I'm hot off the endings so you'll have to forgive me for only speaking in negatives with this. You can find plenty an earnestly true word all over the site about how utterly dazzling, sapphic, and beautiful this experience truly is when things all connect. That's all still true, what this work brings when it indeed does work, in about a good chunk of the runtime, is powerful and swept me up. As a resident witch I can say that large part of things is so lovingly crafted.

Butttt then there's the things I want to talk about. The truth of Little Goody Two Shoes is that it's much more interested in the structural, by and large mechanical aspects of bewitching, german folklore, and its surface levels of the shoujo than telling an earnest story, or really making true on its characters, or hell, its love!!! You will spend 70% of the time doing incredibly visceral trials to culminate in the Most Expected lesson of pursuing desires completely, while only 15% will contribute to a rushed, altogether the only real emotional heart, of finding connection and freeing yourself from that 70% tunnel vision. Which is, dissonant. The game cares so much more about painfully making an example out of Elise than it does actually having much to say, leading its endings bereft of too much closure other than justtt enough to make me feel longing as hell >.>

And Like, I GET IT. My most recent current relationship has utterly freed me from so much ;-; It's made me see what truly matters, what I want really in life, where I want my future to go! It's pushed me out of tunnel vision of some bad habits that have grown in the years I've lived with my past relationships. I understand this feeling Little Goody Two Shoes is about, now more than ever. But there's So, SO much more to it than this work even fucking considersss touching on. There's so much time and getting to know each other than 5 pre-established or just-established love in a week can really make to sell the shortest endings ever on offer. There's too much of a facsimile of relationships, something a short yuri shoujo serial can genuinely accomplish more.

I also can't help that I'm so peeved. I'm so peeved that everything to do with what was defined as 'real witching' was ultimately completely Negative. Fuck off. There's stardamn nuance in devil contracts and corruptive pathways, you can't just give the single astrologian the only positive credit. That the circumstances of the game imply that if you simply dropped every witchy aspect of yourself, moved away from all corruptive influences, every other personal connection (or attempt at one!) and pursued your single chosen lover, it would solve all your problems, is utterly blasphemous smh.

Genuinely though, I can't help but find painful conclusion to this flower that is pretty, perfectly thorny, but far from poetic. It juggles so much on religion, the detachment between self and community, and the feeling of a past and familyhood that was pre-defined for you. For it to mean, nothing. Mostly, nothing.