Fiction of the Self

A literary visual novel about discovering one's self

[fictionoftheself]

FICTION OF THE SELF

A visual novel | in development Genre: Interactive fiction, Slice of life, 16+, Mature theme, Romance, LGBTQ+, Slow burn, Multiple endings, Choices have consequences, Found family, Literature attempting to pretend it's philosophical, Childhood trauma, Mild angst, Immigration, Mental issues Language: English 🎀 Vietnamese Words: Yes. Long form. Chapters: 1 prologue + 6 chapters Romantic options: Aceromantic, 3 Male presenting love interests, 1 Female presenting love interest, Polyamory Platform: free to play on itch.io, probably will have a kickstarter

Hi, i'm Aprix Sage and i'm making a free queer visual novel game because there are never enough of them ( ◡̀_◡́)ᕤ and also i have things to say about identity. I do my best and commit to get it done, since it's my first work, I'd love feedbacks, engagement and any thing from everyone!

The story takes on the POV of a person from South East Asia [customizable gender expressions and intentionally omitted nationality!] in their short but important journey in Dublin. An international student who is highly functional but also kind of a mess.

They aren't not looking for love, but that risk is lurking.

They are going to have a very bad time.

They are going to have a very good time.

They are going to miss it for a life time.

This is a game about the story you tell yourself about yourself. What happens when it stops being true. Whether you get to write a new one or whether you've been revising the same draft since you were a teen.

Current status: writing. Code is being figuring out. Art is being budgeted. It's going to be a while and i'm okay with that. It is being funded by my broke ass and I have been overly ambitious with the scope.

This blog is: dev updates, author shit posts, lore i can't help sharing, me yelling about Dublin geography at 2am, and the occasional character detail that will mean nothing to you now and everything to you later

Reblog if you want more queer VNs ✌︎㋡ Follow if you want to watch me build one

We are looking for members to join this project:

Beta readers/Game testers

GUI artist, BGM musician, any one 𓁉 *beggar pose, whimping*

Culture specialists: guardians of the holy Ireland culture who stop me from slandering the beautiful speech of locals

She/her for the author/dev ⎚-⎚ Aprix Sage

He/him for the unenthusiastic, exploited, half-coerced dev ദ്ദി ༎ຶ‿༎ຶ ) iambread

I have commissioned and gathered quotes from great artists and when it's ready I'll introduce them!

I almost forgot warnings.

THIS IS NOT A SAFE SPACE FOR RACISTS, FASCISTS, ZIONISTS, BIGOTS, MYSOGYNISTS, HOMOPHOBIC, ISLAMPHOBIC, ABLEIST, TRANSPHOBIC, CAPITALISM BOOTLICKERS...

╭∩╮( •̀_•́ )╭∩╮╭∩╮( •̀_•́ )╭∩╮╭∩╮( •̀_•́ )╭∩╮

[depsidase]

[melhyan-writes]

"𝐀𝐧𝐲𝐰𝐚𝐲 𝐈 𝐡𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐟𝐚𝐤𝐞 𝐛𝐞𝐭𝐚 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐬: 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐡𝐨𝐰 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐲’𝐫𝐞 𝐪𝐮𝐢𝐞𝐭𝐥𝐲 𝐛𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐰𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐬𝐩𝐚𝐜𝐞𝐬"

I know the fake “beta readers” can get funny after a point like yeah no sh!t Sherlock, the scripts are obvious, the copy-paste compliments are embarrassing, we all get a laugh out of clocking them in public.

But I’m gonna be real... I’ll never forgive how this shit poisons the well.

The writing & reading community's well.

Because now every time someone genuinely reaches out? Every time someone is actually interested, actually kind, actually normal? My first instinct is side-eye. Suspicion. Waiting for the pivot. Waiting for the “so can we DM?” like it’s a jumpscare. I am immediately checking their profiles, their likes, their following. I am also checking if they have scammy like posts or shared some. I am immediately screenshotting the profiles and everything I can find.

And that sucks.

It sucks that people who do mean well get second-guessed because of you scammers. It sucks that newer writers (and also veteran ones), who should be excited to share their work and connect, are instead being trained to be paranoid from the jump. It sucks that the default reaction is no longer “oh that’s nice” but “okay where’s the catch.”

You didn’t just make yourselves obvious, scammies. You made everyone else harder to trust.

That’s vile.

Congrats on your little scripts and your recycled lines, but what you’re really doing is eroding basic trust in creative spaces, especially for smaller authors who don’t have the experience yet to tell the difference.

Sometimes it’s funny to laugh in scammies faces, to send a witty answer back or snap at them in the comments or dms.

But most of the time? It’s exhausting. And it’s gross. And I am tired of questionning everyone coming onto my account and my posts.

[ryadsstuff]

We can’t afford the medication she urgently needs…

and my little sister is also weak, growing up without proper nutrition or care.

