, the negotiation, and the compromise that render either of the positions possible is regarded as an impossibility.
Indeed, the possibility of any contact between the transgender and non-transgender worlds (which are in reality one world: Earth) seems to be explicitly denied. This theme is especially prominent in one ending, in which the allegory of a doomed romantic relationship is used to express it: a motif I find particularly vexsome.
While my support for the developer is unwavering, I cannot abide the work itself. I truly hope we can one day count on transgender authors, at the very least, not to produce narratives of transgender impotence.