Reviews by manonamora

You are a doll, held by strings, forced to dance, even if it break you apart. Let your strings take you and the dance will start again. Resits and… I liked the creepy setting, and the writing around the doll’s yearning for freedom and control over its body.

A very personal piece about finding comfort in the idea of celestial bodies when life is cruel, and when refusing to comply or escaping seems impossible. Still, like the stars, the piece provides a hopeful future, describing a better path shining ahead.

Baron, a half-tiger half-dinosaur who struggles with his identity and not being able to fit in either groups, decides to find his father for some answers. Even with an intriguing setting and clear themes, this piece felt either like a rushed story or a prologue where all these themes would be explored… Some passages were a tad confusing on where they were going.

Childbirth can be both a wonderful and traumatic experience, and the following period is no better. Nell gives a very personal and raw account of the anxiety, worries, feelings of not being enough, not having done enough, and struggles with one’s body not responding the way you wish it to. The use of the textboxes added onto the layers of those feelings, as they pile up on top of one another without a way to process them fully.
It is also a wonderful love letter to her newborn, a love pouring through those words, unending and unwavering through it all. It takes a lot of courage to be this vulnerable.

LttPR is a half-sequel to Litteraly Watch the Paint Dry (a meta Idle Clicker), during which you are looking forward to the weekend and hanging out with a friend. Through the limited options, neither answering the phone at first, you find out whether your friends are still truly your friends…* This short slice-of-life felt a bit too tell-instead-of-show for my taste… But I found the topic of friendship while being true to yourself had an interesting start.

*both friend appear in LWPD though they weren’t named at that point.

Trapped outside, a vampire is unable to find shelter moments before the sunrise. At the brink of perishing, they reminisce on their past, envy the birds able to fly away from this situation, and ultimately choose to resign themselves (or not) to their death. The writing paints a colourful tableau between the pain of the injured character unable to save themselves, and the beauty of a simple sunrise, welcomed by the songs of birds. The writing was also quite dynamic and fun, considering the situation.

On the surface, SOL is a prose poem of a benign conversation between friends about the sun, as they partake in sharing a joint on a summer evening, with the writing moving from concrete description to what could be interpreted as hallucinations. But, below, hiding under a mouseover macro, is hidden a secret message, unsaid words, repressed feelings. The descriptions of movements and bodies balance between a loving gaze to an almost obsessive and carnal survey through the narrator’s eyes. The writing is intoxicating…

the ride home does a great job at encapsulating the anxiety of a first time driver, realising how cars are essentially killing machines and bodies are just squishy flesh. This is enhanced by the author’s use of animated and timed text and through the formatting (moving from white to red was a good choice).

This piece has an intriguing premise, wherein a child sees (hallucinate?) their (dead? never existed?) brother when the latter cannot be perceived by anyone else. Feelings, sounds, and touches are only experienced by this child, creating an eerie dissonance that sends chills up a spine. The more I read this the less I was sure whether it was about grief or a hallucination through a horror lens… Either way, it works!

Moving on is hard, and harder still when you cannot forget their touch, when you keep remembering their voice, when you keep dreaming about being with them, when they keep coming back to your door… This piece portrays the ache the heart feels about break ups, the guilt of letting yourself down when you succumb to your desires, or the agony when you try doing the right thing, pretty well.

I liked the formatting of the text, with the fading-in giving some dream-like experience or the shaking of the word when your hands tremble. The choice to colour the words spoken was also a nice touch. Having to click after almost ever sentence to reveal another added to the excruciating experience shown in the words.