v3launchunit

i like snakes and a free palestine

aside from the aforementioned affection towards snakes, i also hold a great deal of fondness in my heart for hollow knight (i am extremely normal™ about collector), rain world (miros birds are the best creature i will not be accepting criticism on this), command and conquer red alert 2 (kirov reporting), in stars and time (one must imagine sisyphus stuck in a time loop), and about a million other things.
i played through slay the princess and spent the whole game pretty much completely ignoring her in favor of dicking around with the narrator (there is no good ending because the narrator always dies) and the voices (contrarian is the best one), which probably says a lot about me (i am aromantic asexual (this will not stop me from rebugging horny™ shit that i am tangentially interested in)).
fuck it i'm a girl now (still he/they tho)
i also like to draw and make games & shit.


my goblin.band
goblin.band/@v

alicelai
@alicelai

Trauma is a hole that can only be mapped by absence. There are so many stories I've read where the narrative paces around it, drawing an ever tightening spiral around an uncrossable boundary.

Sometimes, to name something is to make it real.

When I play In Stars And Time I think a lot about trauma and about the unsolvability of it! Spoilers for all of In Stars And Time below the read more (and also, go play it!)


There are many things I love about In Stars And Time but the forgotten country is one of my favorite. I expected (like many players) that the resolution to the plot would involve restoring the memory of the forgotten country somehow.

The hole it leaves is catastrophic. It's world-ending. There are no words to describe what the forcible erasing of an entire country does to the world, much less to the people from that country. Siblings, culture, art, books, technology, cooking, and crafts have all been ripped away and no one can remember that they're missing.

The world of In Stars And Time is broken. Siffrin is broken. The King is broken too, and has decided to break in return. I love that the game leaves this question open -- sometimes healing is not about fixing. Restoring the forgotten country is a way to fix things, but it is not the only way. It may not even be the best way. It certainly isn't something that any one person must shoulder / needs to shoulder.

In the end, Siffrin makes peace with it because they must look forward instead of back into the wound. Absence is a hole in the heart, but the heart can be so much more than the absence.

Before I end this post though, I love the way that the forgotten country is introduced -- by books that can't be read, by symbols that can't be understood. It's unsettling that something so important can just be ignored. How can you ignore that your sister is missing? You forget you ever had a sister at all.

We can chart the edges of the forgotten country by what is missing, but what if something else has vanished that can't even be mapped this way? What is something disappears so totally even the edges to mark its absence has vanished?

I can't tell if I'm reading too much into it -- but in a game that has so much symbolism around stars and the universe...

Where is the moon?


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in reply to @alicelai's post:

I've been hanging around the official In Stars and Time Discord since finishing the game, and while they're few and far in-between, it always kind of puzzles me when someone says something along the lines of "it feels wrong that we didn't get to learn more about The Country, we should have gotten the chance to remember." Because yes, it does feel wrong, and that's the point - that it feels wrong to never know, to always have that empty space inside of you as an echo of the emptiness that Siffrin has to carry around. It's a great move on the part of the writing, and remembering would have considerably taken away from the story for the reasons you've mentioned.

(That's my 2c as someone who's been severed from their culture, anyway. Not for the same reasons as Siffrin, thankfully - my parents were shitty and I had to go no contact with them, and they were my only connection to Chinese culture - but ISAT still really, really dredged up The Feelings.)

Thanks a lot for this essay!

absolutely! thank you for the kind response -- i did want to touch on the feelings re: being the child of immigrants and how Odile / Siffrin talks to the feeling of being part of / apart from a culture you feel that you owe / are owed and i think you do a great job speaking about it in your own post. it's a very good, very thoughtful game!