#igslh

[vidvana]

Which flavour of problematic lesbian do you prefer?

[lovingvenom]

[salyamiliker]

It gets so lonely here / mermaid / fanart

When I first found this visual novel, I immediately liked it for its atmosphere of loneliness and hopelessness. My favorite was the mermaid's route: I listened to the music from it over and over again, watched the backgrounds with the night coast, and replayed the scene where the mermaid drags us to the bottom of the sea...

I wanted to make this drawing as beautiful and creepy at the same time.

---

Когда я только нашла эту визуальную новеллу, она сразу же мне понравилась своей атмосферой одиночества и безысходности. Моим любимым стал рут русалки: я снова и снова переслушивала музыку из него, пересматривала фоны с ночным побережьем и переигрывала сцену, где русалка утаскивает нас на морское дно…

Я хотела сделать этот рисунок таким же красивым и жутким одновременно.

[infinity-squared-comics]

Spoilers for End of An Obsession

End Of An Obsession is the sequel to psychological horror yuri vn It Gets So Lonely Here. If you have not played both games, go do that, they're free, then come back to see me gush about them homosexually.

Is it weird that I ship Medea/Rosette? Like... They're witches, they hate each other, they love each other, they're soulmates, they're each other's abuser, they're so intimately connected that they can't be with anybody else.

And like, when I first read IGSLH, I didn't fully understand it, or why it was making my heart jump out of my chest, and I thought, "I wish there was a way for these characters to just be happy and love each other and not get murdered :<" But I have sense become enlightened and now understand that I am a sucker for doomed Yuri, especially when it has psychological horror elements (Psychological Yuri my beloved).

Cause they do love each other! And it's incredibly unhealthy! Rosette has killed Medea a minimum of three times, and Medea killed Rosette a minimum of six times. Rosette got betrayed by everyone she loved and now she's approximately 50% as prone to toxic yuri style murder as the woman who killed her. And Medea! I don't even know what Medea went through, but it created a very interesting lesbian. Like, she'd rather torture her lover than be broken up with, which is toxic as hell but also kinda like... not sweet, but you can see the love there? The desperation? The absolute, all-consuming NEED that colors her every action.

It's really interesting how in both games the... love interest, I guess you could call them? The insane lesbian witch torturing the protagonist, that's more accurate. But, it's interesting how they both have the goal of making their lover fully dependent on them. Medea does this through the storybook, making every other option just as bad as she is, and even more dangerous. Rosette does this by simply eliminating every other option, and keeping her there as that level of dependence becomes inevitable. And, it seems like Rosette is more successful, based on the ending of both games. But that's the thing- she isn't.

At the end of their games, it seems like Rosette escapes and Medea doesn't, but that's not true, EOAO shows that that's not true. Rosette changed her position, but she never managed to escape Medea. And honestly, that's how abuse and trauma works. I've seen how that kind of abuse from someone close to you can affect people, that place where they're stuck between hating and craving the person who hurt them. And that is portrayed so accurately in these games- Even though Rosette escapes, she comes back. She may be holding the chain now, but she is still, and always will be, chained to Medea. She can't escape, because you can't escape trauma, you can work with it and work through it, but it never goes away. And Rosette seems to have... not really worked through it. Not to victim blame, but she probably had some trouble coping considering she actively sought out her abuser and put her back into her life.

And it's not just the pain, it's the love as well, the love that, like all real and strong love, is unbreakable, the love that even after you acknowledge that that person doesn't have a place in your life, never fully goes away. And they were both so desperate to love, they couldn't let it fade to the background, they had to fan those flames until they were all consuming, because when you've spent your whole life frozen, the sting of the flame feels like paradise. But it's not. Going from one extreme to the other, even if there is that perfect point along the transfer where everything is right, it'll just keep hurting you. They don't just keep hurting each other, they keep hurting themselves by staying, but they would also hurt by leaving, cause losing love always hurts, but when that love is hurting you, it's a choice you have to make.

Oh, and the facades. The faces Medea takes in the first game. They're all so interesting. They all show what the core of Medea is- she holds on so tightly to the one she loves, that it's inevitable that it'll hurt both of them.

The gravekeeper, the mermaid, the princess, even if they have the physicality of their lover always with them, each of them sacrificed something for that, each of them lost the ability to conversate with her, to truly love.

And the exact same thing happens to Medea and Rosette. They hold on too strong until they crush each other, and now, even if they're together physically, that true, pure, healthy love is now forever unobtainable.

gods these games have permanently rewired my brain I think.

Shout out to Toxic Yuri, gotta be one of my favorite genders.