Read This When You Turn 15

Played: 7/22/24
Playtime: 5min

You guys are really throwing down the gauntlet here, aren’t you? Ever shorter lengths, ever tighter conceits, its almost like you’re daring me to spoil! A dual Jam entry this, it is structured as a letter from sibling to sibling. The interactivity is of the page-turning variety, adding more text to a long letter in small chunks until it is done.

The letter itself is just sad, full of regret for a lifetime of (Spoiler - click to show)neglect and emotional isolation of its addressee. There are depressing details, nicely observed, that sell the specificity of its setting. There are equally depressing omissions on the author’s part that paint a pretty complete picture. A sad, complete picture. I found it effective in its brevity, if a bit of a downer. Which, I expect, is the whole point of it. I mean, writing is exercise in empathy, no? Trying to evoke emotions in others (horror, swooning, catharsis, tragedy, horniness, laughter, whatever) is one of the written word’s most common uses. Until advent of motion pictures, it was the main mass market vehicle for it (not to sell stage productions short). RTWYT15 ably steps into that legacy with its brief, cold shot of empathy. Really nice last line too.

Yah, this is shorter than most of my stuff, but it is scaled to the work, I promise!

I have now played a number of Neo-Twiny Jam entries (yes, saying “a number” rather than going back to check is lazy, but look, I’ve capped out on my sponsorships and you get what you pay for) and I feel like I’m starting to get a sense for how you can make a memorable game under brutal space constraints. Minimizing branching is definitely a key strategy to wring the most out of the word-budget, as is focusing on dialogue, or at least prose with a voice, so that fewer words can have more impact. Managing the scope of the story also makes a lot of sense (though now I’m curious whether you can stitch together one or two word mini-phrases, Collision style, to weave together an epic). But less obviously, I wonder whether a respectful relationship with storytelling archetypes – okay, we can just call them tropes – should also be on the list. Not to say that there’s no place for surprises, but being able to sketch a narrative in just a few lines, and then devote the rest to the ways this story is different or unique, probably puts an author in a better position than having to burn most of their fuel just getting the reader to understand what’s going on.

So yeah, given that intro, despite some arresting themes and well-turned phrases, Read This When You Turn 15 didn’t fully work for me because I think its narrative ambitions outstrip the space it’s been allotted. Pitched as a letter written from a brother to his adopted sister, for her to open when she’s old enough to understand it, its 500 words of dynamic fiction paint a picture of an abusive family so idiosyncratically awful I was too busy asking questions to feel very much.

As I understand it, the core trauma here is that the sibling’s mother adopted the sister to be a remote-viewing fashion plate: while galivanting around the world on trips to fashion capital after fashion capital, she has various nannies and caregivers dress up the infant in precious baby-outfits and parade her in front of the webcam (the brother might be complicit in this). But then she apparently tires of this amusement by the time the kid’s Pre-K aged and abandons her to neglect, perhaps assuaging the occasional tiny shred of guilt by sending some of the largesse from her latest shopping trips home. Speaking of guilt, the brother has a lot of his own since the occasion for him to write the letter is his departure to America to get a remunerative job; he took care of her when she was little, but knows he won’t be there during the very hard years to come:

"You are going to be a stranger to me by the time you read this. The isolation and traumas you’ll face, I cannot imagine. I can only hope that this letter is not the way you found out you were adopted."

(Jesus Christ, buddy, if you write a sentence like that maybe take a step back and ask yourself “wait, how would I write this letter differently if it was going to be the way she found out she was adopted?")

On the bright side, the brother’s goal in writing the letter isn’t to try to wring possibly-unearned forgiveness from his sister; less cheerily, that’s because he’s monotonously focused on making sure his sister blames their mother for her misdeeds:

"But your mother, she’ll say she loves you and remind you that she put money into your education.

"I have only one request: please have the courage to hate her."

It’s searing stuff, and I have no doubt that there are abusive families where this particular configuration of pathologies and hatreds could play out. But it’s not a familiar configuration, to me at least – I wanted to know more about what precisely the mom was thinking (adoption is not a quick or easy process in most countries, so it’s a hell of a lot to commit to for some photo ops, especially if you already have a kid), what the brother’s relationship with her was like (was he treated the same, or different?), whether there was another parent in the picture and what they thought of all this, whether the brother was specifically focused on money (he name-checks “getting a job in Silicon Valley”) or just looking for the easiest possible escape….

In a longer work, there’d be room to modulate tones, contrast the Grand Guignol awfulness of the world’s worst mother with a grounded, psychologically-driven portrait of what could have motivated her, and what the consequences could be for her kids, and give a sense of the personalities behind the abuse. And what’s here is a good teaser for that longer piece – it’s shocking, well-written, and again, I want to know more. But I felt like it was trying to do too much in its limited space; to work at 500 words, it might have been wise to make at least some aspect of the family’s unhappiness more familiar, to take some pressure off the player’s imagination and enable the truly aberrant pieces to stand out.

Read This When You Turn 15 is a kinetic epistolary entry made in Ink, from the perspective of a sibling who cannot take care of his baby adopted sister. It is an emotional 499-word piece, that shook me to the core. It is a thing with Kastel’s pieces that touches on very specific things that will resonate with people, often because they themselves have experienced it (fully or close enough to it).

I am still unsure how to read the piece, whether we are the big brother penning an apology letter, or the little sister finding it on her birthday (or early). It might not matter much, but depending on the POV, the reading will take a different tone. I think my personal experiences made me orbit more towards the writing of the letter. The revealing truth bombs*, necessary to understand how they came to that point, the sorrows and the guilt for doing it in such a way and for leaving, and still throughout it all, the love for their sibling, no matter what, unconditional and unwavering, even if not wanted.
*the webcam one really broke me.

The cadence of each paragraph, through repeated reminders of love (from the brother) and of hate (towards the failing mother*), drives the same message again and again: not enough had been done for you, it is not your fault, you can and should be angry about it. There are reminders of love given, never enough, never the right kind, never from the right person, and of fears, of never being enough or not being able to do enough (because you are not what they need). A childhood marked by actions out of her control, and out of his.
*interesting thing: only the mother is mentioned in the story. Is the father absent? Or his presence so inconsequential to the dynamic that he might as well be absent? Or the requirement of providing love or care to a child not being the father’s?

I have not written this letter, but I’ve written similar letters/messages before. Burning one’s self to protect others is only possible for so long, until you are no more but a shadow of yourself. Yet, the guilt of saving one’s self always remains. And so does the love.