62 | REDJACKETS
62 | REDJACKETS
by: Anna C. Webster
Progress:
- I played through Fiia’s path, which took roughly 40 minutes to complete. Ordinarily, I would’ve tried the other paths, but as you’ll see if you read the rest of this response, I was derailed by a weird emotional incident I had at the end of this game. I’m still curious to know if it’s possible to get a good ending rather than the ending that I chose, but I don’t think it would be wise for me to play again without… I don’t know, a lot of reassurance?
Things I Appreciated:
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I love the worldbuilding and portrayal of vampires in general. Playing as Fiia, I like that there was an empathy for her but also a recognition of the grisly details of what that entails (details like: her stomach decaying and crumbling). It does not overly romanticize the implications of being a vampire, but also doesn’t treat being a vampire as some morality-ending state that Fiia needs to be smited for.
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I enjoyed the prospect of the multi-POV format. I love multi-POV writing, and seeing how the narrative intertwines is fascinating. I liked that I had the option of picking from perspectives (vampire hunter, experienced vampire, new vampire) that would be noticeably distinct from each other.
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There’s a lot of good writing here—I liked the introduction to Fiia’s incoherent hunger thoughts as the start of her perspective, which then develops into a much more coherent and worldly perspective of someone who’s been through some shit and has a lot of ideas of how to get revenge. Her characterization built well over the course of the piece.
Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:
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This response turned into a hot mess (see below, I guess
), so I think I need to just describe how this playthrough went to explain why it went this way for me. Starting with the front matter, this game immediately piqued my interest. One of my strongest narrative biases (that I’ve discussed a bit throughout these responses) that I have is in favor stories where “villainous”/“monster”/“demon” archetypes are treated empathetically rather than as flatly evil. If I see a character like that in the text, my natural inclination is to identify with them, even if they’ve been set up as the antagonist. Given the front matter, I was excited going into this game. It isn’t a straightforwardly, humans=good, vampires=evil world, and the characters normally want to use nonviolent and diplomatic approaches to solve problems. But, oddly, while that is the normal methods used by these characters, this story claims to be an exception: “Only one thing is certain: Rosco Jeppson has to die.” That really got my gears turning. I felt certain that there was something interesting thematically afoot here: it would be subverted in some way, and the diplomatic approach would somehow win out at the end. -
During character selection, I gravitated immediately to picking Fiia. I ruled out Declan because, since I already am predisposed to empathize with a vampire character, playing as a vampire hunter would not be a good fit for me if I was fighting against that predisposition. I then ruled out Lynette, with the logic that since I am a new player to this game world, it might be a difficult to roleplay as an experienced vampire. So, Fiia was the perfect choice: a newly turned vampire.
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In the game state I had set up, Fiia, who was acting as the tertiary accomplice—because I didn’t really want to kill Rosco, so I took the cowardly approach of making the other characters do it for me—had to trick Rosco into being alone so the rest of the team could kill him. I saw what the options were, and of course, I knew that (as Fiia) using Vincent as a key piece, essentially preying upon Rosco’s semi-closeted queerness and love for Vincent, would cause the plan to kill him to succeed. And once I clicked that, I felt like I set in motion a chain of events that I couldn’t recover from. Because of the role I had selected, I became a passenger witnessing a scene where Rosco desperately tries to save himself and his boyfriend from getting murdered by Lynette and Declan, and I was hoping for him to somehow survive this while my point of view character is thinking the exact opposite. I had fully been ejected from Fiia’s point of view and wanted nothing more than the antagonists not to die, but of course, Fiia’s plan worked brilliantly, just as I predicted it would. And worse? I feel guilty about feeling this way. (1) The narrative does a lot of work justifying why Fiia wants him dead, and I can’t morally fault her that much for her revenge power fantasy. (2) The power was in my hands. I chose this option, because I privileged the strategic thought of winning the game and getting Fiia’s goals accomplished over any real consideration to how I, an apparently more sensitive than I realized gay guy, would feel about watching it play out; and (3) maybe worst of all, I have had the realization that if Rosco had been written as a straight guy, I probably wouldn’t have felt anything nearly as intense as what I felt. What does it say about me, the limits of my empathy, that merely having one innate characteristic (queerness) in common with this character overrode everything else I had been told about him and caused me to identify more with him and Vincent than anyone else? I feel miserable and pathetic for feeling this much in such an unproductive way. So, okay, now I need say this: this isn’t really even criticism of the game? I had kind of an extraordinary volatile negative emotional response to the end of the game, and while it was wild to go through, I am in a weird way still glad to have felt something so powerful while playing? I really don’t want the fact that me, essentially a random person on the internet playing this game, had a kind of “4 standard deviations away from normal” emotional response to be discouraging to the author. This game has so many great things, it’s bold and interesting and I don’t want that to get lost in this. It’s not their fault that “taking advantage of a gay vampire’s love for his boyfriend to orchestrate his murder” turned out to be the perfectly-shaped key to unlock all my emotional barriers at once and cause me to psychologically crumble while playing their game. That’s just like… incredibly bad luck. As an author, how could you even guess that that exact situation would happen when you’re just trying to write an awesome thriller.
