general thoughts

This is the first “postmortem” I've ever written, and I do find the term kind of grotesque. My story lives. I breathed life into the characters, organic and inorganic, and here they stand, available for download, ready to take shape in the minds and hearts of readers, maybe even to live in some of them, rent free, like they live in mine. That is what I hope for, in any capacity. That is the point of it all.

But postmortem literally means “after death”. So what has died? we ask ourselves. Who do we bury? To what name do we make out the tombstone?

It is, perhaps, a part of me that has died. Or, the version of me that was writing Garbage Doll. Purposeful, single-minded, trying to channel something that already seemed inevitable. I'm not sure if the inevitability of something changes the experience for the reader, but it certainly imbues the process with a feeling of. Destiny. 

We felt almost a sort of magic, we felt drunk on it. We felt high on it. And I have felt this way before, but usually I am a writer of small stories. I work on something for a few short hours, a single night, feel the high--and then I post it, and the high subsides, as I wait, desperately, for engagement. (I need to know that someone has read it, before I can sleep, and since I often post these stories at one or two AM, few (if any) of my small audience are even awake.)

Garbage Doll, on the other hand, was a sustained creative effort over four weeks. Writing, and writing, and writing, and then drawing, and drawing, and drawing, and then a frenzied 24 hours left before the deadline to compose the entire OST…doesn't that sound wonderful? It was a kind of euphoria. 

I posted on my bluesky about dreading the end of the jam, dreading the completion of the project, because of the big new hole it must leave behind in me. It was like an obsession. And I knew, intimately, how hollow it can feel when someone something you see as an intrinsic part of your life, has come to an end. 

Something else I noticed, working on a project of this scope as opposed to the prose-only drabbles I finish in a night, is that one does not have much to show for a night of work. If one wants a headpat, a like on tumblr, a fire react on discord, one must assemble a summary, some screenshots, showing that progress has been made, though one must be careful with how much one reveals. 

Then one's audience might say something like “looking interesting! Excited to read when it is done” but as a writer of small fiction with an audience who is used to your content being delivered straight to the comfort of their Tumblr dashboard, will they read it? Will they follow a link? Will they download an .exe? Will they read all five chapters, the equivalent length of, perhaps, 10 of your usual works? And even if they do all that, how will they indicate to you that they have read it, if there is no handy ‘like’ button? Will they put in the effort, overcome the awkwardness of leaving a comment, sending a message? How can you be so selfish as to hope for all that? How can you feel entitled to so much of their attention span?

This is precisely why, in the aftermath of the death of the creation of Garbage Doll, the responses we have received have been so important of us. Writers and artists, fellow jam participants, my personal friends, have been so supportive. 

I would like to give a shout-out to the discord community, where during the jam so many were available to give technical support and affirmation, and now, even a month later, members still read and respond to each other's games with their reactions and analysis. People know it's important to support one another however we can.

It has also been wonderful hearing back from my personal friends. I was concerned that many of them would have to skip my story because of the triggers, and that the rest would find it off-putting and not want to associate with me anymore. But more read it than I expected, and they all seemed to appreciate it, even if some of them don't understand the doll stuff. And it's just been nice opening this part of myself up to them and being accepted.

the creation of garbage doll

When Nadia Nova's tumblr post about the Toxic Yuri VN Jam ($500 prize!) came across our tumblr dash, we were intrigued. What even is toxic yuri? Women in a relationship, who are bad for each other? I had, I thought, days earlier written something that qualified for that, completely by accident, and though it wasn't a VN, it occurred to me that the Empty Spaces kinds of stories I had been writing, many about a witch and the doll she owned, were often rife with toxic dynamics between women and/or girlthings. Plus I'd been wanting to make a VN. I started one years ago about trans teenage mystery solving magical girls and vampires.

First I thought I might adapt the story I had just written but the consensus was that it's better to come up with new material, so I decided to wait for the jam judges to announce the theme. I knew that once they announced the theme I would have a starting point from which the new ideas would flow, and there was a lot of speculation in the discord server about what the theme would be. Maids? Elvis? Object oriented ontology? Eventually the jam started, the theme was announced, and it was "toxic yuri." 

I had no ideas. But it wasn't like I could get started anyway, it was a week out from my [work employment project] and I really needed to focus on that. Also, pride. 

But eventually I had some time to think about the VN. I knew I wanted it to be about dolls. Because I love dolls. All kinds of dolls. I love writing about doll and reading about dolls and it helps me process pain. The pain of living. The pain of love. The pain of personhood and self-determination and having to take care of oneself. Dolls are an apt metaphor for a lot of things. Dolls are like characters in a book, except they are made of cloth and you can hold them and cuddle them. Or they are made of plastic or porcelain and you can pose them and sit them on your shelf. If you are crafty, you can make your own dolls. Every character you write about is a kind of doll that you have created in your head, something that you can direct what to do, how to think, how to feel. 

When we were little, one of us imagined the others. The one who was born formed the others, dolls, out of thoughts. Children play with dolls, and then throw them away when they're older, but I (child) held on to my brain dolls. Or I (doll) held on to that mind. And we began to write. 

This is a way of conceptualizing a plural system. This is our interior world. We are three. We are one.

I knew I wanted to write about dolls and it was imperative to get started, so I did something I didn't really want to resort to, and thought about the pain of a relationship ending. It had ended just about a year ago at that point, and I liked to imagine I had done the majority of processing it already, but I thought about some of the things I had felt and some of the ways it had changed me, and came up with the feeling of being thrown away. 

