High On Grief
Norbez Jones
Hmm.
It’s weird being asked (in a sense) to comment on a highly personal piece like this (I assume?), especially when my own highly personal experience is just different enough to be… well.
So: the premise is that you are Yancy, an agender child of a terrible woman who just died. The mother in question is given exactly two characteristics: a) abuser and b) Christian. The two kind of blend together for Yancy, especially given that the mother’s reason to reject their agender status was their Christianity.
You go to the mom’s funeral at the mom’s church, where you are further berated for being agender, and when it’s your turn to stand up in front of everyone and say something, if you say your mom was abusive, you then run outside, upset, you are then confronted by the pastor, who seems more concerned about the fact that you made a scene than he is about the fact that you just accused your mom of abuse.
And, like, OK? I don’t want to dump on anyone’s lived experience, but these are cartoon villains. And they may well be cartoon villains because they are based on people who act like cartoon villains in real life. I certainly have heard enough stories that I’d believe there are actual people who act that way. But the game presents itself as a meditation on being sad that someone who was terrible to you has died, and the complicated feelings this engenders. But the solution seems to be to assure themselves that, yes, their mother was indeed a cartoon villain. Assuming this game is some form of therapy, is that… actually helpful? That’s a genuine question. Does it actually help to reduce the memory of someone to merely the (true!) terrible role they filled in your life? The mom is said to be a wonderful person by everyone else in her church, but all Yancy sees this as, is as a facade: a fake face worn to fool people. Is that likely? What if it wasn’t true? What if she genuinely cared about people, as long as they weren’t her own child? That kind of makes her an even more terrible person (which the game kind of hinted at for a second, but never really embraced), but at least she’d have a bit of nuance. Again, I don’t know who these people are based on. Maybe they were just ‘simple evil’. But maybe there was some complication, and maybe (only maybe! I’m not an actual therapist!) acknowledging that complication could help Yancy work through the equally real abuse they suffered? But in the end, my sense was that Yancy still has a lot of work in front of them with respect to their relationship with their mom. This is probably fine; there’s no need to tackle everything all at once. But I could sense the unresolved threads, and it left me a bit unsettled.
I feel like I can say this only because it’s presented as a work of fiction, but I’m trying to tread lightly in case there are more autobiographical aspects to this piece. (And, like, how could there not be?)
The only other thing I want to say here is that while I’ve certainly seen this brand of Christianity in fiction and in news reports, it doesn’t track with the Christianity I’ve seen nor try to exemplify in my own life. I worry that, just like Yancy’s mom was reduced to cartoon villainy, Christianity itself was also reduced to cartoon villainy. Again, maybe that’s the only thing the author has seen! Christianity as an institution is certainly large enough to contain this sort of anti-Christian nonsense, and at pretty large scales, to boot. But this particular brand of nonsense seems to be the only version you ever see in art and media. Probably because it’s the only version that some people see in their lives. So, I dunno. It’s sad, is all. It’s sad all around.
Did the author have anything to say? Yup! It was an interesting and important snapshot into a kid dealing with unexpected grief.
Did I have anything to do? I could choose whether the protagonist stands up for themselves or not, and then semi-randomly choose which friend to talk to afterwards. It was kind of limited, but reasonable.