One thing about the recent update that kinda bugs me is that in the school flashback the "Fucking Idiot" NPC is now made obligatory and they increased the rant Andrew has.
And to drive the point home the screen turns dark when it happens
And I'm not gonna lie...this feels really childish.
Like yeah there's a lot of people who are into this game solely because they have a incest fetish...so what? That happens to every piece of media out there with characters that they find even at least moderately attractive, this game isn't the first and certainly not the last to happen, it's gonna happen to this game regardless of what you say.
Does it suck that it gets reduced to Incest Fetish? Yeah but there's a lot of fans that see it for what it is and as I said, it happens to everything, not just this game.
It even feels OOC because according to the narration Andrew realizes this years later... Even though he's still in deep denial during that time and he always corrects himself in his mind when thinking of Ashley as a lover yet he doesn't do that here because it goes against the heavy handed message.
And the cherry on top is that Nemlei also didn't help with the perception of the game because she was banking on the incest reputation to promote it and ragebait the haters, else she wouldn't have made all this:
Like you can't pull this and be surprised when people just see incest
(Sorry for the rant, you're like one of the only two people I can talk about this game with)
The original exchange already felt like a take that against Andrew/Renee shippers, which was already unnecessary IMO. So what if people ship them? Even if they ship them in a "romantic" way and not in the obviously highly unbalanced way it's supposed to be. They're fans. They're doing their thing. But I could accept it because okay, I can see some asshole being like "hey you wanna fuck your whole family?" not getting that Andrew doesn't wank it to incest porn because it's incest but has multiple reasons for him to develop an attraction to Ashley and only Ashley. The point of it was already "you see the kink, I see actual feelings".
This new rant is pretty much Nemlei venting her frustrations. And I don't even quite get against whom. The haters who think the game is just degenerate porn? Or the fans who don't appreciate it the "right" way? Both options are immature. Haters won't be swayed because they'll always hate the game on principles, and fans have the freedom to engage with the game as they see fit.
I do agree that TCOAAL is not just "the incest game" and that the siblings' relationship is much more complex than that. I personally even agree that I wish I could go into the fandom and find more analyses of their personalities/dynamic and less "damnnn imagine Andrew filling up his sister's womb with incest babies 😍😍😍", because man I do not care about that. But that's my preference, as a fan. The author coming out of the story and doing the same, especially in a game I highly praise for how subtly it weaves characterization and themes, feels not only unnecessary, but insecure. And it is the author, because nowhere else in the game the narration pulls this "in hindsight" approach. It takes you out of the story.
So people think fictional incest is hot. Big deal. Be more confident in your work, will you? Tell the story you want to tell. There are people who appreciate what you're doing. And maybe also think fictional incest is hot. The two things are not mutually exclusive.
This is not enough to sour my opinion of the game obviously, but it's also not the first time it felt like Nemlei went out of her way to correct things that didn't need to be corrected.
