My Girl

Sophia has taken Bluebeard and made it genuinely tense again. I forgot, while reading it, that I knew how the story ended—had in fact written a version of it myself—so engrossed was I in the characters and their stifling dynamic. The well-known tropes of the Bluebeard story (the bodies, the key, the blood) are understated here, which allows the centering of a different aspect of the horror: the violence simmering under even the tender moments in an abusive relationship.

Santiago makes for one scary Bluebeard. Physically imposing, sexually aggressive, and socially controlling, he epitomizes just about everything that makes a man dangerous. His aloofness and preoccupation with the sea mixed with his possessiveness of Carmilla make him unpredictable and difficult to get a read on. This effect is only heightened after Carmilla finds the corpses of his previous wives, when she joins us in questioning the motive behind his every word and action. Does he know? Surely he must. Surely it must be written all over her face and he’s just biding his time, waiting for the most painful moment to strike. As the heat increased, I found myself holding my breath before clicking each link, even though I knew he would die and she would not. The story had me entirely invested.

For me, the story never quite reaches a boil. I loved every moment of it, but I ache for some catharsis. All of the physical violence happens offscreen, and our protagonist never quite manages to claim her own victory. I know this is true to the original story, though, and I recognize that Carmilla’s powerlessness is part of the horror (and very Gothic, for which Sophia and I share a love).

The prose is beautiful, as usual for Sophia. It elevated the story for me, and I found the overall experience to be a tense, enjoyable, heart-pounding ride.

Starting up My Girl I was initially overwhelmed by a swarm of dubious associations. No one of my generation can read that title without thinking first of the lively Motown standard and second of a dying Macaulay Culkin, and then when I started the game and saw that the protagonist’s husband was named Santiago and spent most of his time out at sea, Hemingway shouldered his way in there too. But it didn’t take long to realize that none of these were authentic influences: this is Bluebeard, and a Bluebeard played shockingly straight, with no dramatic twists to the premise or gimmicky gameplay to distract (indeed, this is dynamic fiction – the only interactivity is clicking forward to the next passage).

This means that the game’s prose has nothing to hide behind – which is good news, since you wouldn’t want it to even make the attempt. Some early excerpts will stand for many more that I saved in my notes file, with their precise mastery of detail and portentous allusion:

“You know that I love you, don’t you, Carmilla?” he asks. His eyes are doleful, focused intently on your own: pinning you beneath the weight of his gaze like a butterfly skewered for a collector’s pleasure. “Thank you for listening to me. You know that I only want what’s best for you,” Santiago says. He brushes aside a curl of your dark hair, smudging his thumb against your forehead as if it were Ash Wednesday. You close your eyes. You don’t want to see his mouth slanting closer.

"Later, Santiago is fiddling around with a length of rope, restlessly tying and untying knots in turn. The fires crackle in the distance, the thick stone walls slow to warm. Santiago loves the sea, is bound to die by its hand someday - to be swallowed by the arctic depths, bones plunging to the bottom of the sea: whale-fall, to return from whence he came. Sea foam and salt, smooth bone and corrugated shell. When you view your husband at just the right angle, in the fast falling light, he is nothing but the blue afterimage that burns after bearing witness to the sea."

Visible too in these passages are some of the grace-notes the game does introduce to the folktale. First, rather than doom standing over Bluebeard’s wife, here it’s the sailor himself who seems destined an early grave; second, despite her material dependence upon him, his need for her love and approval goes some way to balancing or even reversing the traditional power dynamics. For all that Santiago carelessly constrains Carmilla to the same straitened horizons as her literary precedents, fulfilling his role as an instrument of the patriarchy, this is a softened Bluebeard: there’s no confrontation scene after she disobeys his instruction, as he meekly accepts her lies and slinks off-stage to be murdered. Indeed, the discovery of the Bloody Chamber is underplayed, so much so that I could almost believe Carmilla decides to kill him as much out of jealousy for his love of the sea as out of desperation to save her own life – indeed, the happy ending crows that “the sea will haunt [her] no more,” as though the ocean was the target of her vengeance, with Santiago simply the unfortunate vessel.

Of course it’s not as simple as all that; the patriarchy is ultimately what sets women against each other in competition, and the sea’s not immune to that, and Santiago’s very blindness to his wife’s needs and emotions justifies his demise. Beyond being a lush and lovely retelling of one of the great stories, I also enjoyed My Girl for the way it denies the ideas that a threatened wife needs to be only a victim, or that a monstrous husband can’t suffer.

Played: 7/11/24
Playtime: 30min, read time really

This is a linear work, its aims cleverly clued by its graphical layout which conclusively evokes pages in a book. Its interactivity is precisely that, turning pages at each one’s end. It is exactly as interactive as a short story. As a short story, its effectiveness is entirely in the hands of the author.

Which is a wild thing to say. At some level, all art, interactive or no, springs from an author’s vision and implementation skill. At least in the ways I am interested in talking about. INTERACTIVE art explicitly aims to include the consumer in the art, (for want of a better word) PASSIVE art does not. This is a two edged sword for the author. The promise of interactivity is a deeper engagement, a unique frisson that is the difference between participation and consumption. The peril of interactivity is that the author has no control over the player, and must somehow accommodate or steer the experience to still deliver their artistic statement against an unpredictable range of interactions.

Am I saying fiction is “easier” than IF? That would be a hell of a hubristic thing, wouldn’t it? Let’s dodge that with mealy mouthed “they both have challenges.” The unique challenge of fiction is to get reader buyin, then keep it. The setup, scenario, human behaviors and plot twists all need to be convincingly communicated and sustained. There is no implicit buyin by player typing along at keyboard. In both kinds of art, the prose itself is doing the lion’s share of this convincing.

My Girl worked for me as a short story for most of its breadth, thanks to its prose. It is somewhat dreamy, somewhat poetic, but always cold and unsentimental, befitting its scenario and characters. It compellingly tells the story of an unhappy marriage, a woman abandoned by her husband for long stretches at sea, then expected to service marital and emotional duties during infrequent returns as if these gaps were immaterial. The wife a player in her husband’s story, as almost a glorified extra. Unsurprisingly, she is increasing dissatisfied with that role. For great stretches, the language and turns of phrase terrifically convey the feeling. Some standouts: “ever bending the crooked language of his devotion like a bludgeon” “There is nothing within your dominion that your husband would not claim as his own, in deserved access” “the hymns you sing segment it small, dividing the hours as neatly as in your book”

It is a slow, sad dance of spiraling despair, very effectively and magnetically conveyed… for 80-85% of its length?

Just often enough, there are narrative twists or observations that do not evolve naturally, that jarringly intrude into the narrative flow without prior warning or support. An observation about “frivolity of men” breaks the personal scope of the narrative, suddenly speaking (in isolation) to a larger indictment than the text was previously concerned with. Contradictory descriptions: “sniffing out for traces of betrayal that you could swear are dribbling in red rivulets down the inside of your wrist as he speaks.” vs “He has no reason to not believe you would be truthful, that you would be true.”

And two major plot twists, one of which carried some setup portent only to be so shadowed as to muddy its impact. Then a final twist from nowhere, the more unsatisfying for its terse, disconnected resolution.

There is a school of thought that for short stories, the ending is whole measure of success. I don’t think it has to be true. Certainly I have found any number of longer format works who have bungled the ending BADLY (looking at you The Stand) that nevertheless are fondly remembered for the many, many things that worked like gangbusters before that. My Girl doesn’t beef anywhere near that bad, but leaves me with analogous feelings. Sure, there were glitches at the end, but for great swaths of its length, I was captivated.