#are necessary or that you're equipped to speak on it 💖

[eyeofthemoongame]

Hello! This isn't really an ask, but I just want to say how much I appreciate this story and maybe also provide words of encouragement. Oh, and sorry if im coming off as formal, too much academic writing melts any other kind of writing style haha. That and maybe this myt get super long, i have a lot to say and im new to this hehe

Im super young, still in my twenties, but life in my province back in Visayas, (especially as a child) was characterized by green rice fields, roiling seas, fresh fruit and carabao filled rivers. Sure, there was danger and fear even then. But those days were also warm and filled with love. Now there are malls, fast wifi, and the rivers have cement walls. In addition to that, the shores that I played in during my childhood have changed as well, growing higher and higher, even during low tide, and its medyo frightening to watch as my home seems to change before my very eyes. Sure, if you go to the more rural areas, you can still see green, but the mountains have changed their shape, and every time I go back to those same areas it gets a bit more jarring every time. But your descriptive setting made me remember the earlier days. Suddenly, it felt like I could see how the mountains looked like again, how clear and untouched the rivers were and maybe even picture the seas I grew up with and played in. You gave me that warmth again.

I also super enjoyed how you wrote the relationship between our MC and the parents, the way you described how they deboned the fish and gave the meat to the mc and how you described how the food was served and even cooked, it was fucking amazing! Food is ingrained in our culture, so many polite practices surround it and i feel like you've captured an unspoken, caring kind of thing that we do for people that we love. Hell my amah ( lola in fil-chi culture) served us our own fish and mango the same way you described! I also love how you wrote the parents relationship. Back then sa pre-colonial times we still had gender roles, but they were so different! Gimme some time, and maybe if i work up the courage again, maybe I’d go on a rant on how the Spanish set back the Philippines on gender shit and progressive ideals—I digress. It’s refreshing to read and so soft, i can’t even explain how soft it made me feel.

I absolutely love this game. I dont know how to explain it without devolving into incoherent gushing, but I do. From the first page palang, I can feel the love and care that has gone into the writing and characterization. How you wrote our culture, and how you reply to pa sa mga asks, mehn I cannot begin to describe how inspiring this entire IF is. With this though, I’d like to finally segue into my words of encouragement (which you can take with a pinch of salt).

When this get bigger (and it will im sure! im such a huge fan man) you'll get pinoys and peeps who will dive in and say na you are doing our culture a disservice or some shit, na you are taking the stuff you want lang and making it palatable/sanitized for people who is outside of our culture. Pinoys can be toxic, ive mostly avoided it, but the freaking hypocrisy when it comes to #PNOYPRIDE is hella blegh. But I digress- when this happens and it gets too much, remember na these peeps should just go kick rocks kay they are barking up the wrong tree. I’m not an expert, I’m not a history major who specializes in pre-colonial Philippine history, but I can say as a person who grew up surrounded by folklore, traditional dances, and songs; that our stories? They are as fallible and as fickle as human nature itself.

These stories weren't written down, we didn't have Pilandok and Biag ni Lamang because a bunch of peeps sat down and wrote these stories. And even if they did have written it down, those written copies are gone, burnt away by white men who thought their God demanded it. No, these stories were passed down by oral tradition. And with each retelling, stuff gets muddled, details changed, morals updated to suit the times, and translations get fucked. But it’s still the same stories. Our dances and songs are treated the same way. Dances are shortened, songs are interpreted and sung differently, does it mean that this takes away their value from them?

This whole blog an amazing, wonderful thing. So much of our culture has been locked away behind foreign academic libraries. And what you are doing is taking these tattered fragments and piecing them together in such a way that a new legend has come from it. So few of these stories remain, I want to read more stories set in our mythology. One can argue that our past is way too bloody to be worth writing about. And its true, our Pre-colonial history is bloody and fucked up, but aren't all cultures? I don't think that we were given the opportunity to love it or to hate it, to cultivate the pride for it and learn from it. And the only records of a solid understanding of the various pre-colonial way of life is written by white men who called it dirty, backward and dehumanizing, thus setting the tone of how its told for centuries.

