personal dump ahead, feel free to skip this one ^_~
cw: vague game typical mentions of suicide and self harm, minor mention of gender dysphoria, minor spoilers
“No one really likes what I make, but I think that’s OK.
To create is my only smile, regardless.” ▷
i find as more time passes it becomes increasingly difficult to create a respectful, nongratuitous or exaggerated mental illness narrative in gaming. i don’t find the way my own brain speaks to me as very respectful either though. this little renpy title was released only around a year prior to this review, and i felt momo’s searing monologue and pleas were dangerously familiar during a particularly rough chapter of my mid to late 20s.
quite a lot is bad right now! i’m stuck presenting as a gender i don’t associate with in a meager retail assistant role, suffering customers who look at me like i’m a bug they’ve stepped on. i endure chronic muscular pain and poor circulation which leaves me barely recovered enough for my next shift. i bite back an intense anger that doesn’t feel like me, having to physically restrain myself from striking out against a wall. i’m creatively starved and have shamefully not drawn even a single sketch for weeks, contributing to my already passive guilt. “just draw for fun! just do it!” yeah, right.
it’s alright though, i guess. i’m medicated again on a comfortable dose, speaking with a therapist fortnightly, and trying to do what i love in the simplest way possible, like playing these games and writing these silly reviews!! like momo, there are people who love me, but my (her) brain doesn't take much effort to forget these wonderful things, of course.
it’s easy enough to say i saw myself in this cute doll, far from the first person to i’m sure. To echo Archagent’s sentiment from her own wonderful review you should totally check out, there’s something idealised about being a mentally ill doll, wearing a cute little dress with bright anime eyes and thin ball joint arms and legs. this allure is heightened in eve’s dreamlike vignette digital photography she (assumed pronoun, please feel free to correct!) posts to her twitter. plastic arms manipulated into a cheer, to brandish an item, or perhaps legs bent to sit upon something soft in introspection. these limbs are not my responsibility. nothing is.
12 years ago i almost fell just like momo did. i relapse, grow frustrated at those who care about me simply because they do, and overindulge in the worst in me. but i’d like to believe there’s joy and light out there, and that none of this pain was for nothing.
thanks for reading my diary! you should read momo’s too☆
cw: vague game typical mentions of suicide and self harm, minor mention of gender dysphoria, minor spoilers
“No one really likes what I make, but I think that’s OK.
To create is my only smile, regardless.” ▷
i find as more time passes it becomes increasingly difficult to create a respectful, nongratuitous or exaggerated mental illness narrative in gaming. i don’t find the way my own brain speaks to me as very respectful either though. this little renpy title was released only around a year prior to this review, and i felt momo’s searing monologue and pleas were dangerously familiar during a particularly rough chapter of my mid to late 20s.
quite a lot is bad right now! i’m stuck presenting as a gender i don’t associate with in a meager retail assistant role, suffering customers who look at me like i’m a bug they’ve stepped on. i endure chronic muscular pain and poor circulation which leaves me barely recovered enough for my next shift. i bite back an intense anger that doesn’t feel like me, having to physically restrain myself from striking out against a wall. i’m creatively starved and have shamefully not drawn even a single sketch for weeks, contributing to my already passive guilt. “just draw for fun! just do it!” yeah, right.
it’s alright though, i guess. i’m medicated again on a comfortable dose, speaking with a therapist fortnightly, and trying to do what i love in the simplest way possible, like playing these games and writing these silly reviews!! like momo, there are people who love me, but my (her) brain doesn't take much effort to forget these wonderful things, of course.
it’s easy enough to say i saw myself in this cute doll, far from the first person to i’m sure. To echo Archagent’s sentiment from her own wonderful review you should totally check out, there’s something idealised about being a mentally ill doll, wearing a cute little dress with bright anime eyes and thin ball joint arms and legs. this allure is heightened in eve’s dreamlike vignette digital photography she (assumed pronoun, please feel free to correct!) posts to her twitter. plastic arms manipulated into a cheer, to brandish an item, or perhaps legs bent to sit upon something soft in introspection. these limbs are not my responsibility. nothing is.
12 years ago i almost fell just like momo did. i relapse, grow frustrated at those who care about me simply because they do, and overindulge in the worst in me. but i’d like to believe there’s joy and light out there, and that none of this pain was for nothing.
thanks for reading my diary! you should read momo’s too☆
3 Comments
Good post, I'm gonna do something out of pocket and throw my slightly edited, deleted post on momo's diary here, I deleted it initially because it seemed underbaked but it works, at least, as a heartwarming gift for somebody going through it rn.
