------------------------LUNA-TERRA------------------------

Soaringly, defiantly, almost certainly the best prose I've ever seen in a Visual Novel. In what is so often an insular, overwritten form that constantly fails to leverage the advantages of, y'know, visuals in order to trim their ludicrously overwritten manuscripts (feel confident in saying Umineko's much-memed length could be halved if you cut out the explanations of things we can see with our eyes and repeating the same descriptions over and over again), the density and gravitational weight of HWBM's beautifully poetic prose shines like a star about to go supernova.

Each line says something important, something meaningful, and it's central metaphors are so perfectly pitched and utilized that the clarity of the text is never in question, even deep into an in-universe e-mail about the metaphysics of generating miniature black holes in the ruins of Side 3. I know not everyone gets on with the writing here, but for me, this was so frequently beautiful and impactful that it blows most traditional novels I've read in the past few years out of the water. The incredible music doesn't exactly hurt, either.

Weighty and important yet flippant and understated. As heady and political as it is emotional and introspective. It's everything I want to be able to write like.

------------------------PLUTO------------------------

As pointedly political as the best of Gundam and as nakedly personal as the highest highs of Evangelion, Heaven Will Be Mine is remarkable in its understanding of what Mecha means, an understanding that eclipses much of the work that so visibly inspires it.

Heaven Will Be Mine is about bodies, and takes a transhumanist perspective of our own bodies to discuss both broad, heady concepts of imperialism, as well as how we ourselves characterise, well, our selves.

Who am I? Am I these hands, these eyes, this flesh, or am I less, just the thoughts that exist behind my AT Field. Is everything else is just an endless layer of shells built to protect it? Or am I more than that, the words you read now, the voice I speak and the things I create? The reviews I write, edited and carefully constructed to present a meaning I want to present, the videos I make, a series of images that tell the narrative I want to tell, all of these things are as true a Me as exists. When I take a selfie, and edit it, erasing beard shadow and smoothing out the bags under my eyes, I'm not creating an inauthentic self, I'm showing you a truer me than a simple photo could, a picture that shows you what I value, what I want you to see and what I want you to Not See.

Is Earth the ground we walk on? Or is it everything we look up to and crave, the planets we've named, the stars we've numbered and categorized the heavens that we want to be ours? Our culture is an udurgh - a thing that contains many things - expanding beyond its borders imperceptibly, imperialism of thought and metaphysics that claims all that exists as territory that belongs to it or will belong to it.

Heaven Will Be Mine gets it. At almost every turn, it understands. It knows that mechs are guns. It knows that the Gundam is the White Devil. It knows that we could have made them look like anything, but we made them look like us. And it knows that we love them anyway.

There's a lot to think about, and a lot to say when it comes to this game. But more than anything else, Heaven Will Be Mine stands as absolute proof of the necessity of diverse voices telling diverse stories. Neither Tomino nor Anno could have told this story, and asking them to is ridiculous. It's a story we have to make for ourselves, using what the things they created told us to say something new.

Eternally glad there are other queers who think about Mobile Suit Gundam: Char's Counterattack as much as I do.

------------------------SATURN------------------------

at the time of writing, well. it's a bad time to be writing. the uk's systemic pervasive transphobia has reached a fever pitch, and currently both the party in government and their supposed opposition trade in barely-concealed terf ideology designed to dehumanize trans people and make us inverse. in the part of the uk's earth where I live - ireland's terra, uk's earth - there is literally no hope for trans people, as we have exactly one gender clinic in the entire country, and they aren't taking consultations. it is impossible to transition right now without obscene wealth and stability that the vast majority of trans people do not possess.

and don't even get me fucking started on the wave of nakedly evil anti-trans legislation that is hitting the USA right now. fuck me.

we live eternally reminded of how much they hate us. how much they hate what we are, and what we want to be. and the few of us that do become accepted, that let themselves fall into the gravity well of their expectations, prostrating themselves before their culture, only highlights how inhuman they think of us.

and in art, in fiction, time and time again, they tell us about the way queer people should exist, hidden in the margins, their queerness incidental rather than defining, something that just exists.

the message is clear. either we be who we are on their terms, or we aren't allowed to be here at all.

Fuck. That.

they think we're not like them? that we're something else, something inverse, inhuman?

fine. let's be "inhuman". let's be new genders and pronouns and names. let's change into new angles, new shapes. let's be loud and obnoxious and screamingly gay.

let's find out just how inverse we can be.

------------------------TRUE-END------------------------

I cannot tell you how much I love this. But I tried my best. A new all-time favourite.