Him (and Us)

My kingdom for a crumb of context!

I liked the setup of this a lot. The art, intro and the fact it was in the Dialogue jam got me in the mindset “I will enjoy this”.

And I did. This is a brief dinner conversation between two individuals, the text spooling out in a format like SMS messages in different colors, but representing a spoken conversation.

I felt like I had a lot of control over how I reacted. I could be the overly fussy partner, the silent one, the gently encouraging. Despite only one ending, my oath there had agency.

However, almost all context is absent from the piece. I have started drawing a lot recently, and I usually spend 90% of the time getting the outlines right and 10% shading. I’ve noticed that the shading tends to add a lot more than most of the rest of the work, even though it’s small.

I feel like context is like the shading here. The format of the story is perfect, everything in place is right. But who are we? What kind of situation is this? What are we? Who is “him?” I don’t think everything needs to be spooked out, but it would be nice to add little grounding touches. Are we cooking on a wood stove? Was our train late? Do I hang up a wet overcoat? Was “he” smoking again? Little details like this could add so much flavor to this.

However, it’s not completely necessary. This works in its own sense, formless and abstract, but it may be nice to state that as a goal to prepare readers for a state of mind ready to accept an abstract situation.

Him (and Us) is a short conversation, made with Ink, between Theomer and Heron before dinner, though it starts with a bit of difficulty, as Theomer is awfully quiet. Playing as Heron, you have different ways of pushing your partner to talk, forcing him to reveal an unpleasant interaction prior to this.

There is only one ending to this entry, one where you finish the conversation with dinner. Though, whether you learn about the secret interaction will depend on your choices. (And it took me a few tries to finally get the right combo… which I got more by chance than by conscious choice).

Still, you don’t really learn who was the interlocutor (though it could be an easy guess), nor the reason for that interaction, only that it was not pleasant and you do not seem to arbour any good will towards that person. The silence answers it all…