CW: Depression, Suicide, Defending the Romantic, Extreme Anti-Rationalist Sentiment
A kinetic VN that shows depression at its most ballistic and futile. There's something to be said about how the unique 'stop motion' style presentation of everyday toy objects gives a much more abstracted view of the private depressive mind. Reminds me of the work of Švankmajer (films like Alice, and Light, Darkness Light), whose foray into stop motion functions as a great way to see the repetitions and discomforts of the body without the unreality of actually seeing a living and breathing human do them.
Stop motion and dolls in particular as anthropomorphized tie ins for the melancholy of human behaviour are much more rare. On the one hand the popularization of Barbie or Raggedy Anne shows that dolls are intended as mass produced objects of joy and/or placidness. But if anything this assumption, works like this argue, reveal our own misogynistic biases about women as 'emotional plastic', people who exist just to feel better. If you look at the glassiness of the eyes or the permenance of the slight smile you get a much more melancholic picture. It's no wonder then that more plastic humanoid dolls have been abandoned as product recently in comparison to something more openly joyous like my little pony toylines etc. Telling here to, that all of Momo's friends are plushies, she constantly pronounces a vengefulness against a god, about no longer belonging to this world. She has no more friends like her, her toylines have been totally abandoned because the implications of her existence embarrassing Him too much, and melancholic marketing is not a thing, such an approach quarentined to 'accidental' direct to DVD art like the Raggedy Anne movie.
Momo's story is meant to be abandoned and set aside in the dirt, thus making its fierce claim to being heard all the more important. Here to Momo exists as another rebuttal to an important trend, if only incidentally, that of literary Rationalism. Another game I love and have defended before is Milk Outside a Bag Outside a Bag and while Mom's Diary is not directly mocking that more rationalistic attempt to understand the struggle integral to mental health, it does seem to argue that it's 'not enough'. I'm certainly no expert to the genre, but in particular Momo's calls to me imitations of the romantic literary movement of "Sturm und Drang" or otherwise translated as Storm and Stress. Whose approach exists directly as a counterargument to 'rational' writing trends of the time. For example The Sorrow of Young Wether one of the seminal works of the genre, depicts the degradation of a young rational university thinker into a pit of alienation out of his attraction to a woman who doesn't care for him, this existed in part as a way for the author Goethe to separate from this proto in celibate thinking, yet also to the overly bourgosie 'cleanness' of other Bildugsromans of the time. Goethe, who wrote it anonymously said that the affect of the book and its ending was "after a general confession, joyous and free and entitled to a new life” (source) (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0366(14)70229-9/fulltext) that is to say it was a way to distance himself from the endstate placed there, that of suicide. This VN is meant also as a decompression chamber for extending these more self destructive urges, and showing tragedy and torment at its most fierce, as a tool to liberate the author and readers as such from performing these actions themselves for catharsis. However, because of how rationalist trends continued, shutting out this emotionality and censoring the 'bare' emotions from the world due to fear of copycat suicides etc. Even Goethe later on denounced the Romantic project as a poison on the world and saw ill in the text he wrote with his own pen.
The rationalist is the censor, that who in pure fear blots out works of raw pain with whiteout. The rationalist is a historical revisionist who argues that the Enlightenment was some concrete secular process with no meaningful resistance to it, that made the world a Better Place. That the world is a better place now because we have better dolls, better people, better products, without actually having to listen or maintain any of that. You just need to overcome your biases and stop making everyone upset. Stop saying upsetting things like 'im mad' or 'im scared' everything is fine. Stop being so emotional. Everything is fine. It's all fine all the time. Stop having outbursts, nobody needs a spoilsport.
There will be a day of reckoning for the injustice against emotions that has been wrought against us. Your clown empires will rot and crumble before our eyes and we will chuckle as it falls apart, while you scramble to reason it in place again.... This VN captured that sentiment so effectively that it almost feels like nothing more needs to be said, its that well done.
That being said, I think a more considerate CW warning for suicidal ideation at the start of this game would have been nice. Helps prime the reader for the actual impact of the storm forecasted to them.
CW: Depression, Suicide, Defending the Romantic, Extreme Anti-Rationalist Sentiment
A kinetic VN that shows depression at its most ballistic and futile. There's something to be said about how the unique 'stop motion' style presentation of everyday toy objects gives a much more abstracted view of the private depressive mind. Reminds me of the work of Švankmajer (films like Alice, and Light, Darkness Light), whose foray into stop motion functions as a great way to see the repetitions and discomforts of the body without the unreality of actually seeing a living and breathing human do them.
