Episode 8 | Beta Build 8.2
Added 2024-02-02 06:12:14 +0000 UTCOur beta build for Episode 8 has been updated!
We're delving deeper into Ryona's arc, and hoping our girl can finally find some peace after the trauma of her past.
Comments
As a gay/bi Korean who's had to learn how to forgive, accept, love, celebrate, and return to my very proud, wildly stubborn, conservative Asian family... discovering that despite running away from them in my youth we still care about each other... was a canon event for me. For us here, in Korea, in our truths, shame is the erasure of a community. I still remember how my mother cried when she told me she had searched for me every day when I had my 가출, when I disappeared without saying goodbye at such a young age. In my youth, I thought running away from Korea, away from Asia, would be like travelling through a magic portal, into a new and beautiful world where I could begin anew and find love. Instead what I discovered is that I'm not quite the victim I wanted to be. The more I tried to create villains from my past, the more I tried to hate and make monsters out of my family, the more I started to understand their pain. Two generations ago my country lost everything. We lost who we were to invasion. My parents grew up in the aftermath of that terrible war as children growing up in the ruins of dead country. Korea is not a culture accustomed to getting what we want through war. When we almost lost, again, many people started to panic. My mother and my father grew up in that other-world where their playmates were famine, orphanage, poverty. I grew up with all the song and privilege of an affluent, transformed, vain, educated, peace-time Korea. I didn't realize that identity was such a powerful prayer for us, in face of extinction. So when I came out to my parents, at 19, and told them that I gaze at Korea, Koreans, and Korean culture— at who we are— as absurd, comical, pathetic, and repugnant, they were hurt. As children they held on to the impossible hope that someday we could be a country free from war, that someday there would be food, and friends to protect us, and suddenly they found themselves living in a new world with new rules they couldn't understand. They felt left behind and disoriented after enduring pain and despair for so long. What I love about the Tilaarin story-arc is that, it feels like this is the first time Asian/Asiatic cultures are represented in the game. I realize it's selfish of me to want to see people like me, our lived experiences, our pain, our urgency, and our questions represented in someone else's narrative, but I console myself with the reminder that human connections were, perhaps, what were missing in that other-world filled with famine, and abandonment, and war, where my parents grew up. Perhaps if we understand each other, things can change. It's taking an enormous amount of self-control not to play this episode before its full chapter release. I'm really looking forward to the experience. Thank you for making this game, this story. Cheering you on, or as we tend to say— 파이팅! Korean fighting spirit! From Korea, -Daniel.
Daniel Goh
2024-03-16 05:30:46 +0000 UTCSounds like such a guilt-tripping way to phrase that, Edrid.
Jack Newbill
2024-02-02 17:29:00 +0000 UTC
