In this game, you are a trans woman in your late 30s trying to make sense of your place in the world. To do this, you must consider everything that shaped, informed and inspired you, and apply this to what you desire for the future.
Your backstory details how you grew up with teenage chatrooms - AOL, then IRC - and grappling with all of the intense emotions that can come with it: friendship, rivalries, compliments, flame wars, love, breakups, bullying, embarrassment, hours and hours of people just rolling /dice to see who gets 100. When spending time here, you increase your wisdom, intelligence and happiness. Outside of your room is a town uninteresting to you, and whose inhabitants are uninterested in you.
The backstory also involves a growing fandom in many video games, but especially Final Fantasy. The first of the series you played - the first to actually release in your part of the world map - was a formative and awe-inspiring experience. And much, much later, you found Final Fantasy XIV, whose re-release coincides with the exact time you needed a playground for your newly found gender, not to mention a place to road test that name you've had bouncing around in your mind for the past thirteen years.
In the game, you find a text - A/S/L by Jeanne Thornton (recommended to you by a delightful trans woman just half an hour after meeting them), and become entranced by each part of the story: the vivid likening of the IRC chat of confused, power-hungry, lost, ambitious, gender-playful, gender-anxious teenagers to your own backstory. The intrigue of the characters Abraxa, Sash and Lilith as they navigate social obstacles, interpersonal predicaments, survival and the meaning of their own lives. You wonder what exactly will happen between them as their paths begin to lightly brush up against each other. The unspoken bond between dolls can be intense, and so you read on to find out: will this text lead to love, validation, catharsis, sex, companionship? Or to jealousy, hate, misunderstandings and another dissolution?
Your primary objective is to see this story through, relating it your own journey, your own thought processes, your own neuroses, and finally cry uncontrollably for a good fifteen minutes at its conclusion.
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This instantly became one of my favourite books, ever. Certainly one of the most meaningful to me personally. I saw, felt, and responded to what this book was giving at every level. Thank you.
