The Warren

Adapted from a Review-A-Thon 26 Review

Style: Choice-Select
Played: 7/4/26
Playtime: 5m, left warren

Are babies actually cute? Objectively, they are pudgy, helpless piles of flesh that periodically turn red, loud, and stinky. With beady little eyes. Evolution wisely realized the peril of banking the future of the species on these burdensome things and so hard wired us to THINK they were cute. Nice trick evolution! Tie their very specific physiognomy to a primal protective/nurturing urge and we just.. might.. make it!

Text-based IF is at a disadvantage when conjuring this dynamic, as shorn of physical presence and visual impact their alienness really smacks you in the face. A work attempting to grapple with this instinct is going to need to do some sleight of hand to make it stick. Turns out the recipe is pretty simple: cover them in fur!

This is a work that deals with the competing parental impulses to protect and prepare, from the perspective of the child. I have long held that Troublesome Adolescence is nature’s way of getting parents to HATE their kids, to facilitate the decoupling. Since there are millions of us, sooner or later some parents will statistically tilt too far in one direction or another, to the child’s detriment. Here the ‘protect’ urge has curdled to ‘sheltering’ and our protag must grapple with a future not guided by a loving mentor, but intrusively imposed.

This is a choice-select work, where the choices are for a young rabbit to explore the breadth of possible futures, then make a single choice to accept or defy their mother’s hovering. It is not immediately obvious HOW the young rabbit has access to these possibilities, particularly given the one-sided information likely provided by their mom, but the work makes that clear enough in due course. The breadth of possibilities are admirably broad and unsentimental, and relatable despite their furry specificity. Once the exhaustive exploration is complete, a final choice is presented. I found it ably captured the wonder of burgeoning maturity and yearning for actualization, while not sugar coating the danger in the world. I also found that one of the choices was so asymmetrically appealing that it didn't feel like a true choice. While I could FEEL the pull of that choice, its alternative was just not sold to me, narratively. Just like nature has biased parenting, so has it biased adolescence into yearning for freedom. All in the name of preservation of species. You have a lot of emotional baggage to vindicate, evolution! Also, so many tattoos, and possibly the entire vaping industry.

In the end, I thought this was a concise, effective condensation of that dynamic, really effectively conjuring it in the reader. I’m just not sure what it has to say about it? Or how the single choice could play out any other way? I think that’s fine, part of why we engage fiction is to capture recognizable aspects of our existence. It’s just, it is SO recognizable that absent surprise or insight its impact is a kind of melancholy nodding of recognition and nothing else. In a longer work this might not satisfy much, but in a work this short it becomes a pretty effective emotional snapshot. I don’t think it needs to be more than that.

As you can tell, like most parents, I have A LOT of child rearing theories. Here’s another: that second children are more difficult than first kids as nature’s way of back pressuring population explosion. My youngest really loves that theory.