#ive done the Cradles Grace and Celestial Mechanics endings

[berah-ronah]

so i think i remember you talking about fate and hwbm in relation to each other at some point (idr the context) but it made me curious what the pitch on hwbm was, like whatd you like in it?

OH RIGHT, the basic pitch for Heaven Will Be Mine is that it's a visual novel about homoerotic mech duels between the pilots from three factions that formed after humanity won a space war against an Existential Threat: Cradle's Grace, a space liberationist faction pursuing independence from earth; the Memorial Foundation, an earth-based faction that urges humanity to unite back in earth's gravity well now that their enemy has been defeated; and Celestial Mechanics, a space-based organization pursuing mysterious goals of their own

the basic pitch is that you control one of three characters, and duel/make out with the other two over eight days, choosing whether to win or lose (which allows you to side with your faction or betray it to help another faction win). The themes mostly revolve around transhumanism, transgenderism, and the need for humanity to unite themselves by defining specific groups of people as a nonhuman Existential Threat; lots of stuff about how culture is like gravity, and its difficult-to-impossible to escape.

Most of what I liked was the prose and the character writing; WKTD has fantastic writing, but its scope is fairly limited by them being awkward semi-closeted teens (which 100% works for the story they're telling); HWBM has a LOT of good mech duels that vary between homoerotic to just straight up erotic, and having a supporting cast of minor characters with their own personalities and motivations and political attitudes makes it feel like a much deeper world. WKTD showed a small glimpse of a world while giving us throwaway lines that hinted at what the rest of the world might be like, while HWBM shows a fully fleshed out world with larger political and societal stakes (while still leaving some ambiguity)

ALSO it asks questions like "what if Char was a hot white-haired trans lesbian" and "what if there was a pilot whose piloting style revolved around them being a brat"