[ryadsstuff]

I don’t know how long I can keep writing like this…

I am 23 years old, trying to stay strong, but I feel like I’m reaching my limit.

[ryadsstuff]

The hardest part is not my own struggle…

it’s my sisters. One of them is suffering from severe allergies, and her condition is getting worse every day.

[ryadsstuff]

All I want is to protect them… but I can’t do this alone.

Please, if you can help, do it. And if you can’t, share this…

maybe it will reach someone who can. 🙏

✅️Vetted by @gazavetters, my number verified on the list is ( #476 )✅️

[fundraiser-reblogs]

£21/55000

Funds are extremely low! Please help them by donating what you can and reblogging with tags for visibility!

[rozzed]

why not have the reader re-read a sentence now and then? it won't hurt him....

[pronouncingitwang]

at some point in your life you will be boiling fruit, water, sugar, and lemon juice in a pot to make a syrup or jam. the instructions will tell you to simmer for a certain amt of time. your timer will go off and you will look at the pot and go, "hm, this doesn't look thick enough. maybe i'll let it go for another 10 minutes." this is the devil speaking. it's only so liquid right now because it is at boiling point. it will thicken when it cools down. learn from the follies of my youth and do not let this happen to you

[yokowan]

at some point in your life you will be making a sauce or a stew in which you need to add cornstarch to thicken it. and you will prepare a slurry of starch in cold water and think "this looks like way too little starch to thicken this amount of liquid." this is the devil speaking. cornstarch instantly polymerizes at 95°C and if you add too much it will turn into an impossibly thick goop.

[le-jardin-inculte]

at some point in your life you will be making some sort of cream based dessert that requires gelatin to thicken it. and you will soak some gelatin sheets in water and think "this is too few gelatin sheets for this amount of cream." this is the devil speaking. it will thicken in the fridge and if you add too much you will end up with milk jelly

[shithowdy]

at some point in your life you will be baking cookies. you will take the sheet out after twelve minutes as the recipe instructs and the cookies will still be glistening and soft. "these don't seem cooked enough," you will think to yourself, "i should place them back into the oven until their edges are nice and golden." this is the devil talking. this is how you get dry, overdone cookies. the cookies will continue to bake on the warm sheet for several more minutes and then harden up after sitting on a rack for a while. trust the process. trust the process.

[whitachi]

at some point in your life you will be adding a small pasta to a soup and you will think "that is not enough small pasta." this is the devil talking. the pasta will absorb the stock and expand. this is how you end up with a soup that is a solid mass of soggy ditalini.

[luna-azzurra]

Moments that reveal your Character's Loneliness!!

✧ Keeping a running list in their head of things to tell someone, even though there's no one to tell.

✧ Talking to the cat. Not in a playful way. In a confessional way.

✧ Lingering at the checkout counter a beat too long because the cashier made eye contact.

✧ Watching the clock on Friday evenings and feeling something they can't quite name drop in their chest.

✧ Answering "what did you do this weekend?" with something tidied up and social-sounding, leaving out the two days they saw no one.

✧ Muting their TV just to hear how loud the silence actually is.

✧ Ordering too much food and eating alone with the plates set out, taking up the whole table.

✧ Spending longer than necessary in public places (bookshops, grocery stores) because being around strangers is close enough.

✧ Re-reading old messages from people who don't talk to them anymore, not out of longing but out of proof they existed to someone.

✧ Getting very invested in strangers' lives online: their updates, their kids, their ordinary days.

✧ Starting conversations with service workers and then feeling ashamed of how much they wanted it to continue.

✧ Making plans they know won't happen just for the brief warmth of having something to look forward to.

✧ Dreaming about people they barely know.

✧ Waking grateful, then embarrassed.

✧ Keeping their coat on too long at parties, as though they're still deciding whether to stay.

[sacredwhores]

Christina Hornisher - Hollywood 90028 (1973)

[anarchistmemedistro]

[penissekai]

text pngs/overlays

everything permitted, no creds needed at all

all fonts should be completely fine for all use (personal + commercial) !!! if i’ve made a mistake please let me know :3

[bimyheel]

This is one of the funniest things I've found on tumblr and I've seen some shit

[crippled-peeper]

While still in school, my clinical psych professor, a guy I respect a lot, did give us a lecture about this attitude as it is becoming more and more prevalent unfortunately. He said you will inevitably work with people you do not want to work with in your training. You can go on to choose your clients later on but you WILL be expected to have this skill and even exceed at it. Yes, even predators. Yes even offenders. Yes even “those” people who scare you. You will train in prisons. You will train in hospitals. Working with difficult clients is unavoidable. You absolutely must learn to do it. If you cannot, then stop wasting your time and switch majors now

If academic psychology had any teeth this person would not make it beyond year 1. Unfortunately it doesn’t. It’s a field with rampant historical racism, eugenics, and pseudoscience. That’s how people like the person who wrote those tags make it so far despite being completely unqualified to counsel a single baked bean

[tlaquetzqui]

“I want to be a proctologist but I don’t want to touch butts.” “I want to be a mortician but I don’t want to deal with corpses.”