Stop motion and dolls in particular as anthropomorphized tie ins for the melancholy of human behaviour are much more rare. On the one hand the popularization of Barbie or Raggedy Anne shows that dolls are intended as mass produced objects of joy and/or placidness. But if anything this assumption, works like this argue, reveal our own misogynistic biases about women as 'emotional plastic', people who exist just to feel better. If you look at the glassiness of the eyes or the permenance of the slight smile you get a much more melancholic picture. It's no wonder then that more plastic humanoid dolls have been abandoned as product recently in comparison to something more openly joyous like my little pony toylines etc. Telling here to, that all of Momo's friends are plushies, she constantly pronounces a vengefulness against a god, about no longer belonging to this world. She has no more friends like her, her toylines have been totally abandoned because the implications of her existence embarrassing Him too much, and melancholic marketing is not a thing, such an approach quarentined to 'accidental' direct to DVD art like the Raggedy Anne movie.
Momo's story is meant to be abandoned and set aside in the dirt, thus making its fierce claim to being heard all the more important. Here to Momo exists as another rebuttal to an important trend, if only incidentally, that of literary Rationalism. Another game I love and have defended before is Milk Outside a Bag Outside a Bag and while Mom's Diary is not directly mocking that more rationalistic attempt to understand the struggle integral to mental health, it does seem to argue that it's 'not enough'. I'm certainly no expert to the genre, but in particular Momo's calls to me imitations of the romantic literary movement of "Sturm und Drang" or otherwise translated as Storm and Stress. Whose approach exists directly as a counterargument to 'rational' writing trends of the time. For example The Sorrow of Young Wether one of the seminal works of the genre, depicts the degradation of a young rational university thinker into a pit of alienation out of his attraction to a woman who doesn't care for him, this existed in part as a way for the author Goethe to separate from this proto in celibate thinking, yet also to the overly bourgosie 'cleanness' of other Bildugsromans of the time. Goethe, who wrote it anonymously said that the affect of the book and its ending was "after a general confession, joyous and free and entitled to a new life” (source) (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0366(14)70229-9/fulltext) that is to say it was a way to distance himself from the endstate placed there, that of suicide. This VN is meant also as a decompression chamber for extending these more self destructive urges, and showing tragedy and torment at its most fierce, as a tool to liberate the author and readers as such from performing these actions themselves for catharsis. However, because of how rationalist trends continued, shutting out this emotionality and censoring the 'bare' emotions from the world due to fear of copycat suicides etc. Even Goethe later on denounced the Romantic project as a poison on the world and saw ill in the text he wrote with his own pen.
The rationalist is the censor, that who in pure fear blots out works of raw pain with whiteout. The rationalist is a historical revisionist who argues that the Enlightenment was some concrete secular process with no meaningful resistance to it, that made the world a Better Place. That the world is a better place now because we have better dolls, better people, better products, without actually having to listen or maintain any of that. You just need to overcome your biases and stop making everyone upset. Stop saying upsetting things like 'im mad' or 'im scared' everything is fine. Stop being so emotional. Everything is fine. It's all fine all the time. Stop having outbursts, nobody needs a spoilsport.
There will be a day of reckoning for the injustice against emotions that has been wrought against us. Your clown empires will rot and crumble before our eyes and we will chuckle as it falls apart, while you scramble to reason it in place again.... This VN captured that sentiment so effectively that it almost feels like nothing more needs to be said, its that well done.
That being said, I think a more considerate CW warning for suicidal ideation at the start of this game would have been nice. Helps prime the reader for the actual impact of the storm forecasted to them.
@LordDarias thank you so kindly for your words and well wishes :) i hope things are well for you!
@Erato_Heti appreciate your out of pocketness dearly and am thankful you shared this writing ;) i understand my own reviews are highly surface level and somewhat clinical, so i'm glad i got a little bit more open here, and that you shared your own words on the same game!
i very much second your desire for a content warning either in the game or on the store page. i myself went in expecting something along the lines of what was portrayed, but i must admit it left me in a bit of a state immediately after.
thank you again for a thoughtful and kind reply btw nwn
@Erato_Heti appreciate your out of pocketness dearly and am thankful you shared this writing ;) i understand my own reviews are highly surface level and somewhat clinical, so i'm glad i got a little bit more open here, and that you shared your own words on the same game!
i very much second your desire for a content warning either in the game or on the store page. i myself went in expecting something along the lines of what was portrayed, but i must admit it left me in a bit of a state immediately after.
thank you again for a thoughtful and kind reply btw nwn
LordDarias
10 months ago