13 | LGG | DO NOT LET YOUR LEFT HAND KNOW
13 | LGG | DO NOT LET YOUR LEFT HAND KNOW
by: Naarel
Progress:
- I reached the end of the piece in about 28 minutes. (I was really absorbed in the narrative so I’m a little surprised it wasn’t a longer amount of time. Perception is weird like that!)
Engagement with Horror Genre:
- This piece is big on body horror for sure, and bodysnatching/invasion narratives. The idea of losing your body to someone else, losing time/memory, etc., is a very palpable horror theme that is on full display here. But you know what this piece really felt like? It felt like the trolley problem
You are forced to select between two very bad and ethically dubious options, and make your peace with that.
Things I Appreciated:
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Fair warning, this is going to be a weird personal tangent, but I had a distinctive/specific experience of reading this piece—especially the kind of thesis line in it, “That’s the danger - once you let your left hand know what it’s like to lead, it will never want to go back under the right hand’s rule.”—because I’m left-handed. No doubt, it’s the source of my various… sinister personality traits. But my handedness has a weird backstory. (I recognize that it’s a bit weird to even have a backstory for handedness at all.) Basically, I’m told by family members that I trust, that when I was very young, I would just write on the left side of paper with my left hand, and on the right side of paper with my right hand. My mom, who is left-handed and grew up in a cultural context where she was punished/criticized by the older generations for being left-handed, decided to make me left-handed. I don’t know exactly why, but my guess is that it was a kind of petty revenge against the social and cultural power of righthandedness that so affected her growing up. So I became left-handed and still am, though later in childhood I happened to take a grip strength test and it turned out that my right hand was actually stronger. My belief is that I probably “should have been” right-handed, but it got intercepted due to these idiosyncratic social reasons. As a result I have what I assume is a bit atypical mixed-handedness where I do precision tasks like write, draw, chop vegetables etc with my left hand but do more physical sports/tasks right-handed. Anyway, I explain this because the in-game metaphor using handedness to represent something else, is something that literally happened to me? My mom let my left hand know what it was like to lead, and I became left-handed. How weird to have a (mostly) on-topic reason to discuss this in an IF response.
Please leave your own weird handedness backstories in the comments! (/s) -
While reading the entire piece, I knew from before it started that I would pick the left hand just based on the weird personal identity I have around handedness I discussed above. But when I got there, I was legitimately torn. I’ll explain why. On the surface, the left hand felt like the obvious correct choice at the outset—Monica seems to actually yearn for life, to exist, in a way that Lisa doesn’t. Monica didn’t have the chance to start with a body, and it felt fundamentally unfair that she was cursed with the “inferior” position within the body by default. I sided with her immediately because of this. But a detail about Lisa really affected me though—the fact that she is just… allowed to be suffering in the office for days with no one bothering to check on her. Lisa has been treated as disposable by the world. In reaching the choice, I felt horrible because I was faced with deciding who deserves a chance to keep living in this body, and even though it felt like the correct choice to pick left, I was aware of the fact that I, like the people in the office, had treated Lisa as disposable and unworthy of her life. By the end, even though it is (apparently?) the case that Lisa was the actual “changeling,” or perhaps, both were changelings alternating back and forth throughout time with no true “original,” I felt a terrible sense of regret and unease about choosing to push her out and essentially declaring that her life was somehow worth less. As if I should get to decide that. It’s rough.
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So what do the “left” and “right” represent here? I mean, I think it’s an open enough idea that you could apply a lot of concepts to. But what bubbled to the top of my mind here was the idea of a “work persona” vs. a “home persona.” In my last job as a grad student/instructor I often thought of putting my work clothes on as like… doing drag, but in a bad/unfun way, and arriving back at home to immediately change into normal clothes as “de-dragging.” I felt deeply out of place and uncomfortable in my work persona, wearing clothes I hated, being assigned attention and authority that I didn’t really want. (Let me tell you, nothing made me more nostalgic for the comparatively amazing experience of taking classes than having to teach them.
Actual nightmare fuel) . So I interpreted the right hand as like, a version of yourself that is drawn out of you by capitalism (in this case, Lisa is like an office worker persona who lives for spreadsheets), and the left hand as perhaps, who you yearn to be or would be if not for that.
Miscellaneous Comments:
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I thought this was really cleanly edited overall. The main gripe I have with it is the lack of dialogue tags (or if not tags for style reasons, some kind of color or other way of differentiating it). This is a minor gripe; most of the time, I could tell through context who was speaking, but the occasional times that I got lost were pretty much the only things disrupting me out of what was otherwise an immersive and gripping narrative. I noticed toward the end that mousing over dialogue would cause it to become bold, which may have helped a bit earlier, but instead just accidentally jumpscared me later in the narrative the first time I encountered it. (I’ve gotten jumpscared by so many ridiculous things already this EctoComp and I haven’t even played Jump-scar-é Manor yet, I’m so nervous for that one
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One minor element that slightly pushed me out of the narrative was the exposition about the changeling that Vivienne gives. It’s good context to have, and I thought some effort was made to make it connect to her trans narrative so it makes sense in-universe as something for her to talk about, but I still felt like the author is taking me aside and sitting me down to tell me this background info, in a way that I never felt at any other point in the story.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
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Well it was fun to play essentially a Single Choice Jam game out of that context, because I have experience with that prompt and still cling to fond feelings about my game that seemingly almost no one played! I had a Leo-DiCaprio-pointing-in-recognition moment at realizing it was a single choice game. I really appreciated how tough the choice was here, I thought I would know what to choose but I still had a hard time picking what I thought was the less bad option. Since this is the only choice in the narrative, it needed to pack a disproportionate punch and it absolutely did.
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I really liked how the right-aligned, left-aligned, and center-aligned text worked to communicate point of view switches and dialogue vs. thoughts, I was fascinated by how the left/right alignment in the narrative was also portrayed visually.
Memorable Moment:
- For sure, it was when Lisa watched the video footage of herself being left in the office for days with no one helping her, that really affected me.