How, pray, is “psychologist only for people who have nothing wrong with them” supposed to work?

[partywithponies]

[partywithponies]

[caz-the-yarncromancer]

First time I see the full lyrics without it being take me to snurch (snail church)

[darrenpillowscriss]

What really makes this for me is that OP could have phoned it in on the chorus and just repeated the same fics, but no. They found a unique one every time. Class act.

[daisywords]

not everything in a story has to or should be "realistic" but in my opinion there's a level of illusion that should be maintained, and I think that's the actual problem that many people try to pinpoint with the "unrealistic" criticism. Dialogue shouldn't be written like an actual transcript of human speech, but should contribute to the illusion of a real person speaking. A character is a tool of the story, not a narrative, but we're trying to maintain the illusion that they are a person. Worldbuilding should exist to serve the story, not to be a perfect simulacrum of how every aspect of nature/society etc. would actually play out for real. But there should be the illusion that it could be real, that organizations and systems would operate in such a way, that people might behave in such a way.

in conclusion: "Is this realistic?" <<wrong question. "Does this serve the illusion or disrupt it?" <<now we're talking

[beaft]

bitch moment: obviously this is subjective but a lot of modern queer lit (especially YA) has this specific tone that i find really grating. i want to call it "smug" but that's not exactly it. it's more like, that sense that the author is utterly convinced of the correctness of their own worldview and expects everyone else to agree with them on principle

[ozztwinkie]

I read a book like this last year (didn't finish it) I went in expecting a fun lesbian romance with fantasy elements, but instead, almost half of it was the author very clearly getting up on their soapbox about the abysmal state of public accessibility and accomodations for disabled people. Which like, I totally agree with what they're saying, but it was very much like the author was telling me the "correct" opinion about the issue through a bunch of monologues from the main character (literally) instead of actually showing it through the narrative.

The whole time I was reading it, I was mentally grabbing the author by the shoulders and telling them to chill tf out.

And neither the main character or the love interest was disabled, which in my humble opinion, would've been a good way to get the point across without it feeling preachy and forced. But no. Both of them were conventionally attractive (which is fine cuz it was a romance) straight sized, able-bodied women.

How did the topic get brought up in the first place you ask? The main character had a friend who was in a motorized wheelchair. Literally that's the only thing we learned about him. He's in a wheelchair and he needs the "good person" main character to help him because of the lack of accessibility and accomodations. That was his only purpose in the story. He sorta disappeared around the halfway point in the book.

There were other "correct opinions" expressed by the main character, (which again I agreed with almost all of it) but it was really clunky. The main character felt like the author's puppet to teach the correct morality to the love interest, (who has a different background from the MC, and I guess was supposed to function as a kind of reader insert)

Anyways, my fantasy lesbian romance turned out to be less that and more of a sermon in a fantasy lesbian romance costume.

I guess it was just really disappointing, because it made the position of being empathetic to disabled people and supporting better accessibility come across as really annoying. 😤😤

Okay, rant over.

[notjusthespongenextdoor]

For a city to be walkable. It must also be sittable.

[notjusthespongenextdoor]

#every time I read this phrase the same thing happens#I read it as shittable and go wait that can't be right#oh right they were talking about public benches that makes more sense#but public bathrooms available without fees should also be a thing tho#cities should definitely be shittable#it happens EVERY SINGLE TIME

it must also be shittable

[solenamedo]

Summer is knocking on Gaza’s doors, but my children don’t know “summer” the way the world does.

The heat inside their tent is unbearable, just as the cold was merciless months ago.

Two years of war have stolen their sense of safety… even sleep has become a daily battle.

[depsidase]

[eternal-fractal]

Can't express how stress free being open minded is.

Some lesbians use he/him? Oh cool.

Some people have people inside their head and sometimes it's fictional chars? Sick your brains like a pirate ship they're all working to run.

Some people like being treated like a pet dog? Bark bark bro.

Being fat isn't unhealthy but a perfectly normal type of body to have? Kinda beautiful how different we can all be.

Something doesn't make any fucking sense? Cool an opportunity to learn. And even if I can't figure it out it's cool we still have mysteries today.

[owenthetokencishet]

It's just... idk man. People are weird. Being a person is weird. Society is weird. The universe is weird. Rather than having to "normalize" everything, just accept that some people are weird. So are you. Nothing is normal. the rules are all made up. I once saw a Klingon pushing a baby stroller down the street in toronto. The world is a weird place, man. Just roll with it.