I want to balance being honest about what playing this was like for me while not giving the impression that I think the author was in some way wrong for writing the story this way. Hopefully I found that balance enough here. -
Now here is the section of criticism that is thankfully, unrelated to the above. My major writing concern I have with this piece is the point-of-view slippage between Fiia and Lynette. Multi-POV writing is already challenging, because in order for it to work, you need to edit each character’s narrative with the mindset of what only that specific character would know, think, be able to see, etc. That seems even more important in second-person multi-POV, because the text is being addressed to “you.” There were several times during Fiia’s narrative where I became conscious that she was thinking something that only Lynette would be thinking. Here’s an example of a chunk of narrative in Fiia’s point of view. “‘I was wondering why a vampire was working as a hunter,’ she says, somewhat sheepishly. The arrangement, especially to younger vampires, was indeed odd at first glance. But it wasn’t some newfangled feeble attempt at campfire-singalong altruism. It had a history all its own. And damn it: it got results.” This is Lynette speaking. That part is fine: Fiia can hear what Lynette says and make physical observations about Lynette standing there. The second part, though, is Lynette’s perspective. It would only occur to Lynette that this method “had a history all its own. And damn it: it got results,” because that’s Lynette’s experience and familiarity with her methods. Why would Fiia, who is just now learning about all this, think in this way? For Fiia’s POV to feel immersive, she needs to not have access to this detailed internal information about what Lynette feels about the world. So my specific writing advice is: go through Fiia’s narrative with the revision mindset of, “is this something that newly turned vampire Fiia would think, or be able to access in a conversation with Lynette?” I think more details will pop out when you read through this lens. There were moments that felt like I was reading text that was originally written in Lynette’s POV with the pronouns shifted to match the correct character without a deeper revision for inhabiting that new character’s perspective. This could be wildly inaccurate, but that’s how I felt when the boundaries between POVs started blurring. Each character voice needs to be sharp, distinctive, and accurate to the information and perspective they inhabit.
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A minor technical issue that I encountered was that, in the conversation with Lynette, the game required me to select the dialogue option “about you and Declan” two times before I was allowed to advance, causing that scene to repeat. That is hopefully
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
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This game has a really compelling approach with the multi-POV, but it alerts me to the dangers of writing especially second-person POV and how disorienting that can get. I have to applaud the many authors in games that I’ve played for choosing to write in 2nd person and the unique challenge that creates. You have to be even more crisp and accurate with voice to make this work, where I feel like 3rd-person-limited POV allows a little more flexibility.
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I really liked the recurring symbol of the red jacket and how that played out. I like in stories when there are certain objects that gain more and more importance over the course of a narrative—Fiia starts with an ill-fitting new jacket that represents her initiation, and then finally, receives the gift of the perfectly tailored jacket that represents how Lynette has accepted and welcomed her at a deeper level.
Quote:
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“But what if we just killed a guy and traumatized his boyfriend for nothing?”
Lasting Memorable Moment:
- It’s subtle, but I think if you read the response carefully you might be able to guess which part had a lasting emotional impact on me