Coolest metaphor for puberty probably ever made.

People rag on this game for returning to the cult stuff from the first game and not focusing on the personal horror of the first game, but I think it does a pretty good job of blending both the cult stuff and the personal horror of the SH2 into it.

Also damn this game looks so damn good, Heather's player model is just great and the environments aswell man. Cool stuff!

-the use of comedy in parun’s work I find to both be rlly fascinating and disorienting. in both this and rekinder there will be very long monologue scenes that are disgustingly raw in their emotion, some of the best written stuff I’ve ever seen tbh and it’s almost always followed up by a punchline. I’m very into finding the connective tissue between diff generations and I think for zoomers and millennials it’s these attempts at kind of manipulative shows of emotion followed up by jokes to downplay their own emotional truths. everything is ironic and everything is a joke, it’s all one big performance for the person they’re trauma dumping on, you the audience. I don’t rlly feel like content warning this so I won’t go into specifics but I’ve had friends and loved ones tell me and show me fucked up shit and then play it off like they’re not hurting. I’m not saying any of this in a critical way, I do it, you do it and so did parun in all his work.
-the first creative effort my bf ever showed me was about a gay teenager and his relationship w his single dad and how bc the teenager didn’t feel at all connected or loved by his father he would do things to make his father hit him. it’s a fictional story but it was the first impression I ever had of my father in law, in the story the man was presented as cold and aloof, quiet but aggressive at a moments notice. the fictional description of this man ended up being pretty similar to the real life guy. and he’s a guy who’s been very sweet to me and who in his later life tried being closer to his family, a family which he’s readily welcomed me into when he didn’t need to, but we all end up paying for mistakes no matter how long ago we made them. him being kind of a shitty father long ago has followed him his whole life, it was the first thing I ever knew about the guy and no matter how close I am to him or how sweet he can be my mind always goes back to the story my bf showed me like six years ago.
-lots of interesting stuff here about how children grow up to be like their fathers and I think it largely rings true. think by the ending the themes of the story are just hammered in a bit too much, some stuff is a little too repetitive and unsubtle in a way that I never felt w rekinder. also I think this is like way more pessimistic and hateful in comp to rekinder, that game seemed hopeful that future generations will correct the mistakes of the past and lead better lives, it’s a very strange final game to make. in contrast this is very bleak and negative and seem to suggest future generations will actually make the exact same mistakes and go down the exact same routes. it’s two totally different explorations of the same themes. both r rlly good :-))
-gay in way that’s incredibly hard to describe?? gay in the way an image of a kid picking flowers during the baseball game is but also gay in the same way an image of like jeffrey dahmer or john wayne gacey is. idk if that makes complete sense tbh but what I’m trying to get at is how parun is often battling himself and conversing w himself here? presenting what seems like two totally different versions of who I can only assume is his self insert. how one version feeds into the other and how the other version is always present under the pretense? rlly genuinely hard to describe I’m sorry lmaoo
-think the usage of multimedia is genuinely fucking beautiful and funny and also disorienting and scary. idk any zoom in on the convenience store is kind of all of those at once. need more stuff that’s as experimental in form and medium as this is tbh so if anyone has any goods recs across all forms of media I would love to hear. have seen most of anno’s work and most of it does what I’m describing but specifically his and her circumstances and ritual, gemusetto’s first season does it. uhh twelve oz mouse too kind of
-literally was shocked at bit at the end w the spirits. rlly well done and I think what confirmed it to me as like a masterpiece.