leaving the party

Wow! The first actual episode of the Leaving the Party podcast! What a treat. And it’s only a modest 2 hours and 40 something minutes. Surely the next episode won’t be even longer!

The blog post this week is mostly gonna be about podcast stuff, but I feel I should talk a little about the game: this month, we played Lovely Lady RPG, which has been described as a game about walking around, a game about making women smile, a game about walking in the woods, etc. It is all of those things and even more transgender! What I didn’t expect was that it would use the structure of a lesbian furry visual novel to explore the effects of the first world war on its survivors, 20th century global politics, and what it means to find a path through your own mundane transgender life in the midst of all of this. I was very pleasantly surprised by this game, and I remember being so taken aback by the first conversation with The Weapon that I had to pause and tell my girlfriend about it. The Weapon tells you all about the world teetering on the edge of nuclear fire and I was like: look, baby, there’s world building in this one!

And boy is there. The world building is the part of this game that, honestly, I feel most complicated about by the end of it: what we call the Lovely Ladyverse is basically teeming with lore and a sort of gestural world history that exists way outside of the scope of its characters. At the center of the dead zone in the center of the Soviet Republic, a volcano clouds the sky with black smoke. In Pawris, they’ve built a Midgar-esque table that elevates all the beautiful bourgeois neighborhoods into the sky and above the filth of the proletarian streets, blotting out the sun and dropping debris on the city below. And everything, everything that exists and has ever existed, hangs at the edge of nuclear death as nations the world over hover their furry little paws over the levers of a power that could destroy us all, but never pull them. I have no doubt that the world building document out there in DAS POPPY UND MIA KUNSTKOLLEKTIV HQ is huge and complex and detailed and organized. And I like it! It’s big and strange and I like to rotate it all in my brain. But I do feel that for a game so interested in history, its world is sometimes lacking in a certain material sense of reality.

It’s hard to even articulate what I mean by this, but what I think I’m saying (and what I begin to fumble through saying on the podcast) is that I feel the world as presented in Lovely Lady RPG is missing texture and material. Historical events happened, are referenced, but are not necessarily explored in any great depth or detail. Pawris Table is built, but we don’t know by whom, or why beyond the narrative function of completing the metaphor for The Pulp Writer’s book. Expeditions are launched into the volcano, but we don’t know how or by whom except to illustrate The Weapon’s skepticism. History is littered with intriguing stories of bad, weird people and their personal follies. It’s asking too much from this game to expect to hear about everything, but details matter and it makes a world matter. The example I mention in the show is like: what is communism? Some of us have preconceptions about what communism means in the real world, so we can infer what it means in the Lovely Ladyverse, but we have to do that translation work ourselves.

I like to do a little heavy lifting, and that’s okay with me, but I do feel as though I’m missing something about the world. The Pulp Writer is a communist. Ghost, in most dialogue options available to her here, is a communist. But me, the biggest communism builder of them all, I don’t actually know for sure what they mean when they say that. Where does communism come from? In what conditions does it arise, how and why? Does it come from volcanoes? Chloe is a social democrat, the traitorous bitch she is, but I don’t actually have a good idea why Chloe is so traitorous except by extrapolating my understanding of real history onto the game. I am certain it maps! But because Ghost doesn’t know these things and isn’t very curious about it, we don’t get to either. This causes me to go kind of insane in the episode and talk about the German Revolution for an extended clip. I think that’s fine, but I also think it’s indicative of a disinterest in exploring the world as a historical place and time, emphasized by the anachronistic writing style. it’s like, super online. The characters in this world sometimes talk like they’ve been ripped whole cloth out of our internet culture and into the world as it might have been about one century ago. The result I feel is an absence of a material history, and the setting loses some of the narrative weight I think I would’ve liked from it. I hope it’s clear this comes from a place of great appreciation for the game though: there’s obviously a lot of intricate world building going into this, I just really want to see that part of this game work for me.

So Lovely Lady RPG isn’t always interested in the material workings of the world in this particular way. I think that’s fine though. Ultimately, what this game appears to be most interested in is portraying something more relatable to a certain 21st century transgender experience. On the show, Tess pointed out a comment from Poppy and Mia on the itch.io page that says: “sorry to be the bearer of bad news but while the game is set in the past its about the present.” What defines this game and connects me to it most is how relatable and true the characters feel to 21st century lil ole me. Lovely Lady RPG loves transgender people. Everybody important to Ghost is transgender or gender non-conforming in one way or another. It’s not any one specific thing, but the way everyone talks and relates to one another, thinks about each other and themselves and the world, feels like a reflection of so many communities that I’ve been a part of in my life. The Pulp Writer, The Sinner, and Ghost are all girls containing (and almost entirely constructed of) parts of myself and parts of people I love. Ghost is always doing gay little waves and whimpers, she’s the perfect image of limp-wristed. Everybody talks like they’re posting. They’re funny in the way my friends are! And all of them still, as Tess points out, are trying to escape to somewhere else, and from this life they’re living. The Weapon obsesses over the nuclear destruction of everything in order to imagine a scenario where they can hide from the world in their bunkers. The Sinner imagines an escape into a cave, into the magenta, from this life and into the next, driven by a delusional sort of death drive. The Pulp Writer plots to move to Iberia, to live at the foundation of modern communism, between puffs of Oestradiol and a progressively rougher cough. These are all the imagined futures of transgender people who want to escape. None of them think they have a future in the world they live in now. I don’t blame them; it can be hard to imagine one.

By the end of Lovely Lady RPG, though, depending on how you played, they have you and they have each other and you’re all going to keep trying to live tomorrow. It is this that matters most. You all continue to have people in your lives who you can walk in the woods with. That’s enough to keep going, at least. So I really liked it. I probably am not selling enough that I think Lovely Lady RPG is awesome and it’s wonderful that it exists. I think it’s a beautiful thing when women make good video games together.

Okay so I guess most of this blog post is not going to be about podcast stuff. But still. This was my first time editing and producing and even really appearing on a podcast. It has been a learning experience. I think the audio quality and my own performance here isn’t exactly where I’d like it to be, but I’m not gonna beat myself up about it. It’s fine and totally functional. It’s everybody’s first time making a website podcast blog. I think it’s enjoyable and fun at the very least. I probably say some stupid stuff but that’s life. And I think it’ll just get better going forward as we continue doing the pod! Despite my weird fear that I will be put under intense scrutiny for this show and everything I make, I still hope you listen to and enjoy it. I edited the podcast in full probably three different times because I wanted to make it as good as it could be, and in the process of preparing, recording and editing this episode I do think we learned a lot. This whole operation is powered by two girls with Audacity and a dream. Think of this as a rags to riches story where you’re only seeing the rags part so far. I’m certain that we will get very many riches off of this “business venture”…..

Either way, we left excited to do another episode, which is exactly what we’re doing. The episode next month is gonna be about Felvidek, an RPG maker game about a drunken knight in 15th century Slovakia. It’ll be a fun one! We like to have fun here. We like to play and laugh. okay bye i love you

PS: we didn’t mean to misgender the weapon. i’m sorry the weapon. i tried to course correct shortly after tho for whatever that’s worth. i just googled “suitable punishment for accidentally misgendering fictional character” and it does say i have to die so consider me on the run