I Got You

One of the dangers of waiting until the last day of a comp to judge and create everything is, there may be one entry that sticks with you and you want to think over, before you move on to the next one. Which is usually a good thing, but if you've procrastinated, well, you'll have to put that off. That's the story of me and I Got You at EctoComp 2025.

I looked at the cover art a few times and wondered what "I Got You" meant. It's a flexible phrase. I figured it might be a play on the Sonny and Cher song, or even a man showing off a woman and his trophy wife. The second of these of course is very bad, and it's been covered in other ways, but the initial implication of "I got you" is "I will have advice for everything, and if you slip up I will help you." That's your wingman, Tom. But as the story goes on, it's revealed to be more about "Ha, I GOT you," as in Tom catches you making a dumb mistake and goes all "what were you thinking." Also, in some branches, Tom has you to listen to him, and you can't push him away ("I got you cornered.")

It starts as a relatively straightforward advice for a date. I got you, says Tom. In this case, it clearly means, I have your back. I'll pick you up if you slip and fall. It may mean other things later. He hints what to say, and you don't need a lot of reading comprehension to figure it out. His advice is very general -- one funny bit, you pick the right ice breaker but he is quiet on the follow up, where the wrong answer makes you look very foolish indeed. And yet the wrong choice could potentially be spun at least as well as the right one.

He tells you how to say the right things to get a woman to be interested in you. Most of this is pretty basic advice, like don't be a jerk, or don't talk about boring stuff, or don't be too melodramatic or unenthusiastic. These aren't the deal breakers, though. There's only one question that matters, and because it is unusual and potentially unexpected, I won't spoil it here. But you have a choice on with or not to sympathize.

Tom wasn't prepared for this, or at least, he wasn't prepared to give positive advice. Because boy oh boy, if you do the wrong thing, he gives you quite the gish gallop full of whataboutism and other conversational tricks. Usually I'm opposed to huge walls of text and having to sift through them, but here, it's appropriate, sort of how someone gives you quick useless advice to start, and you can pass it off as keeping it simple early on, until you realize there's not too much depth. But once you slip up taking their advice, even if their advice was self-contradictory or bad, boy howdy do you hear it. We've all had that sort of person, whether it be for romantic advice or otherwise.

And that's why this piece worked for me, because it was ostensibly about going on a date and impressing a girl you like, but on the other hand, it brought back much more low-key and platonic memories for me, of someone being a slightly unwanted guru that I listened to at first out of politeness. I had my share of other males in high school who would tell me about how to talk to chicks (yes, not girls or women,) and their advice wasn't particularly helpful. I didn't have the guts to ask them why they didn't follow it, or if they did, why it didn't work for them.

In essence, they saw me as a captive audience. At least they weren't advocating anything illegal! There were varying degrees of intent. For instance, when I was thirteen, some friends told me I could do better than a certain girl that I sometimes walked home with. They had advice on how to talk to girls. It was wrong, because they were thirteen, but as we get older, there's less excuse for this sort of thing.

So how Tom turns against you is really the main thrust of this piece to me, which made it not just about romance, or whatever. It's about having someone captive, willing to listen to you, sort of like a Walter Mitty fantasy but trying to impress someone who might be beneath you, as opposed to Walter Mitty testifying against himself in the courtroom. Tom has a captive audience, and it's not just that they want to listen, but he wants them to be sure he is giving them information they couldn't get anywhere else.

And it's not just about Talking To Girls. I've certainly had my share of people told me I should be more social, but the problem is, a lot of them told me that I needed to put myself in social situations they would enjoy and I wouldn't. This was hard to articulate, and I didn't really have any proof it was the case, but fortunately I built that up over the years. I've found where I worked best. It's rewarding. Some of my "helpers" would find it weird. Tough luck for them. I'm glad I forgot some of their names. So Tom helped me take a look back at the sort of person whose advice ostensibly opens you up to new things, but all the same, it bends you away from new things you might want to and not Tom. It reminded me of people who talked me out of connecting with, well, other people I'd be a better friendship fit for. Whether or not they meant to.

Twine games are rich ground for discussing guilt trips, but I think I Got You covers new ground, because Tom genuinely is giving you a lot of advice. It's just very shallow or trivially true, or the opposite is quite silly. There's the feeling that even if you connect on a deeper level with your date, you'd owe it to Tom anyway, even though he's completely useless on that front. So "I got you" can mean a few other things: I got you all this help and this is what you do with it. Or "We're having an argument here, even if you didn't know it, and I got you." The textwall has a lot of rhetorical tricks I recognize from studying them, and in one case Tom pulls the "some people have it worse than you" card. When I sincerely got that Tom actually cares about these other people one bit. But that's how whataboutism or fast-paced argument works. In this case, as I thought through my past and the "advisors" I wasn't able to shake, I could hear Tom telling me, oh, so what if you got gaybaited in high school, why let it drag you down? You were never punched for it. Or nobody said a slur when punching you. Or they laughed and said "just joking." Or nobody waited at your house. People wind up in the hospital or dead. So don't feel too upset about a little gay baiting. (This may seem like a tangent, and it's a potential spoiler if you really want to dig into it, but ... just play. It's quicker.)

With Naked Bombs in IFComp, that makes two efforts in a row by this author that I really was able to relate to, even on the mundane level, one that looks into very G-rated needs we all have and should fulfill. Yet the setting is the sort that younger me would've been told "you're too young for that." Of course we are never too young or too (favorite adjective here) to want to belong or to share and explore ourselves and find the best people to do so with.