I want to encourage you, and i dearly hope that this message did this job, because I love my roots and I want to be proud of it, to accept it the way other cultures have accepted theirs. What you are doing is amazing. You're amazing! The love and care that you put into it, the new story and legend that you are providing us— I cannot begin to say how much I needed this. Tbh I almost cried, first chapter plang, because of how much care went into this. And I want to thank you for that. Thank you for making something so precious and loved. Thankyou for allowing us to read something so close to you, its made me so happy talaga. It's humbling, and very much so in a good way.

Ill end it here, kay this has become a 1k essay. But I just had to say it. Its like 3 am here and i have so many (academic) papers to do. But I just had to you how much I love and appreciate this. Congrats on your demo! And thankyou so much for giving me ( and the rest of the IF community ) the opportunity to read this.

Ingat ate maarte! And may you be blessed po!

anon eye—WOW THANK YOU SO MUCH this is one of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me and i'm a little overwhelmed at how thoughtful and kind and genuine this message is!! 🥺😭

this sort of connection between me and you and our other kababayan is TRULY what motivates me to write and i'm honestly so touched. thank you so much for writing this out and sharing this with me 💗and don't worry about being too formal at all!

putting the rest under a cut to be kind on the dashboard bc my response kinda turned into an artist talk haha

showing our people's respect for the land was a priority for me in this story. pre colonial filipinos (like many indigenous groups) had such a deep relationship with nature and understood how to care for the land like it takes care of us. this is what inspired the themes of balance in eotm; there's a constant give and take between mortals and deities and taking advantage of the other or taking the other for granted leads to decay.

the family interactions were really important to me too! i was writing eotm over the summer, when i finally got to see my extended family after over a year of pandemic to celebrate my lolo's birthday. it was a really joyful experience and after everything that's been happening i was just really struck with a profound sense of gratitude that we were able to all see each other again because i knew that a lot of people weren't able to say that. and so i wanted to convey that very deep sense of familial love in this story; of understanding people well enough to perceive how they give and receive love; of reconnecting with people that will always love you no matter how long you've been apart. god i'm tearing up again now 😭

and yes there were "gender roles" back then but not necessarily in the same hierarchical framework as the western context. my understanding is that men and women played different roles in society but there wasn't a reinforcement of patriarchy or cisheteronormativity like there is now after the spanish poisoned our culture and forced their religion onto us. and so the way i have translated that into eotm is to subvert the roles between lakapati and mapulon. lakapati is the one that mostly tends to the fields and works while mapulon tends to the house and cooks and handles their social calls. lakapati is even taller than mapulon. and i intentionally don't really bring attention to this subversion within the text. it simply just is.

i really appreciate your words of encouragement re: #pinoypride bc honestly, that had been one of my biggest worries. i was born in the philippines but moved to the states when i was a kid. i've been on the internet long enough to witness the diaspora wars lmao. there will inevitably be people who receive eotm in the way you described, and before i ever even published this game i accepted that. creators of color, especially those who are women and also queer, are put under a severe magnifying glass. there's always going to be someone whose standards of purity i will not meet.

i understand that narrative scarcity makes all of us very protective of how our stories are told and so flaws within the work are exaggerated. there's such a lack of stories like this and so every scrap of representation matters. but i've never hidden the fact that this is a work of FICTION and that i'm taking a good bit of my own creative liberties in order to make the story work the way i want it to work. like yes this story is representative of filipino culture and history, but also i want to make my hot OCs kiss you feel me? 😂

also i'm clearly not entertaining these white folk at ALL lmao so i just hope those people save us both the trouble and block me from the get go 🤷🏽‍♀️

really appreciate everything you said—nothing but the truth! 😤 thanks again for being on this ride with me 💗