I had written about being thrown away before, but that story, written shortly after the breakup, had ended with the doll being thrown in the trash. So what if we started in the trash? What then? Good dolls don't crawl out of the trash, of course, they accept their fate, but I wanted this doll to save itself. So the doll had to disobey. The doll had to become bad. 

After that, almost everything that happened in the story felt inevitable. I had some trouble at certain points, I think, especially involving Neon Cat because emotionally she is based on my ex, the way she throws Garbage Doll out is intended to mirror the cold way my ex threw me off and went about their own life, but it would have been too painful to try and create an accurate portrait of my ex in this vn. Neon Cat is her own thing. Garbage Doll is too. The main thing we share is that we are ugly angry things who want to get some agency back while also sort of wanting a relationship  where someone takes care of you and decides things for you.

A fellow jammer, Sandwiches, asked me what percentage of Garbage Doll is autobiographical last night, and very little of it is. I do want to clarify because I feel like the character of Mother invites some speculation, but she is not based on any real person I know or anything I have experienced. I thought about toxic aspects of motherhood. The claim a mother might feel she has on her child. How a mother might feel if a child (even as an adult) chose to live with a witch instead of her. An evil witch who transformed her flesh and blood into a different kind of being entirely, so they're not a human anymore, not even a person anymore. As good as dead. And then what if, years later, such a being returns to her. Filthy, stinking in tatters, a bundle of rags, barely conscious, but still somehow alive, vulnerable, in need of help, help she can bestow. It might not have been her child, exactly. And if it was, can it really still count as her child, in the form it is now? And what if she's been alone all this time, and is religious, and is really repressed, sexually? I was afraid to write about this character, to be honest, but I felt compelled to.

The idea was that the doll headmate would do the majority of the writing and the frog headmate would do all of the art and music. But since the doll headmate is used to writing shorter fiction, it would get stalled at some points, and the frog headmate, who specializes in novels, would come in and help get things moving. So it ended up being more of a collaboration. This accounts for some of the shifts in tone. The jokes in chapter 4 are frog influence. The ambiguous but ultimately uplifting ending is frog influence. 

Our original concept for the ending would be a revelation that Garbage Doll is a puppet to which Neon Cat still holds the strings, with Neon Cat's new doll, Oat Latte, replacing Garbage Doll in the trash. But I suppose in the end we couldn't write it. I suppose we ultimately wanted to write about healing and reconciliation.

The art was challenging too. Frog has a strong aesthetic sense but has always struggled with consistency, with making two drawings of the same character look like the same character. It was a challenge to make the character sprites look like the characters in the CGs (cgs are like special illustrations to show important scenes that you can't convey as well through sprites but don't want to rely on text alone) but I tried really hard, looking at all of the shapes and how big things were etc and I think I was moderately successful! I'm really pleased with all of the colors and lines in most of the drawings (some things esp in chapter 5 were rushed and don't look as consistent but I kind of still like them).

And finally, the music. By the time we were done with all of the writing and drawing, there were about two days left before the jam deadline. Everyone was encouraging me to use free music but I just couldn't bring myself to do it. I love writing music, I hardly ever have time to write music, but I have always wanted to write music for videogames and I've not really had time to pursue this so I wasn't going to pass up this opportunity. My partner was on a roadtrip and I had the house to myself so I just locked in. I had barely given the thing any thought beforehand and I don't know I came up with it, but I settled into this process of a theme for every chapter that gradually builds up towards the end, with a few repeating leitmotifs.

So basically each chapter had like a main track that was 3 to 5 minutes long, but I would make like a subtrack of just the first four measures to loop at the beginning of the chapter, then a second track of just the first eight measures, to come in seamlessly after the reader reached a certain sentence in the script.  Then additional chunks of that same track would cycle in. So just listening to the main track for each chapter would be a much different experience! I might want to polish it up and release it on bandcamp at some point but I would have to put some thought into how to divide up the tracks. 

what we've learned

I've become aware of some weaknesses in the VN, things I would have liked to think about more or do differently.

1. I already mentioned the tonal shifts in the writing.

2. I think some of the characterization is weak in places. 

3. There's the unanswered question of why is this dumpster lid so heavy that the dolls, who have similar physical strength to a human, are unable to push it open? There's probably a few moments that don't make sense that I wasn't able to fix or provide a satisfying explanation for.

4. I think the sprites kind of look clumsy. I didn't look into ways to make them move naturally and I could have flipped them to have them look at one another when they were talking to one another but I thought that was against the rules. I thought I needed to do a separate drawing of each sprite facing right or left or forward because these characters, you know, are not symmetrical, so simply flipping them would not be, correct. Right? Because her hat would be pointing the wrong way, her wand would be in a different hand, hair doesn't do that. But like, these concerns are silly. I've seen enough VNs by now that just flip their sprites and they look great.

5. Music really was a rush job. There are a few errors.

6. Going forward, I want to play around with different formats instead of locking myself into this default sort of widescreen template with a text covering the bottom of the picture. I want to put more thought into the layout of the art and the text. 

7. I wish I would have asked for more help with the technical side of things. I wanted to go it all alone (well, aside from my headmates etc) but I don't have a lot of experience with ren'py and help was available and I didn't avail myself of it. I used a lot of time researching, and sometimes I learned some cool things, but I could have had more time for like, the music, and making the sprites zoom around the screen, and asking more questions to learn more things. I think it had to do with either pride or shyness, reluctance to admit that I didn't understand a thing. Yeah, that's pride. 

I think that covers all of the things that a postmortem should cover? Yeah I wanna make another VN. But I have this novel. It feels kind of underwhelming to go back to since there won't be any art or music or coding, and I don't know if it will ever be publishable, but it's probably worth finishing at least. 

thanks for reading.

- doll and frog